Editor’s note: This article is an update from a year ago. Trying to fix the climate change planetary boundary at the expense of biodiversity or any of the other planetary boundaries is a fool’s errand. This article does not state the fact that it only takes one planetary boundary to collapse to cause a massive die-off of life on the planet. Plus no mention of the poly-crisis of nuclear war, increasing inequality, AI and global economic crash.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. – The Second Coming William Butler Yeats in 1919
By Edward Carver writer for Common Dreams
Six of nine planetary boundaries have already been transgressed, and a seventh, for ocean acidification, is on the verge of being breached, according to a major report released Monday.
The 96-page report, produced by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is the first in a planned series of annual “planetary health checks.”
The authors found that safe planetary boundaries had already been crossed for the climate, freshwater, land use, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and biosphere integrity—in keeping with a study in Science Advances last year. They found a “clear trend towards further transgression”—moving deeper into the danger zone, where irreversible tipping points are more likely to be triggered—in each of the six categories.
“Our updated diagnosis shows that vital organs of the Earth system are weakening, leading to a loss of resilience and rising risks of crossing tipping points,” Levke Caesar, a PIK climate physicist lead author of the report, said in a statement that announced a “red alert.”
The health check also showed that ocean acidification, a seventh category, has reached a dangerous precipice, putting the foundations of the marine food web at risk. Ocean acidification, which can threaten coral reefs and phytoplankton populations, is caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other human activities.
Caesar said a “safe operating space” threshold for acidification could be crossed in the next few years.
“Looking at the current evolution, I’d say it’s really, really difficult to prevent that [boundary] crossing,” she toldMongabay.
A graphic shows the status of nine environmental categories, four of which have been broken down into two control variables. Image from Planetary Health Check 2024. Design by Globaïa.
PIK director Johan Rockström, a co-author of the new report, helped develop planetary boundary research in the late 2000s. In a seminal 2009 paper in Nature, he and his co-authors found that three of the nine boundaries had already been crossed. That number has gradually gone up based on a series of studies over the last decade.
The planet boundary framework, which is often connected to the degrowth movement, emphasizes that the categories are interconnected.
“The interconnectedness of [planetary boundary] processes means that addressing one issue, such as limiting global warming to 1.5°C, requires tackling all of them collectively,” the new report says.
Boris Sakschewski, a climate scientist who, along with Caesar, is a lead author of the report said that, “We know that all planetary boundary processes act together and each one needs protection to protect the whole system.”
The consequences of continued ocean acidification, which is primarily measured by aragonite saturation, would be severe, the report warns.
Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold, with significant declines in surface aragonite saturation, particularly in high-latitude regions like the Arctic and Southern Ocean. These areas are vital for the marine carbon pump and global nutrient cycles, which support marine productivity, biodiversity, and global fisheries. The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems, especially those reliant on calcium carbonate for shell formation.
Some researchers believe that the ocean acidification threshold has already been crossed, especially given regional variability, with cooler polar waters absorbing more carbon dioxide, causing a faster drop in pH levels.
The report was written with a general audience in mind and is not peer-reviewed, though it’s based on peer-reviewed studies, the authors said.
The final pages of the report present solutions, especially agricultural. A radical overhaul of the global food system, heavily dependent on fertilizer and other harmful inputs, will be necessary to reverse the disturbing trends documented in the report, the authors wrote.
“Sometimes overlooked compared to the impacts of energy production and consumption—particularly the use of fossil fuels—the food systems we depend on are among the largest drivers of environmental degradation. The global food system is the single largest driver behind the transgression of multiple planetary boundaries,” the report says.
Editor’s note: Climate change is a symptom predicament of overshoot and is exploited by power elites to deflect from what is necessary, ending modern civilization. The slow death of nature started with civilization, it has exponentially sped up since the 1700s. The reason there are no more natural disasters is because they are all now man-made.
Rich countries have exported climate breakdown through extractive industries, creating a “carbon colonialism.”
Almost everything we buy exploits the environment and the people who depend on it to a greater or lesser extent. Almost everything we buy contributes to climate breakdown through emissions, local environmental degradation, or, most commonly, both. Yet, in a world where greenwashing is so commonplace that almost every product proclaims ecological benefits, it tends not to be seen that way. In fact, it tends not to be seen at all.
