Is the Planetary Boundaries Concept Useful for Communication?

00:00:00: Böhning-Gaese: There's also scientific evidence that nature conservation is working. There's meta analyses showing that two thirds of the nature conservation management measures actually worked, so that we can actually save biodiversity, we can restore ecosystems so we can tell positive narratives. And that's something actually where the climate community can learn from the biodiversity community that in some aspects we can do a better job than them.

00:00:31: Hahn: Welcome to Inside Biodiversity. This podcast is hosted by iDiv, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. My name is Volker Hahn. I'm head of the Impact unit at iDiv. My guest today is Katrin Böhning-Gaese. Katrin is the scientific director of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, one of iDiv’s founding institutions, as well as a close partner and collaborator. Katrin is a biodiversity researcher with expertise in relationships between people and ecosystems. She also frequently speaks about biodiversity to different audiences. In this episode, we will discuss the Planetary Boundaries framework, this time focusing not only on the science, but also considering the value of this framework for science communication. Other questions at the heart of this episode are. Where has communication on climate and biodiversity gone wrong, and how can researchers in the media do better? Enjoy. Katrin. Welcome to Inside Biodiversity. What got you into biodiversity? You studied biology. Why are you enthusiastic about biodiversity, but also research and you also spend a lot of time on communication.

00:01:48: Böhning-Gaese: Yeah. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm happy here to discuss this issue with you. I guess I started working on biodiversity questions in my Master’s when I realised that the lab work that you can do in biology is not fulfilling enough. And I started with fieldwork about the white stork and spent a whole season out in the field observing white stork during their daily behaviour, learning a lot about all the different constraints and opportunities that these animals have. And while being out there, I realised how fulfilling it is to spend the whole day out in the field and to learn about nature and to be fascinated about all the idiosyncratic details you observe out there, and it generates happiness. And I stayed with this ever since.

00:02:45: Hahn: Today we'll talk about biodiversity change, but we'll focus on biodiversity communication. And before we talk about maybe how to do it better, how would you assess the current status of biodiversity communication. Do you think people in the media. Communicators like myself. Researchers like you. Are we doing a good job in general?

00:03:09: Böhning-Gaese: I think in general, like journalists do, almost the best they can do because there's all this professionalism out there. There are many dedicated people with very good skills. The problem is a little bit that in the journals. In the medias there's priorities. And it's not only about setting agendas and good publication. Organs can do this and do this. It's also about attention. And if there's not sufficient attention for a subject, it will be difficult for a journalist to bring this on the front page, let's say, of a newspaper. One can discuss if journalists can be brave and bolder, and be more hard on their editor in chief to make sure that also biodiversity or climate or other environment related issues cover the front page more frequently. You can also discuss if they can be more creative. And I think with biodiversity there's a lot of opportunities to tell very interesting stories. And I think here journalists can become more open minded to the stories you can tell. Um, and I think that is very rewarding because people like to hear stories about nature, maybe not biodiversity, but nature. But the current political and societal climate is not in favour of journalism on biodiversity or any other environmental issue.

00:04:48: Hahn: Um, this is probably also changed over the last years and decades that maybe it has because of the many other crises, uh, where this topic is getting less attention.

00:05:01: Böhning-Gaese: Exactly. That is a fairly recent issue. For example, when preparing for the World Biodiversity Summit 2022 in Montreal. That was a time when biodiversity was in all the media, and where whole groups of journalists prepare for the prepared for the summit, and there was a lot of enthusiasm. And since then, other crises have overshadowed the biodiversity crisis. So it's a fairly recent decline in attention in the past three years.

00:05:34: Hahn: When we hear the media, but also researchers talk about biodiversity change. We sometimes hear these very alarmist terms like ecological collapse or insect apocalypse. For example, in a recent study, a scientific publication, it's called Global Catastrophic Risks 2026. There is one section called ecological collapse, and I quote one sentence from that section. It says. Scientists warn that crossing multiple Earth system thresholds could lead to the rapid collapse of most ecosystems across the planet, compromising the biosphere'sability to support human life. This is quite drastic wording, I would say. What I would like to ask you is, do you think this is truthful or is this an exaggeration?

00:06:34: Böhning-Gaese: I agree that it is very pointed statements and I think they are overstated. If you look at the long term data on biodiversity, I mean, there's not that many data sets and they are alarming and they are dramatic. For example, looking at the Living Planet Index that indicates a loss of more than 70% of the number of vertebrate Animals on earth, that is, birds and mammals, reptiles and amphibians. And if I look back into my own lifetime, the last 50 years, that's between the time I went to high school and today, that almost three quarters of all the animals on earth have disappeared during my own lifetime. It's clear that the situation is dramatic. Whether this leads to a collapse of the ecosystems, I'm not sure. And the data situation we have, the experimental manipulation of biodiversity levels, the observations in the field. There's here and there an indication of a really catastrophic reorganisation of an ecosystem. But in general, these tipping points that are implicit in this idea of ecosystem collapse are very, very rare.

