Publications

Johan Rockström. 2024. Reflections on the past and future of whole Earth system science. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.15

With unabating climate extremes, evidence of waning biosphere buffering capacity, and surging ocean surface temperature, Earth system analysts are posing the question: is global environmental change accelerating, driven by the depletion of our planet's resilience? No scientist contributed more actively to addressing this question and thus defining sustainable development in the Anthropocene than the late Professor Will Steffen...

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...

Johan Rockström, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Carl Folke, Dieter Gerten, Line J. Gordon, Patrick W. Keys. 2024. Malin Falkenmark: Water pioneer who coined the notion of water crowding and coloured the water cycle. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-01989-7

"Water is the bloodstream of the biosphere" is a wise insight coined by Professor Malin Falkenmark (Falkenmark and Biswas 1995), a world-leading international hydrologist, who passed away on 3 December 2023, at the age of 98 years. Falkenmark was a scientific visionary, calling for global water stewardship as a fundamental step towards human development, even before modern thinking on sustainable development was established th...

Johan Rockström. 2024. Food matters: Dietary shifts increase the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways in line with the Paris Agreement. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj3832

A transition to healthy diets such as the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet could considerably reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the specific contributions of dietary shifts for the feasibility of 1.5°C pathways remain unclear. Here, we use the open-source integrated assessment modeling (IAM) framework REMIND-MAgPIE to compare 1.5°C pathways with and without dietary shifts. We find that a flexitarian diet increase...

Johan Colding, Caroline Nilsson, Stefan Sjöberg. 2024. Smart Cities for All? Bridging Digital Divides for Socially Sustainable and Inclusive Cities. Smart Cities. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities7030044

This paper aims to emphasize the need for enhancing inclusivity and accessibility within smart-city societies. It represents the first attempt to apply Amartya Sen’s capability approach by exploring the implications of digital divides for promoting inclusive and climate-friendly cities that prioritize well-being, equity, and societal participation. Sen’s framework recognizes individual variations in converting resources into v...

Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Shane Griffiths, Hilario Murua, Henrik Österblom, Jon Lopez. 2024. Adaptive spatiotemporal management to reduce shark bycatch in tuna fisheries. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14324

Purse-seine tropical tuna fishing in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean (EPO) results in the bycatch of several sensitive species groups, including elasmobranchs. Effective ecosystem management balances conservation and resource use and requires considering trade-offs and synergies. Seasonal and adaptive spatial measures can reduce fisheries impacts on nontarget species while maintaining or increasing target catches. Identifyi...

Max Troell, Noureddine Benkeblia, Catriona Hurd, Thierry Chopin, Barry A. Costa-Pierce, Mark J. Costello. 2024. Seaweeds for carbon dioxide removal (CDR)–Getting the science right. PLOS Climate. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000377

To keep global warming < 2˚C, Almaraz et al. [1] highlight the need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food production and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2050. They provided an expert analysis of the potential of terrestrial based biological methods of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), including technologies that “demonstrated high impact potential supported by peer-reviewed literature”. However, scientific...

Per Olsson, Michele-Lee Moore. 2024. A resilience-based transformations approach to peacebuilding and transformative justice. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101392

Moving from a state of war or violent conflict will require a transformation, but there are no guarantees that transformations automatically lead to peace, sustainability, and justice. This review focuses on the temporary phase when a system is in limbo between the existing, dominant state and a new alternative state. We combine insights from a resilience approach to transformations with peacebuilding and transformative justic...

Bunge, A.C., Mazac, R., Clark, M. et al. Sustainability benefits of transitioning from current diets to plant-based alternatives or whole-food diets in Sweden. Nat Commun 15, 951 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45328-6

Plant-based alternatives (PBAs) are increasingly becoming part of diets. Here, we investigate the environmental, nutritional, and economic implications of replacing animal-source foods (ASFs) with PBAs or whole foods (WFs) in the Swedish diet. Utilising two functional units (mass and energy), we model vegan, vegetarian, and flexitarian scenarios, each based on PBAs or WFs. Our results demonstrate that PBA-rich diets substantia...

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...