Carbon emissions and pollution are a phase that we all pass through, meaning that the ability—and crucially the money—to avoid the ratcheting risks of climate change is something we have earned, and others too will earn as each nation continues inexorably along its separate curve. Wealthy countries accept this narrative because it is comfortable and provides a logical and moral explanation of the relative safety and health of the rich world.
But what if it wasn’t true? What if one place was devastated because the other was clean? Just as carbon emissions are not acts of God, neither is exposure to the results of those emissions. In other words, you can’t remove money from the geography of disaster risk.
This is carbon colonialism: the latest incarnation of an age-old system in which natural resources continue to be extracted, exported, and profited from far from the people they used to belong to. It is, in many ways, an old story, but what is new is the hidden cost of that extraction: the carbon bill footed in inverse relation to the resource feast.
Most colonial economies were organized around extraction, providing the raw materials that drove imperial growth. As a result, even when the imperial administration is taken out, the underlying economic structures put in place by colonizers are very difficult to get away from and continue to hold newly independent countries back.
On a basic level, exporting raw materials adds less economic value to the country that does it than processing, manufacturing, and reselling those materials, so for every watt of energy, every hectare of land, and every hour of work used to make goods exported from the global North to the South, the South has to generate, use, and work many more units to pay for it.
Decolonizing Climate Change
We already have the ways and means to decolonize how we measure, mitigate, and adapt to climate change.
This task is as sizable as it is vital, but at its core are three priorities. First, carbon emissions targets based on national production must be abandoned in favor of consumption-based measures, which, though readily available, tend to be marginalized for rich nations’ political convenience. Secondly, with half of emissions in some wealthy economies now occurring overseas, environmental and emissions regulation must be applied as rigorously to supply chains as they are to domestic production.
By adopting these new viewpoints, we can aim towards a final priority: recognizing how the global factory manufactures the landscape of disaster. Our globalized economy is built on foundations designed to siphon materials and wealth to the rich world while leaving waste in its place.
Yet there is, as ever, another way. It is possible to reject the globalization of environmental value by giving voice to the people it belongs to. Environments do not have to be merely abstract commodities.
Giving greater value to how people think about their local environments is seen as a way to decolonize our environmental thinking, move away from extractivism, and perhaps forestall the slow death of nature that began in the 1700s.
Environmental Myths and How to Think Differently
One of the most widely shared myths in climate change discourse is that climate change increases the likelihood of natural disasters. This burden is ‘disproportionately’ falling upon poorer countries. Yet, it is fundamentally flawed. Climate change is not causing more natural disasters because disasters are not natural in the first place. They do not result from storms, floods, or droughts alone, but when those dangerous hazards meet vulnerability and economic inequality.
A hurricane, after all, means something completely different to the populations of Singapore and East Timor. This difference is no accident of geography but of a global economy that ensures that some parts of the world remain more vulnerable to climate change than others. Natural disasters are, therefore, economic disasters: the result of centuries of unequal trade and the specific, everyday impacts of contemporary commerce.
With rich countries doing an ever-diminishing share of their manufacturing, the responsibility to report real-world emissions is left to international corporations, which have little incentive to report accurate information on their supply chains.
The environments of the rich world are becoming cleaner and safer, even in an increasingly uncertain environment. The resources needed to tackle the challenges of climate change are accruing and being spent to protect their privileged populations.
Yet, for most of the world, the opposite is true. Natural resources continue to flow ever outward, with only meager capital returning in compensation. Forests are being degraded by big and small actors as climate and market combine to undermine traditional livelihoods. Factory workers are toiling in sweltering conditions. Fishers are facing ever-declining livelihoods.
In other words, we have all the tools we need to solve climate breakdown but lack control or visibility over the production processes that shape it. From legal challenges to climate strikes and new constitutions, people are waking up to the myths that shape our thinking on the environment. They are waking up to the fact that climate change has never been about undeveloped technologies but always about unequal power.
As the impacts of climate breakdown become ever more apparent, this can be a moment of political and social rupture, of the wheels finally beginning to come off the status quo.
Demand an end to the delays. Demand an end to tolerance for the brazenly unknown in our economy. Demand an end to carbon colonialism.
Editor’s note: This article does not mention the subsidies going to “renewable” energy, which is in the trillions, and its environmentally harmful implementation. Also not mentioned are the costs associated with the loss of livelihood for those humans affected by these unsustainable “developments”, not to mention the harm done to more than human species.