00:07:56: Hahn: And that is because the communities in an ecosystem rearrange, and there are new species coming in, other species going out. But it's so there's a kind of ecosystem adaptation, but not necessarily a collapse.

00:08:11: Böhning-Gaese: Exactly. I mean, there's these experimental studies and the meta analysis of it on how different levels of biodiversity are needed for ecosystem functioning. And all the data I have seen point to a linear relationship between levels of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. So with the positive news is that you don't have a tipping point where when you are across it have great difficulties coming back to a high level of ecosystem functioning. The negative side of this observation is that with each species you lose, you lose resilience in your ecosystem and make the ecosystem more vulnerable to disturbances. However, there are cases where you have a real collapse of ecosystems. In my own experience, I can tell only basically one example I've seen in Uganda, in the Usambara mountains, where you have steep mountain slopes, very old mountains with which were formerly forested, and where the people there for agriculture cut down the forest. And with the heavy rains you have in this region, actually, really the soil got washed down the mountain. And what ended there was poor cliffs, and there's nothing that can grow there anymore. And the people who have lived there have lost their livelihoods. And when driving there with a car, I saw at the side of the road people making a living out of taking pebbles and making them smaller for construction by hand and putting them in big sex to to sell on the market. What a hard living is this? So for me, this is an ecosystem colleagues with all the consequences also for the livelihoods of the people. But the cases we have seen this in this severity are extremely rare. So in general, I think you have a continuous loss of ecosystem functioning, but if you restore ecosystem resilience, you can come back to a higher level. And there are in biodiversity, as you said, mechanisms like turnover of species, new species coming in also under climate change from the south. Even in corals we observe this and evolution adaptation of species to other environmental conditions. Maybe not quick enough, maybe not in all the species. But they are these compensatory mechanisms that are overlooked if you take the systems just as static systems.

00:10:47: Hahn: We had two previous episodes in Inside Biodiversity, where we discussed thresholds and tipping points, as you mentioned, and there was agreement. And I think this, um, aligns with what you say, that that tipping points are existent, but they are rare. And the ones that we know of are on the local level based on these tipping points. There's this framework of planetary boundaries. And I've read statements of yours where you've also have been critical of these. And at the same time you said, well, this Planetary Boundaries framework is useful for communication. I found that very interesting. And we'll talk about that. Um, but let's begin with the science. How robust is this framework from your point of view?

00:11:39: Böhning-Gaese: I have really trouble in in the scientific aspects of the planetary boundaries framework. I mean, it's obvious that our Earth is limited. And if you look at biomass production, there's only a certain amount of biomass that can be produced on this planet, and it goes into food and feed and currently into energy generation and so on and so forth. And there's a limit to this. Nevertheless, to identify boundaries where you can basically with a loss of biomass, actually reach a tipping point, it's extremely difficult. And if you look at the different axes of the planetary boundary framework, one of them is biosphere integrity. And it's measured, among others with HANPP. That's the human appropriation of net primary production. So how much of the NPP the planet produces is put into human value chains? And currently the value is about 30%. So 30% of the NPP on earth goes into humans. The rest is left for the rest of their thousands of animals and other plans, and the boundary was set at a 10% HANPP. So we are way above the boundary. And the argument was that 10% is ten times the pre-industrial level of 1.9% HANPP. That is taken as kind of the benchmark, but I have no idea if there's really scientific evidence that 10% HANPP is a planetary boundary. If you look at production systems in Europe, the cultural landscapes, they have high productivity. They are integrated natural cultural systems where people make a living from where the systems are fairly robust, where you have feed and food produced and at the same time a high level of biodiversity. To me, this looks like stable landscapes and stable ecosystems. They are probably beyond 10% HANPP. Are they unstable? I don't know. So here you see that the clear definition of a planetary boundary. Seems to me with a basically connected with a high uncertainty. And the uncertainty is so high that it almost feels arbitrary where the boundary is actually set.

00:14:23: Hahn: So there's no sharp boundary. And this was also discussed in the previous episode, this was an argument I made, that if you would assume that 0 or 1% HANPP would be safe for humanity. Um, it doesn't sound reasonable because it would mean that everyone would starve. I mean, we need to extract food for 8 billion people from the planet, so we need agricultural land. And we also need to apply nitrogen fertiliser, which is another control variable for for another planetary boundary. And we can't stop doing that. It makes sense to me that if we do too much of it, then we are also in an unsafe operating space for humanity. But I would say also, if we go too low, then it would mean, you know, people can't can't exist because they don't have enough to eat.

