What planetary health means for the private sector

Speaker A: Lindsey Hall.

Speaker B: I'm Lindsey Hall. And I'm Esther Wheeldon. Welcome to All Things Sustainable, a podcast from S and P Global. As your hosts, we'll dive into all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business world. Join us every Friday for in depth analysis and interviews with leaders from around the globe. Together, we'll break down, um, big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon. One of the biggest topics we cover on this podcast is, of course, climate change. And in recent years, we've seen more climate weeks emerging in cities all around the world. Just last month, the city of Zurich hosted its inaugural Climate Week, where All Things Sustainable was the official podcast. And for the entire time I was in Zurich, there was one name that seemed to come up in almost every conversation I had. Johan Rockstrom. That's because Johan gave a presentation during Climate Week Zurich's opening ceremony that got everyone talking. Now, Johan is an internationally recognized scientist on global sustainability and Earth resilience. He's director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a, uh, German nonprofit. And he is perhaps best known for his work leading development of the planetary Boundaries Framework. If you're not familiar, scientists identified nine critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth. If you pass over those boundaries, you increase the risk of losing stability, support for life, and nature's ability to absorb shocks and damage. The nine planetary boundaries relate to climate, biosphere, land use, fresh water, nutrients, ocean ph, aerosols, ozone and pollution. And the planetary boundaries are sometimes described as guardrails that ensure the Earth's health. They're used to assess the state of the planet in an annual planetary health check for 2025. That health check found that seven out of the nine boundaries have been transgressed. And this places the planet at the upper end of the danger zone, pushing closer to the high risk zone. This is what Johan discussed during those opening ceremony remarks in Zurich, and it's what got people talking all week. I wanted to understand more about what the science shows us about the state of the planet and also understand what the business world is supposed to do with this information. For this, let's dive into my interview with Johan. He starts by giving us, uh, some explainer on the planetary boundaries framework.

Speaker A: The planetary boundary science, which was first published in 2009, is actually a result of integrating advancements that has been remarkably progressing over the past 30 years. One source of evidence is all the hockey stick curves of exponential rise of human pressures on the planet, which is now defined as a great acceleration, and that we've entered the Anthropocene, where we are seeing increasing evidence only from observations that we are hitting the ceiling of hardwired biophysical processes that regulates the stability of the climate system or the hydrological cycle. So that's one line of evidence. The second one is that we increasingly understand that our planet is regulating itself through tipping points. And there are feedbacks that can go from dampening and cooling, meaning resilience, to a state where we self amplify and then move away from stable conditions. So that's the tipping point science. And the third and final is that we today understand that the Holocene, the geological epoch, we've been residing in the equilibrium of the planet since we left the last ice age 18,000 years ago, is not only the state that we depend on for the world as we know it, for civilizations and prosperity and equity in our world, it's also a remarkably stable state. And when you put all that together, we realize that we need to ask two questions. What are the Earth system processes that regulates the ability to remain in that stable state? And can we, second question, quantify for control variables, a boundary for each of those processes so that we can define scientifically a safe operating space where we have a high chance of keeping the resilience, the stability and the life support on Earth as close as possible to the Holocene equilibrium stability, which is a warm, stable, interglacial, meaning to avoid that, the planet flips out of that stability and starts drifting away towards irreversibly less and less life supporting conditions. And there you have it. That's the planetary boundary framework. It quantifies the safe operating space for us to be able to have a prosperous, equitable future for humanity, for our world, for the global economy on planet Earth for generations to come?

Speaker B: A note on a couple of terms we just heard Johan use. He talked about the Holocene epoch. That's an official geologic term to define the period we're currently living in. It started when the last ice age ended and humans started practicing agriculture more than 10,000 years ago. Johan also talks about the Anthropocene, a word derived from Greek that means the recent age of man. Anthropocene is a relatively recent invention. Two scientists introduced the term in the year 2000, and it refers to the idea that humans are now shaping the global environment rather than vice versa. While it's a bit of a less formal term, it is frequently used. We'll also hear Johan mention the ipcc, that's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United nations body that assesses the science related to climate change. In talking to Johan, I told him that his opening ceremony remarks at Climate Week Zurich caused quite a stir among attendees. Johan is from Sweden, by the way, and in the course of our conversation, you'll hear the difference in the way he pronounces the city Zurich, from how I'm saying it with my American accent. Okay, here he is again.

