South-South transnational advocacy: mobilizing against Brazilian dams in the Peruvian Amazon

South-South transnational advocacy networks (SSTANs) targeting emerging states, Southern companies, and their supporting institutions warrant nuanced distinctions from those of traditional transnational advocacy networks that are heavily reliant on Northern actors and targets, particularly in terms of the strategies and arguments they employ. This article analyzes the dynamics of SSTANs through the case of an environmental campaign against Brazilian hydropower projects proposed in the Peruvian Amazon. It demonstrates how Southern actors are mobilizing against new and emerging patterns of South-South cooperation, which, despite occurring on unfamiliar institutional terrain, reproduces familiar asymmetrical power relations and socio-environmental burdens

Reconciling safe planetary targets and planetary justice: Why should social scientists engage with planetary targets?

As human activity threatens to make the planet unsafe for humanity and other life forms, scholars are identifying planetary targets set at a safe distance from biophysical thresholds beyond which critical Earth systems may collapse. Yet despite the profound implications that both meeting and transgressing such targets may have for human wellbeing, including the potential for negative trade-offs, there is limited social science analysis that systematically considers the justice dimensions of such targets. Here we assess a range of views on planetary justice and present three arguments associated with why social scientists should engage with the scholarship on safe targets. We argue that complementing safe targets with just targets offers a fruitful approach for considering synergies and trade-offs between environmental and social aspirations and can inform inclusive deliberation on these important issues

Earth system justice needed to identify and live within Earth system boundaries

Living within planetary limits requires attention to justice as biophysical boundaries are not inherently just. Through collaboration between natural and social scientists, the Earth Commission defines and operationalizes Earth system justice to ensure that boundaries reduce harm, increase well-being, and reflect substantive and procedural justice. Such stringent boundaries may also affect ‘just access’ to food, water, energy and infrastructure. We show how boundaries may need to be adjusted to reduce harm and increase access, and challenge inequality to ensure a safe and just future for people, other species and the planet. Earth system justice may enable living justly within boundaries

Impacts of meeting minimum access on critical earth systems amidst the Great Inequality

The Sustainable Development Goals aim to improve access to resources and services, reduce environmental degradation, eradicate poverty and reduce inequality. However, the magnitude of the environmental burden that would arise from meeting the needs of the poorest is under debate—especially when compared to much larger burdens from the rich. We show that the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human impacts was characterized by a ‘Great Inequality’ in using and damaging the environment. We then operationalize ‘just access’ to minimum energy, water, food and infrastructure. We show that achieving just access in 2018, with existing inequalities, technologies and behaviours, would have produced 2–26% additional impacts on the Earth’s natural systems of climate, water, land and nutrients—thus further crossing planetary boundaries. These hypothetical impacts, caused by about a third of humanity, equalled those caused by the wealthiest 1–4%. Technological and behavioural changes thus far, while important, did not deliver just access within a stable Earth system. Achieving these goals therefore calls for a radical redistribution of resources

