Charting a Transformational Course Toward a Safe and Just Future: The Earth Commission's Contribution
- Jul 1
- 7 min read
A 2026 Earth Commission commentary outlines a science-based framework integrating planetary boundaries with justice to guide systemic transformation toward a safe and just future.
The planetary boundaries framework has spent fifteen years mapping the edges of the safe operating space for human civilization — the biophysical thresholds beyond which Earth system stability cannot be guaranteed. But knowing where the edges are is not the same as knowing how to stay within them, or who bears the cost of doing so. The Earth Commission, founded in 2019 as the scientific cornerstone of the Global Commons Alliance, set out to answer a harder question: what does it mean for a future to be not just safe for the planet, but just for the people living on it?
In a 2026 commentary in Earth's Future, Rockström, Denton, Norström, and more than fifty co-authors from across disciplines and continents report on the Commission's first phase of work and lay out the scientific agenda for its second phase (2024–2027) — an agenda that integrates biophysical limits with justice, models the interactions between boundaries and tipping points, and begins translating global thresholds into targets that cities, businesses, and governments can actually act on.
Note: This is a peer-reviewed commentary, not a primary research article. It synthesizes findings from the Earth Commission's first assessment phase and outlines a research programme for the second.
Key Arguments
The First Assessment: Seven Boundaries Already Breached, and a Dual Crisis Confirmed
The Earth Commission's first phase (2019–2023) produced the first quantitative assessment integrating safe and just Earth system boundaries across five planetary processes: climate change, aerosol loading, biosphere integrity, freshwater use, and biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus). The safe boundaries — defined as the thresholds within which Earth system resilience is maintained — and just boundaries — defined as the thresholds above which significant harm to people and other living beings occurs — were quantified using comparable units, enabling for the first time a combined assessment of where the planet stands on both dimensions simultaneously.
The findings were stark. Globally, safe and just boundaries for the biosphere, climate, nutrient cycles, and freshwater were all found to be breached. Two or more safe and just sub-global Earth system boundaries were transgressed across more than 52% of the world's land area, affecting 86% of the global population. Crucially, three just boundaries — for climate, nitrogen, and aerosols — were found to be stricter than their corresponding safe boundaries, meaning the thresholds that protect people from harm are crossed before the thresholds that destabilize the Earth system. This finding has direct implications for policy: it demonstrates that a world within safe planetary limits is not automatically a just one, and that justice considerations must be built into the framework from the start rather than added as an afterthought.
The Commission also introduced the concept of "just access" — minimum resource thresholds required for a dignified life — and showed that under existing technologies and inequalities, achieving universal minimum access for the world's poorest would push Earth system processes even further beyond their boundaries. Without systemic transformation, lifting the floor for the worst-off makes the ceiling problems worse, not better.
The Structural Problem: Inequality as Both Driver and Barrier
A thread running through the entire commentary is the interaction between biophysical destabilization and social inequality — and the Commission's insistence that these cannot be treated as separate problems. High-income countries, comprising just 16% of the global population, are responsible for 74% of global resource consumption. The wealthiest individuals and nations exert pressure on Earth systems that is structurally misaligned with the distribution of harm: the communities least responsible for boundary transgressions are often the most exposed to their consequences, and the least equipped — in terms of institutional capacity, finance, and political voice — to respond.
This creates what the Commission calls a dual inequity: the same global inequalities that drive environmental degradation also erode the resilience and transformation capacity of the societies most at risk. Addressing the boundaries without addressing the power dynamics that produce them risks either failing to achieve change at all, or achieving it in ways that reproduce or deepen existing injustices — what the paper describes as "environmental problem shifting."
Earth System Justice: From Concept to Operational Framework
The Commission's core conceptual contribution is Earth system justice (ESJ), a framework that goes beyond conventional environmental justice (which focuses on local inequities) and beyond planetary justice (which emphasizes global fairness) to integrate biophysical and social thresholds into a single analytical structure — along with the means to achieve those thresholds. ESJ encompasses intragenerational justice (within the current generation), intergenerational justice (to future generations), and interspecies justice (to other living beings), and treats justice not as a normative add-on but as a structural condition for planetary resilience.
In the second phase, the Commission will deepen and operationalize ESJ across several dimensions: developing accountability tools, linking ESJ to governance structures and multilateral agreements, embedding justice checks in corporate sustainability frameworks, exploring debt-for-nature swaps and tax justice mechanisms, and building analytical capacity to assess the ex-ante origins of inequalities — not just their downstream manifestations in emissions disparities or risk exposure. The framework will also refine principles for defining minimum, medium, and maximum levels of resource access, drawing on human rights frameworks, decent living standards, and limitarian approaches that set upper bounds on individual environmental impact.
Expanding the Framework: Novel Entities and Ocean Change
The second phase extends the boundary assessment to two Earth system processes not addressed in the first: novel entities and ocean change — both of which represent significant gaps in the current global assessment architecture.