Speaker A: And of course, unfortunately, the reason why it was referred to is very likely that it was a scientific update showing with overwhelming evidence that we're facing very severe risks. And, uh, that these risks are now and these risks are global. So we're seeing accelerated warming on planet Earth, which is the first sign of a planet showing indications of losing resilience and that the resilience is to a significant extent because of breaching planetary boundaries. So we're not only emitting greenhouse gases and causing this heat injection into the Earth system, we're also losing biodiversity, degrading land areas, particularly forest systems, losing intact nature, over consuming fresh water and overloading with nitrogen and phosphorus and destabilizing the ocean. These what I call nature boundaries or the biosphere boundaries, they don't have planetary scale tipping points necessarily, but they operate under the hood, like down in the engine room of the planet to regulate the stability of the entire system. And what we're starting to see when we now observe accelerated rates of warming is that it proves the risks that we've been trying to communicate in the planetary science, that being outside of the safe space on the nature boundaries leads to a consequence that carbon uptake, heat uptake feedbacks through changes in fire patterns, changes in hydrology, causing more droughts, which then leads to more indirect warming because of lowered carbon uptake and photosynthesis. All of these processes was one point of the update in that Climate Week talk. The second is the confirmation that seven of the nine planetary boundaries are breached. So it just confirms that we don't only have, ah, a climate crisis on our watch, we have a planetary scale crisis on our watch. And the third is that tipping points are coming close and climate impacts are hitting hard today and are costing the significant. We're talking hundreds of billions of US dollars in cost of climate extremes already today. And that we are inevitably moving into what we today define as overshoot, meaning that we are breaching even the climate limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which by the way, is the warmest temperature on Earth for the past 100,000 years. And that this hits fast as impacts on humans and the economy, food systems, Today, but it also risks pushing us closer to tipping points, which then would accelerate the rate of change and undermine life support over decades and centuries. So that was the dire diagnostic I shared at that talk. But I also closed by giving the full diagnostic that science today can give on the planet, which is that when we integrate all the nine planetary boundaries and the status of the boundaries, we still conclude that we are in danger. Conclusion 1. But second conclusion is that the window is still open to turn this around. We haven't yet transitioned into the deep red zone where all the boundaries are pushing the planet away from its dampening capacity. On the contrary, I, uh, close by making clear that we have so much evidence today that despite the unsustainable pressures on the planet, Mother Earth is still standing. She's wobbling, she's under stress, she's sending the first indications of warning through accelerated warming, for example. But she's still dominated by dampening feedbacks. The ocean is still absorbing heat. Natural ecosystems are still taking up more carbon than they emit. This is fundamentally a warning, but also fundamentally a sign of hope that if we now start really moving forward on transitioning away from danger, which means accelerating the phase out of fossil fuels, transitioning to circular economic processes, really shifting towards sustainable agricultural systems, those kind of transitions, we still have a chance of coming back to a safe operating space without losing the stability of the planet.

Speaker B: Okay, and thank you for outlining that. This podcast, All Things Sustainable, was the official podcast of the inaugural Climate Week Zurich, which meant I had an opportunity to speak to many different stakeholders, including members of the business community and financial institutions. And I'd love to know, what did you hear in response to this dire message that you've just shared with us? What did you hear from the business community? Do you think they generally recognize and accept what you've just outlined?

Speaker A: You know what, it's, um, it's of course a mixed picture, so you cannot give one answer across all business leaders or financial representatives. But in general, I felt quite reassured. The Zurich Climate Week is absolutely unique in gathering representatives from the private sector, from business, from finance, And I feel that there is a very high bar that the minimum level of understanding of risk is very well confirmed. And we have statistics on this as well, that it's popular to say today that there's a new climate denialism and misinformation and questioning of science arising. And true, there are headwinds there, but statistics also show clearly and confirm that a majority of citizens and also business leaders still trust science and are concerned about climate change. So I think we're standing on a very mature, high level of understanding. The floor we stand on is very reassuring. That said, I must say that I still feel that the frontier of science is not fully understood. It's, for example, not really understood that 1.5 degrees Celsius is something we will now inevitably be exceeding. And that takes us into a new level of danger. Not only danger in terms of economic impacts and extreme events, droughts, floods, fires, et cetera, but also that we may be pushing the on button on an irreversible melting of the green and ice sheet, that even the Amazon rainforest may be irreversibly crossing a tipping point that tropical coral reef systems are very close to irreversibly being at a collapse point, which means that they cannot come back, at least not in relevant timelines. We're talking decades or centuries. So. So I think the level of risk is not fully understood because we in science must admit that we have so far underestimated the pace of change and underestimated how fast things hit. But overall, I think the level of understanding is remarkably reassuring and is high. I should finally say also that it's interesting to be in Swedish in particular, because you gathered so many representatives from the insurance industry and they understand these risks. I mean, they are doing research on risks because the premium for extreme events are skyrocketing because of the higher not only frequency but also severity of extreme events. So not tipping points, but the fast variables of extreme events.

