Johan Rockström writes: The challenge before us  to provide for the needs of more than ten billion people while safeguarding our planetary life-support systems. Recent scientific insights have made us better equipped than ever to strike that balance. Doing so will be our generation’s great task.

Ending poverty has become a realistic goal for the first time in human history. We have the ability to ensure that every person on the planet has the food, water, shelter, education, health care, and energy needed to lead a life of dignity and opportunity. But we will be able to do so only if we simultaneously protect the earth’s critical systems.

For the last 10,000 years, the earth’s climate has been remarkably stable. Global temperatures rose and fell by no more than one degree Celsius (compared with swings of more than eight degrees Celsius during the last ice age), and resilient ecosystems met humanity’s needs. This period – known as the Holocene – provided the stability that enabled human civilization to rise and thrive. It is the only state of the planet of which we know that can sustain prosperous lives for ten billion people.

But humans have now become the single largest driver of ecosystem change on earth, marking the start of a new geological age that some call the Anthropocene.

Human activity has undergone what is being called the Great Acceleration.

The planet’s response to our pressures is likely to be unpredictable. Indeed, the surprises have already begun. As we overdraw on our planet’s accounts, it is starting to levy penalties on the global economy, in the form of extreme weather events, accelerated melting of ice sheets, rapid biodiversity loss, and the vast bleaching of coral reefs.

We face an urgent need to define a safety zone that prevents us from pushing our planet out of the unusually benevolent Holocene state. For each of the earth’s key processes, a boundary is proposed  – a quantitative ceiling – beyond which we risk inducing abrupt changes that could push our planet into a state that is more hostile to humanity.

These nine boundaries include climate change, ozone depletion, ocean acidification, interference in the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, land-use change, global freshwater use, biosphere integrity, air pollution, and novel entities.. Humanity has already transgressed four boundaries: climate change, nitrogen and phosphorus use, biodiversity loss, and land-use change.

Our challenge is to bring the earth’s systems back within the safety zone, while simultaneously ensuring that every person has the resources he or she needs to lead a happy and fulfilling life.

Meeting these goals will require a far more equitable distribution of the planet’s resources and far greater efficiency in how we use them.