Recording 170 CHE-Alaska 6/29/2022 Pollution & the planet
CHE-Alaska webinar: Pollution & the planet: perspectives on being outside the ‘Safe Operating Space’. This webinar was recorded on June 29, 2022. Additional resources and a more detailed description can be found at the CHE-Alaska webpage - https://www.akaction.org/webinars/pol...
Description: CHE-Alaska's June 29 webinar was a presentation on Pollution & the planet: perspectives on being outside the ‘Safe Operating Space’ from the co-author Dr. Sarah Cornell from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
The more that scientists understand about global environmental changes, the more we recognize the role of life in shaping the dynamics of the Earth system. Huge scientific efforts have been made to assess the scale and pace of human impacts on the planet, especially the climate changes driven mostly by the wealthiest, most industrialized and highest consuming societies. But most work on chemical pollution has focused on much smaller scales – the effects on individual organisms, human health, and local ecosystems. The planetary boundaries framework, first proposed in 2009, has proven to be useful in helping to bring the planetary and the person-scale perspectives together.
Earlier this year, an international group of scientists who research different aspects of chemical pollution and environmental health focused on the ‘novel entities’ planetary boundary. This relates to all the many kinds of technologically enabled synthetic substances that have the capacity to change how life itself works up to the planetary scale. We acknowledge the limitations of chemical and environmental data, but our conclusions were clear – the balance of evidence is that today’s use, misuse and production trends for synthetic chemicals are changing Earth system processes in unprecedented ways and are currently outstripping societies’ capacities to monitor and mitigate the problems and emerging risks. In the past few months, we have also seen a fresh perspective in policy debates, including discussions of worldwide treaties to deal better with chemical pollution in systematic and ambitious ways.