Entitled "Solving the climate challenge within the planetary boundaries", Eric Lambin, Professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Louvain in Belgium and co-author to the article on Planetary Boundaries, will give a 20 minutes presentation on the planetary boundaries concept, with a special focus on deforestation and land-use changes.Will Steffen, centre theme leader and co-author of the article on Planetary Boundaries, will contribute to a panel discussion following Lambin's presentation.
The presentation is ahead of centre director Johan Rockström's presentation on biodiversity and climate change, Saturday, 12 December, 1300-1500, EU Pavilion.
Global interest
The planetary boundaries concept caught global interest when a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists proposed that global biophysical boundaries, identified on the basis of the scientific understanding of the Earth System, could define a ‘safe planetary operating space´ for humanity.
This new approach to sustainable development was conveyed in "Nature" and in "Ecology and Scoiety" where the scientists made a first attempt to identify and quantify a set of nine planetary boundaries.
- The human pressure on the Earth System has reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. To continue to live and operate safely, humanity has to stay away from critical ‘hard-wired´ thresholds in Earth´s environment, and respect the nature of planet's climatic, geophysical, atmospheric and ecological processes, says lead author Johan Rockström.
Read more about the planetary boundaries here.
