Publications

Fabian Stenzel, Liad Ben Uri, Johanna Braun, Jannes Breier, Karlheinz Erb, Dieter Gerten, Helmut Haberl, Sarah Matej, Ron Milo, Sebastian Ostberg, Johan Rockström, Nicolas Roux, Sibyll Schaphoff, Wolfgang Lucht. 2025. Breaching planetary boundaries: Over half of global land area suffers critical losses in functional biosphere integrity. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101393

Mapping ecosystem integrity is a key task of the planetary-boundaries framework. Two new control variables have been suggested for the core planetary boundary for functional biosphere integrity: (1) human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) and (2) a metric for ecological disruption (EcoRisk). However they have not yet been mapped spatially and temporally explicitly. Here, we use simulations with the dynamic global...

Carlos A. Faerron Guzmán, Nicole Redvers, John S. Ji, Oliver Lacey-Hall, Jemilah Mahmood, Oskar Masztalerz, Alexandra L. Phelan, Johan Rockström, Samuel S. Myers. 2025. Planetary Health: Focusing on the Intersection of Human Health and the Earth System. Annual Review of Environment and Resources. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-111523-102309

The core insight of Planetary Health is that the Earth crisis is fueling a global health crisis. Planetary Health examines the links between human health and Earth's natural systems. This review outlines key drivers of environmental degradation and how they lead to global environmental change, which is marked by the transgression of six Planetary Boundaries and causes severe health impacts such as malnutrition and the spread o...

Joyeeta Gupta, Jesse F. Abrams, David Armstrong McKay, Xuemei Bai, Kristi L. Ebi, Paola Fezzigna, Giuliana Gentile, Lauren Gifford, Syezlin Hasan, Lisa Jacobson, Aljoscha Karg, Steven Lade, Tim Lenton, Diana Liverman, Awaz Mohamed, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, David Obura, Johan Rockström, Ben Stewart-Koster, Detlef van Vuuren, Peter Verburg, Raimon C. Ylla-Català, Caroline Zimm. 2025. Thresholds of significant harm at global level: The journey of the Earth Commission. Earth System Governance. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2025.100263

The planetary boundary framework proposes ‘safe’ boundaries, but these boundaries are not necessarily ‘just’. Hence, we ask: How has the Earth Commission defined just boundaries building on the concept of minimizing significant harm and how many people are currently exposed to harm above the safe and just threshold? We document the work of the Earth Commission to address these questions using our Earth System Justice framew...

Felicitas D Beier, Jan Philipp Dietrich, Jens Heinke, Gabriel Abrahao, Patrick von Jeetze, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Michael Crawford, Florian Humpenöder, Leon Merfort, Isabelle Weindl, Mario Herrero, Daniel Mason-D’Croz, Johan Rockström, Marina Sundiang, Sofie te Wierik, Anna Norberg, David Klein, Christoph Müller, Hermann Lotze-Campen, Alexander Popp. 2025. Planetary boundaries under a land-based climate change mitigation scenario with a food demand transformation: a modelling study. The Lancet Planetary Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(25)00087-7

Ambitious climate change mitigation in all economic sectors is crucial for limiting global warming. Cost-effective mitigation pathways to keep global average temperature increases below 1·5°C by the end of the 21st century often rely on land-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions, increased land-based carbon uptake and biomass supply to other sectors (eg, energy and transport), and demand-side changes in the food syste...

Samuel S Myers, Oskar Masztalerz, Samantha Ahdoot, Sabine Gabrysch, Joyeeta Gupta, Andy Haines, Henrika Kleineberg-Massuthe, Nathalie J Lambrecht, Philip J Landrigan, Jemilah Mahmood, Lisa M Pörtner, Jason Rohr, Claudia Traidl-Hoffmann, Amanda S Wendt, Britt Wray, Johan Rockström. 2025. Connecting planetary boundaries and planetary health: a resilient and stable Earth system is crucial for human health. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(25)01256-5

Fiona Rickowski, Florian Ruland, Örjan Bodin, Thomas Evans, Mike S. Fowler, Lotta C. Kluger, Guillaume Latombe, Robert Arlinghaus, Gustavo A. Castellanos-Galindo, James W. E. Dickey, Sabine Hilt, Yuval Itescu, Ivan Jaric, Sophia Kimmig, Lohith Kumar, Cristian Pérez-Granados, Menja von Schmalensee, Florencia A. Yannelli, Giovanni Vimercati, Bernd Lenzner, Rafael Macêdo, Tim Adriaens, Jaimie Dick, Franz Essl, Belinda Gallardo, Ana Novoa, Francisco Oficialdegui, Petr Pyšek, Wolfgang Rabitsch, David Richardson, Núria Roura-Pascual, Montserrat Vilà, Jonathan Jeschke. 2025. A systems perspective: How social-ecological networks can improve our understanding and management of biological invasions. Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf174

Reversing biodiversity loss and the sustainability crisis requires approaches that explicitly consider human-nature interdependencies. Social-ecological networks (SENs), which incorporate social and ecological actors and entities as well as their interactions, are such an approach. SENs have been applied to a range of complex issues, such as sustainable resource use, management of ecosystem (dis-)services, and collective actio...

Örjan Bodin, Michele L. Barnes. 2025. A synthesis and afterword: Handbook of Social Networks and the Environment. Pages 337–341. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035318759.00033

Meaningful progress toward a sustainable future requires new strategies to manage the intricate social and social-ecological interdependencies that define our world today. In this concluding chapter of our edited volume Handbook of Social Networks and the Environment , we synthesize some key insights from this collection that demonstrate how a network perspective can advance this agenda and discuss the challenges of studying...

Bridget McGlynn, Angela M. Guerrero, Julia Baird, Örjan Bodin, Ryan Plummer. 2025. A system perspective to flood planning combining multiple multilevel collaboration networks. Handbook of Social Networks and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035318759.00021

Flooding is an increasingly impactful and concerning phenomenon. A shift towards addressing flooding through an integrated systems perspective involves recognizing flood risk as a collective action problem with distributed characteristics. As flood planning is multi-faceted, associated issues must be addressed across multiple jurisdictions to align with the ecological space involved. Shifting to a systems perspective emphasize...

Sofie te Wierik, Fabrice DeClerck, Arthur Beusen, Dieter Gerten, Federico Maggi, Anna Norberg, Kevin Noone, Lena Schulte-Uebbing, Marco Springmann, Fiona H. M. Tang, Wim de Vries, Detlef van Vuuren, Sonja Vermeulen, Johan Rockström. 2025. Identifying the safe operating space for food systems. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01252-6

Global environmental pressures from food systems threaten biodiversity and the stability of the Earth system, yet the safe operating space for food systems is unknown. Here we calculate food system boundaries as shares of planetary boundaries, proposing budgets for the food system across nine boundaries. Our results indicate that food systems are a critical driver of planetary boundary transgressions, dominating at least four ...

Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Michele-Lee Moore, Line Gordon, Carl Folke, Malin Falkenmark. 2025. Fostering water resilience in the Anthropocene. Global Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2025.10035