Anthropocene and Planetary Boundaries

Re-defining Sustainability: Living in Harmony with Life on Earth

The notion of security has changed significantly in international contexts since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm 1972, so as to include social-ecological concerns even at the global scale. This change is paralleled by the increasing attention to mankind's position, impact and responsibility in a global environmental context, even to suggest that we are entering into a new geological epoch where mankind is 'a major environmental force': The Anthropocene . This chapter explores international law and policy for social-ecological security in light of the notion of the Anthropocene and the planetary boundaries. In addition to planetary boundaries, international law and policy on social-ecological security must take into account the equitable distribution of burdens and benefits related to health, the environment, 'eco-services' and resource uses within any boundary. Keywords: eco-services; international law; obal environmental context; planetary boundaries; social-ecological concerns; Stockholm; The Anthropocene ; United Nations Conference

Dramatic alterations to the natural environment due to human activity have produced a permanent rupture in the Earth system; the relative stable epoch of the Holocene has given way to a volatile Anthropocene. Acceptance of these claims means that we now live in this altered physical reality, inviting us to rethink how we conceptualise disasters. Yet, disaster scholars have been hesitant to apply the Anthropocene label and to acknowledge the profound changes that it can bring to the study of disasters. This paper queries whether this label is a necessary adage or unnecessary baggage for disaster studies by examining the possibilities and the challenges associated with engaging with the Anthropocene. An analysis of the concepts, causes, and consequences of disasters reveals how the Anthropocene provides, as the very least, a theoretical heuristic for challenging linear temporal assumptions, the epistemological status of uncertainty, and the location of agency in disaster studies.

Planetary boundaries is an Earth systems science concept that aims to comprehensively assess human-caused disturbances on the planet. First developed in 2009, the basic premise is that there are thresholds for a series of Earth systems—such as ocean acidification, freshwater depletion, and climate change—that, if crossed, will cause abrupt and potentially catastrophic environmental change. As such, planetary boundaries is useful to frame sustainability objectives and practices. This review investigates the scholarly diffusion of planetary boundaries. How did it take off and spread? Using academic databases, I trace the growth of the concept over time, by the geographic location of scholars, as well as their disciplinary affiliations. Using citation counts, the most influential papers that have diffused the concept are identified. Moreover, the temporal expansion of planetary boundaries is compared to older, well-established sustainability concepts. The results indicate that the planetary boundaries concept has penetrated a wide variety of different academic disciplines, although such research is predominantly European. Fewer studies currently involve planetary boundaries compared to the related sustainability concepts Anthropocene and ecological footprint; however, the growth rate of planetary boundaries research is comparable to trends when those concepts were new. Most research that addresses planetary boundaries uses it as a background idea to frame their research questions. Although quantitatively fewer, some research studies continuously assess and refine the planetary boundary concept itself.

The Anthropocene concept arose within the Earth System science (ESS) community, albeit explicitly as a geological (stratigraphical) time term. Its current analysis by the stratigraphical community, as a potential formal addition to the Geological Time Scale, necessitates comparison of the methodologies and patterns of enquiry of these two communities. One means of comparison is to consider some of the most widely used results of the ESS, the ‘planetary boundaries’ concept of Rockström and colleagues, and the ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs of Steffen and colleagues, in terms of their stratigraphical expression. This expression varies from virtually non-existent (stratospheric ozone depletion) to pronounced and many-faceted (primary energy use), while in some cases stratigraphical proxies may help constrain anthropogenic process (atmospheric aerosol loading). The Anthropocene concepts of the ESS and stratigraphy emerge as complementary, and effective stratigraphic definition should facilitate wider transdisciplinary communication.

Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

The doughnut framework of social foundations and ecological ceilings has become a popular visual tool to assess progress towards sustainability and inform decision making.(1) While rich in indicators for human development, the framework is less detailed on planetary health. Biodiversity breakdown, one of nine planetary boundaries, ranks amongst the ecological ceilings with most relative overshoot. Given this overshoot and the strong dependence of human well-being on nature,(2) biodiversity conservation merits a complementary doughnut.This paper proposes such a biodiversity doughnut with an outer ring that displays threats to biodiversity and an inner ring that tracks values derived from its conservation. The outer ring depicts global direct drivers of biodiversity loss as identified by IPBES (2019) or threat information from the IUCN Red List of endangered species.(3),(4) The inner ring draws from the Nature Futures and Nature’s Contributions to People frameworks and the ecosystem services literature.(2),(3),(5)Visual prominence of threat categories in the outer ring can reflect relative importance (e.g., by using IUCN threat frequency as percentage of the doughnut radius). Threat mitigation scenarios can be displayed in the doughnut its margin, since the biodiversity doughnut has no overshoot equivalent. The biodiversity doughnut its inner ring seems less suitable for expressing relative importance of values, since some values will be impossible to translate in comparable terms.The biodiversity doughnut offers ample opportunity for targeted downscaling, where downscaling to (bio-)region, industry, or firm supports nature-inclusive policymaking and business strategies.(6) Downscaled doughnuts to ecosystem or taxonomic levels present tools for environmental education and science communication. The paper illustrates downscaled doughnuts for Europe, Madagascar, mangroves, and butterflies, while being sensitive to knowledge gaps and uncertainty.Through above methodological innovations, the biodiversity doughnut provides doughnut economics a second ‘wing’ in order to accelerate metamorphosis from the growth-based caterpillar economy to a just and sustainable butterfly economy.References(1) Fanning and Raworth, 2025. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09385-1.(2) Costanza et. al., 2014. Global Environmental Change, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.002.(3) IPBES, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673.(4) IUCN. 2025. https://www.iucnredlist.org/search.(5) Pereira et. al., 2020. People and Nature, https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10146.(6) Turner and Wills, 2022. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101180.

