The notion of people and nature as intertwined and embedded in the biosphere is gaining traction in contemporary scientific discourses. But what does it mean for a human being to be intertwined? Here, we explore this question through two lenses: looking at the human body as an open living system in continuous exchange with the chemical elements on Earth; and looking across the biosphere, at the intricate functioning of the web of life in mediating these exchanges. The first lens focuses on relationships between chemical elements and life processes within us humans, relationships that are critical for our bodies to operate and function. We then expand the perspective to show how microorganisms, fungi, plants, and animals in ecosystems shape and mediate the elemental flows through the air, water, and food that our bodies require for survival. The two lenses highlight that humans have evolved as part of, and remain integrated with, these complex and dynamic life–element interdependencies, spanning all scales and domains across the biosphere. In the Anthropocene, humans remain as bodily dependent on life-mediated elemental cycles as ever, irrespective of culture, economic development, or technological advances. This inseparability reflects the core reality of existing in the biosphere, with implications for how to approach and understand human–environment relations and confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. It further implies that biosphere stewardship is not only a cognitive or ethical orientation, but also an embodied practice: one that involves learning about, caring for, and enhancing the living relations that mobilise, regenerate, and circulate life-sustaining elements.

Current research challenges in sustainability science require us to consider nonlinear changes e.g. shifts that do not happen gradually but can be sudden and difficult to predict. Central questions are therefore how we can prevent harmful shifts, promote desirable ones, and better anticipate both. The regime shifts and transformations literature is well-equipped to address these questions. Yet, even though both research streams stem from the same intellectual roots, they have developed along different paths, with limited exchange between the two, missing opportunities for cross- fertilisation. We here review the definitions and history of both research streams to disentangle common grounds and differences. We propose avenues for future research and highlight how stronger integration of both research streams could support the development of more powerful approaches to help us navigate toward safe and just futures.

Dominant traditions in Western science have traditionally separated humans from nature, a division that is reproduced in the distinction between natural and social sciences. This rift has persistently hampered the ability of sustainability science to comprehensively understand and address the profound challenges of the Anthropocene. In this perspective, we aim to challenge entrenched separations between humans and nature by emphasizing the embeddedness of humans in the biosphere. We conceptualize embeddedness from a systems perspective and illustrate it using case studies on human microbiomes and freshwater availability. We discuss how a focus on embeddedness can increasingly be adopted in sustainability research through developments in sensing, modeling, and commoning practices. By highlighting these conceptual and practical opportunities for studying embeddedness in the biosphere, we seek to support transdisciplinary dialogues and practices toward sustainable futures.

Abstract. Rapid societal transformations are necessary to mitigate risky anthropogenic climate change and maintain human systems within Earth's planetary boundaries. Societal tipping processes have gained attention as mechanisms towards sustainability, yet generalisable solutions for intentionally transforming societal systems remain unclear. Here, we emphasise the significance of uncovering the systemic societal conditions enabling tipping from a complex adaptive systems perspective. Building upon research on societal tipping, transitions, and transformations, we develop the concepts of criticality – the likelihood of societal tipping – and critical agency – the human capacity to shape conditions that increase or reduce systemic criticality. We identify the transformation stages of criticality as the key analytical focus, and explore the phases of enacting critical agency within the societal tipping process. Criticality can serve as a crucial compass for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and activists, and other change-makers illuminating how critical agency can be used to instigate desired 'positive' societal tipping.

Non-technical summary Efforts toward global sustainability transformations risks being undermined by the formation of a global polycrisis, where multiple global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical conflict, and pandemics interact to reinforce each other. Resilience scholarship has identified multiple capacities needed for adaptation and transformation of social-ecological systems. Here, we explore the leverage and vulnerability of such capacities to the global polycrisis. We find that many capacities have both and their development and expression can therefore be thought of as being in a direct coevolutionary struggle with the development of a global polycrisis.Technical summary Social and environmental challenges are combining to form a complex of crises with potential to delay or reset many sustainability efforts. These risks raise questions about what capacities will be needed for advancing sustainability during a time of global polycrisis. Here, we evaluate the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities - collectively, resilience capacities - for navigating the polycrisis. Specifically, we perform a rapid assessment of their potential for addressing the 14 recently proposed Anthropocene traps. We find that 10 of the 14 Anthropocene traps have characteristics that challenge in total 17 of 23 adaptive and transformative capacities. On the other hand, 10 of 23 capacities - with an overrepresentation of transformative capacities - have general potential to prevent formation and progress of traps. Coevolutionary struggles between the expression of a capacity and the progression of traps are widespread. Importantly, transformative and adaptive capacities complement each other in the types of Anthropocene traps they most frequently address, with transformative capacities targeting global traps and adaptive capacities the emergent structural traps related to connectivity and pace of change. We end by proposing five unifying processes that can serve as an organizing framework for consideration of other sustainability and crisis capacities.Social media summary Adaptive and transformative capacities complement each other in navigating a global polycrisis.

