For the first time in history, the World Economic Forum's report Global Risks Davos (2020) features the environment. Problems such as pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, invasive alien species, deforestation, soil degradation, overexploitation of natural resources, water scarcity, overpopulation, waste management or extreme weather events are the main threats to the sustainability of the planet.

As early as 2009, some thirty leading researchers, led by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen, established the so-called planetary boundaries, environmental thresholds that, if exceeded, could lead to abrupt and non-linear environmental changes on a planetary scale. Unfortunately, today the limits of four of the nine environmental problems identified have already been exceeded: biodiversity loss, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), climate change and changes in land use, with the alteration of the nitrogen cycle being the limit that has been exceeded the most (200%).

Throughout the evolution of the Earth, the main drivers of the observed major changes have been related to natural processes: variations in the Earth's orbit, volcanism, the appearance of oxygen-producing microorganisms, meteorite impacts, etc. However, the changes observed since the Industrial Revolution are much more acute and accelerated than those that have occurred in the last 400,000 years. This fact led the Nobel Prize winner award of Chemistry, Paul Crutzen, to coin the term Anthropocene, referring to the current geological era in which Man has emerged as a force capable of dominating the fundamental processes of the Earth. 

Although many of the environmental problems mentioned above are of great relevance, they all have their origin in the same cause: human activities, which have a direct influence on all environmental spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere). For this reason, we can assure that the main challenge facing the environment today is the so-called global change, understood as the set of interferences and impacts produced by human activities on the processes that determine the planet's equilibrium. These impacts affect the essential ecological processes that sustain life on Earth, causing losses of biodiversity, environmental resources and services and, ultimately, of social welfare.

Despite the dramatic environmental status in which our planet finds itself, threatened on a global scale, we still have time to reverse the current status and work towards a sustainable world. This requires coordinated and united action, radical decisions to transform our lifestyles, and a holistic approach to the problem multidisciplinary . The challenge is huge and requires acceptance of the problem by world leaders and effective communication to citizens based on science, fostering adaptive capacity in terms of social change.

In this degree program background that we are living, perhaps it would be good to recognize that Homo sapiens is just another species that inhabits the Earth. We should put aside this anthropocentric vision of nature, learning to respect and preserve our planet, just as our ancestors did. That's why they referred to it as Mother Earth...

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Jesús Miguel Santamaría
Full Professor from Chemistry Analítica, University of Navarra
This article was originally published in The Conversation.