In Davos was dit de speech waar alle aandacht naar toe zou mogen gaan. We bereiken de gevaarlijk zone, waar het proces van klimaatverandering onomkeerbaar wordt. En wij, de mensheid, kunnen dat veranderen. Alleen moeten we dat wel samen willen. En dat laatste is wat ontbreekt momenteel. De machthebbers zijn druk bezig met land te veroveren in plaats van er voor te zorgen.
De volledige speech: (bekijk het verhaal op video hier (2-12 minuten)
(eerst zin mist, is zonder geluid)... With two to three sources of scientific evidence that proves that we now have overwhelming evidence of the need to transition the global economy within prosperity within planetary boundaries.
The first one is that the human pressures on the planet has now reached a crisis point. The era where we can continue with economic growth without putting the stability of the planet at risk has come to an end. Welcome to the anthropocene.
The second is that these pressures on the planet are now at risk of causing irreversible, potentially catastrophic tipping points that would irreversibly drift away from the life support we depend on.
And the third is that we are now understanding for the first time with scientific evidence that our world economy depends on the extraordinary stability of the holocene. We leave the last ice age 18,000 years ago and enter what you see here: this extraordinarily stable 12,000-year period, with a 14°C global mean surface temperature, with a maximum variability—can you imagine?—plus or minus 0.5°C, which gives us the corridor of life that is the basis for all our life support.
And then we come to the start of the industrial revolution, and look at that kickoff point. We push ourselves outside of the corridor of life. We have in the next three to five years a trajectory of breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of global surface temperature rise, and we’re heading towards a disastrous—unmanageable in terms of scientific evidence—3°C world in the next 75 years.
This exponential rise originates from multiple exponential hockey sticks. To the left you see the socioeconomic pressures, from GDP growth to material use. On the right-hand side, the impacts on the Earth system. These are the hockey sticks of carbon dioxide, biodiversity loss, degradation. I won’t count them. You can pick any parameter that matters for human well-being and the global economy—they look the same.
Up until the mid-1950s, we have incremental linear impacts—unsustainable pressures indeed—but on an infinitely large Earth system. And then off we go in the moment of the Great Acceleration in the mid-1950s.
And we’re now at the ceiling of these hockey sticks, hitting the ceiling of biophysical hardwired processes that regulate the very functioning and stability of the system. And unfortunately, dear friends, we’re still following a dangerous path.
2025 data, which you see here: carbon dioxide, methane emissions, nitrogen oxide continue rising. Ice mass, sea level rise continue rising. Actually temperatures are increasing faster than we had expected. We see an acceleration even of warming. The Earth’s energy imbalance, which should be stable, is rising. That is the heat that is in the pipeline, even if we turned off the economy today.
This pushes us closer to tipping points. Tipping points are biophysical large systems that, in a healthy state, can cool the planet by being dominated by dampening feedbacks. Push them across thresholds and they will change feedbacks and self-amplify warming and undermine the basis for stable economies.
We’ve mapped those big climate tipping point systems. Here you have them: 16 systems across the entire planet that regulate the stability of the climate system. Six of them are in the Arctic. The Greenland ice sheet with 7 m sea level rise stored in the ice mass. The AMOC, the overturning of heat in the North Atlantic. The Amazon rainforest, the richest biome on terrestrial ecosystems on land. Three of them down in Antarctica. And of course also the tropical coral reef systems. They are across the entire planet. These are the systems we depend on.
Six of them are likely to cross their tipping points if we permanently exceed 1.5°C.
So, dear friends, this is what adds up scientifically to the heuristic equation you see on the screen. Welcome to the anthropocene. We’re now in the driving seat, the dominating force of change on planet Earth.
We now know that the holocene is the planet we depend on for our civilizations. We’ve been around on planet Earth for 250,000 years. We’ve lived like hunters and gatherers— a few million people in caves during ice ages. But our economy, our world, can only thrive in a holocene reference point as a desired planet.
And tipping points are hardwired. Push the systems too far and we will irreversibly drift away. That is why we need to define a safe operating space for the world economy on a stable planet.
And science can do it. We’ve been, for the past 20 years, mapping the Earth system processes, which you see to the left here, that regulate the stability of the Earth system. We’ve been defining control variables with Earth observation data and analytics for all of these 13 control variables, uncertainty ranges, and quantified for the first time safe boundaries. Go beyond them and we risk causing these irreversible changes.
Now here you have them. It gives us a safe operating space. That’s what you have here in green. It’s the climate system. It’s biodiversity. It’s land system change. It’s the bloodstream of the whole Earth system, the hydrological cycle. It is the nitrogen-phosphorus cycles of eutrophication. It’s stable ocean. It’s aerosol loading. It’s chemicals. And of course the stratospheric ozone layer.
Nine systems. If we’re stewards of them, we have a good chance of prosperity and equity for humanity on planet Earth.
What you see here is the planet of Adam Smith. This is the wealth of nations. This is the basis for economic growth if you understand it. It was essentially a very forgiving planet. We could go on quite unsustainably without having invoices being sent back to the economy.
