KN Rockstrom

Johan Rockström

New Paradigm to Navigate Humanity's Future on Earth

It is within the last 15 years that deep new scientific advancements have resulted in fundamental insights, giving us new concepts and frameworks such as the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene, Tipping Elements in the Earth system, the Holocene stability, and the Planetary Boundaries framework. Taken together, this leads to two distressing facts that need to penetrate all higher education, across all disciplines; (1) that we are now - as humanity - at risk of distabilising the entire Earth system, i.e., the liveability on Earth, and (2) that we are no longer a "small world on a large planet" with apparent infinite growth potential as finite resources seemed so redundant, to now being a "large world on a small planet", where we are hitting the biophysical ceiling of Earth's finite carrying capacity. This "changes everything", necessitating a Paradigm shift, where human development, at any scale or sector, must "reconnect to the Planet" and be guided by science-based guardrails, targets, or boundaries, to avoid irreversible changes that undermine life support systems on Earth. Taken together, this requires rapid and fundamental integration of Earth system understanding across all disciplines of higher education, and in particular in economics and political science, as a way to once and for all position society and the economy, within the safe operating space on a stable and resilient Earth system.