Speaker B: We've definitely heard a lot more on this podcast. The recognition that, oh, maybe we should be talking to the insurance industry and that the insurance industry does, as you've said, uh, understand these risks in a perhaps more robust way. Another thing I've heard recently is this awareness, this acknowledgment, as you've said, that we're going to breach 1.5 degrees. And in some instances that means I'm hearing more focus on the role of adaptation versus mitigation. And I'd just like to ask how you're thinking about that and what you've been hearing in the work that you do.

Speaker A: Yeah, so at my institute, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, we run one of the integrated assessment models that informs the ipcc and we do particularly the updates on what I call the best that science can offer today, meaning the most optimistic scenarios that we today can offer. And what do I mean by that? It means not only what is necessary to do, but what is also feasible to do in terms of the maximum, the best estimates of how Fast we can phase out oil, gas and coal in an orderly way, not to destroy jobs and economies and uh, social stability. And when you look at these latest scenarios, I mean these are even scenarios produced after the latest IPCC assessment, they show that we are inevitably breaching 1.5, yes, but that we can minimize what we define as overshoot, meaning that at best we are facing 1.7 degrees Celsius of a peak temperature rise, and then that we can bring temperatures back under 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next 75 years. So by the year 2100, that's overshoot minimized to a level where we will experience inevitably more extreme events. Every tenth of a degree leads to more suffering and more impacts on the global economy and more risks to particularly food security. But the science shows that it is possible to bend the curve back. The challenge with this though, is that those scenarios, which then give us a chance of a manageable safe landing, require accelerated phase out of fossil fuels at a pace of at least 5% global reductions of emissions every year from now onwards to a net zero world economy within the next 25 years. They require a transition of the global food system from being the single largest net emitter of greenhouse gases to become a, uh, net sink of emissions. That's nothing less than a green revolution. It's possible. We have the technologies to do that. And the third is that we need to start scaling at a very rapid pace carbon dioxide removal. So technologies for carbon capture, storage, direct air capture. And it has to happen at a very rapid pace from the piloting we're doing today to billion ton of carbon dioxide per year removals within just the next 10 to 20 years. And finally, we need to ensure that intact nature on land and that marine systems in the ocean remain healthy, meaning coming back within the safe boundary levels for the biosphere boundaries. Because these natural systems, when we turn off our emissions from fossil fuel burning, which we then have to do in the transition away from coal, oil and gas, nature will then continue sucking up carbon and helping us to return back to 1.5. So as you hear, to minimize overshoot and to come back within a manageable future is nothing less than a full planetary scale global sustainability transformation. It's about the energy transition, it's about the food system transition, it's about technologies and it's about nature. And it all has to happen simultaneously. That's the journey we have ahead of us.

Speaker B: Okay, so clearly not just a shift to focusing on adaptation, like it has to be this really robust as you've just described continued focus on mitigation measures.

Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. And I should say that what this implies is also that every tenth of a degree increases impacts, which means that adaptation must occur in parallel with mitigation. I'm actually of the view that we should redefine adaptation and mitigation and not separate them and rather talk about resilience, talk about climate resilience, which is, in my terminology, zero carbon adaptive capacity, meaning sustainability, transitions away from danger, which is mitigation, but doing that with investments that build more adaptive capacity, more resilient ways of diversifying financial systems, diversifying infrastructure, diversifying ecosystems to reduce risks from everything from climate extremes, stable hydrology, reduce risks of pandemics, and avoid risks when it comes to our urban, in particular, infrastructure. All of this has to happen. It's quite interesting that when you learn from resilience science, the red thread is to recognize the value of abundance. Optimization is always a risk. You want to have some buffering capacity and you want diversity, social, financial, ecological diversity, so that you can play on several strings at the same time. You don't want to have only monocultures with one species providing all your biomass or all your food, because then you're much, much more vulnerable to an extreme heat, extreme disease pattern, or some form of extreme, like drought or flood. So I would definitely strongly support both adaptation and mitigation, but not under any circumstances say, well, oh my God, now we're breaching 1.5. Let's therefore give up on mitigation and do only adaptation. That would be a fundamental mistake.