Governments across the world now spend a total of $2.6 trillion per year on subsidies that harm the environment, jeopardizing global climate and biodiversity targets, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
The analysis came in an updated report from the research group Earth Track, which found that harmful fossil fuel subsidies top $1 trillion annually and harmful agricultural subsidies top $600 billion. Governments also fund pollution and destruction in sectors such as water, construction, transport, forestry, and fisheries.
The $2.6 trillion total, which the report authors said was likely an underestimate, marked an $800 billion increase—or about $500 billion in real dollars—from $1.8 trillion cited in the initial report, released in February 2022.
In December 2022, the world’s nations agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a deal that included, as target 18, a commitment to identify environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) by 2025 and reduce them by $500 billion by 2030.
“Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk,” Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ chief climate diplomat when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, told The Guardian. “Estimates are higher than previously thought—with at least $2.6 trillion now funding the destruction of nature, endangering the chances of meeting our nature and climate goals.”
Private interests usually benefit from the harmful subsidies. Bill McGuire, an emeritus professor of earth sciences at University College London, responded to Earth Track’s findings by spelling out this out.
“Want to know how criminally insane our political-economic system is?” he wrote on social media. “We are actually paying corporations to destroy the planet.”
The report shows the massive scale of government investment in EHS across the world, with the $2.6 trillion total for 2023 amounting to about 2.5% of global gross domestic product.
Other estimates of EHS have been even higher. An International Monetary Fund working paper last year estimated that fossil fuel subsidies alone amount to $7 trillion annually. Subsidies are difficult to quantify as some are implicit, such as not applying an excise tax on fossil fuels that damage the environment.
Report co-author Doug Koplow of Earth Track told Common Dream that the IMF paper included more externalities “rather than just fiscal subsidies,” based on his recollection.
The Earth Track report found that increased global fossil fuel subsidies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine were the main reason for the $800 billion increase since the last report was written. “This example highlights the sensitivity of EHS to macroeconomic conditions,” the report says.
In a statement, Koplow emphasized the importance of the cross-sectoral analysis, arguing that sectors, such as agriculture, are too often looked at in isolation. “It is the combined effect of subsidies to these sectors that compound to drive loss of nature and biodiversity resources,” he wrote.
The analysis comes amid an onslaught of extreme weather this year that’s been made more likely by fossil fuel-driven climate breakdown. Large-scale flooding devastated Central Europe this week, killing more than 20 people. The planet has seen record temperatures for 15 straight months.
Biodiversity loss also continues apace, with experts calling for strong action as the COP16 meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is set to begin in Colombia on October 21.
Almost 200 people were killed in 2023 for attempting to protect their lands and communities from ecological devastation, Global Witness revealed Tuesday.
This raises the total number of environmental defenders killed between 2012—when Global Witness began publishing its annual reports—and 2023 to 2,106.
“As the climate crisis accelerates, those who use their voice to courageously defend our planet are met with violence, intimidation, and murder,” Laura Furones, the report’s lead author and senior adviser to the Land and Environmental Defenders Campaign at Global Witness, said in a statement. “Our data shows that the number of killings remains alarmingly high, a situation that is simply unacceptable.”
At least 196 people were murdered in 2023, 79 of them in Colombia, which was both the deadliest country for defenders last year and the deadliest overall. In 2023, more defenders were killed in Colombia than have ever been killed in one country in a given year since Global Witness began its calculations.
While the government of left-wing President Gustavo Petro has promised to protect activists, organizers on the ground say the situation has only gotten worse for defenders in the past year. Colombia will host the 16th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in October and has promised to highlight the role of defenders in protecting nature. This presents a “historic opportunity” to stand up for the rights of environmental activists, Global Witness said.
Overall, Latin America is the deadliest region for defenders, making up 85% of killings in 2023. It was home to the four deadliest countries for defenders—Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico—which together accounted for 70% of all killings. Honduras also saw the highest number of killings per capita, both in 2023 and over the past 11 years.
“It is the job of leaders to listen and make sure that defenders can speak out without risk.”
The fifth deadliest country for defenders in 2023 was the Philippines, which saw 17 people killed. Overall, nearly 500 people have been murdered in Asia since 2012, with the Philippines remaining the deadliest country in the region during that time. Global Witness recorded four deaths in Africa in 2023, and 116 since 2012, but noted that this is likely a “gross underestimate” as killings on the continent are more difficult to document due to a lack of information.
