Climate Action

Planetary Commons: What they are — and why businesses should care

glass planet in a forest with sunshine - Usa map. Our Planetary Commons are being eroded — but it is not too late to act.

Our Planetary Commons are being eroded — but it is not too late to act. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Johan Rockström
Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
This article is part of: World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
  • From freshwater to outer space, some resources are fundamentally global.
  • These Planetary Commons are being eroded — and their loss will impact us all.
  • The burden of responsibility to act immediately must be felt throughout the community of global economic players.

Humanity’s fate on planet Earth is a shared one. We rely on globalized economic structures for almost all aspects of our daily lives. We are all too familiar with the potential for sudden and catastrophic disruption due to far-removed events. But the Earth system, the fabric that underlies today’s global markets, is just as intricately woven and increasingly subject to disruption.

The interconnectedness of the Earth system has been captured in the idea of the Planetary Commons, which describes the critical biophysical systems and functions that regulate resilience on Earth. Freshwater is a prime example of a Planetary Common. Generally considered a local affair, stable water supply is in fact tightly interwoven across economies. Around half of all freshwater derives from land-to-land flows via atmospheric rivers. Massive volumes of vapour from land, in particular from forests, generate clouds, which deliver rainfall to downwind countries both near and further afield. This connects all socio-economic regions in the world, well beyond national border or river basins, making freshwater a global common good.

Safeguarding the Planetary Commons is not just of concern to conservationists or those geographically close to them. We all depend on them. Residents of Hong Kong, Abidjan and Texas all depend equally on the health of the ocean, the ice sheets and the big forest systems. If we jeopardize these Planetary Commons the ripple effect throughout the Earth system will reduce liveability globally.

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Planetary Commons being eroded

The problem is that we are failing to safeguard the Planetary Commons. In 2024, scientists have described the state of our planet in superlatives for all the wrong reasons. For the first time in at least 100,000 years, annual global mean surface temperature rise broke the 1.5°C mark on a year to year basis. The first glimpses of a 1.5°C warmer world are harbingers of the disruption on the horizon. Daily-temperature records were set in 15 countries, with extreme heat during the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage claiming over 1,300 lives; the US hurricane season was super-charged by unprecedentedly hot ocean surface temperatures; and the record-breaking Canadian fire season in 2023 was fuelled by sustained extreme fire-weather conditions.

Although the impacts of climate change are already delivering unmanageable conditions today, the most worrying scientific observations in the past year point to a future in which the Earth system’s resilience, its ability to buffer stress — like human-caused global warming and loss of biodiversity — continues to erode. Six of nine planetary boundaries, which together regulate the stability and life-support on Earth, covering climate, deforestation, biodiversity and freshwater have now been breached, articulating a real risk of destabilizing the planet.

In 2023, extreme drought in the Amazon and southeast Asia and the Canadian fires led to abnormally large amounts of carbon returning from soils and vegetation back to the atmosphere. While nature’s ability to absorb and store carbon seems to have recovered somewhat in 2024, this quintessential function is revealing its vulnerability to a changing climate. This needs to be brought into perspective. We assume nature on land will continue to soak up around one-quarter of all the carbon dioxide we emit. If this service rendered by nature weakens, more of the carbon emitted by humans will end up in the atmosphere, and global warming will be faster and more than expected.

The world’s ocean is also displaying signs that the underlying dynamics of our Earth system are beginning to shift. As a sink for over 90% of the excess heat generated in recent decades by human activity, the ocean is an extremely powerful actors in determining how warm our climate will become.

There are more than enough reasons to be concerned here. A warming ocean means rising sea levels due to thermal expansion of water, bleached corals, accelerated melting of ice sheets, more extreme storms and changes to the biology of the ocean, including decreased biodiversity and decline in fisheries productivity. Warming also affects how water circulates around and between various parts of the ocean. The chances that a tipping point will be crossed, leading to a complete shutdown of the most important Atlantic circulation system, the AMOC, are higher than previously thought. A collapse of the AMOC would have abrupt and severe impacts on global climate, including temperature drops by between 5 and 15 degrees in several European cities.

A lacking international response

Despite this increasingly vivid picture of rising systemic risks, the global community’s response is thus far woefully inadequate. Global carbon dioxide emissions rose in 2023 by 0.8%, whereas the binding agreement to strive to keep global warming below 1.5°C would require a 7.5% decrease in global emissions in 2024. Although renewable energy is continuing to grow at record pace, it’s still not keeping up with global energy demand, which is, ironically, in part being driven by the need for air conditioners to combat extreme heat in India and China. Methane emissions, responsible for a quarter of all human-driven warming, also continue to rise unabated.

We are facing systemic and unprecedented risks on a planet whose life-supporting functions are derived from its interconnectedness. It is glaringly obvious that the hitherto international mandate to protect the global commons like Antarctica, the high seas, the atmosphere and outer space is insufficient to secure a stable planet. Social stability, resilience and well-being globally depend on protecting all major biophysical systems on Earth, irrespective of whether they are within or outside national jurisdictions. These are the Planetary Commons and they include all tipping point systems, not least the Greenland ice sheet, the AMOC and the Amazon rainforest.

The commons challenge requires a common solution. We must acknowledge that independently-acting nation-states cannot be entrusted with safeguarding the Planetary Commons. As a matter of survival and future competitiveness, governance of both public and private entities must pivot to safeguard the Planetary Commons in chorus and at speed and scale.

The checklist is nothing new: phase out fossil fuels, transform the food system, transform land and forest use, protect the oceans and roll out carbon dioxide removal technologies — and it is ripe with opportunities for leadership and innovation. But the burden of responsibility to act immediately must be felt throughout the community of global economic players.

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