A new study on functional biosphere integrity, or the plant kingdom’s ability to co-regulate the state of the ecosystem, found that Earth is in trouble—big trouble.
Published in the renowned journal One Earth, the study — led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) together with BOKU University in Vienna — investigated whether the plant world is getting enough energy to perform the processes necessary to ensure planetary equilibrium.
The majority of the world’s land is in a “precarious state,” according to researchers who mapped the Earth’s functional biosphere integrity. That refers to the plant’s ability to photosynthesize to maintain the material flows of carbon, water, and nitrogen that support ecosystems.
Lead author Fabian Stenzel, member of the PIK research group, emphasized in a press release the enormous need “we have to utilize the biosphere — for food, raw materials and, in the future, also climate protection.”
“Our demand for biomass continues to grow, so it’s becoming even more critical to quantify the strain we’re already putting on the biosphere.”
Recent research is paving the way to understanding how we’re impacting the planet so we can take the necessary and appropriate action steps.
How far have we crossed the planet’s boundaries?
The study builds on the latest update from the Planetary Boundaries framework published in 2023.
“The framework now squarely puts energy flows from photosynthesis in the world’s vegetation at the centre of those processes that co-regulate planetary stability”, explained Wolfgang Lucht, head of PIK’s Earth System Analysis department and coordinator of the study.
“These energy flows drive all of life – but humans are now diverting a sizeable fraction of them to their own purposes, disturbing nature’s dynamic processes.”
Based on the global biosphere model LPJmL, which simulated water, carbon, and nitrogen flows on a daily basis at a resolution of half a degree of longitude/latitude, the study provides a detailed inventory of each individual year since 1600, the press release continues.
According to this model, worrying developments began as early as 1600 in mid-latitudes.
The Earth is hurting
By 1900, the proportion of global land area where ecosystem changes went beyond the locally defined safe zone, or were even in the high-risk zone, was 37 and 14 percent, respectively, compared to today’s 60 and 38 percent, according to the study.
In other words, industrialization was already taking a toll, and land use was already putting significant pressure on the Earth’s system much earlier than the onset of climate warnings. Right now, researchers can say that the biosphere boundary has been transgressed on almost all land surfaces, mainly due to agriculture.
Though the news might sound troubling, researchers describe the map as a “breakthrough from a scientific perspective” because it reveals the relationship between the human need to extract resources from the environment and the impact that’s having. The map concerns itself with “planetary boundaries,” and it seems they’ve been crossed.
However, the information gleaned provides “an important impetus for further international climate policy development. This is because it points to the link between biomass and natural carbon sinks, and how they can mitigate climate change. Governments must treat it as a single overarching issue: comprehensive biosphere protection together with strong climate action,” concluded Johan Rockström, PIK Director and one of the co-authors of the study.