00:15:19: Böhning-Gaese: It would work only with either a much smaller number of people on the planet or end, or with a much smaller ecological footprint per person, which means completely different livelihoods than we have today.

00:15:35: Hahn: Yeah, you would probably have to differentiate them between rich countries like Germany on the one hand, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where actually the the productivity on agricultural fields is very low and they need to get more food from their land so that they don't have to cut down all the forests.

00:15:55: Böhning-Gaese: Exactly.

00:15:56: Hahn: And throwingthis all into one Planetary Boundaries framework is maybe, well, there are some problems to it, but you do say that the concept is quite useful for communication. That surprised me and I would like to hear why you think so.

00:16:13: Böhning-Gaese: Well, they basically the advantage of this concept of this framework for communication is that it emphasises that our planet has limits and that if we have, for example, constant economic growth, it's just not working because the basis is, in the end, all we can provide on the planet. And you cannot have indefinite growth and indefinite numbers of people and increases in ecological footprints on this one planet. And to put this into people's minds is important and actually seem to have worked in at least parts of the economics system where people like Dasgupta, who wrote, for example, the Dasgupta Report made clear that the system is limited and that we cannot develop business on a planet that disregards these planetary boundaries. So as a metaphor, reaching a good life for ideally everybody on the planet within Planetary Boundaries, it's working the problem, and I'm getting more and more critical about the concept, is that it implies these Planetary Boundaries, and it means that we are beyond the boundaries. We are leaving the safe living space for humanity. And if you take catastrophe theory, it would mean it's very difficult to come back. You have hysteresis effects. You invest a lot to get in this better original state. And in the end, that means once you are beyond the boundary, there's almost no coming back. And this has psychological consequences for people. So some people then just ignore everything and don't listen anymore and put this. Need to put this problem aside to move forward. And then there's people who are sensitive, many young people. And it has increased disease burden very much psychological diseases. People getting worried about climate change, a whole movement calling themselves the Last Generation makes this visible. I hear from psychologists that they have large numbers of young people they need to treat about future worries, about future, fear about the future. And I think here as scientists, we might have had also a responsibility in causing this, because the way we argued, frightening people into action has made a lot of people so worried that they are getting sick about it.

00:18:48: Hahn: Yeah. I think you're raising an important point, first of all, that there is responsibility to how we do it. Not to understate things, but also their risk with overstating things. And the other question is there's this type of communication even work for society to make progress. Like, can we scare people into action or does it actually lead to, um, to to people not doing anything either by rejecting the whole issue or by Doom's perspective saying it's too late anyway? We'll discuss that later. How? What would be a better way of doing it? But another aspect that you mentioned regarding the planetary boundaries, that was in a different interview that you gave and that I, that I listened to, you said that we've already crossed a couple of planetary boundaries, according to the scientists who created that framework. And currently they say that we've crossed seven out of nine planetary boundaries. And what you said in the interview is that? Well, nobody noticed. Maybe because there was no there is no sharp boundary. But another question that follows for me is how does that feed back into what people think about the people claiming these planetary boundaries, who are sometimes using a stark rhetoric to draw attention to these threats associated with breaching planetary boundaries? Could this backfire on researchers’ credibility? If the risks that we warn off don't materialise, or they don't materialise in a way that we notice?

00:20:33: Böhning-Gaese: I think this is a huge risk, and I think we as scientists should act as honest brokers. Well, first of all, we communicate the risks, but not overemphasise the risks and making them more worrisome than they actually are, and especially also communicating the uncertainties very well. I think there's a risk of overstating and understating risks. In general, I feel that my fellow biodiversity researchers, environmental scientists, including also me, we have tended to overstate the risks. And this has the danger of backfiring. And I think part of the backlash against environmental laws and so on, we are experiencing right now. There's a lot of reasons why we have this backfiring, but some of this is also partly responsible, our own responsibility as scientists in overstating things. And then people do not experiencing the negative effects. And obviously, biodiversity is one of these issues where the effects are taking place slowly and indirectly. So it's very difficult to communicate and see the connections. And I think we should be, especially in current times, very careful as scientists to to stick exactly to the scientific evidence and not overstating things.

00:21:59: Hahn: This is also an issue in other environmental topics. For example, the climate change debate, which I think has been more prevalent over the past decades, has received much more attention than biodiversity. Is there anything that we can learn from how climate change was communicated? And actually it has been quite divisive this topic, especially in the United States, but partly also, I think, in Germany and Europe. Is there anything that we can learn from that?

