Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen and leader of the Sustainability Science Centre there. Richardson led the 29-author team, including Johan Rockström, that produced the 2023 update to the planetary boundaries framework originally proposed by Rockström and colleagues in 2009 and updated by Steffen et al. in 2015.
The 2023 paper (Science Advances 9, eadh2458, September 2023) reports that six of the nine planetary boundaries are now transgressed: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical (nitrogen and phosphorus) flows, and novel entities. In the paper’s own words, the update finds that Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity. Humans appropriate roughly 30 percent of the net primary production available before the Industrial Revolution.
Richardson belongs on this list because the 2023 update is the single most important empirical anchor for the claim that the industrial S-curve is entering deceleration. It shifts the planetary-limits argument from a projection (as in the 1972 Limits to Growth modeling) to a measurement of the current state of the Earth system. In the sequencing that makes BioConomy possible, the 2023 finding sits alongside Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) and the 2019 EROI collapse as the ecological premise the historical retention tradition could not yet have.
Related pages
- Joseph Tainter
- Planetary Boundaries (glossary)
- Deceleration Indicators
- The S-Curve Thesis
- The BioConomy Developmental Arc
Sources
- Richardson et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 9, eadh2458
Provenance
Extracted from Section 3 of the Research Brief: The S-Curve Thesis.