The Stockholm Resilience Centre has produced a new study of the planetary boundaries, a concept it first unleashed on the planet in 2009. It reveals a worsening situation. It has received considerable media attention as an issue of  environmental impact. But it is much more than that.
Boundaries of sustainability

The idea of the planetary boundaries, of which the Stockholm Centre identifies nine, is that these are the boundaries of a sustainable world. Staying within them makes the world liveable. In 2009, a large team of scientific authors concluded humanity had breached three of them. The new study says we have broken through four.

The nine boundaries are:

- Climate change
- Change in biospheric integrity (loss of biodiversity and extinction of species)
- Biogeochemical flows (the phosphorous and nitrogen cycles)
- Land system change (such as deforestation)
- Ocean acidification
- Freshwater use
- Stratospheric ozone depletion
- Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic atmospheric particles)
- Novel entities (organic pollutants, radioactive materials, micro-plastics…)

I have re-ordered them compared to how they are arranged in the Centre’s summary to make it neater. In this list,

- The first four are the boundaries humanity has transgressed – the climate, the biosphere, key chemical balances and land;
- The fifth – ocean acidification – looks likely to be the next one we will bust through;
- The sixth – fresh water – is, by the standards of the first five, not too bad;
- The seventh – the ozone layer – is the one that’s moving in the right direction, becoming more sustainable;
- The last two have not yet been quantified so we don’t know how we’re doing.

For the complete article, please see Dan Smith's blog.