00:22:31: Böhning-Gaese: What I think we can learn from them is this decision for simple variables, temperature and CO2 equivalents. And at least they attempt to calculate how much emissions we can afford before we reach potential tipping points. So there's a very quantitative approach, very simple measures. And in the biodiversity community, If you ask biodiversity researcher what is the most important biodiversity variable you get? Immediately huge lists. And if you ask ten biodiversity researchers, you get 20 times these lists. So we tend to increase the complexity of biodiversity to a degree that it's not feasible to handle it. For example, now for the reporting duties that companies have. So I think we need to be more brave in reduce the number of indicators. And we have started here. And you have said in our project Triple Bird, it's called where we use bird diversity as an indicator of the biodiversity status of Germany in Europe, realising that it is only one taxonomic group among many, many. And to see how far can we get with a group where we have good long term data and good spatial coverage, and waiting for the onslaught of the biodiversity community telling us that it's only the birds and they are very special and not very threatened in comparison to other groups, but to see how far we can get with this in use, this obviously also for communication. Well, I think the biodiversity community has advantages that maybe because of the complexity of the theme and not being in the position of clearly defining tipping points, if they exist and so on. And also because of the situation that nature restoration is working quite nicely. And we have here in Leipzig wonderful examples of completely devastated landscapes that have regenerated quite nicely in the past 30 years, to see that biodiversity is an issue where we can create a lot of positive communication, where we can see that nature restoration is working well, nature can heal herself. If you want to argue this way? So you can create very positive. And um, and actually there's also scientific evidence that nature conservation is working, that there's meta analysis, analysis showing that two thirds of the nature conservation management measures actually worked. We see that since 1992. That was the big summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the CBD, the Convention on Biological Diversity, was founded. We have actually lost 15 species of mammals and birds. However, we have also saved between 28 and 48 species of birds and mammals, three to 2 to 3 times the number of species, so that we can actually save biodiversity, we can restore ecosystems so we can tell positive narratives. And that's something actually what the climate community can learn from the biodiversity community that in some aspects we can do a better job than them.

00:25:59: Hahn: That's a very nice statement and I agree. We need to talk more about solutions that we have at hand and solutions for the future and and how we can convey positive messages and do this in a balanced way without underplaying risks, but also not not overstating them and how we can solve things. I think we've covered the most important aspects that I wanted to discuss with you. Is there anything left that you wanted to say? Anything left that we haven't covered from your point of view?

00:26:35: Böhning-Gaese: One thing is that, um, humans have a positive relationship to nature, and even in current times where everything feels so difficult, then a theme of nature is something that is connecting to people. And even our environmental minister Schneider is using now nature for communication rather than climate. So there's a lot of opportunities for biodiversity communication now to make use of the positive relationship people have with nature. Maybe not biodiversity, but with nature, and that because of its complexity, biodiversity poses so many possibilities to tell stories on individual species and fungi, how they collaborate to make forests work on insects, how they pollinate on animals. And if you look at the nature documentaries, so many are about the fascinating behaviour of animals. You can tell the success stories about how nature restoration is working, and its success story is about people, heroes, stories that made a difference. And now you have flourishing ecosystems and success story about places, Devastated places that have in surprisingly short periods of time, have been restored in our flourishing again. So this is an opportunity that we biodiversity scientists, I think, need to use more. And I think we are also responsible for the narratives we use. And we can tell the story about how we started the decline of biodiversity and the negative trend in the Living Planet Index. We can also start the story about all the successes in nature restoration and in conservation, and whether we shouldn't use those more and work from them and see we have had successes. What can we learn from them? Which of them can we scale and well, can we scientists make a difference in, in in scaling all these success stories?

00:28:49: Hahn: One last question. Do you think that nature is a better term than biodiversity. Is it easier for people to relate to to nature? Than biodiversity? Because it might be too abstract?

00:29:05: Böhning-Gaese: I think it depends a little bit in which context. Biodiversity decline has reached many people and they have a basic understanding of. Biodiversity. But if you want to reach the really broad public and if you get want to win the hearts of the people listening, I think nature is the better term.

00:29:24: Hahn: So we've covered quite a few issues. What are the most important points that you would like the audience to remember?

00:29:34: Böhning-Gaese: I think we as scientists have a responsibility in how we help shaping a better Anthropocene. And I think one important issue is that we think hard about the narratives we use, whether we really want to stick to the Planetary Boundaries framework or whether we want to look at other frameworks on nature, positive stories and restoration, and on the scaling successes in nature conservation and restoration. And one step further, also, we scientists have the responsibility of developing solutions, so not only analysing the problem and contributing to the systems understanding, but more and more. For example, asking this question why did some measures in nature restoration work and others not? What can we learn from this? So then environmental sciences or biodiversity wouldn't be a crisis discipline anymore, but also a solutions discipline.

00:30:36: Hahn: Great. Thank you very much for this very interesting discussion, Katrin.

00:30:41: Böhning-Gaese: Thank you very much for the invitation. It was a pleasure to discuss with you.

00:30:47: Hahn: If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe. Inside biodiversity is available on all major streaming platforms.