In your earlier lessons on human impact you examined how habitat loss, invasive species and overexploitation drive biodiversity loss. This lesson asks three harder questions. First, how serious is that loss at the scale of the whole planet (3.2.13)? Second, who has actually managed land sustainably for centuries, and why is that knowledge now under threat (3.2.11)? Third, what happens when efforts to protect nature collide with the rights of the very people who depend on it (3.2.12)?
We will keep the focus close to home, in Europe, rather than reaching for distant examples. Our running cases are the planetary-boundaries framework developed in Stockholm, the reindeer-herding Sámi of northern Scandinavia, and two contrasting European cases from Switzerland and Norway. As a Higher Level lesson, you will also test each case against the three HL lenses: environmental law, environmental economics and environmental ethics.
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3.2.13 The planetary boundary "loss of biosphere integrity" indicates that species extinctions have already crossed a critical threshold.
Consider the claim that species extinctions caused by human impacts could lead to a tipping point in the whole Earth system.
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The planetary boundaries framework, developed by Johan Rockström, Will Steffen and colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, identifies nine Earth-system processes that keep the planet in the stable state that has allowed human civilisation to flourish. For each, scientists propose a boundary: a level beyond which the risk of abrupt or irreversible change rises sharply. Staying inside all nine defines a "safe operating space" for humanity.
Loss of biosphere integrity is one of these nine boundaries, and it is among the most severely transgressed. It has two components:
The 2023 update to the framework placed biosphere integrity firmly in the high-risk zone. The concern is not simply that individual species are disappearing, but that the living systems regulating the whole planet are being weakened.
The tipping-point claim: ecologists warn that biodiversity loss may not be gradual and reversible. Because species are linked through food webs and mutual dependencies, the loss of key species can trigger cascading collapses. If enough of these accumulate, the Earth system could shift into a new and far less hospitable state, a change that would be effectively irreversible on human timescales.
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3.2.11 Traditional indigenous approaches to land management can be seen as more sustainable but are facing challenges of population growth, economic development, climate change and a lack of governmental support and protection.
Threats to the notions of sustainability in traditional indigenous approaches come not only from the outside, but also from within as the society develops economically and aspires to follow the development model of the rest of the world. Consider threats to a named sustainable traditional indigenous land-management practice.
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Indigenous peoples manage or hold tenure over roughly a quarter of the world's land surface, and these areas contain a strikingly high share of the planet's remaining biodiversity. Their practices are often more sustainable than industrial alternatives because they rely on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK): detailed, place-specific understanding built up over many generations, using resources at a rate the land can renew.
Europe has one internationally recognised Indigenous people: the Sámi of Sápmi, the region spanning the north of Norway, Sweden and Finland and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. Their best-known land-management practice is reindeer herding.