Interconnected risks and

solutions for a planet

under pressure

The urgent global risks and challenges facing all nations are interconnected: poverty alleviation; the financial crisis; economic development; political stability; pollution; food, water and energy security; health; wellbeing; climate change; ocean acidification; and loss of biodiversity, to name just some. Understanding this interconnectedness is crucial for tackling these challenges and improving the wellbeing of all societies.

This policy brief outlines key interconnections at a global level and makes six recommendations for lowering the risk of catastrophic change to the Earth system, achieving sustainable prosperity and wellbeing for all, and protecting natural capital (land, water, soil, biodiversity and ecosystem services). These actions underpin the shift to a green economy and the transformation of the world’s institutional frameworks for sustainable development.

Summary of key points and policy recommendations

• Reduce risk. Concerted, global and immediate action is needed to reduce the risk of fundamentally disrupting the stability of the Earth system, with consequences for global economic and political systems. The immediate priority is to stabilize the global climate at a temperature of no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels¹. We must reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy, undertake a massive decarbonisation of the energy sector and effectively manage Earth’s  carbon and radiant energy budgets. Other immediate challenges include: massive biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and disruption of the nitrogen cycle, all of which need coordinated action.

• Transform global governance to address the interconnected nature of today’s challenges. While our global societal systems are increasingly interconnected, our governance systems often act independently and are slow to respond. Nations must work together to devise effective ways of protecting such globally common resources as the atmosphere, oceans, freshwater, biodiversity, the ice sheets and natural cycles for the benefit of all societies, present and future.

• Engender strong leadership. Leadership is a powerful catalyst for action. This includes:

• Broaden accountability and empowerment from global to local levels to improve all people’s access to and participation in international decision making.
• Establish an international high-level consultative body on global sustainability. Such a body would include a chief scientific advisor or “planetary ecologist” and broad representation from the UN General Assembly, UN system, G20, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, business and civil society, as well as science and technology organizations. Part of its role would be to review regular global sustainability assessments.
• Strengthen and upgrade the Commission on Sustainable Development; upgrade the UN Environment Programme to agency status and strengthen its links to sustainable development policy and the global economic system.

• Halt unsustainable production and consumption and value natural capital. Economic systems ignore global-scale costs and benefits to humanity (e.g. the cost of disrupting the climate system). The world’s biggest market failure is to exclude the value of the stable functioning of the Earth system. Nations must adopt new measures of well-being that go beyond financial metrics to include quality of life. The successor to the Millennium Development Goals must have global sustainability at its foundation.

• Develop global knowledge systems for interconnected challenges. This includes:

• Deploy modern communications infrastructure across all nations. Communications infrastructure has become as important to quality of life and prosperity as our transport, water and power infrastructures.
• Launch a major international research initiative for global sustainability. This collaborative endeavour will challenge the research, policy and business communities to provide the resources, knowledge and tools required to manage global risks and navigate an increasingly interconnected world.
• Bring cohesion to the international science–policy interface. Establish an Intergovernmental Panel on Global Sustainability to ensure scientific coherence. This would produce a regular ‘State of the Planet’ assessment that includes socio-economic dimensions and brings together and expands upon existing assessments, strengthening links between science and policy.
• Develop an international approach for tackling emerging technologies eg. synthetic biology, geoengineering and nanotechnology.
• Ensure international treaties are dynamic enough to respond to new information effectively.
• Invest in tertiary education in developing countries. Education builds endogenous capacity to address global challenges, improves well-being and generates economic growth.
• Create a global integrated monitoring system for global sustainability.

• Build resilience and prepare for unavoidable changes. The great acceleration in human activity (Figure 1), seen largely since the 1950s, has committed the Earth system to substantial change, some of which is not reversible on human timescales. All nations must be ready to adapt to inevitable environmental and social changes.

¹ Evidence is mounting that even this limit carries substantial risks for societies. To avoid it will require immediate and unprecedented global action and cooperation.

A new perspective

Just as the planet’s systems are interconnected, the path forward hinges on an interconnected approach to policy and a rapid response. Political recognition and acceptance of the scale of the challenges has led to wideranging efforts to solve them. Real progress has been made in reducing poverty, tackling HIV and protecting the ozone layer, for example. But political processes have had limited success in many other areas, prompting calls for a fundamental transformation of the global governance model to make it fit for 21st-century challenges.

