Lecture 3

Climate change and planetary boundaries

Lecturer: Elina Eriksson

Content: This lecture concerns climate change and planetary boundaries. We will go through the natural science background to climate change; the carbon cycle, green house gas emissions and the effect on life on earth if the global mean temperature increases. Furthermore we will also touch upon other important planetary boundaries such as biodiversity, freshwater use and biogeochemical flow boundaries.

About: Elina Eriksson is working as a researcher at Green Leap and at the Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC) at KTH. Her research interest has been in change issues, and user-centred design. However, on a personal level, the survival of the human race and her children in particular has pushed her into climate-sustainability-zombie anxiety, something she tries to harness in research.

Literature:

Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S.R., de Vries, W., and de Wit, C.A. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347, 6223 (2015), 1259855.

Steffen, W., Crutzen, P.J., and McNeill, J.R.: The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. Ambio. 36, 8, 614-621 (2007)