Interview with Katherine Richardson, Professor of Biological Oceanography and Leader of the Sustainability Science Center at the University of Copenhagen
We had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Katherine Richardson, distinguished researcher in Marine Ecology and Biological Oceanography and leader of the Sustainability Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen. She has been a part of many national and international advisory boards related to Climate. Notably, Katherine helped to present a roadmap for Denmark to become fossil fuel independent by 2050 and was Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for the scientific conference Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions, which sought to inform the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Most recently, Katherine was a member of the fifteen-member independent group of scientists charged by the UN General Secretary to prepare the 2019 UN Global Sustainable Development Report.
Katherine opened up to us about her research and her role in establishing the planetary boundaries framework, and using it to study how human activities are interacting with the Earth System and changing both the environment and climate. We discussed where we stand after five years of the Paris Agreement; how society’s mentality towards climate change has evolved over time, and using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as valuable tools for change, by focusing on reducing trade-offs rather than enhancing strengths.
Conchita Fraguas (CF): You are one of the core people to work on and define the concept of planetary boundaries. In a nutshell, what is it about and how does it relate to climate?
Katherine Richardson (KR): Over the last 20 years, together with Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, and others I have been very involved in developing a new science domain, called Earth Systems Science. It considers the Earth as a complex system and recognises that it is the interactions between physics, biology, chemistry and human activities that actually determine the state of the environment, and the planet as we know it.
One of our contributions to this new domain is the development of the planetary boundaries framework, which we started in in 2009 with a Nature paper.. The idea is that if we think of the Earth as a system and sustainability as getting our use of resources to be within the supply of those resources, we ask how much can we push critical processes in the Earth’s system without risking that the Earth changes its overall state. We know that humans thrive under the conditions found on Earth for the last 12,000 years but we do not know with certainty that we can thrive under vastly changed conditions. Therefore, it would be unwise of humanity to knowingly change the overall conditions on Earth. When it comes to climate, politicians have said we must let the average global air temperature increase exceed 2 degrees ºC compared to pre-industrial temperatures. With that guardrail in mind, it is relatively easy to calculate the limit for how much greenhouse gas we humans can release to the environment and still stay within the 2-degree limit.
Climate change is, however, not the only way humans are altering environmental conditions at the planetary level. With the planetary boundaries framework, we are trying to use scientific evidence to propose limits for human impacts on other critical Earth System processes, such as biodiversity, fresh water use, felling of forests, particles in the air, ocean acidification, the ozone layer, release of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment and so on. We concluded in a paper published in Science in 2015, that the two “core” boundaries are climate and biodiversity. All of the other Earth System processes that we are interested in are important because they operate either through climate or biodiversity.
CF: Why is system-thinking important when studying the Earth and climate?
KR: We’re very much suffering I would say, under the inheritance we got from Newton, with this very reductionist way of looking at things. The way universities are built up at the moment, you have geology over there, physics over there, and biology over there, and then economics in the other part of town… It’s as though we believe that if we really discovered all the details in our own little box, and then put all the details into a big pot and stirred it up that we would understand how the Earth works.
"It’s as though we believe that if we discovered all the details in our own little box, and then put all the details into a big pot and stirred it up that we would understand how the Earth works. And that would be like taking doctors with different specialities; hearts, lungs, ears or noses... and if you were to put all of their knowledge together in a pot, you wouldn’t be able to understand what a person is, and how it works... because it's the interactions between our different parts that makes us what we are! And it’s the same way with the Earth."
And that would be like taking doctors with different specialities; hearts, lungs, ears or noses and if you were to put all of their knowledge together in a pot and stirred it up, you wouldn’t be able to understand what a person is, and how it works. Obviously we cannot describe a person that way because it is the interactions between our different parts that makes us what we are! It’s the same way with the Earth; we cannot really understand how it works until we understand the interactions between physics, chemistry, biology and human activities.
CF: How do you feel that our understanding of climate as a society has evolved over time?
