Publications

Hannah Zoller, Steven J. Lade, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Ingo Fetzer, Nitin Chaudhary, Juan C. Rocha. 2025. Supplementary material to "A global map of Earth system interactions". https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3341

The intricate interplay of the biophysical processes of the Earth system provides the basis for Earth resilience and human well-being. With local anthropogenic pressures increasing in most regions, there has been a growing need for a systemic understanding of this interplay on a sub-global scale. However, due to inconsistency in the temporal and spatial scales in the corresponding studies, a holistic assessment of the environm...

Hannah Zoller, Steven J. Lade, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Ingo Fetzer, Nitin Chaudhary, Juan C. Rocha. 2025. A global map of Earth system interactions. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3341

The intricate interplay of the biophysical processes of the Earth system provides the basis for Earth resilience and human well-being. With local anthropogenic pressures increasing in most regions, there has been a growing need for a systemic understanding of this interplay on a sub-global scale. However, due to inconsistency in the temporal and spatial scales in the corresponding studies, a holistic assessment of the environm...

Joyeeta Gupta, Jesse F. Abrams, David Armstrong McKay, Xuemei Bai, Kristi L. Ebi, Paola Fezzigna, Giuliana Gentile, Lauren Gifford, Syezlin Hasan, Lisa Jacobson, Aljoscha Karg, Steven Lade, Tim Lenton, Diana Liverman, Awaz Mohamed, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, David Obura, Johan Rockström, Ben Stewart-Koster, Detlef van Vuuren, Peter Verburg, Raimon C. Ylla-Català, Caroline Zimm. 2025. Thresholds of significant harm at global level. Earth System Governance. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2025.100263

The planetary boundary framework proposes ‘safe’ boundaries, but these boundaries are not necessarily ‘just’. Hence, we ask: How has the Earth Commission defined just boundaries building on the concept of minimizing significant harm and how many people are currently exposed to harm above the safe and just threshold? We document the work of the Earth Commission to address these questions using our Earth System Justice framework...

Rebecca V Gladstone-Gallagher, Jason M Tylianakis, Johanna Yletyinen, Vasilis Dakos, Emily J Douglas, Suzie Greenhalgh, Judi E Hewitt, Daniel Hikuroa, Steven J Lade, Richard Le Heron. 2025. Water Flows Downhill. Frontiers for Young Minds. https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2025.1568483

Our planet is in trouble. We are losing plants, animals, and habitats, and the processes that link them are changing. Nature is becoming sick. People have been trying to fix this problem, but the situation keeps getting worse. One problem is people ignore a simple law of nature—ecosystems are connected. For example, when forests are cut down, soil is exposed to rainfall and washed into the sea, where it covers and kills shellf...

Hannah Zoller, Juan Rocha, Ingo Fetzer, C. Kendra Gotangco Gonzales, Nitin Chaudhary, Steve Lade. 2025. A bottom-up spatial pattern of Earth system interactions. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12239

The intricate interplay of the Earth system’s biophysical processes provides the basis for Earth resilience and human wellbeing. While this interplay has been systematically studied on a global scale, a better understanding of the sub-global interactions is crucial in order to fully assess the systemic environmental impact of human activities. Building on the quantitative framework provided by the Earth system impact metric ...

Vitor Hirata Sanches, Joseph Guillaume, Takuya Iwanaga, Sarah Clement, Steven J. Lade. 2025. Pathway diversity: a resilience metric sensitive to agency applied to a lake eutrophication problem. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.09.658728

Measuring resilience has been a longstanding challenge in social-ecological research. While there are established resilience metrics, they often do not account for agency, which is crucial in social-ecological systems. Pathway diversity is a recent approach to measuring resilience that integrates systems thinking with individual-based elements, such as agency. According to this approach, resilience is larger if actors have mor...

S. E. Bunn, B. Stewart-Koster, C. Ndehedehe, C. Gordon, J. Rockström, J. Gupta, D. Qin, S. J. Lade. 2024. Reply to: Concerns regarding proposed groundwater Earth system boundary. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08083-8

REPLYING TO: M. O. Cuthbert et al. Nature https://doi-org.ezp.sub.su.se/10.1038/s41586-024-08082-9 (2024). Groundwater is widely used for domestic and agricultural purposes, but is subject to increasing risks from overexploitation. Responding to this global significance, we recently defined a safe and just Earth system boundary (ESB) for groundwater and, in the absence of a consistent data source on baseline aquifer vol...

Steven Lade, Kate Lawrence, Genevieve Newey, Anita Peerson, Bjorn Sturmberg, Liam Taylor, Stuart Howden. 2024. Submission: Climate Change Authority Issues Paper. Research Gate. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.11969.77925

The Australian National University (ANU) Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions (ICEDS) welcomes the opportunity to comment on the Climate Change Authority (CCA) Issues Paper on Targets, Pathways and Progress (IP). As a signatory to the Paris Agreement, Australia has committed to pursue efforts to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels. The window of time to achieve thi...

Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Raf Jansen, Daniel Avila Ortega, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Jonathan F. Donges, Henrik Österblom, Per Olsson, Magnus Nyström, Steve Lade, Thomas Hahn, Carl Folke, Garry Peterson, Anne-Sophie Crepin. 2024. Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-21005

The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity and most recently by what some have called a polycrisis. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of Anthropocene trap for humanity. We identify 14 Anthropocene tra...

Steven Lade. 2024. Safe and just Earth system boundaries. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-21091

The stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being are inseparably linked, yet their interdependencies are generally under-recognized; consequently, they are often treated independently. Here, we use modelling and literature assessment to quantify safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, water and nutrient cycles, and aerosols at global and subglobal scales. We propose ESBs fo...