Johan Rockstrom: Let the environment guide our development
Human growth has strained the Earth’s resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognise this and change behavior. His research has found nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that can guide us in protecting our planet’s many overlapping ecosystems.
ABOUT TED
TED is a small Non Profit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design.
ABOUT Johan Rockstrom
“Johan Rockstrom is a leader of a new approach to sustainability: planetary boundaries. Working with a team of 29 leading scientists across disciplines, Johan and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine key Earth processes or systems and marked the upper limit beyond which each system could touch off a major system crash.
Climate change is certainly in the mix but so are other human-made threats such as ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, chemical pollution.
He teaches natural resource management at Stockholm University, and is the Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He’s a leading voice on global water, studying strategies to build resilience in water-scarce regions of the world. Fokus magazine named him “Swede of the Year” in 2009 for his work on bridging the science of climate change to policy and society.”
The VIDEO
RELATED
1. Stockholm Resilience Centre 2. Book: Rethinking Water Management: Innovative Approaches to Contemporary Issues 3. Book: Balancing Water for Humans and Nature: The New Approach in Ecohydrology 4. Book: Integrated Watershed Management in Rainfed Agriculture (Available June 2011)