Speaker B: Okay, so this more holistic approach you're describing.

Speaker A: Exactly, thank you. Yeah.

Speaker B: One thing I heard a lot at Climate Week Zurich was this message in particular from the business audience, this idea that, okay, we're tired of talking about target setting and goals and we really want to roll up our sleeves and get to the action part, the implementation part of addressing climate change. I wanted to test that with you, see if you heard something similar. And if so, what do you think is the hurdle here? What is the challenge to getting from that goal setting, talking about these ideas, to actually implementing them?

Speaker A: Well, fundamentally, I think that's quite a healthy sign. But at the same time, I advise a bit similar to our discussion on adaptation and mitigation, the need for a holistic approach. I would under no circumstances kind of separate target setting from the action, because what the targets provide us with is the following. Once you use science to quantify a boundary, like a boundary of, uh, 1.5 degrees Celsius as a target Or a boundary on not allowing more expansion of agriculture into intact forest systems, which is another planetary boundary, or a budget for nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, the maximum allowed reactive nitrogen loading that we can allow into the biosphere. Once you do that, budgets translate to economic value. They translate therefore to an incentive to innovate and to become more resource efficient. And this we know, and it's kind of macroeconomic theory. ABC is like the most fundamental insight that economics is really about distributing resources under constraint. That is what fundamentally economic development is all about. And that is what target setting gives us. It gives us the incentives for being even more clever in our resource use and in our innovation pathways, which then guides and accelerates action. So I wouldn't separate the two. And I do agree though, however, that just look at what happened over the last month in the Hormuz Strait and the spike in oil and gas prices, which we discussed in Swedish as well, which then in a positive way gives a kind of a third and final argument. Argument one being climate risk. Argument two being that we now have exponential rise in substitutes that can replace fossil fuels. Argument three, oil and gas prices crash through the hundred US dollar per barrel ceiling. Put all that together and the debate suddenly is we need action. Yes. And we need action which is all about energy independence. It's about more resilient societies. It's about creating stronger social cohesion at the demand side of the energy mix. And I think that is really positive. It's something we've been calling for for so many years. I mean, I'm one of the founding directors of the Stockholm Resilience Center. I mean, we established that in 2006, that this is not about moral or just environmental arguments. These are important arguments, but it's also about building the welfare in more resilient societies that we want, that we desire, that we appreciate and want to have as aspirational targets. So I wouldn't separate the two. I, uh, would use the targets as driving that action agenda.

Speaker B: And here in 2026, how would you characterize the willingness of political and economic actors to address climate change?

Speaker A: Unfortunately, we're facing headwinds right now, which is very contradictory, because the tendency is, unfortunately, that when the oil and gas prices skyrocket, the tendency among many political leaders is to use the old narrative from the 1970s to say that our objective, number one, must be to reduce costs so that we don't risk economic development. We need to have high consumption, we need to reduce risks of minimizing the ability of citizens to purchase their goods and services. And Therefore, the tendency is to try and backtrack on climate policies because it's wrongly described as being too costly. And secondly, you have countries even where I'm sitting here in Germany, but also my home country in Sweden, where governments now in panic go in and subsidize diesel and petrol because of the higher prices, when the most obvious thing to do today, if you want to really think strategically about building more resilient economies, is of course to see this as the incentive to electrify faster, to keep the prices high on petrol and diesel and instead help citizens and buffer through other means through for example, tax reform, and instead use this as the incentive to accelerate the pathway away from the planet damaging and quite frankly conflict supporting and undemocratic oil and gas imports. So it's a very unfortunate situation we have right now. And I think that's why science needs to come forward even more actively to explain and to share the evidence that look at this is moving ourselves backwards and it's a dead end. Uh, if you want to really have competitive economies in the future and citizens that are more likely to have both jobs and healthy environments, you want to use this crisis we're in in terms of energy as a pathway to accelerate the phase away from oil and gas and coal dependence. Now I think that the battle is, I mean the debates are going on very actively right now and I foresee that we'll be landing hopefully in a good place. I mean REM that just a month ago, 57 countries met in Santa Marta and Colombia for the first time in a gathering on transitioning away from fossil fuels. And it was very strongly, positively informed by the Homer Strait and the spike in oil and gas prices as an argument for phasing out more rapidly. Oil and gas and these 57 countries represent 30% of global GDP. They are very significant share of the global economy. And therefore if they start moving decisively away from danger and away from planet damaging fossil fuel use, this can of course spill over also on many of the countries that are sitting on the fence, not necessarily being skeptic, but being uncertain on what direction to take.

