Earth Resilience and Cross-Scale Interactions

Resilience must be explored across different scales. The risk of pushing the entire Earth system outside its stable state is called Earth resilience, which is dependent on the different components of the Earth system operating together and regulating itself through feedbacks. Cross-scale interactions are different from teleconnections. The Holocene, also calls the “Eden’s garden of human development,” is the stable state that we want to remain in, because we know the safe operating space of this state. Professor Rockström runs through the example of greenhouse gas emissions from the Industrial Revolution until now, and explains how the Earth system is applying biogeophysical processes to remain in its stable state. All biomes play a critical role in regulating Earth resilience; we must connect the local to the biome scale, the biome to the planetary scale, and become stewards of these collective systems.

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