Human activity seems to have pushed the planet two times beyond
the ‘safe operating space’ on at least four boundaries.
Current and projected status against planetary boundaries,
multiples beyond planetary boundary¹
Boundary
Control variable
Biodiversity loss
Biodiversity intactness index (BII)²
Forest cover loss³
Forested land as a percent of potential forest cover
Freshwater consumption
Blue-water consumption
Chemical and plastic pollution
Plastic-waste emissions to aquatic environments
Nutrient pollution⁴
Nitrogen runoff, nitrogen deposition, and phosphorous pollution
Climate change⁵
GHG⁶ emission contribution to warming
Aerosol pollution
Not analyzed–lack of reliable data
Ocean acidification
Not analyzed–lack of reliable data
Ozone depletion
Not analyzed–on path to recovery
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McKinsey & Company
Note: Refer to Technical Appendix section 2 for a detailed analytical approach for each boundary.
¹This chart only reports the planetary boundary and does not include the looser, outer “zone of uncertainty.” Beyond the strict boundary there is a nonzero risk of triggering a “tipping point” (systems collapse).
²BII is an estimated percentage of the preindustrial (pre-1750) number of species that remain and their abundance in any given area, given the prevalence of human impact in that area. BII does not extend to marine environments.
³This report uses a data set from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), focusing on deforestation since 2000, and defines deforestation as a persistent conversion of forest to any other land use. This differs from other databases, such as Global Forest Watch, which classifies any sort of forest degradation as deforestation. Natural forest conversion to plantation forests is not considered forest cover loss in the planetary-boundaries framework because plantation forests still enable land–climate interactions.
⁴Nutrient pollution includes three separate control variables: terrestrial nitrogen deposition, nitrogen surface water runoff, and phosphorus pollution. The exhibit shows the current state and projections for phosphorous pollution, which is the furthest beyond the boundary of the three.
⁵This report’s analysis follows the planetary-boundaries literature to use “radiative forcing,” which measures excess Earth system energy and, when positive, causes warming. Radiative forcing is driven in large part by GHG emissions.
⁶Greenhouse gas.
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