Boundary issues

What is our point of no return? Caesar proclaimed 'the die is cast' while crossing the Rubicon, but rarely does modern society find so visible a threshold in our continued degradation of ecosystems and the services they provide. Humans have always used their surroundings to make a living—...

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Published in:	Environmental research letters 2011-03, Vol.6 (1), p.011001
Main Authors:	Townsend, Alan R, Porder, Stephen
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Agricultural development Agricultural land Agrochemicals Animal wastes Aquatic environment Biodiversity Biogeochemical cycles Biogeochemistry Boundaries Carbon dioxide Climate change Closed loops Cretaceous Degradation Depletion Diamond machining Diamonds Environmental changes Environmental degradation Environmental impact Environmental management Eutrophication Exhaustion Exploitation Farms Fertilizer application Fertilizers Food Food consumption Food production Food security Fresh water Freshwater ecosystems Human populations Human wastes Hunger Legumes Mathematical analysis Nitrogen Nitrogen cycle Oceans Oscillations Phosphorus Phosphorus cycle Reserves Science Shoals Soils Thresholds Trends Waste management Water quality Waterways
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Summary:	What is our point of no return? Caesar proclaimed 'the die is cast' while crossing the Rubicon, but rarely does modern society find so visible a threshold in our continued degradation of ecosystems and the services they provide. Humans have always used their surroundings to make a living— sometimes successfully, sometimes not (Diamond 2005)—and we intuitively know that there are boundaries to our exploitation. But defining these boundaries has been a challenge since Malthus first prophesied that nature would limit the human population (Malthus 1798). In 2009, Rockström and colleagues tried to quantify what the 6.8 billion (and counting) of us could continue to get away with, and what we couldn't (Rockström et al 2009). In selecting ten 'planetary boundaries', the authors contend that a sustainable human enterprise requires treating a number of environmental thresholds as points of no return. They suggest we breach these Rubicons at our own peril, and that we've already crossed three: biodiversity loss, atmospheric CO2, and disruption of the global nitrogen (N) cycle. As they clearly hoped, the very act of setting targets has provoked scientific inquiry about their accuracy, and about the value of hard targets in the first place (Schlesinger 2009). Such debate is a good thing. Despite recent emphasis on the science of human–ecosystem interactions, understanding of our planetary boundaries is still in its infancy, and controversy can speed scientific progress (Engelhardt and Caplan 1987). A few weeks ago in this journal, Carpenter and Bennett (2011) took aim at one of the more controversial boundaries in the Rockström analysis: that for human alteration of the global phosphorus (P) cycle. Rockström's group chose riverine P export as the key indicator, suggesting that humans should not exceed a value that could trigger widespread marine anoxic events—and asserting that we have not yet crossed this threshold. There are defensible reasons for a marine-centric boundary (Filippelli 2008, Handoh and Lenton 2003). However, human alteration of the P cycle has multiple potential boundaries (figure 1), including P-driven freshwater eutrophication (Smith and Schindler 2009), the potential for world P supply to place an ultimate limit on food production (Smil 2000, Childers et al 2011), and depletion of soil P stocks in some world regions (MacDonald et al 2011). Carpenter and Bennett revisit the P boundary from the freshwater eutrophication perspective. Given the extrao
ISSN:	1748-9326 1748-9326