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The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship

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Abstract

Over the past century, the total material wealth of humanity has been enhanced. However, in the twenty-first century, we face scarcity in critical resources, the degradation of ecosystem services, and the erosion of the planet’s capability to absorb our wastes. Equity issues remain stubbornly difficult to solve. This situation is novel in its speed, its global scale and its threat to the resilience of the Earth System. The advent of the Anthropence, the time interval in which human activities now rival global geophysical processes, suggests that we need to fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit. Many approaches could be adopted, ranging from geo-engineering solutions that purposefully manipulate parts of the Earth System to becoming active stewards of our own life support system. The Anthropocene is a reminder that the Holocene, during which complex human societies have developed, has been a stable, accommodating environment and is the only state of the Earth System that we know for sure can support contemporary society. The need to achieve effective planetary stewardship is urgent. As we go further into the Anthropocene, we risk driving the Earth System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from which we cannot easily return.

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Acknowledgments

The article is based on Steffen et al. (2011). The Anthropocene: from global change to planetary stewardship. Working Paper No. 2 prepared for the “3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability: Transforming the World in an Era of Global Change”, in Stockholm, 16–19 May 2011, Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact. We acknowledge support from Ebba och Sven Schwartz Stiftelse, Kjell and Märta Beijer Foundation, Formas, and Mistra through a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a cross-faculty research centre at Stockholm University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The ANU Climate Change Institute, The College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Coombs Building, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Will Steffen

  2. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Will Steffen, Åsa Persson, Lisa Deutsch, Carole Crumley, Carl Folke, Line Gordon, Johan Rockström & Uno Svedin

  3. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Åsa Persson & Johan Rockström

  4. Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester,  UK

    Jan Zalasiewicz & Mark Williams

  5. Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate Biological Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Katherine Richardson

  6. Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany

    Paul Crutzen

  7. Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden

    Carl Folke

  8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Mario Molina

  9. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, CA,  USA

    Veerabhadran Ramanathan

  10. Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen,  The Netherlands

    Marten Scheffer

  11. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany

    Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

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Steffen, W., Persson, Å., Deutsch, L. et al. The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship. AMBIO 40, 739–761 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-011-0185-x

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