Publications

Laura M. Pereira, Matthew Ford Gibson, Jesse F. Abrams, Elina Brutschin, Juan Camilo Cardenas, William W.L. Cheung, Joachim Claudet, Sarah E. Cornell, Vassilis Daioglou, América Paz Durán, Erik Gomez-Baggethun, Paula A. Harrison, Sophie Hebden, Justin A. Johnson, Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, Patrick W. Keys, HyeJin Kim, Marcel T.J. Kok, Carolyn J. Lundquist, Timothy M. Lenton, Daniel Mason-D’Croz, Pamela McElwee, Claudia Munera-Roldan, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Albert V. Norström, Maganizo K. Nyasulu, Garry D. Peterson, Patricia Pinho, Alexander Popp, Keywan Riahi, U. Rashid Sumaila, Arne Tobian, Ricarda Winkelmann, Nico Wunderling, Detlef van Vuuren, Joost Vervoort, Caroline Zimm. 2026. Solving science conundrums in the climate-nature-equity polycrisis with integrated transformative scenarios. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2026.101710

Addressing the intertwined climate, biodiversity, and equity crises requires transformative societal change. Yet the scenario frameworks and models used to explore future pathways often reproduce existing institutions, governance systems, and social structures, limiting their ability to imagine more sustainable and just futures. A key gap is the lack of approaches that can identify and evaluate transformative actions while acc...

Ida Edling, Laura Pereira, Michelle Lim. 2026. Justice for the whole forest: reimagining international law to address drivers of forest-related Earth system tipping points. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7198441

The imminent risk of triggering Earth system tipping points underlines the urgent need for transformative change of societal systems, including legal systems. International environmental law, characterised by anthropocentrism, neoliberalism and legacies of Western colonial domination, has failed to stop large-scale forest exploitation driving forests towards tipping points. This article envisions a transformed version of plane...

Richard Wood, Konstantin Stadler, Daniel Moran, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Can Nguyen, Edgar Hertwich, Jan Weinzettel. 2026. Decoupling must accelerate threefold to align national environmental footprints with planetary boundaries. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-10299849/v1

Reducing environmental impacts is essential for maintaining Earth-system stability. The planetary boundaries (PB) framework defines a safe operating space for human pressures, yet it remains poorly understood how national environmental footprints are evolving relative to that space, what drives their trajectories, and whether progress is fast enough. We assess consumption-based footprints for seven PB domains against equal per...

Caroline Schill, Dianty Ningrum, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Cynthia Flores, Henrik Österblom. 2026. Amplifying initiatives with transformative potentials through a ‘living repository of hope.’. World Biodiversity Forum. https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-619

Hope is a powerful concept associated with human motivation to act, but its conceptual and practical use in relation to enacting society-wide transformative changes has been limited. Building on theoretical works on active hope across the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and behavioral science, we argue for a scientific mobilisation to amplify initiatives with transformative potentials through a ‘living rep...

Dianty Ningrum, Caroline Schill, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen. 2026. Global evidence of collective human efforts to live in harmony with nature. World Biodiversity Forum. https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-610

In response to the interconnected crises related to nature’s decline, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for large-scale actions to ‘live in harmony with nature’ by 2050. Achieving this vision requires shifts in practices, social structures, and values across society, which demands collective actions across all major societal systems on local, regional and global scales, and engaging governments, civil so...

Simon P. Heselschwerdt, Thorsten Wagener, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Anna M. Ukkola, Yannis Markonis, Yuting Yang, Peter Greve. 2026. Large impact of extreme precipitation on projected blue–green water partitioning. Earth System Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-17-811-2026

Precipitation partitioning into blue (runoff) and green water (transpiration) flows is a fundamental hydroecological process shaping freshwater availability across vegetated and hydrologically active land areas. This partitioning is determined by interactions among climatic conditions, land surface characteristics, and vegetation dynamics, which change with rising temperatures and CO2concentrations. Yet, future global shifts i...

Giulia Cigna, Elena De Petrillo, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Marta Tuninetti. 2026. Evapotranspiration shed of agriculture: combining agro-hydrological estimates with atmospheric moisture dynamics. EGU26. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-7907

The increasing global demand for food, feed and flexible crops is exerting unprecedented pressure on the global hydrological cycle through landscape conversion and increasing irrigation demand, which altogether contribute to the alteration of land moisture recycling. This alteration influence evapotranspiration and precipitation patters through atmospheric flows. Atmospheric moisture flows connect sources of evapotranspiratio...

Bo Su, Lan Wang-Erlandsson. 2026. The Cryosphere Beyond a Planetary Safe Operating Space. EGU26. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-5093

The cryosphere, the frozen components of the Earth system, plays a vital role in regulating planetary dynamics and maintaining a stable and habitable Earth. Despite its critical importance and the rapid cryosphere degradation underway in the Anthropocene, it remains unclear whether essential functions for Earth system resilience have so far been undermined, i.e., whether cryosphere changes still remain within a ‘safe operating...

Marlene Rimmert, Luana Schwarz, Carolin Janssen, Aeon Alvarado Amaro, Jonathan F. Donges. 2026. Accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture: A participatory modeling framework for analyzing social tipping elements and their interactions in the food and land use system. GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society. https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.35.3.11

Transforming the food and land use system is urgent, as current practices threaten both biosphere integrity and human health. Triggering social tipping processes has been proposed as a way to accelerate such large-scale systemic change. These processes occur in social tipping elements which are parts of a larger complex system such as the food and land use system, where initial critical interventions are amplified via reinforc...

Felix Jäger, Andrew Hugh MacDougall, Gergana Gyuleva, Da Nian, Chris Smith, Jonathan Friedemann Donges. 2026. Uniting physical climate and carbon cycle feedbacks as Earth System Resistance. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.15007255/v1

Forcing-feedback frameworks are central for the study of Earth system dynamics and model intercomparison in climate science. Additionally, looming exceedance of internationally agreed warming limits motivates the study of global cooling dynamics. Thus far, the literature lacked a time-dependent framework that unifies effective climate and carbon feedbacks. We propose Earth system resistance to CO2 emissions as an overall metri...