Eco-civilization meets planetary boundaries

Over a decade after the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals — to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all by 2030 — we are in a precarious situation.

As we approach the 2030 deadline for the SDG framework that has defined not only the last decade of global development, but also work on climate, water, health and beyond, the question naturally arises: What next?

At a time of growing geopolitical fragmentation, it is increasingly difficult to imagine the UN forging the same broad consensus around a new global development framework that it did with the SDGs.

In this context, China's vision of an ecological civilization is a political and developmental framework that seeks to reconcile economic growth, social stability and environmental protection.

It is based on evidence that the old industrial production methods have run up unsustainable ecological costs, and concludes that environmental considerations must be integrated into planning, governance and economic activity.

This vision has seen a strong role for the state in its energy transition, such as large-scale investments in renewable technologies, ecological restoration programs, pollution control, and the use of environmental targets in government performance assessments.

Environmental protection is not above economic growth; rather, growth is compatible with ecological limits and national development goals.

Building an ecological civilization is fundamentally about succeeding in attaining aspirational social goals for human welfare and economic development, within scientifically defined boundaries: economic growth within the safe operating space of a stable, healthy and resilient planet. But a precondition to building an ecological civilization is to define and quantify the ecological limits or boundaries.

The planetary boundaries framework does just that. On the basis of the latest Earth system science, it starts by identifying the environmental processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the planet. These are the planetary boundaries.

It is not only about carbon and climate change, but also the ecological boundaries of biodiversity, land use, freshwater use, overloading of nitrogen, ocean stability, air pollution, depletion of the ozone layer and finally, novel entities, such as the overloading of persistent chemical compounds into the Earth system.

For all of these nine planetary boundaries, we have identified control variables, which — backed by big data, long time series and advanced analytics — enable us to quantify a safe boundary level that defines the transition from safety (when staying within the boundary level) to danger (when breaching the boundary).

Our scientific assessment from 2025 concludes that seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been breached. This means there is strong scientific support that we, as humanity, are in danger of destabilizing the Earth system and undermining human welfare across the world.

In the last decade, global warming has accelerated; the intensity of extreme events such as droughts, floods, wildfires and human-reinforced storms is increasing; and we are increasingly close to crossing tipping points, which would cause the permanent collapse of systems that provide planetary stability and life support for millions of people.

A new development paradigm will be needed to grapple with these challenges, and it will require policies, economic incentives, regulations and profound equity dimensions (such as how to share, in a fair way, the ecological space on Earth among countries). If translated into ecological civilization targets, it can also drive innovation and efficiency and contribute to the next phase in humanity's journey toward shared prosperity.

At the same time, the international agenda will have implications for a large economy such as China. Our old and still dominant economic paradigm, which assumes that the planet has infinite capacity to buffer our unsustainable Anthropocene pressures, has long been proven wrong. The Earth is regulated by dampening (stress-reducing and cooling) feedback and interactions that regulate the large tipping point systems.

Scientifically, we have recently suggested that all tipping point systems (such as the large ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the Amazon rainforest) need to be legally defined as global commons.

Why? Because, to ensure strong socioeconomic development, not only must the ecological civilization targets of all countries be met within their national borders, but also all tipping point systems on Earth must stay within safe planetary boundaries.

This also suggests a need to further align the Belt and Road Initiative with China's ecological civilization principles and scientifically defined planetary boundaries. If we fail to keep the Earth's tipping point systems intact, ecological invoices will be sent, and they will hit indiscriminately across the world.

Ecological civilization in China thus not only implies clean, healthy environments for economic development within the country, but also becoming Planetary Stewards to keep the Earth, as a whole, within safe planetary boundaries.

The author is the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK and professor in Earth system science at the University of Potsdam.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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