Abstract Humans are now operating well outside the planetary conditions under which social and economic development has been possible. A precondition for securing equitable access to this prosperity is to safeguard the stability of the Earth system. The situation is urgent—we need a swift and profound shift in direction—a collective transformation. In response, the Earth Commission has developed a science‐based framework that integrates biophysical limits with justice considerations, aiming to enable human wellbeing for all. The Earth Commission's first assessment showed that multiple safe and just Earth system boundaries have already been transgressed, threatening the resilience of the planet and the well‐being of billions. This paper outlines the vision and scientific strategy for the Earth Commission's second phase (2024–2027), which focuses on advancing this framework and translating it into actionable budgets and exploring transformation pathways toward a safe and just future. Key components include expanding the safe and just boundary assessment to currently under‐assessed Earth system processes (e.g., novel entities and ocean change), integrating justice more deeply into the framework, modeling interactions between boundaries and tipping points, and developing practical approaches to cross‐scale translation and transformation. Special attention is given to the structural inequalities and power dynamics that shape both environmental degradation and our capacity to act. Through coordinated research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and stakeholder engagement, the Earth Commission seeks to provide knowledge to guide collective efforts toward transforming to a safe and just space for both people and the planet.

Finance steers the global economy, determining which activities thrive and which decline. Historically, financial flows have driven biodiversity loss. In response, the concept of "Nature Positive Finance" has emerged, arguing that investments should actively enhance nature rather than either ignoring it or merely minimizing harm. However, current definitions of "Nature Positive" remain vague. Furthermore, when analyzed using the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), they embody values clustered around ‘Nature for Society’, with minimal attention to ‘Nature for Nature’ values and almost none to ‘Nature as Culture’ values. This narrowness contrasts with the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which explicitly embraces pluralistic nature values.Without a robust, pluralistic definition, Nature Positive Finance will not be effective and could even promote conflict. This paper proposes a systems-oriented approach to Nature Positive Finance. We trace the roots of nature-positive concepts across knowledge clusters in the Natural, Social, and Integrated sciences. We compare over twenty knowledge clusters that contain nature-positive concepts ranging from Earth System Governance and Planetary Boundaries, to Industrial Ecology and Environmental Justice, to Rewilding and Landscape Ecology.To robustly compare these diverse streams, we employ a tripartite coding methodology designed to capture the plural dimensionality of nature-positive approaches:The NFF is used to identify implicit nature values and visions of the future.The Seven Resilience Principles are used to assess how each stream handles different aspects of social-ecological complexity, such as connectivity, feedbacks, and polycentricity.Dryzek’s Environmental Discourses are used to deconstruct the political framings and problem definitions embedded in each stream.Our analysis reveals that no single stream covers all domains; however, a synthesis of them spans the full spectrum of values, dynamics, and narratives. We argue that genuine nature-positive action must bridge these perspectives. We suggest that the NF, in combination with the resilience principles, can provide a methodological framework that will enable multiple approaches to Nature Positive to be used in a complementary fashion that clarifies the existence of gaps, trade-offs, and synergies. We believe that anchoring Nature Positive Finance within a rigorous, diverse scientific foundation can enable approaches that respect the diversity of people, knowledge, and nature.

Abstract Non-Technical Summary Transformations to sustainability and justice have recently encountered backlash and political polarization, violent conflict, democratic backsliding, and dehumanization. In this article, we describe three archetypes of backlash that may affect whether and how transformations unfold. We then explore the role of harnessing hope and imagination, hospicing with dignity, and enabling radical collaboration while holding paradox as three capacities that may prove helpful to navigating backlash during transformative change efforts. Technical Summary Recognizing backlash as a dynamic of transformations that is distinct from the forms of counter-resistance or contentious politics that have previously been documented as crucial in transformations, we focus on three backlash archetypes and the potential for derailment of transformations to sustainability and justice. Focusing on the specific transformation phase of ‘in-betweenness’ when systems are in flux and the risk of backlash and derailment is high, we suggest there is a need for capacities that help create provisional spaces to grapple with the range of emotional, relational, and political issues underpinning backlash. We explore the role of three transformative capacities for their relevance in addressing backlash and derailment based on existing evidence: harnessing hope and imagination, hospicing with dignity, and enabling radical collaboration while holding paradox. Social Media Summary Societal transformations involve backlash and derailment risks – three archetypes and key capacities to navigate them.