KR: We first got pictures of the Earth from space taken in 1972 that show very clearly that it has no umbilical cord. That when we use the Earth’s resources, which is what makes us rich, we are not going to get any more. The lack of an umbilical cord also means there’s no place for waste to go. Even as a marine scientist, I’m quite disgusted by this discussion we’re having about plastic in the ocean, because we’ve been throwing out plastic since the 1950s, knowing that it is basically non-degradable in nature. We’ve had pictures of the Earth from space since the early 1970s where we can see that there is no way for the plastic to leave the Earth and most of the Earth is covered by ocean. Of course much of the plastic we throw away ends up in the ocean!
"Over time, we have also lost respect for the fact that our real currency is the Earth’s resources. Our ancestors understood that... they bought and sold from each other using natural resources. It’s not money that makes us rich, it’s the Earth’s resources. And you can use money as a proxy for the Earth’s resources, say climate and biodiversity."
So, I think that those satellite pictures started changing the way that we think about our relationship with the rest of the planet. And we don’t have everybody in the same place. I like to think of it as a normal distribution, which is constant movement. And 20 years ago, the front end of that normal distribution was talking about climate change; but no one else was. 10 years ago, the front end was talking about planetary boundaries. And now the front edge is talking about systemic transformation.
Over time, we have also lost respect for the fact that our real currency is the Earth’s resources. Our ancestors understood that, and they bought and sold from each other using natural resources. It’s not money that makes us rich, it’s the Earth’s resources. And you can use money as a proxy for the Earth’s resources, say climate and biodiversity. What makes Earth unique is the fact that we have life. And it’s the interaction between life and the energy flux from the sun that moves around molecules, elements and creates the conditions on Earth.
I would say the culture is changing since those satellite pictures, even though we’ve had them since the Apollo mission in the late 60s – early 70s, which showed that the Earth’s resources are limited. And yet it wasn’t until the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that we got an international political agreement that acknowledges the fact that our resources are limited.
CF: Let’s talk about the SDGs. How are they linked to the Earth’s resources and how can we use them as valuable tools to drive change?
KR: The Sustainable Development Goals are a vision for how we can share, how we want to share the Earth’s resources. Not only among humans, but among all other living organisms. And if you look at the SDGs that have to do with people; 1. Poverty, 2. Food, 3. Health, 4. Education, 5. Gender Equality, 6. Water… all of those that have to do with people come with a cost in the natural resources, and that cost is to climate and biodiversity. And the problem is that the trend for both biodiversity and climate is negative – we are moving farther away from reaching the goals for every day that goes by. We need to stop that negative trend and at least get it to be flat, preferably, get it to start going towards meeting the goals.
What I think makes the SDGs interesting is not the different goals themselves, there’s nothing new on that list. We knew well before 2015 that we had challenges in all of those boxes and indeed we actually had UN agreements for women, peace, poverty, climate, biodiversity, water… What’s interesting about this is that we are bringing them into the same agreement, putting them into the same framework. Which means that suddenly it’s not the individual boxes that are interesting, but the interactions between the boxes. And the goals don’t become a tool or a language for change until you look at the interactions and the positives and negatives.
"The SDGs actually, if you use them correctly, get you to focus on the “lose, lose” as well. They are therefore forcing us to think in systems, and not in super-optimising our specific parts of a system."
Because everything we do will have synergies and trade-offs. Thermodynamics teaches us that every time you have “win, win”, you’re going to have a “lose, lose”. So the SDGs actually, if you use them correctly, get you to focus on the “lose, lose” as well. They are therefore forcing us to think in systems, and not in super-optimising our specific parts of a system.
CF: What are your thoughts on our current state of climate policy? About five years have passed since the signing of the Paris Agreement- were the goals that were set then realistic in your opinion?