Global Witness cannot always link a particular industry to the murders of the land defenders who oppose environmental harm. In Colombia, for example, it estimates that half of people killed in 2023 were killed by organized criminal elements. However, for the deaths it was able to connect, most people died after opposing mining operations at 25. This was followed by logging (5), fishing (5), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (4), and hydropower (2).
The threat of even more mining-related violence looms as nations scramble for the critical minerals necessary for the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable forms of energy. This dovetails with another component of Global Witness’ findings: the disproportionate violence borne by Indigenous communities for defending their homes. Of the defenders killed in 2023, nearly half were Indigenous peoples or Afro-descendants, and almost half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are located on or near Indigenous or peasant land.
Jenifer Lasimbang, an Indigenous Orang Asal woman from Malaysia and executive director of Indigenous Peoples of Asia Solidarity Fund, explained the situation her community faces:
In Malaysia, as in many other countries, we Indigenous Peoples have been subject to wave after wave of destruction. First came the logging and oil palm companies. As a result, nearly 80% of the land surface in Malaysian Borneo has been cleared or severely damaged.
Now, as the world moves away from a fossil-fuel based economy, we’re seeing a rush for critical minerals, essential to succeed in the transition to a green economy.
With Malaysia the regional leader in aluminium, iron and manganese production, extracting rare minerals isn’t new to us. But our experience so far has been that this comes at a huge environmental cost.
The Malaysian government is issuing an increasing number of prospecting and mining licenses. We know what this new “green rush” means for us. We know it’s going to get worse while demand for resources remains high.
Lasimbang said that her community did not oppose development itself, but an “unsustainable and unequal global system” predicated on ever-increasing consumption, and that world leaders should learn from Indigenous communities like hers how to sustain a society without destroying the environment.
“There is only really one thing left to say: Trust us. Let us lead. We will take you with us,” Lasimbang said.
While global awareness of the climate crisis and commitments to address it should have translated into greater protections for those on the frontlines of defending biodiversity, that has not been the case. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, at least 1,500 defenders have been murdered, Global Witness said.
Even in wealthier countries like the U.K., E.U., and the U.S. where killings are less frequent, governments have increasingly repressed environmental activists by criminalizing protests. In 2023, Global Witness observed that the “global surge in anti-protest legislation persisted.”
For example, in 2023 the U.K. expanded its Public Order Act to allow police to prosecute certain protests that disrupted national infrastructure or caused “more than a minor” disturbance. In November of that year, police arrested at least 630 people for marching slowly on a public road to protest new fossil fuel projects.
In the U.S., more than 20 states have passed “critical infrastructure” laws that target protests against fossil fuel projects like pipelines. E.U. countries have passed similar laws as well.
Even in the developed world, the criminalization of protest can turn deadly: In January 2023, police in Georgia shot and killed 26-year-old defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or Tortuguita, as they were camping out in a local forest to prevent it from being bulldozed to facilitate the construction of a “Cop City” training facility.
To protect defenders worldwide, Global Witness called on governments and businesses to document attacks and hold perpetrators to account.
“Governments cannot stand idly by; they must take decisive action to protect defenders and to address the underlying drivers of violence against them,” Furones said. “Activists and their communities are essential in efforts to prevent and remedy harms caused by climate-damaging industries. We cannot afford to, nor should we tolerate, losing any more lives.”
Nonhle Mbuthuma of South Africa, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2024, wrote in the report’s forward that both defenders and governments had a role to play in creating a more just and sustainable world as it teeters on the brink of climate and ecological breakdown.
“Now it is my role, as a defender, to push elite power to take radical action that swings us away from fossil fuels and toward systems that benefit the whole of society,” Mbuthuma wrote. “It is the job of leaders to listen and make sure that defenders can speak out without risk. This is the responsibility of all wealthy and resource-rich countries across the planet.”
Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast continue to suffer threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining.
Residents say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
This year, there have been 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to Indigenous rights groups that spoke at an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights panel this month.
Increasing violence in northern Nicaragua this year has displaced rural families and led to calls for more drastic action from the international community, which activists say hasn’t done enough to hold the Ortega government accountable for human rights abuses.