As corporations have come to recognise their role in shaping the biosphere, there has been an increase in inter-corporate cooperation, whereby corporations come together to address issues of common concern. The rationale for developing a collective approach arises from a realisation that "wicked" problems are beyond the capacity of any one organisation to tackle. At the same time, although inter-corporate collaborations exist in the practice landscape, little is known about their characteristics from an academic perspective. Moreover, these initiatives raise questions in terms of how collective performance might be communicated, thereby creating the possibility for accountability to be discharged. This paper seeks to understand how inter-corporate sustainability initiatives (hereafter ISIs) have been explored in the literature by using a systematic literature review (SLR) of 203 academic papers and explores how these aspects can be integrated to start the process of developing an understanding of potential accountability mechanisms for ISIs. The paper contributes to accounting literature by emphasising the likely relevance of different ISI configurations in designing appropriate accountability approaches. It expands existing discussions around accountability-based accounting systems and highlights the importance of considering a variety of factors, including the governance approach, nature of collaboration, and ISI mechanisms and attributes, in informing accountability measures. The SLR suggests that certain aspects, such as leadership, trust, legitimacy, and outcomes, are critical in understanding ISIs and influence our ability to imagine how accountability could be sought for collective outcomes as well as participant achievements.

The relationship between inequality and the biosphere has been hypothesized to mutual dependecies and feedbacks. If that is true, such feedbacks may give rise to inequality regimes and potential tipping points between them. Here we explore synergies and trade-offs between inequality and biosphere-related sustainable development goals. We used the openly available SDG datasets by the World Bank (WB) and United Nations (UN) and applied ordination methods to distill interactions between economic inequality and the environmental impact across countries. Our results confirm the existence of inequality regimes, and we find preliminary evidence that corruption may be a candidate driver of tipping between regimes.

. Natural disasters driven by climate change have increased in frequency, intensity, and scale. The consequences of these disasters include the loss of human lives, property damage, increased economic costs, and decreased ability to respond effectively to both abrupt and more gradual disasters. Government responses to such disasters are often based on a desire to rapidly recover to normal, which is understandable, but is difficult in the Anthropocene because of rapidly changing social-ecological baselines that exceed the limits of adaptation and mitigation. Here we identify pitfalls of a narrow and singular focus on resiliency. Resiliency focuses on efficient and rapid recovery, which is laudable, but assumes linear responses, absence of tipping points, a single scale of cause and effect, and an implicit assumption of stationarity. In contrast, we highlight the importance of social-ecological resilience, which includes resiliency but also accounts for multiple spatial and temporal scales, cross-scale effects, and most importantly, the possibility of alternative system configurations (or regimes) separated by tipping points. Social-ecological resilience provides a more comprehensive and realistic framing, and therefore the ability to persist with change, prepare for, and perform adaptation and transformation of socialecological systems. Accounting for social-ecological resilience is essential for governance of coupled systems of humans and nature as we collectively face a future in the Anthropocene that will contain more surprising and unpredictable events propelled by global change including climate change.

Transformations towards sustainable futures can only be achieved with an advanced understanding of how human life is intertwined with the whole biosphere. Systems of people and nature are not separate entities but inherently connected across temporal and spatial scales. There is a dynamic interplay between the biosphere and the broader Earth system. Life in the biosphere has evolved with the basic building blocks of planet Earth, like water, carbon, nitrogen, and other biogeochemical cycles. Social conditions, such as health, culture, democracy, power, justice, equity, matters of security, and even survival, are interwoven with the Earth system and its biosphere resulting in a complex interplay of local, regional, and global interactions and dependencies. In “The Intertwined Biosphere” project at the Anthropocene Laboratory, we explore empirical evidence of biosphere-Earth system dynamics since deep time and synthesise insights that can foster radical changes towards recognising humanity’s embeddedness in the world. By doing so, we aim to contribute to narratives that bridge human-nature dialectics to foster a deeper understanding of the critical interplay of humans as part of the living biosphere. In this presentation, we share our preliminary conceptual model of the biosphere as intertwined. We invite you to discuss human embeddedness in the biosphere and new directions for guiding human actions in the Anthropocene. What are the ontological and epistemological implications of understanding the Anthropocene biosphere as intertwined complex human-nature entanglements? How to study how life shapes its own living conditions?

