Expert points to ASU professor for effective resource management

Sustainability expert Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, recently told a TED Talks audience that “incremental change is not an option” when it comes to protecting our world’s resources.

Rockström is one of 29 scientists from around the globe – including Arizona State University School of Sustainability dean Sander van der Leeuw – who outlined nine planetary boundaries for human survival and published their work in the journal Nature last fall. According to their findings, three boundaries – loss of biodiversity, climate change and nitrogen input to the biosphere – may already have been irrevocably breached due to human activity.

TED, the nonprofit devoted to promoting “Ideas Worth Spreading,” has posted to their website Rockström’s presentation regarding those nine boundaries and the need to move quickly, on a global scale, to preserve Earth as a viable environment for humankind.

While Rockström described a difficult road ahead, pegging the next 40 years as the window in which massive, transformative development must occur to save our planet – and us – he also offered rays of hope.

Rockström said, “Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows, empirically, across the world, that we can govern the commons if we invest in and trust local, action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations where local actors, together, can deal with the global commons at a large scale.”

Ostrom is a research professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, a member of the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems. Her work on the management of common-pool resources earned her the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.