4 Planetary Boundaries & Doughnuts: Further Reading / Resources

Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al. 2009. ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’. Nature 461 (7263): 472–75. https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a. “Identifying and quantifying planetary boundaries that must not be transgressed could help prevent human activities from causing unacceptable environmental change, argue Johan Rockström and colleagues.” More-or-less the origin of the Planetary Boundaries model.

Aspects of the Planetary Boundaries model have evolved. See Ten Years of the Planetary Boundaries Framework for presentations in 2019 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Montoya, José M., Ian Donohue, and Stuart L. Pimm. 2018. ‘Planetary Boundaries for Biodiversity: Implausible Science, Pernicious Policies’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33 (2): 71–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2017.10.004. This is a critique of the planetary boundaries framework; a response counters that Montoya et al. misrepresent their use of tipping points.

ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination operates at the intersection of future studies and the arts and humanities. They’ve published open access anthologies of climate themed speculative fiction.

Acaroglu, Leyla. 2021. ‘Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking’. Disruptive Design (blog). 11 March 2021. A nice accessible introduction to some principles of systems thinking.

Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Random House Business Books. Accessible primer critiquing mainstream economics. Exploratory mapping of promising alternatives.

Raworth, Kate. 2017. A Doughnut for the Anthropocene: humanity’s compass in the 21st century. The Lancet Planetary Health. 1 (2): e48–e49. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(17)30028-1

The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) is a hub of crowdsourced, curated resources relating to the Doughnut.