Earth science education: The current state of play

Recruitment and professorial appointment procedures are crucial for the administration and management of universities and higher education institutions in order to guarantee a certain level of performance quality and reputation. The complementary use of quantitative and objective bibliometric analyses is meant to be an enhancement for the assessment of candidates and a possible antidote for subjective, discriminatory and corrupt practices. In this paper, we present the Vienna University bibliometric approach, offering a method which relies on a variety of basicindicators and further control parameters in order to address the multidimensionality of the problem and to foster comprehensibility. Our "top counts approach" allows an appointment committee to pick and choose from a portfolio of indicators according to the actual strategic alignment. Furthermore, control and additional data help to understand disciplinary publication habits, to unveil concealed aspects and to identify individual publication strategies of the candidates. Our approach has already been applied to 14 professorial appointment procedures (PAP) in the life sciences, earth and environmental sciences and social sciences, comprising 221 candidates in all. The usefulness of the bibliometric approach was confirmed by all heads of appointment committees in the life sciences. For the earth and environmental sciences as well as the social sciences, the usefulness was less obvious and sometimes questioned due to the low coverage of the candidates' publication output in the traditional citation data sources. A retrospective assessment of all hitherto performed PAP also showed an overlap between the committees' designated top candidates and the bibliometric top candidates to a certain degree.

Information Needs: Developing Personas of Humanities Scholars

During the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic the Newark rift basin of the northeastern US accumulated in excess 5 km of continental, mostly lacustrine strata that show a profound cyclicity previousl...

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

Institutional insights on integrating social and environmental science for solutions-driven research

Andrea Cupp made a serendipitous discovery when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University: While investigating how chemicals affect sex determination in embryonic animals, she bred the offspring of pregnant rats that had been dosed with an insecticide called methoxyclor. When the males from that litter grew into adults, they had decreased sperm counts and higher rates of infertility. Cupp had seen these same abnormalities in the animals’ fathers, which had been exposed to methoxyclor in the womb. But this latest generation hadn’t been exposed that way, which suggested that methoxyclor’s toxic effects had carried over generations. “At first I couldn’t believe it,” says Cupp’s advisor, Michael Skinner, a biochemist and Washington State professor. “But then we repeated the breeding experiments and found that the results held up.” Skinner and Cupp, who is now a professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, published their findings in 2005.1 Since that paper—which showed that reproductive effects not just from methoxyclor but also from the fungicide vinclozolin persisted for at least four generations—the number of published articles reporting similar transgenerational findings has increased steadily. “In the last year and half there’s been an explosion in studies showing transgenerational effects from exposure to a wide array of environmental stressors,” says Lisa Chadwick, a program administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). “This is a field that’s really starting to take off.” According to Chadwick, the new findings compel a reevaluation of how scientists perceive environmental health threats. “We have to think more long-term about the effects of chemicals that we’re exposed to every day,” she says. “This new research suggests they could have consequences not just for our own health and for that of our children, but also for the health of generations to come.” Figure 1 Glossary The NIEHS recently issued requests for applications totaling $3 million for research on transgenerational effects in mammals.2 Chadwick says funded studies will address two fundamental data needs, one pertaining to potential transgenerational mechanisms and another to the number of chemicals thought to exert these effects. These studies will extend to what’s known as the F3 generation—the great-grandchildren of the originally exposed animal. That’s because chemicals given to pregnant females (the F0 generation) interact not only with the fetal offspring (the F1 generation) but also the germ cells developing within those offspring, which mature into the sperm and eggs that give rise to the F2 generation. Thus, the F3 animals are the first generation to be totally unexposed to the original agent. Effects that extend to the F2 generation are known as “multigenerational,” whereas those that extend to the F3 generation are known as “transgenerational.”3 Transgenerational effects have now been reported for chemicals including permethrin, DEET, bisphenol A, certain phthalates, dioxin, jet fuel mixtures, nicotine, and tributyltin, among others. Most of these findings come from rodent studies.4,5,6,7 But preliminary evidence that chemical effects can carry over generations in humans is also emerging, although no F3 data have been published yet. Given the challenges of tracking effects over multiple human lifespans, the evidence is more difficult to interpret, particularly with respect to potential mechanisms, says Tessa Roseboom, a professor of early development and health at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Still, some reports have linked nutritional deficiencies from famine and exposure to diethylstilbestrol (DES)—a nonsteroidal estrogen used to protect against miscarriage from the 1940s to the 1970s—to effects that persist among the grandchildren of exposed women.8,9,10,11,12,13

AN ASSESSMENT OF SPATIAL VARIATION OF LAND SURFACE CHARACTERISTICS OF MINNA, NIGER STATE NIGERIA FOR SUSTAINABLE URBANIZATION USING GEOSPATIAL TECHNIQUES