The Six Sustainability Boundaries

Abstract

In spite of the multilateral advances on human development and environment of the last 50 years, since the Stockholm Conference, and the much greater global awareness of the need for sustainability humankind is challenged by a triple planetary crisis of biodiversity degradation and loss, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and climate change, together with considerable geopolitical strife. Here we present a set of six boundaries that we believe impede the transition to full sustainability. They are deeply rooted in human individual and collective behavioural characteristics, like selfishness and immediate gratification, developed during the mammalian and Homo sapiens phylogeny and later through civilization advancements leading to scientific, technological, economic and social developments. In turn, they influence restricted approaches to dealing with future consequences, curtailing social cooperation, limiting the common good, protecting personal gain, increasing inequality, fracturing international relations, and fragmenting the connection between human conditions and the role of the natural world. Identifying and analysing these boundaries are essential to finding possible ways to soften them so that progressive sustainability may be achieved.