Here you have the 1950s, the takeoff point of the Great Acceleration. Already then we had, actually, agriculture that was destroying biodiversity and we were loading chemicals. You all remember Rachel Carson and Silent Spring.
This is the moment of Robert Solow. This is the neoclassical economic growth model that we still operate under today. But look at what’s happened. 1960: we’re still operating very largely in a safe operating space. 1970s, 1980, and then we have the big takeoff point. We breached the climate boundary in 1988. Bang.
We have overloading of nutrients and dead zones in the ocean from nitrogen-phosphorus loading, which reaches a critical stage, and it just continues.
2010s, 2020s, 2023—and finally we are at a point of the scientific most recent update where we conclude in 2023 that six of the nine boundaries were breached, and that is what you see on this slide.
And finally, we have now ramped up and updated the science every year, and this is the 2024 planetary health check, and here you have the 2025 most recent update.
So we are ourselves, in science, also providing you with a state-of-the-art diagnostic at a much higher frequency.
What you see here is a dire message to humanity: seven of the nine boundaries are outside of the safe operating space. It’s not only a climate crisis. We’re doing a double mistake. We’re loading our system with unsustainable levels of heat and at the same time undermining the resilience of the living biosphere—the ocean and the biosphere—that can dampen this stress.
This is the situation we’re in. When we integrate all these nine, we come to the following conclusion: we are outside of the safe operating space. We have a real challenge on our watch, but we are in the yellow danger zone, which is a scientific uncertainty range. We’re not yet fully in the red zone where we are very likely to cause a planetary-scale drift away from stability.
What does this imply? Well, one is it’s urgent, but two, it’s not too late. The resilience of the planet biogeochemically is still dominated by dampening feedbacks. Despite all unsustainable pressures, she’s still standing. She’s wobbling, but still standing.
Now, this is proven in the following slide. Look at this data. This is the Global Carbon Project on the global carbon cycle, which is an attribute of essentially all the biosphere boundaries and our fossil fuel burning.
Above the zero line is fossil fuel burning and deforestation. That’s the pressure we’re putting—loading heat into the system. Under the zero line you see, in blue, the carbon uptake in the ocean. In green, the carbon uptake on land from intact nature.
A phenomenal increase of uptake when we continue stressing the system. It’s only that gray sliver you see there which is the net amount of carbon which remains in the atmosphere, causing the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming so far—the crisis we’re talking about.
But look at the graph: despite the stress, a healthy planet has been very forgiving and dampening this stress.
The problem is you can actually see, I think, if you look at this graph, that the green line is starting to flatten out. We are having very worrying signs that the carbon uptake in the land-based biosphere is going down. The resilience of the planet is under jeopardy. And this is what we now understand.
Secondly, we may be underestimating the tipping point risks. And here’s just one example. This is the richest biome on land on planet Earth: the Amazon rainforest.
Climate science has been communicating for many years that the risk of tipping this system into a degraded bush savanna—which we know can happen—will not happen until we reach 3 to 5°C of warming, meaning low risk.
But when you bring in the breaching of the boundaries of water, biodiversity, deforestation, combining it with climate, the assessment today is that already when we breach 1.5°C, combined with losing over 25% of the canopy cover, we are very likely to cross the tipping point.
Professor Carlos Nobre, Brazil’s leading Amazon rainforest scientist, is in public statements very clear: we’re very close to a tipping point in the Amazon rainforest.
So there we are. And this is the safe operating space that we’re trying to define scientifically. We’re pushing ourselves to the edge. We are still in a holocene basin. We are at risk of now sliding away in an irreversible journey towards a hothouse Earth.
If we cross tipping points, lead to self-amplified warming from permafrost and the thousand petagrams of carbon in the Amazon basin—if we would cross tipping points—our task is to transition towards prosperity and equity within a holocene-like state.
That is the scientific charge. That is what we’re arguing is needed to be able to be successful into the future, because sitting on the edge is already costing the economy. We have the data now.
The latest synthesis on climate change impacts on economy, which you see here, shows that already at 1.5 to 2°C we are at risk of having a 5% on average loss of income in the global economy. We’re talking trillions, not billions, if we continue the journey we’re on. And just look at the curves if we continue beyond 3°C of warming.
So, in conclusion, before I hand over to the panel: we are at this really, really decisive juncture. Time is running out, but it’s not too late. Technology, innovation, getting the economics right on a transition—we know that the solutions are there. We know that solutions across all sectors can give better outcomes for security, for equity, for prosperity.
But we need to unload a new paradigm of prosperity within planetary boundaries. In my view, that’s what science is clear in messaging to stakeholders around the world.
And with that, I thank you so much for this primer from science. And I’d now like to invite my dear colleague and friend Andre Hoffmann to take the stage as moderator for the panel following up on this priming. Thank you very much.
Over de spreker
Johan Rockström is een Zweedse klimaat- en duurzaamheidswetenschapper. Hij is (co-)directeur van het Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Duitsland en daarnaast hoogleraar Earth System Science aan de Universiteit van Potsdam.