KR: We’re in the situation that we don’t have, and we don’t want, a global government. Therefore, we need to find a governance system that can help us manage our impacts on the Earth at the planetary level. What we’re trying to do is a way to make the international community work together on this. I heard Christiana Figueres, who was the chief negotiator for the UN in the Paris Agreement say once that “fighting climate change is like getting your lorry out of the mud”. And you can either pull it or you can push it. And if you pull it, you run the risk of losing control over the back end, and then you run the risk of not being able to control where the thing is going. So you need this interaction between push and pull.
There was a lot of a top-down pull in terms of getting to Paris. And even in the United States, where Trump withdrew from the Agreement, even the US is on track to meet the goals that they put into it, as many of the states are very ambitious, and the price of fossil fuels can’t compete any longer with some renewable technologies. Biden has recently re-joined the agreement, so we have a pendulum and it’s this movement between the push and the pull. We had a big pull around Paris, we had a big push at the national level and I think we are going to go back to a pull.
"I heard Christiana Figueres, who was the chief negotiator for the UN in the Paris Agreement say once that “fighting climate change is like getting your lorry out of the mud”. And you can either pull it or you can push it. And if you pull it, you run the risk of losing control over the back end, and then you run the risk of not being able to control where the thing is going. So you need this interaction between push and pull."
China has a goal, Denmark has a goal, the EU has a stronger goal, so we’ve had a period of major action locally. And you have to respect the fact that countries are never going to promise something that they don’t know they can do. So what they’ve so far promised for Paris isn’t nearly enough. I mean it would bring us [the Earth] to about 3.2 degrees if they really did it.
And I actually think that the Covid crisis gives us some good opportunities to build back better. We can see that we don’t have the money to invest to go back to where we were before, only to invest again to meet the climate goals. We need to use our money wisely and “build back better”. There is room for hope and optimism but it’s not a given. I wish we were at a better place, a farther ahead place, but I'm actually not surprised at where we are now and I don’t think that where we are now should be read as a disaster [just] because we haven’t made it yet.
CF: You are the leader of the Sustainability Science Center in Copenhagen, can you talk a bit about the kind of work that you do and what is the center’s core mission?
KR: I believe very strongly that you shouldn’t have a separate center for Sustainability, but that it should be integrated into all education, and many [if not all] of the faculty members at the University of Copenhagen should consider themselves to be a part of any university’s sustainability initiatives. Therefore, the SSC is not a center in the traditional sense of a research center. Instead, it is an infrastructure that is designed to try and catalyse and facilitate working across faculty and institute borders on issues that are relevant for sustainable development, and that also addresses the interface between students and the university.
"The SSC is not a center in the traditional sense of a research center. Instead, it is an infrastructure that is designed to try and catalyse and facilitate working across faculty and institute borders on issues that are relevant for sustainable development, and that also addresses the interface between students and the university."
The students are desperately looking for sustainability courses, and we try and go in and do a real vetting of courses. We try and help get applications together and hold scientific workshops. We hold lectures and have a program where the students decide a topic that they would like to use a Saturday morning on, and we pull faculty members to try and make a workshop for the students on it. We are also a one-stop shop that people can come to, such as businesses, especially when they need a combination of experts to address specific issues.
CF: That is amazing. Is there any exciting research that you are working on now involving system-thinking and planetary boundaries?
KR: Right now, apart from working on a planetary boundaries paper, I’m interested in interactions between biological processes and climate development. Many believe that changes in the CO2 levels in the atmosphere from ice ages to non-ice ages resulted at least in part from changes in ocean productivity, and how much of the phytoplankton that fix carbon how much is transported to the bottom via the “biological pump”.
I believe that the changes in the strength of the biological pump can be related to changes plankton ecosystem structure but, until now, it has not been possible to test this theory with data from earlier periods of climate change. Together with Eske Willerslev, who is specialised in obtaining and studying ancient DNA, we are studying marine sediment cores collected near Iceland, and using ancient DNA to try and reconstruct the structure of phytoplankton communities through historical time and relate that to climate.
You can sign up to one of the SSC lectures or check out future online events from the Sustainability Center on their website. Read more about Planetary Boundaries and Katherine’s research here.
Interview by Conchita Fraguas
The Earth Youth Project