How the Planetary Guardians Can Help Secure Earth’s Future
Richard Branson is founder of the Virgin Group and co-founder of The B Team.
September 18, 2023
Catastrophic wildfires in Canada and Europe. Drought in East Africa. Extreme heat waves in the U.S. and the Mediterranean. Torrential rainfall and floods across Libya, Pakistan, India, China, and Italy. The headlines tell a grim story: our planet, the only home we have, is in bad shape. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Yes, greenhouse gas emissions play a huge part. Humanity is not on track to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. And the cost to future generations is rising with every passing day of inaction.
But runaway climate change is not our only problem. To better understand what we are really facing, think of earth, as others like Buckminster Fuller and Adlai Stevenson have done before, as a cosmic vessel journeying through space, equipped with a number of life-support systems that keep its passengers alive. What if we keep pushing all of these systems too far?
Enter the concept of “planetary boundaries.”