The next ten years are crucial for the sequence of international cooperation needed to turn world affairs in a sustainable direction. Strong leadership is a major trigger for rapid change: leadership from politicians,  from society, from business and from the scientific community. The global community must establish a new compact² between science and society to deliver the knowledge necessary for a sustainable future.

²United Nations terminology for contract or agreement.

A planet under pressure

Welcome to the Anthropocene
Human societies have always altered their environment, particularly since the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The industrial revolution, though, spurred remarkable and rapid change. And more recently,  since around the 1950s, revolutions in science, industry and international politics have catalyzed an explosion in the human population and consumption. In just 50 years, humanity has become a prime driver of planetary change, leading to major disturbances in the Earth’s key biological, physical and chemical processes.

This new development has led some scientists to propose that we have recently entered a new geological epoch, one dominated by humans: the Anthropocene. This profound shift in perception follows from the direct  evidence of society’s impact on the functioning of the Earth system, particularly during the past 60 years – just one lifetime.

In 2011, the global population will pass seven billion, from just three billion in 1960 and one billion in 1800. We are on track to reach between eight and ten billion by 2050. Meeting the basic needs of this growing population is dependent on a healthy environment and, in particular, a stable Earth system. It is clear that the unsustainable consumption patterns witnessed since the middle of the 20th century will need to change. This
will require a multipronged approach, including family planning, nonconsumptive models for enhancing well-being, technological change and more equitable access to resources.

Tipping points and systems thinking

Natural and social systems are increasingly interconnected and changes in one may lead to a tipping point in another: an earthquake tips a financial crisis, or human activity drives a slow decline in a once-healthy ecosystem that suddenly disappears  entirely.

In some cases, we seek to harness tipping points, such as when an online video or advertisement ‘goes viral’, exploding overnight from single-digit viewing figures into a global phenomenon. In other cases, we want to avoid them: the onset of collective neural activity triggering an epileptic seizure, for example, or potentially catastrophic regime shifts in the Earth’s climate.

Complex systems can contain feedback loops that accelerate change. Now, the global socio-economic system – itself part of the Earth system – is pushing the Earth system and many ecosystems within it towards planetaryscale tipping points. Feedback loops in the socio-economic system cause emissions to accelerate. For example, as more people use commercial airlines, the price of flying drops, allowing even more people to fly. And feedbacks in the climate system can cause other natural systems to release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.

Planetary boundries

After the last ice age, which finished 12,000 years ago, the Earth system settled into a relatively stable warm period that has allowed human society to grow and develop, eventually becoming a global force. Without significant external interference, this period would have likely persisted for several thousand years to come.

In 2009, researchers made the first attempt to define planetary boundaries associated with thresholds or tipping points in the Earth system that threaten the current state. They identified nine interconnected boundaries (Figure 4). Ensuring these boundaries are respected, the authors argue, will reduce the risk of crossing dangerous thresholds that push the Earth system into a new state. But the authors also state that human activity has already driven the Earth system across three boundaries: climate, biodiversity loss and nitrogen use¹.

The boundaries concept is still in its infancy and is expected to be refined in the coming years to explore its full implications. However, it is a useful communication tool. It moves the discussion beyond sustainable resource use to focus on fundamental
and uncontrolled changes to Earth’s biological, chemical and physical processes, prompting society to rethink definitions of sustainable development. Furthermore, it has the potential to help policymakers take an interconnected approach to managing planetary risks.

¹Nitrogen and phosphorus represent one boundary in this analysis.

Growing interconnectivity

Globalization has altered the rates and scale of events that were once confined to smaller areas or spheres of influence. Our global interconnected system can move rapidly from one state to another, for example from apparent economic stability to a financial crisis. The 2008 global financial crisis had local beginnings through banks granting high-risk mortgages, but it quickly spread globally, driven by the world’s vast interconnected financial system.

Disease epidemics are particularly susceptible to increasing connectivity. Urbanization, increased human mobility and changing land use all affect the global spread of new, and the resurgence of older, diseases that in the past could have been controlled locally. Over 300 infectious diseases new to medicine emerged between 1940 and 2004, including HIV/AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Ebola Fever, Lyme Disease and a new strain of cholera. Much of the effort to understand and monitor new diseases is found in wealthy nations, but risk maps point to developing countries as the more likely source of new outbreaks.

