Atmosphere, Energy and Planetary Boundaries

Course description

Climate change affects the entire life support system with far reaching consequences in the future for human life and the planetary ecosystem. Already now climate change continuously forces socio-technical and natural systems to change and to adapt, stemming from a vicious circle of practices characterized by resource depletion, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. To comprehend the magnitude of this systemic problem, this course introduces the Planetary Boundaries Framework, which defines a safe operating space for humanity across nine interconnected ecological limits. By now, already seven boundaries have been breached, pushing our planet out of its safe operating space and increasing the risk of triggering large-scale, abrupt, or irreversible environmental changes.

This course examines the anthropogenic influences that are leading to the serious climatic consequences we are already experiencing today. By focusing on the key processes of climate change, the climate problem becomes comprehensible, localized and applicable to the urban environment and its surroundings. To this end, the essential climate variables are introduced, which form an important foundation for understanding the measures required to protect the environment and the climate. By diving into the Paris Climate Agreement, the policies and pledges to reduce pollution and GHG emissions by the participating countries are critically examined. Using their Nationally Determined Contributions, with its mostly inadequate measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly, we analyse material and energy flows to examine the consequences that maintaining the current regimes and "lock-ins" have on planetary boundaries, and which sectors, as the biggest polluters, need to be addressed most urgently. With this approach the course goes beyond the traditional greenhouse gas reduction and environmental sustainability narrative by prioritizing sufficiency and circularity as systemic imperatives over efficiency gains and technological fixes. With this approach the course demonstrates how incumbent polluting sectors need to be examined to determine which must be retained as essential and indispensable, and which should be phased out as rapidly as possible to reduce planetary boundary overshoot.

Learning objectives

At the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. Understand the relation between anthropogenic activities and global warming levels and their impact on socio-technical and natural planetary systems.
2. Apply localized climate data to illustrate how essential climate variables manifest in urban environments and inform mitigation and adaptation strategies.
3. Analyse material and energy flows across different sectors on urban to global scales to determine their impact on the planetary boundaries.
4. Critically evaluate Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement by assessing how they prioritize sufficiency and efficiency principles to prevent planetary boundary overshoot.
5. Develop evidence-based transition strategies to zero-pollution pathways for incumbent polluting sectors by adopting pollution control, energy transition, citizen science, and sufficiency principles, focusing on the Port of Rotterdam.

Key topics

• Science foundation: The Planetary Boundaries Framework; key principles of the climate system and essential climate variables; climate mitigation, adaptation and extremes; localized climate projections
• Material and energy flows: Sufficiency versus efficiency; assessment of material and energy flows; the Paris Agreement and Nationally Determined Contributions, emphasizing on planetary boundaries
• Applications and transition: energy transition, air pollution exposure, urban heat island effects; role of communities in climate mitigation; role of citizen science in policy making; carbon markets; Port of Rotterdam