Publications

Arne Tobian, Dieter Gerten, Ingo Fetzer, Sibyll Schaphoff, Lauren Seaby Andersen, Sarah E. Cornell, Johan Rockström. 2024. Repository - Climate change critically affects the status of the land-system change planetary boundary. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6985317

The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity. To date, these boundaries have mostly been investigated separately, and it is unclear whether breaching one boundary can lead to the transgression of another. By employing a dynamic global vegetation model, we systematically simulate the strength and direction of the effects of different transgression levels of the climate change boundary (using cl...

Victor Galaz, David Collste. 2023. Finance for Resilience of People and Planet. Reflecting on 50 years after the Stockholm Conference in 1972. Resilience of people and ecosystems under climate stress. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Fifty years might not seem long in the history of planet Earth, but the last 50 years have had profound implications for the climate system, natural systems and all life on Earth. The year 2022 marks the 50th Anniversaries of the historic 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and the beginning of multilateral collaboration on environmental and sustainability challenges. Financial pledges to support developin...

Laura M. Pereira, Steven R. Smith, Lauren Gifford, Peter Newell, Ben Smith, Sebastian Villasante, Therezah Achieng, Azucena Castro, Sara M. Constantino, Ashish Ghadiali, Coleen Vogel, Caroline Zimm. 2023. Risks, Ethics and Justice in the governance of positive tipping points. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1454

Biophysical tipping points pose existential threats to current and future generations, both human and non-human, with those currently underserved being the most vulnerable. Social tipping points, as deliberate interventions into systems with the expectation of non-linear impacts and widespread change, have the potential to address some of these challenges. However, the imperative to act cannot increase risks nor perpetuate unj...

Paula Andrea Sanchez García, Victor Galaz, Juan Carlos Rocha. 2023. Financial dimensions of global zoonotic disease risks dataset. The Lancet. FigShare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21269292

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential (EID) such as COVID-19 and avian influenza, pose serious threats to human health and wellbeing all over the world. The emergence and re-emergence of zoonotic diseases are affected by a number of interacting social, environmental and ecological changes. The financial sector plays an important, yet often ignored role as owners and investors in industries linked...

Schröter, M., Berbés-Blázquez, M., Albert, C., Hill, R., Krause, T., Loos, J., Mannetti, L.M., Martín-López, B., Neelakantan, A., Parrotta, J.A., Quintas-Soriano, C., Abson, D.J., Alkemade, R., Amelung, B., Baptiste, B., Barrios, E., Djoudi, H., Drakou, E.G., Durance, I., García Llorente, M., Geneletti, D., Harmáčková, Z.V., Jacobs, S., Kaiser, N.N., Kingsley, J., Klain, S., Martínez-Harms, M.J., Murali, R., O’Farrell, P., Pandit, R., Pereira, L., Rana, S., Riechers, M., Rusch, G.M., Sala, J.E., Schulp, C.J.E., Sitas, N., Subramanian, S.M., Villasante, S., van Oudenhoven, A.. 2023. Science on ecosystems and people to support the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Ecosystems and People. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2023.2220913

In December 2022, members of the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) (https://www.cbd.int/gbf/targets/) to guide international biodiversity conservation efforts until 2030 in order to be able to live ‘in harmony with nature’ by 2050. This framework addresses the implementation gap left after the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which were the previous global instru...

Mercedes Bustamante, Joyashree Roy, Daniel Ospina, Ploy Achakulwisut, Anubha Aggarwal, Ana Bastos, Wendy Broadgate, Josep G. Canadell, Edward R. Carr, Deliang Chen, Helen A. Cleugh, Kristie Ebi, Clea Edwards, Carol Farbotko, Marcos Fernández-Martínez, Thomas L. Frölicher, Sabine Fuss, Oliver Geden, Nicolas Gruber, Luke J. Harrington, Judith Hauck, Zeke Hausfather, Sophie Hebden, Aniek Hebinck, Saleemul Huq, Matthias Huss, M. Laurice P. Jamero, Sirkku Juhola, Nilushi Kumarasinghe, Shuaib Lwasa, Bishawjit Mallick, Maria Anne Martin, Steven McGreevy, Paula Mirazo, Aditi Mukherji, Greg Muttitt, Gregory F. Nemet, David Obura, Chukwumerije Okereke, Tom Oliver, Ben Orlove, Nadia S. Ouedraogo, Prabir K. Patra, Mark Pelling, Laura Pereira, Åsa Persson, Julia Pongratz, Anjal Prakash, Anja Rammig, Colin Raymond, Aaron Redman. 2023. Ten New Insights in Climate Science 2023/2024. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2023.25

We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding the future contribution of natural carbon sinks, (5) intertwinedne...

Laura M. Pereira, Benjamin Abbott, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, Jennifer Baltzer, Ronja Reese, Emily Hill, Marco Gaetani, Camilo Mora, Saskia E. Werners, Michael Hagenlocher. 2023. Overshooting tipping points: Thresholds and impacts. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.11.015

Anthropogenic impacts have perturbed the planet to the edge of the known “safe operating space” for human civilization, and it is now practically certain that global climate will overshoot the “safe” temperature limits of the Paris Agreement. In this unprecedented future, there is a growing risk of crossing tipping points into a new, and potentially irreversible, state. This Voices asks, where are the thresholds, and the poten...

Johannah Bernstein, David Collste, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Nathalie Spittler. 2023. SDGs for All: Strategic Scenarios. Earth4All System Dynamics Modelling of SDG Progress. The Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Earth4All.

The report examines SDG progress in the light of Earth4All’s five extraordinary turnarounds – poverty, inequality, empowerment, food and energy – and against the scenarios that lie at the core of the Earth4All model: Too Little Too Late, where societies maintain the types of economic policies that have been in place for decades, and the Giant Leap, a scenario where societies make ambitious decisions and investments today which...

Collste, D., Barbour, F., Callegari, B., Cornell, S.E., Gaffney, O., Spittler, N., Stoknes, P.E.. 2023. Modeling human wellbeing on a finite planet towards 2100 with Earth4All. Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3228512/v1

How can wellbeing for all be reached while reducing risks of destabilizing the planet? This ambition underlies the 2030 Agenda but analyzing whether it is possible requires linking global socioeconomic developments with life-supporting Earth systems, incorporating feedback between them. Our new integrated systems model, Earth4All, enables exploration of plausible developments of human wellbeing and environmental pressures, 198...

Chandrakant Singh, Ruud van der Ent, Ingo Fetzer, Lan Wang-Erlandsson. 2023. Supplementary material to "Multi-fold increase in rainforests tipping risk beyond 1.5–2 °C warming". Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1486-supplement

Tropical rainforests invest in their root systems to store moisture in their root zone from water-rich periods for use in water-scarce periods. An inadequate root-zone soil moisture storage predisposes or forces these forest ecosystems to transition to a savanna-like state, devoid of their native structure and functions. Yet changes in soil moisture storage and its influence on the rainforest ecosystems under future climate ch...