Speaker B: So it sounds like you have a very challenging job, not just the science piece of it, but also communicating about the science in a way that a broad audience can understand, which is something we try to do on this podcast as well. And then also there's the behavioral element. It's a lot of behavior changes that would need to happen in order for some of these changes to take place. You have previously said there's still a remarkably High level of public misunderstanding about the risks of global warming. What's the number one message you think is important for the private sector, our audience, to understand about climate change?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the. And it might sound almost banal that I'm saying that the biggest misunderstanding and the fundamentally most important basic message to understand is that 1.5 degrees Celsius of global mean surface temperature rise on planet Earth is a big number. It takes us into danger, actually, when you look at the data over the past 3 million years, we never exceeded 2 degrees Celsius. And when we left the last ice age 18,000 years ago, we were fully modern humans on planet Earth. We've been around for 250,000 years as fully modern humans. We've lived through two ice ages. We've had very rough conditions on planet Earth during those rough conditions, when we couldn't trust the seasons, we couldn't trust hydrology, we couldn't trust temperatures. We were just a few million people. We lived in caves. We were hunters and gatherers. And when we left the last ice age and came into this extraordinarily stable interglacial state of the Earth system, the Holocene, the temperature stabilized at 14 degrees Celsius. And that is when we went through the Neolithic revolution. The biggest innovation of all innovations in civilization's existence on planet Earth. We became farmers, we domesticated animals and plants, and off we went in the civilizational journey that has taken us to the modern world of today. And now we're 8 billion people heading towards 9 billion people. And our responsibility is to cater for the civilization's possibility of having prosperity and equity on planet Earth. Now, during that whole journey in the Holocene, the maximum variability, can you imagine, the maximum variability of temperature is 14 degrees Celsius plus minus 0.5 degrees. So the maximum temperature was 14.5. That's the warmest temperature throughout the whole Holocene. It includes the Little Ice Age, it includes the Medieval Warm Period, it includes a wet savannah in the Sahara Desert flipping over to arid conditions. But it occurred within that plus minus 0.5. Moving to 1.5 is therefore a gigantic number. It's a big leap out of the corridor of life that we depend on. So understanding that 1.5 is a big number, and it's when you turn up that average temperature, 1.5, which means that a country like Switzerland will have 3 degrees. Northern parts of Sweden will have up to 5 degrees. The Arctic will potentially move towards 6 degrees because it's not evenly distributed. So we are in the Northern part of the hemisphere, living in the part of the planet that will amplify even more. And that this is what we're talking about. We're talking about moving ourselves out of the only state of the planet we know for certain can support us. And that is what is at stake. And it should be understood as being such an existential, and I would call it unacceptable risk that of course we should collectively move away from danger as quickly as possible, whatever it costs. And that I think is the fundamental mistake that we're playing with these numbers. I don't know how many times, probably even twice a week, I have to remind people I talk to Please don't call 1.5 a goal, please don't call it a target. It's a limit, it's a boundary, it's a physical boundary. Go beyond it and we enter really deep danger. Actually we're in danger already before. But beyond 1.5, science shows we may cause irreversible damage to the Earth's system. Who wants to do that? I mean, it's not a sustainability issue. It's about security, it's about health, it's about stability. We know today that even the next pandemic risk is largely very likely going to occur because of our unsustainable exploitation of nature, simplifying ecosystems, allowing bats, uh, and other virus carrying species to penetrate more into urban regions and flavor that with rising temperatures. And we create the conditions for these kind of planetary scale unwanted risks. So I think that is the very fundamental. And can you imagine that's just that number? I haven't even touched upon all the complexities of tipping points or interactions or planetary boundaries.

