Johan Rockström

But we will be launching in New York on Monday, the 21st, another planetary health check of these nine planetary boundaries.

It's the work... of Johan Rockström and the institute that he has in Germany that is very highly regarded scientifically.

And the reason for calling it the planetary boundaries is these are the nine ecosystems that sustain life.

And climate is one, of course, oceans is one, the ozone layer is the one we retrieved.

Which brings us to a further set of discussions in recent publications talking about how individual tipping points are not moving in isolation, but are all interconnected with each other.

This paper, published in February 2026 on the One Earth website by climate experts including Johan Rockström, highlights the risk of tipping cascades rather than individual tipping points.

Essentially, the Earth systems are a network, the authors explain.

Changes in one part of the network can increase the likelihood of changes in another.

Despite the fact that the IPCC has now done away with their pretty implausible so-called RCP 8.5 scenario, which assumed the world would increase coal use sevenfold from 2010 onwards, something that patently hasn't happened.

And even if we shield our eyes and choose to ignore the recalibrated high scenario in this new chart, The so-called medium scenario still looks alarming enough.

It tallies pretty well with what Johan Rockström and his colleagues are warning, namely that if we don't decelerate our emissions and decarbonise extremely rapidly, then there's a very real risk we could stray into the region of four degrees Celsius or more of warming, at which point, the authors warn, the economy and society will cease to function as we know it.

Now, Rockstrom and his colleagues are not saying that a hot house earth scenario is inevitable.

BBC News reports.

The director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Johan Rockström, yesterday told the Reuters Sustainability Europe conference that global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions is accelerating.

Rockström said damage to coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest was close to becoming irreversible, and parts of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system were close to collapse, Simon Jessup reports.

A UN Environment Programme report published today said countries are not doing enough to cut emissions that cause climate change, and that the United States sticks out as the only major country where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year.

So GDP and stock market prices are reported nightly in every market on Earth.

Unless you follow Johan Rockström or this podcast or a handful of others, planetary boundaries have never once led a news broadcast.

And that asymmetry was decided by the rungs above that I've just described, um, not by any news editor.

Simon Kuznets famously built the national income accounts for the United States Congress in the nineteen thirties.

Mm-hmm

And, um, and i- if anybody doesn't know about him, Professor Rockström and, uh, the Stockholm Resilience Center, um, have put out some amazing work about planetary boundaries, and I think we're already past five out of eight.

And all of them except for climate are about our use of nature.

Yeah.

Um, and, and so, but that was the key thing, to just get that off the ground and up and running, and, and, um, and prove that it could be done.

Uh, obviously the name of this podcast is Inspired to Invest, so I also like to ask my guests if they've got a particular quote that motivates or inspires them.

I think something that's particularly relevant, I'm referring back to Professor Rockström's work, et cetera, where the science is very well laid out.

But Albert Einstein, so that was quite some time ago.

And then also, I think it's aerosols might be another one.

But anyways, there's nine planetary boundaries, and that's basically Johan Rockström's work from Sweden, and now he's currently at the Potsdam Institute.

But then on the inside you have the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and then in the center of the doughnut is the green zone.

That's, like, the safe and just zone.

Uh, so if Aidan's in front of me or a meat eater's in front of me, at that moment they're the most important person, and the most important thing, time is now, and the most important thing to do is to be kind or, or just.

And, and so, uh, that's how I see it and just, uh, yeah.

I, I just think, um, w- there, there still is a small window as, uh, Johan Rockström, the, the planetary boundary Earth scientist says, uh, for us to turn this around, to turn the Titanic around, so that has to be our focus.

He said we have to urgently change, and so we have to urgently change towards a plant-based food system, and how are we gonna do that? Uh, that's, that's the mission I, I, you know, that's my mission.