Systematic exploration of a ‘safe operating space’ for Europe

Project description

The Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework has attracted a large interest from policy makers, researchers and from the business community. The possibility that several exceeded global environmental limits could severely affect humankind requires to think on the best ways to address these issues in a fair and efficient manner. One of the currently explored ways to tackle these global environmental issues is to consider the Planetary Boundaries as environmental resources with a global limit (i.e. a maximum acceptable use) that could be allocated among human beings or among countries, on a yearly basis or over time.

The first objective of this report is to explore the possible allocation strategies for sharing these global resources between people and countries, and to compute the resulting EEA shares and limits.

The second objective of this report is to compute the EEA footprints corresponding to these limits and to evaluate the current EEA performance by comparing the two. This enable understanding if current EEA production and consumption patterns are compatible with global environmental limits.

The third objective of this report is to explore the possible improvements of the footprint’s metrics by using bottom-up regional/country-specific data from the EEA.

The fourth objective is to suggest a few visualisations in order to ease the understanding of issues related to the Planetary Boundaries.