A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations

The health of the planet and its people are at risk. The deterioration of the global commons—ie, the natural systems that support life on Earth—is exacerbating energy, food, and water insecurity, and increasing the risk of disease, disaster, displacement, and conflict. In this Commission, we quantify safe and just Earth-system boundaries (ESBs) and assess minimum access to natural resources required for human dignity and to enable escape from poverty. Collectively, these describe a safe and just corridor that is essential to ensuring sustainable and resilient human and planetary health and thriving in the Anthropocene. We then discuss the need for translation of ESBs across scales to inform science-based targets for action by key actors (and the challenges in doing so), and conclude by identifying the system transformations necessary to bring about a safe and just future. Our concept of the safe and just corridor advances research on planetary boundaries and the justice and Earth-system aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals. We define safe as ensuring the biophysical stability of the Earth system, and our justice principles include minimising harm, meeting minimum access needs, and redistributing resources and responsibilities to enhance human health and wellbeing. The ceiling of the safe and just corridor is defined by the more stringent of the safe and just ESBs to minimise significant harm and ensure Earth-system stability. The base of the corridor is defined by the impacts of minimum global access to food, water, energy, and infrastructure for the global population, in the domains of the variables for which we defined the ESBs. Living within the corridor is necessary, because exceeding the ESBs and not meeting basic needs threatens human health and life on Earth. However, simply staying within the corridor does not guarantee justice because within the corridor resources can also be inequitably distributed, aggravating human health and causing environmental damage. Procedural and substantive justice are necessary to ensure that the space within the corridor is justly shared. We define eight safe and just ESBs for five domains—the biosphere (functional integrity and natural ecosystem area), climate, nutrient cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen), freshwater (surface and groundwater), and aerosols—to reduce the risk of degrading biophysical life-support systems and avoid tipping points. Seven of the ESBs have already been transgressed: functional integrity, natural ecosystem area, climate, phosphorus, nitrogen, surface water, and groundwater. The eighth ESB, air pollution, has been transgressed at the local level in many parts of the world. Although safe boundaries would ensure Earth-system stability and thus safeguard the overall biophysical conditions that have enabled humans to flourish, they do not necessarily safeguard everyone against harm or allow for minimum access to resources for all. We use the concept of Earth-system justice—which seeks to ensure wellbeing and reduce harm within and across generations, nations, and communities, and between humans and other species, through procedural and distributive justice—to assess safe boundaries. Earth-system justice recognises unequal responsibility for, and unequal exposure and vulnerability to, Earth-system changes, and also recognises unequal capacities to respond and unequal access to resources. We also assess the extent to which safe ESBs could minimise irreversible, existential, and other major harms to human health and wellbeing through a review of who is affected at each boundary. Not all safe ESBs are just, in that they do not minimise all significant harm (eg, that associated with the climate change, aerosol, or nitrogen ESBs). Billions of people globally do not have sufficient access to energy, clean water, food, and other resources. For climate change, for example, tens of millions of people are harmed at lower levels of warming than that defined in the safe ESB, and thus to avoid significant harm would require a more stringent ESB. In other domains, the safe ESBs align with the just ESBs, although some need to be modified, or complemented with local standards, to prevent significant harm (eg, the aerosols ESB). We examine the implications of achieving the social SDGs in 2018 through an impact modelling exercise, and quantify the minimum access to resources required for basic human dignity (level 1) as well as the minimum resources required to enable escape from poverty (level 2). We conclude that without social transformation and redistribution of natural resource use (eg, from top consumers of natural resources to those who currently do not have minimum access to these resources), meeting minimum-access levels for people living below the minimum level would increase pressures on the Earth system and the risks of further transgressions of the ESBs. We also estimate resource-access needs for human populations in 2050 and the associated Earth-system impacts these could have. We project that the safe and just climate ESB will be overshot by 2050, even if everybody in the world lives with only the minimum required access to resources (no more, no less), unless there are transformations of, for example, the energy and food systems. Thus, a safe and just corridor will only be possible with radical societal transformations and technological changes. Living within the safe and just corridor requires operationalisation of ESBs by key actors across all levels, which can be achieved via cross-scale translation (whereby resources and responsibilities for impact reductions are equitably shared among actors). We focus on cities and businesses because of the magnitude of their impacts on the Earth system, and their potential to take swift action and act as agents of change. We explore possible approaches for translating each ESB to cities and businesses via the sequential steps of transcription, allocation, and adjustment. We highlight how different elements of Earth-system justice can be reflected in the allocation and adjustment steps by choosing appropriate sharing approaches, informed by the governance context and broader enabling conditions. Finally we discuss system transformations that could move humanity into a safe and just corridor and reduce risks of instability, injustice, and harm to human health. These transformations aim to minimise harm and ensure access to essential resources, while addressing the drivers of Earth-system change and vulnerability and the institutional and social barriers to systemic transformations, and include reducing and reallocating consumption, changing economic systems, technology, and governance