When the human being ceased to be a hunter and gatherer to become a farmer and rancher, everything changed. It was then that he began to modify, slowly at first and then rapidly, the functioning of the planet. The domestication of animals and plants was perhaps the first impact due to man, which would cause many other chain reactions. It was unthinkable then, but then the 9 ‘untouchable’ limits of the planet.
Agriculture was the origin of the current production system, a system that, having been intensifying exponentially, has ended up becoming a serious threat to the planet and to human beings themselves.
An international group of scientists led by Sweden’s Johan Rockström, from the Stockholm Resilience Center, defined in 2009, through a famous study, the nine limits (rather, interdependent parameters) on which the stability of the planet depends.
The Earth is a set of chained pieces, that is to say, a system, and whatever happens to one of these pieces ends up having repercussions on all the others, sooner or later. Therefore, Rockström first identified which are the large sets of pieces on which the planet depends and then analyzed the state of conservation and balance in which they are found.
The Stockholm Resilience Center warns that, as long as these borders are not crossed, humanity will continue to prosper throughout generations. However, in the case of overcoming just one of them, irreversible and global environmental changes can be generated on the planet, and push our society towards collapse.
And yet heMankind has already crossed not one, but four of these boundaries.. Only three are still within the safe zone and another two are still not very well known in what state they are. The panorama, therefore, is one of true emergency.
The nine planetary boundaries are:
1.- The weather.
It is, as everyone knows, one of the four limits that have already been exceeded through climate change caused by man due to the massive emission of polluting gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
Since that period of recent history, the average temperature on the planet has increased by 1.1º C, which has triggered a greater frequency of extreme weather events (heat waves, floods, droughts, etc.).
Although the Paris Agreement established concrete measures to avoid exceeding 1.5º C in 2100, NASA already considers very likely that this ceiling will be reached even in 2030 and it does not rule out that 4º C could be exceeded by the end of the century. That would have fatal consequences: millions of people around the planet would be forced to move to other countries and many of them would die due to lack of food and water, as well as other consequences derived from that warming.
2.- Biodiversity.
Man is causing the disappearance of species at a rate that scientists have already identified the current moment as the sixth global extinction, after the previous five occurred in the 4,500 million years that the planet has. Of the eight million animal and plant species estimated to inhabit the Earth, one million are in danger of extinction.
It is not just a threat to a rich and varied biological or aesthetic heritage. When all these elements of biodiversity disappear, the whole of the natural system within which man functions will be altered.
The situation of this limit or border is so worrying that its progression far exceeds that of climate change. In fact, if global warming is in the “increasing risk zone”, the disappearance of biodiversity is already in the “high risk zone”.
Rockström affirms that, to stop this problem and reverse it in the future, it would be necessary to start losing zero species as of this year 2022, but the reality is that plants and animals continue to disappear in large quantities.
3.- Land use.
The planet, to guarantee the prosperity of everyone who lives on it, needs the trees it has. Only in this way can it guarantee the natural functions required to maintain the survival of the system on which man depends.
But this limit has also been exceeded. The transformation of the land through the destruction of forests, wetlands, tundra and other types of native vegetation to convert them into land for crops and livestock is advancing at a galloping pace.
The expansion of these two activities (agriculture and livestock), which began in the Neolithic, some 8,000 years ago, nevertheless presents a paradox, as it is needed to feed the growing human population. However, large-scale industrial techniques are aggravating the problem and making it worse in relation to agriculture with sustainable uses.
The planet now has more than 7,000 million inhabitants, but will reach 10,000 million in 2050, which can only lead to the transformation of larger land surfaces. This, in addition, also causes more species to disappear and also contributes to the increase in global warming.
4.- Biochemical flows.
Earth’s natural systems have their own biochemical fluxes that keep ecosystems stable. However, this is the fourth of the limits that humanity has already overflowed with its performance.
Due to the massive use of nitrogen and phosphorus for decades, basically due to intensive agriculture and livestock, this section has already reached the risk zone.
The impact exerted by these chemical elements affects the subsoil aquifers, in which it infiltrates directly from the ground. But also, because of the rain, they end up in the sea, massively ‘fertilizing’ aquatic ecosystems and completely altering their functioning.
5.- Ozone from the stratosphere
Another of the nine ‘sacred’ boundaries of the Earth is the ozone layer of the atmosphere. Without it, ultraviolet radiation from the Sun would break free of a barrier that prevents it from reaching the Earth’s surface and would scorch everything in its path.
And yet This limit managed to be saved after being seriously threatened at the end of the 20th century by the action of man. The prohibition of chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs), which caused a huge hole in this ozone layer, managed to slowly heal this atmospheric scar, reestablishing the protective shield against solar radiation.
The consequences of not having acted would have resulted in a large number of deaths, both from skin cancers and other irreversible environmental damage.
6.- Fresh water.
The fresh water of the planet it is still, fortunately, within a safe zone. However, the progression is not good, as it is moving quickly towards the risk zone where the climate, biodiversity, soil and chemical flows already exist.
The vision of the blue planet, with water as the protagonist, is misleading, since only 2.5% is fresh water, which is what man needs to live every day. But that small percentage is progressively reducing, due to the pressure from agriculture to produce more and more food for the ever-increasing population of the earth.
Far from being a solution, the desalination of seawater in turn causes other problems, such as polluting gas emissions into the atmosphere and alteration of coastal ecosystems with its brine discharges.
7.- Acidity of the oceans.
The oceans have a PH that moves within certain margins so that life is possible in them. And yet, in the last 200 years, ocean water has increased its acidity by 30%. It represents a brutal increase, because suffice it to say that it is a transformation up to a hundred times faster than that recorded in the last 55 million years.
This causes the death of essential ecosystems and habitats for underwater life, such as the Posidonia meadows in the Mediterranean or the large coral reefs, without which many species would disappear.
In fact, of the five mass extinctions that the Earth has recorded so far, several of them were centered in the oceans and were precisely due to ocean acidification.
This boundary has not yet been crossed within the parameters of the Stockholm Resilience Center, but it is worryingly close to it.
8.- Pollution of the atmosphere.
There are two other parameters that simply do not yet know if they have exceeded the equilibrium limits or not, since they are so new that scientists do not have references to make any comparison.
The first of them is the load of aerosols present in the atmosphere, that is, the level of particles originating from the surface (from pollution generated by man, but also from forest fires) that end up ascending towards the upper layers.
These particles, grouped under the generic name of aerosols, affect both the climate (they cause changes in the tropical monsoons, for example) and living organisms. Without going any further, it is the cause of premature deaths from pollution in cities.
9.- New entities.
The last of the limits consists of the incorporation into the natural environment of new elements that did not exist until now. The best known case is that of the plastics.
They are elements that, despite being made from natural ingredients, have been so modified by man that they are actually completely foreign to the environment. The proof of this is its very long life, which reaches several centuries in the case of plastics.
The radioactive elements is another of the paradigmatic examples, although there are thousands of elements that are grouped under this category. So are the CFCs that caused the hole in the ozone layer.
In short, humanity is causing the greatest disfigurement of its own planet ever imagined. The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, was blunt at the last climate summit COP26: “Our addiction to fossil fuels is taking humanity to the brink of the abyss. No more burning, drilling, digging deeper. We are digging our own grave”.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.