For years, Indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast have suffered threats, kidnappings, torture and unlawful arrests while defending communal territory from illegal settlements and mining. This year appears to be as bad as ever, and residents say they are desperate for help.
“Urgent measures must be taken to protect these communities,” said Gloria Monique de Mees, the OAS rapporteur on the rights of Afro-descendants and against racial discrimination. “Failure to address the crisis will only embolden the Nicaraguan government to continue its repressive campaign.”
Much of the violence is concentrated within the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN), a jurisdiction communally governed and titled by Indigenous communities since the late 1980s. It’s home to Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ulwa, Ramas, Creole and Garífunas peoples, and contains mountain, rainforest and coastal ecosystems.
The area has attracted non-Indigenous Nicaraguans, known locally as colonos, looking to set up farms, logging operations and artisanal mines. Massive gold and copper deposits have also created opportunities for multinational mining corporations, with backing from the government.
Indigenous communities say they’re worried about losing ancestral land as well as traditional farming, hunting and fishing practices as the forest is cleared and mines pollute local streams and rivers.
An IACHR panel in March on unlawful arrests in Nicaragua. Photo by CIDH via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Conflicts between Indigenous communities and the colonos, who are often armed, have led to tragedy in multiple instances this year, according to witnesses who spoke at a panel hosted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) this month.
“This situation was created particularly by the dispossession of our territories as part of a process of colonization that implies, in the words of the communities, an ethnocide, in which settlers deprive us of our food and exploit our natural resources, usurping Indigenous territories through acts of armed violence and strategies to destroy out traditional ways of life,” Tininiska Rivera, a community member now living in exile, said during the panel.
In the first six months of this year, there have been over 643 cases of violence against Indigenous peoples, including death threats, the burning of homes, unlawful arrests, kidnappings, torture and displacement, according to several Indigenous rights groups present at the panel.
Many of the communities where the violence occurred have protection measures in place from the IACHR, which involves asking for special intervention by the Nicaraguan government. Human rights advocates say officials haven’t complied.
In one instance this year, five people were killed and two were seriously injured in the Wilú community in the Mayangna Sauní As territory. During the same incident, other families saw their homes and crops burned down, resulting in their displacement. At least 75 Indigenous people have been killed in the area since 2013, according to the panel.
At least 58 of this year’s cases in protected communities involved sexual, psychological, or physical violence against women, the groups said.
There have also been 37 cases in which forest rangers have been targeted by the government while carrying out patrols, according to Camila Ormar, an attorney for the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Eleven Mayangna people have been formally convicted while another 14 have outstanding arrest warrants.
Colonos have used high-caliber weapons and deprived their captors of food, according to the communities. They allegedly have connections to the government as well as various groups made up of former combatants from the revolution.
“One of the stopping points is not to engage with the dictatorship as if everything were normal, but rather to recognize the scale of the abuses that are ongoing, the imprisonment of not just the religious but the young people, the sexual violence against women and children, the dispossession of whole communities,” said OAS Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Arif Bulkan.
In 2022, the US issuedsanctions against state-owned mining company Empresa Nicaragüense de Minas (ENIMIENAS), saying that it was “using gold revenue to continue to oppress the people of Nicaragua.” But the country’s mining concessions have continued to expand, often in Indigenous communities that struggle to find adequate legal representation or don’t understand their rights.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, the government granted three Chinese companies 13 mining concessions in the country, eight of them in the RACCN, according to a Confidential investigation published earlier this year. All of them were approved within eight months, suggesting that proper environmental impact studies and consultation with the communities were never carried out.
The concessions last 25 years and gives the three companies — Zhong Fu Development, Thomas Metal and Nicaragua XinXin Linze Minera Group — exclusive rights to extract minerals in the area, according to the investigation.
The companies couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. The Ministry of Energy and Mines didn’t respond to Mongabay’s requests.
Speakers at the IACHR panel said it’s important to continue to document the human rights abuses taking place on the northern Caribbean coast and to bring it to attention of the rest of the world. They also said that many protection measures are still working but also need to be improved.
For his part, Bulkan said that the international community has been “timid” in its response to the situation in Nicaragua. “[There has been] a shameless response from what we would think of as champions of human rights in the region,” he said. Adding, “One clear line of work has to be continuing with advocacy with the international community.”
Max Radwin is a staff writer covering Latin America for Mongabay. For updates on his work, follow him on Twitter via @MaxRadwin.
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