A good life for all within planetary boundaries

Abstract

A good life for all within planetary boundaries. Nature Sustainability, 88 (95).https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4 © 2018, Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper published in Nature Sustainability. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy.eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over seven billion people without destabilising critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a "safe and just" development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for close to 150 nations. We find no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity, and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (e.g. high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2-6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial. A good life for all within planetary boundariesThis article addresses a key question in sustainability science: What level of biophysical resource use is associated with meeting people's basic needs, and can this level of resource use be extended to all people without exceeding critical planetary boundaries? To answer this question, we analyse the relationships between seven indicators of national environmental pressure (relative to biophysical boundaries) and eleven indicators of social outcomes (relative to sufficiency thresholds) for close to 150 countries. Our study represents the first attempt to measure national performance using a "safe and just space" framework 1,2 for a large number of countries, and provides important findings on the relationships between resource use and human well-being. A Safe and Just SpaceThere have been two recent, complementary advances in defining biophysical processes, pressures, and boundaries at the planetary scale. The first is th...

Incorporating basic needs to reconcile poverty and ecosystem services

“…It therefore provides a universal list of criteria that conservationists and decision makers anywhere can agree to adhere to when driven by the principle of do no harm. The theory of human need is one of many approaches applied to conceptualizing poverty and measuring poverty thresholds specifically (Alkire 2002;Tsui 2002), but we argue that its universality and tangibility make it a rich operational framework for addressing hard choices between nature conservation and poverty alleviation goals (Gough 2014;O'Neill et al 2018) and a basis for monitoring and mitigating conservation impacts on multidimensional poverty.…”

Potential net primary production footprint of agriculture: A global trade analysis

“…While climate change mitigation is an important aspect of current policies globally, shifting from fossil fuels to biofuels (European Commission, ), and from abiotic resources toward bio‐based materials is related to land use expansion and increasing land use competition (O'Brien, Wechsler, Bringezu, & Schaldach, ). The majority of countries that have high per capita carbon (Davis & Caldeira, ; Hertwich & Peters, ; Hubacek, Baiocchi, Feng, & Patwardhan, ; O'Neill et al., ) also have high per capita NPP pot footprints. Land‐system change and climate change, both of which are interlinked and closely associated with carbon stored in ecosystems, have already transgressed planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., ).…”

“…Net primary production (NPP) provides the energy basis for most ecosystem processes and functions through the photosynthetic conversion of atmospheric CO 2 into organic matter and the subsequent accumulation of carbon in biomass (Vitousek, Ehrlich, Ehrlich, & Matson, , ). Global NPP and the fraction of global NPP co‐opted by humans have been suggested as bases for calculating a planetary boundary of biosphere integrity (Running, ), land use (Haberl et al., ), and land‐system change (O'Neill, Fanning, Lamb, & Steinberger, ). Various approaches to HANPP calculations have been applied, including the original low, intermediate, and high estimates after Vitousek, Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Matson ().…”

Integrating the Water Planetary Boundary With Water Management From Local to Global Scales

“…For commercial organizations, economic indicators such as a corporation's global market share are typically used (Ryberg et al, ; Sandin et al, ). For political contexts (e.g., nations), allocation is most often implemented using a per capita approach in which the global value of the control variable of the planetary boundary is apportioned based on the number of people living in that nation (Dao et al, ; Hoff et al, ; Nykvist et al, ; O'Neill et al, ). The major flaw of per capita allocation is that it allocates a larger portion of the global safe operating space to more populous nations, without taking into account local hydrological factors or people's capacity to respond to environmental challenges (Häyhä et al, ).…”