Safe and just operating spaces for regional social-ecological systems

By J. Dearing, Rong Wang, Ke Zhang, J. Dyke, H. Haberl, M. Hossain, P. Langdon, T. Lenton, Kate Raworth, Sally Brown and 11 more. 2014

434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humanity faces a major global challenge in achieving wellbeing for all, while simultaneously ensuring that the biophysical processes and ecosystem services that underpin wellbeing are exploited within scientifically informed boundaries of sustainability. We propose a framework for defining the safe and just operating space for humanity that integrates social wellbeing into the original planetary boundaries concept (Rockstrom et al., 2009a,b) for application at regional scales. We argue that such a framework can: (1) increase the policy impact of the boundaries concept as most governance takes place at the regional rather than planetary scale; (2) contribute to the understanding and dissemination of complexity thinking throughout governance and policy-making; (3) act as a powerful metaphor and communication tool for regional equity and sustainability. We demonstrate the approach in two rural Chinese localities where we define the safe and just operating space that lies between an environmental ceiling and a social foundation from analysis of time series drawn from monitored and palaeoecological data, and from social survey statistics respectively. Agricultural intensification has led to poverty reduction, though not eradicated it, but at the expense of environmental degradation. Currently, the environmental ceiling is exceeded for degraded water quality at both localities even though the least well-met social standards are for available piped water and sanitation. The conjunction of these social needs and environmental constraints around the issue of water access and quality illustrates the broader value of the safe and just operating space approach for sustainable development.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d1edb789916c1ad7d4829091a589328799cc5ad

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Securing a Just Space for Small-Scale Fisheries in the Blue Economy (2019, background): “Marine spatial planning defines spaces for industrial development, for fishers, energy, land reclamation for development (Ding et al., 2014), and marine reserves that separate conservation from other uses (Ehler and Douvere, 2009).”
Limiting livestock production to pasture and by-products in a search for sustainable diets (2016, background): “dation and within the environmental ceiling (these two boundaries forming a doughnut) is the safe and just operating space (Raworth, 2012; Dearing et al., 2014).”
Beyond Cockpit-ism: Four Insights to Enhance the Transformative Potential of the Sustainable Development Goals (2015, background): “, sustainable fish farming) within a particular region” [15].”
Urban versus conventional agriculture, taxonomy of resource profiles: a review (2016, background): “As centers of population and economic activity, cities have a dominant influence on the 66 scale and form of anthropogenic material and energy flows, consequently playing a central role in 67 any shifts towards sustainability (Dearing et al. 2014; Pincetl et al. 2014).”
Education for Sustainable Development: A Systemic Framework for Connecting the SDGs to Educational Outcomes (2019, background): “Considering the uncertainty in earth system interactions, critical thresholds and tipping points, this increases the risk of compromising the ecological integrity of the earth which is the foundation of society and all economic activity [53].”
The world’s road to water scarcity: shortage and stress in the 20th century and pathways towards sustainability (2016, background): “population Shortage 1700 m cap yr (3) 3 1 1”
The sustainable development oxymoron: quantifying and modelling the incompatibility of sustainable development goals (2016, neutral): “…such as agent-based simulations (Castella et al. 2005), participatory observations and focus groups (Cuthill 2002) or case studies (Crépin 2003; Dearing et al. 2014; Duit 2014; Guerrero et al. 2016), for example, of the Bolivian case, the first country to grant nature equal rights to humans in…”