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The evolution of the planetary boundaries framework. Licenced under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Credit: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Based on Sakschewski and Caesar et al. 2025, Richardson et al. 2023, Steffen et al. 2015, and Rockström et al. 2009).

The planetary boundaries framework highlights the rising risks from human pressure on nine critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth
In 2023, a team of scientists quantified, for the first time, the framework's nine processes that together maintain a stable and resilient Earth system.

The planetary boundaries were first proposed in 2009 by a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists led by former centre director Johan Rockström. Combining insights from many fields of global environmental change research, the framework highlights nine global change processes where human activities affect Earth system functioning. Planetary boundaries are quantitative assessments of the safe limits for human pressure on these nine critical processes.

The 2023 update not only quantified all planetary boundaries, it also concluded that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed.

Crossing boundaries increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. The impacts of these changes will not necessarily be immediate or drastic, but together the boundaries mark a critical threshold for risks to societies and the biosphere we are part of.

Planetary boundaries are interdependent. The long-term large-scale stability of the past, which allowed human societies to develop and thrive, comes from the complex interactions of biophysical processes within the Earth system. This means we cannot consider planetary boundaries in isolation in any decision-making on sustainability. Action that affects one process in the planetary boundaries framework will affect the risks of the other processes. Only by respecting all nine boundaries can we maintain the safe operating space for humanity.

Over the years, the planetary boundaries framework has generated enormous interest. Centre researchers develop and use the framework within science, policy, and practice.

Since 2024, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research uses the planetary boundaries framework for its Planetary Health Check, updated yearly. Find the new report here.
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Science & Advocacy  Institutions & Organizations

Rockström

What connects complex networks in trade or social networks is also at play in the climate system and even the human brain. Frontier research using advanced mathematical methods explores the dynamics of all these; dynamics that are often non-linear and hard to detect but to some extent universal in nature. Machine Learning, often dubbed Artificial Intelligence, is applied to this end, making sense out of Big Data from weather phenomena to human interactions. Decision theory and Game Theory helps to understand why people do what they do. And it helps to develop novel designs for processes that may support finding comprehensive solutions.

​HOW Philosophy: The Moral Leadership Framework

Dov Seidman’s lifelong study of moral philosophy and the law resulted in a powerful vision that in today’s connected and transparent world, people and organizations stand to gain by dedicating new thought and energy to how they do what they do. That’s the inspiration behind his award-winning book, “HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything.”

HOW is more than a book. HOW is a philosophical leadership framework for a reshaped world. Technological advancements, social shifts, and rapid economic developments are reshaping the world faster than we have yet been able reshape ourselves, our leadership and institutions.

Our world has gone from connected to interconnected to globally interdependent. Today, a single banker can cause the market to lose billions from his desk in minutes. A vegetable vendor and a cell phone can spark a revolution towards freedom. Mobile apps are disrupting entire industries and bringing strangers into intimate proximity. Companies — once fortresses protecting our privacy and their secrets can now be exposed by one hacker anywhere in the world enabling people to see deep into organizations and into the attitudes of the people who run them. So few can now so easily and so profoundly affect so many so far away.

At the same time, machines are quickly gaining the ability to out-think, out-process, and out-perform us. Yet, the things machines cannot do, the things that come from the heart — character, creativity, compassion, humility — are all uniquely human and uniquely valuable and cannot be automated or commoditized. But it is one thing to proclaim the primacy of human values and moral decision making, it is yet another to scale them and again make them central to daily life. That is the work that urgently remains to be done.

More than ever, we rise and fall together and the implications for leaders, organizations and society are profound. We are facing a public crisis of truth and trust. Our common imperative must be to put humanity, shared values, and purpose-inspired missions at the core of how we lead, how we shape culture, how we govern and how we relate to each other and to society. Because of our interdependence, this all matters more than ever and in ways it never has before.

​​​A river is alive Robert Mcfarlane Interview:   
​Theology.    Word. Apophasis

And actually, I think where we end up is what in theology is called “apophasis,” which is definition by negation—as you know very well—and a trope of the mystical tradition, in which recognizing that which cannot be articulated, one ends up shaping its absence by speaking around it. And you create a kind of shatter-belt, an Oort cloud of linguistic debris. And that, in fact, makes visible the shape of the thing which is unspeakable. And I find that very exciting. And this is another version, I suppose, of that idea that the attempt is one that fundamentally changes the way one thinks about language and self. So keep trying even in the knowledge of failure, even in the knowledge of the absent center. Does that make sense?

Who speaks for the river is a vital question, because that answers the question of who or what is the ligament between phenomenon and power.
And he spoke about how, to be we have to be related, and that before we can know a river to be alive, we must first widen our understanding of the ways we are connected with it; because a river doesn’t exist in isolation.
…………
So when I began work on this book, I took a very clear vow, which was that I would not try to ventriloquize the river. I would not try to write pages of the book as if the river were speaking. I realized this would be a terrible sort of derogation and a mutilation, in fact, of the core philosophical ideas. And the history of art and literature and song are littered with the debris of attempts to do so. And actually, I think where we end up is what in theology is called “apophasis,” which is definition by negation—as you know very well—and a trope of the mystical tradition, in which recognizing that which cannot be articulated, one ends up shaping its absence by speaking around it. And you create a kind of shatter-belt, an Oort cloud of linguistic debris. And that, in fact, makes visible the shape of the thing which is unspeakable. And I find that very exciting. And this is another version, I suppose, of that idea that the attempt is one that fundamentally changes the way one thinks about language and self. So keep trying even in the knowledge of failure, even in the knowledge of the absent center. Does that make sense?

Who speaks for the river is a vital question, because that answers the question of who or what is the ligament between phenomenon and power.
And so the role of the river guardian, as it’s becoming increasingly known—the book is dedicated to the river guardians—is an absolutely crucial one. And it seems to me self-evident that we should be devolving and devising new democratic structures which allow the representation of river, of river voice, of river—well of river good—to be represented by, in effect, citizens’ assemblies of riparian dwellers, of those who truly know the river. And we see that happening. So the Innu community at Ekuanitshit, led in part by Rita Mestokosho, they co-devised the rights bill for that river—the first river in Canada, or Nitassinan, as Rita and her people would call it—to have its rights recognized in law. But, my goodness—

The Guardian interview w/Robert Macfarlane: ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me’
John Watts Global Environmental Editor