Speaker B: It's not a goal, it's a limit. Is such an important reframe and a useful note for our audience. Certainly, Johan, in our last couple minutes here, I, uh, just wanted to circle back to this question of Climate Week Zurich and your key takeaways from that. Because this is one of a growing ecosystem of global events that convene the public and the private private sector to address climate change. So what were your key takeaways and sort of what's next on your agenda as you look ahead to the rest of 2026?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, to begin with it was incredibly inspiring. And as a scientist I can tell you it's so valuable that we in the Earth system science, working in our labs and studying Earth system risks, it's so encouraging to interact with representatives from business, from finance, from the economy at large. And seeing that there's so much innov there's so much willingness to have science aligned development. And particularly coming back to the discussion we had Lindsay, on understanding risk and how you translate risk into not something that scares, but something that can help us be successful in our innovation and responsible economic development. So that I bring with me from this series, Climate Week also is so promising to see how the Swedish Climate Week is now part of a family of city weeks on climate, like the London Climate Week, the New York Climate Week. And I think this is a signal to the world that in the midst of what many portray as assaults on science and backtracking on action, cities around the world are showing that we've turned a corner already. We're in the beginning of the end of this planet damaging journey. We want to have a safe operating space for our cities, for our countries, for our regions and for the planet. And I think that this is fundamentally a question of handing over competitive, healthy societies for future generations. I think that came across very strongly in Swedish. This was not so much kind of an environmental gathering as a strategic gathering on the pathway forward for the global economy. And I think that in itself is also part of very powerful.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, Johan, I've asked you lots of questions. Is there anything I haven't asked about that you feel is really important to get across to our global audience?

Speaker A: No, I think you've covered a lot of ground. I mean, the only thing I may want to add is that which I also got some very positive feedbacks in Swedish is that. So what happens in Swedish does not stay in Swedish, and that any city, any economy, is today so interconnected with the planet as a whole. So what happens in the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet, or in the overturning of heat in the North Atlantic is today immediately, uh, connected to the stability also of living conditions in a city or in a country, because we've filled up the entire environmental space. There's no free, unsustainable room for losing more biodiversity or losing more trees or loading with more greenhouse gases anywhere on planet Earth. So if we fail on the ammo Amazon, it will send invoices hitting suresh. Therefore, we scientifically today actually define the tipping point systems as the new global commons. These are systems that we all need to care for. In summary, it means that we're no longer this small world on a very big planet, that we don't have to care what's happening far away on the other side of the planet. We are today a very big world on a small, small planet. And we have to manage the whole system and we're connected with the whole system. So it's not only value chains in a global economy, it's also that all the environmental systems, the planetary boundary systems, are so intertwined that you fail in one corner and it will cascade and hit you and bite you in the back, even if you're on the other side of the planet. And that, I know, is challenging. It's a kind of a complete paradigm shift. But that's why we talk about the need to be stewards of the planet. It sounds like a buzzword, but I wish that if I could, as we discussed earlier, if every business leader understand that 1.5 is a big number. Well, in that case, the second thing I'd love everyone to understand is that we have to become planetary stewards, all of us, irrespective of our walk of life and where we operate. We have to connect whatever we do to the planet, because the planet is a very small unit. A little blue marble sitting there in the corner of black space is the only livable planet we know. And we are at risk of destabilizing the entire system, and it will bite us all if we fail. So that, I think, is, um, an additional dimension of this, which I think came out in the discussions in several sessions I had in Swedish. And I'd love to continue that discussion as well.

Speaker B: That's a great point, and definitely it is a paradigm shift. And thank you, Johan, for taking the time to share your perspective and your expertise with our audience today. It's been a pleasure talking with you, and I hope we can continue the conversation in future.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Speaker B: Johan gave us a lot to chew on today. Number one, he said the planet is in danger. And the way he put it, I found really compelling. He said it's not a sustainability issue. It's about security, it's about health, it's about stability. Importantly, Johan said the window is still open to turn this around. He said the planetary boundaries are a warning, but he also fundamentally sees a sign of hope. He mentioned that dozens of countries recently met in Santa Marta, and there he was referring to the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which took place in April, hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. As, uh, background. This conference arose from COP30, the UN's climate change gathering that took place in Belem, Brazil, in 2025. One result of COP30 was the Belem Declaration on the just transition away from fossil fuels. Johan also pointed to encouraging conversations that are happening between the business, finance and science communities at events like Climate Week, Zurich and London Climate Action Week, which wraps up in just a couple days on June 28th. We'll be back soon with an episode covering key takeaways from that London Climate Action Week, so please stay tuned. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of All Things Sustainable. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. And a special thanks to our agency partner, the 199. See you next time.