The impacts of natural catastrophes now reverberate around the globe through financial, political and communication systems. There is a shift towards more frequent weather-related natural catastrophes involving floods, droughts and storms, even when adjusted for rising populations and prosperity (Munich Re, 2011). During 2010, there were 950 natural catastrophes, 90% of which were weather-related. With social and ecological systems becoming increasingly connected, the potential for crises to spread grows ever greater.

Two mechanisms often lie at the root of the problem. Firstly, global drivers can compete or overtake local drivers as the dominant force in systems such as river basins, deltas, drylands, fishing grounds and national economies. Global drivers increase pressure on these types of systems. As they buckle under the pressure of multiple stresses, the impacts propagate outwards with knock-on
effects in far off places, increasing the reach and scale of disasters. Secondly, increased connectivity enables local disturbances to spread farther and faster, occasionally turning local disasters into global crises. Increased connectivity also means there is a greater risk that management responses in one system will lead to unintentional and undesirable changes elsewhere.

Global governance

Such a process must begin with an ambitious roadmap for institutional change, leading to fundamental reform of international governance. A starting point should be improving accountability and legitimacy, so allowing Earth system governance to be undertaken collectively, with strong leadership from governments and public participation in international decision-making. In the
absence of large-scale reform, some immediate improvements in the current system would help.

Recommendations
(see Brief No. 3: Institutional Frameworks)

• Strengthen international environmental treaties and connections between treaties
• Ensure that future treaties rely on qualified majority voting
• Strengthen and upgrade the UN Commission on Sustainable Development and upgrade the UN Environment Programme to “Organization” status
• Place environmental goals at the foundation of all global economic institutions
• Address equity concerns within and among countries.

Vive la difference!

The green economy

But a green economy must encompass more than just green technology. To reduce global risk, the green economy must also address the underlying socioeconomic drivers of change and operate in harmony with the planet’s biological, physical and chemical processes. An immediate starting point is to monitor progress towards sustainability and increased wellbeing through new metrics that go beyond income and material wealth (see Briefs No. 6: Well-being and 7: The Green Economy).

Recommendations
(See Briefs No. 4: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 6: Well-being, and 7: The Green Economy)

• Fix market failures. The value of natural capital must lie at the foundation of consumption and production patterns and all global economic institutions and systems. The world’s biggest market failure is to exclude the value of the stable functioning of the Earth system. Economic systems ignore the costs and benefits relating to the environment, including such globally  common resources as the Earth’s carbon, water and nitrogen cycles, the oceans, and atmosphere and ecosystem services.
• Cut greenhouse gas emissions and use energy efficiently.
• Remove subsidies for unsustainable energy, water and food production systems, particularly subsidies for fossil fuels.
• Spark investment in cleaner, greener products. In addition, the global trade system should include harmonized systems  that allow for discriminating between products on the basis of production process.
• Focus on urban areas. More than half the world’s population live in urban areas and consume 75% of global energy. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities and other urban areas. Cities are the action arm of civilization. As such, they must be given incentives to spearhead a revolution in green living. Initiatives such as the C40 cities should be encouraged to expand.
• Prioritize government spending on stimulating green growth across economic sectors.

Global citizens become planetary stewards

Most of the tools required to achieve global sustainability already exist, but we need to overcome inertia. Planetary stewardship should be undertaken cooperatively, with strong leadership from governments. For this to happen through open political processes, people everywhere must be able to participate meaningfully in global decisions. This depends upon a basic awareness of the actual or potential consequences of failing to manage our impact on the Earth system effectively. For this we need to
improve the collective understanding of the Earth system. People need to ask: ‘What are, or may be, the consequences of fundamental changes in the Earth system for our society, for others and for future generations?’

Globalization and two decades of incredible innovation in information technology have given us the internet and mobile telecommunications. These advances have allowed individuals across the planet to connect in new and profound ways. We are already
witnessing how this can foster rapid change. We are reaching a historical tipping point in global communications with far-reaching implications for global governance and citizen participation. We are on the cusp of becoming responsible stewards of our planet, but we need to act globally...and soon.