Novel entities — manufactured chemicals, plastics, and other synthetic substances that accumulate persistently in the environment — present a particularly difficult boundary challenge. Their numbers are large (tens of thousands of registered chemicals), their interactions complex, and regulatory oversight is diminishing relative to the pace of production and release. The Commission will assess "known knowns" — substances with sufficient data — to establish safe and just boundary thresholds using existing regulatory benchmarks, while a horizon-scanning exercise using machine learning will identify emerging substances and future risk trajectories.
Ocean change represents an equally significant lacuna. The ocean covers more than 70% of the planet, regulates key Earth system functions including carbon sequestration and heat absorption, underpins the nutritional security and livelihoods of billions of people, and is home to some of the most biodiverse and least understood ecosystems on Earth. It is also undergoing unprecedented simultaneous change through warming, acidification, deoxygenation, fisheries collapse, sea level rise, and what the paper calls the "blue acceleration" — a surge in commercial exploitation of ocean resources that is generating complex ecological, economic, and equity challenges. The Commission will develop ocean-specific control variables and boundary thresholds that integrate biophysical and justice dimensions, with candidate variables including deoxygenation, sea surface temperature, marine biodiversity, trophic structure, fish biomass, and equity-related indicators such as access to fish for small-scale fisheries.
Tipping Points, Cross-Boundary Interactions, and the TIPMIP Initiative
A key scientific advance in the second phase will be the systematic modeling of interactions between boundaries and between boundaries and tipping points — the nonlinear thresholds beyond which parts of the Earth system may shift abruptly and irreversibly. The Earth Commission incubated and helped develop the Tipping Points Modeling Intercomparison Project (TIPMIP), a multi-model international collaboration that aims to provide standardized assessments of tipping point likelihoods and biophysical impacts across key Earth system components including ice sheets, AMOC, permafrost, and tropical and boreal forests.
These interactions matter for boundary-setting because approaching one boundary can amplify pressure on others — climate change weakens biosphere resilience, reducing the sequestration capacity that helps stay within carbon budgets — and because synergies are also possible: biosphere stewardship and climate goals can reinforce each other in well-designed reforestation projects. The second phase will systematically map these interdependencies, both among safe and just "ceilings" and between ceilings and justice "foundations," and assess their governance implications for science-based target-setting.
From Assessment to Action: Translation, Transformation, and Governance
The gap between knowing a planetary boundary has been crossed and knowing what a city, company, or government should do about it is large, and closing it is the most practically urgent challenge the Commission faces in its second phase:
Transcription turns global boundaries into local budgets. The process of cross-scale translation begins with transcription — determining the maximum aggregate pressure that a given actor can exert without contributing to boundary transgressions, and converting that into an actionable environmental budget. The Commission will test and refine these transcription methods across case study locations, ensuring they are scientifically robust, fair, and aligned with Earth system justice principles rather than reinforcing existing injustices.
Transformation pathways must be modeled, not just asserted. The second phase will generate qualitative and quantitative time-bound transformation pathways toward a safe and just space, formalized using integrated assessment models with a focus on inter-comparison and participatory scenario design. No existing scenarios have been developed that look into what would be needed to live within the safe and just space assessed by the Commission — these new scenarios will explore what governance, economic, technological, and societal changes are required, and what short-term actions are consistent with reaching long-term goals.
The Science-Based Targets Network is already translating the framework. The Commission's assessment informs science-based targets for businesses and cities through the Science-Based Targets Network (SBTN), which by May 2025 had released methods for target-setting for water, nitrogen, phosphorus, land, and the ocean in addition to climate. Companies and cities can apply these methods to identify individual targets consistent with the safe and just space.
Governance of power and redistribution is central, not peripheral. A key advance in the second phase will be the integration of analysis on entrenched political and economic systems that shape environmental outcomes and reinforce inequalities. This includes examining concepts such as carbon debt, "polluter pays," and "ability to pay" principles; exploring redistribution mechanisms that simultaneously curb overconsumption and meet essential needs; and analyzing how legal, financial, and institutional instruments can be designed to counterbalance the power dynamics that currently drive both environmental degradation and social exclusion.
The Measure of the Moment
The Earth Commission was not founded to describe a crisis — it was founded to define the destination and chart the path. After five years of establishing what a safe and just space looks like and confirming that humanity is operating well outside it, Rockström et al.'s second-phase agenda turns toward the harder problem: how to get back inside, in a way that distributes both the burdens and the benefits fairly. The science alone will not be sufficient.
The Commission's framework will need to reach into governance structures, financial systems, corporate practice, and international law — and it will need to do so in a way that confronts, rather than sidesteps, the structural inequalities that make planetary limits so difficult to respect and so unevenly felt. The window for incremental response has closed. What remains is the question of whether the speed and scale of transformation that the science demands can be matched by political will and institutional capacity — and whether the tools the Earth Commission is building will help bring that match about.
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