Earth vitality: An integrated framework for tracking Earth sustainability

Abstract

The Anthropocene era is characterized by the escalating impact of human activities on the environment, as well as the increasingly complex interactions among various components of the Earth system. These factors greatly affect the Earth’s evolutionary trajectory. Despite notable strides in sustainable development practices worldwide, it remains unclear to what extent we have achieved Earth sustainability. Consequently, there is a pressing need to enhance conceptual and methodological frameworks to measure sustainability progress accurately. To address this need, we developed an Earth Vitality Framework that aids in tracking the Earth sustainability progress by considering interactions between spheres, recognizing the equal relationship between humans and nature, and presenting a threshold scheme for all measures. We applied this framework at global and national scales to demonstrate its usefulness. Our findings reveal that the current Earth Vitality Index is 63.74, indicating that the Earth is in a “weak” vitality. Irrational social institutions, unsatisfactory life experiences and the poor state of the biosphere and hydrosphere have remarkably affected the Earth vitality. Additionally, inequality exists between high-income and low-income countries. Although most of the former exhibit poor human-nature interaction, all of them enjoy good human well-being, while the opposite is true for the latter. Finally, we summarize the challenges and possible options for enhancing the Earth vitality in terms of coping with spillover effects, tipping cascades, feedback, and heterogeneity.

Keywords

Multi-sphere / Human-nature interaction / Sustainability / Earth vitality framework

Declaration of Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper

Acknowledgements

We thank Jianguo Liu for constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. This work was supported by Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42121001) and Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41590840).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2023.11.002.

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