Both resilience and regeneration are relevant concepts in sustainability science. Resilience thinking has led to improved understanding of cross-scale cycles of growth and renewal, regime shifts, and planetary boundaries. Regeneration highlights the role of positive, place-based and partially self-perpetuating social-ecological dynamics and seeks to foster mutualistic relationships between human and more-than-human entities. This paper lays out similarities, differences and overlaps between work on resilience and regeneration. The concept of regeneration emerged both independently of resilience as well as playing a role within resilience scholarship. We show that the literatures on resilience and regeneration have elaborated complementary ideas and can be combined to derive guidance for improved governance of social-ecological systems. Because of its explicit and proactive future-orientation, the concept of regeneration could help boost nascent efforts to enact biosphere stewardship and develop positive visions for how to re-build a world that is dominated by regenerative rather than degenerative dynamics.

Climate change will worsen conditions for people in the Global South, while conditions in large parts of the North will improve. Migration seems an effective adaptation strategy. However, making that a win-win for migrants and receiving communities requires revision of the food system, rules for mobility, and strategies for social integration.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020 was a reminder of society’s vulnerability in the face of natural upheavals, leading to widespread unemployment and increased poverty. Simultaneously, human activities have precipitated large-scale environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change. Here, we conduct a global-scale, 186-country analysis examining the potential impact of basic income (BI) as a two-pronged solution to both sustainability and social resilience. We reveal BI’s potential to bolster economies, particularly in times of crisis. To lower the huge barrier imposed by implementation costs, we suggest a diverse array of strategies aimed at financing BI, strategically designed to concurrently alleviate economic insecurity while fostering nature conservation. We suggest that BI implementation is feasible and could be a potent tool in addressing the twin challenges of decreasing worldwide poverty while reducing environmental degradation—a nexus that arguably constitutes the paramount global challenge of our times.

Much of the discourse around climate change and the situation of diverse human societies and cultures in the Anthropocene focuses on responding to scientific understanding of the dynamics of the biosphere by adjusting existing institutional and organizational structures. Our emerging scientific understanding of human behaviour and the mechanisms that enable groups to achieve large-scale coordination and cooperation suggests that incrementally adjusting existing institutions and organizations will not be sufficient to confront current global-scale challenges. Specifically, the transaction costs of operating institutions to induce selfish rational actors to consider social welfare in their decision-making are too high. Rather, we highlight the importance of networks of shared stories that become real—imagined orders—that create context, meaning and shared purpose for framing decisions and guiding action. We explore imagined orders that have contributed to bringing global societies to where they are and propose elements of a science-informed imagined order essential to enabling societies to flourish in the Anthropocene biosphere. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bringing nature into decision-making’.

Social and environmental challenges are combining to form a polycrisis with potential to delay or reset many sustainability efforts. These risks raise questions about what capacities will be needed for advancing sustainability during a time of interlinked crises. Here, we evaluate the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities for navigating the polycrisis. Specifically, we perform a rapid assessment of their potential for addressing the 14 recently proposed Anthropocene traps. We find that ten Anthropocene traps have characteristics that challenge in total 17 of 23 adaptive and transformative capacities. On the other hand, 10 of 23 capacities - with an overrepresentation of transformative capacities - have general potential to prevent formation and progress of traps. Coevolutionary struggles between the expression of a capacity and the progression of traps are widespread. Importantly, transformative and adaptive capacities complement each other in the types of Anthropocene traps they most frequently address, with transformative capacities targeting global traps and adaptive capacities the emergent structural traps related to connectivity and pace of change. We end by proposing five unifying processes that can serve as an organizing framework for consideration of other sustainability and crisis capacities.

AbstractFew disagree that we should pass on the Earth in good shape to future generations, and many scientists want their work to contribute to that goal. Recent work has shown that hopelessness stands in the way of people taking an active attitude. At the same time, it is becoming clear what can be done about that: providing compelling visions of attractive futures and highlighting feasible pathways. Currently, science and the humanities are not well designed for this task. Practices that stand in the way of a more holistic change‐making approach include proposal‐based funding, paralyzing rigor requirements, and a focus on explanation rather than action. Removing those barriers may require culture shifts, a notoriously difficult and slow kind of change. Meanwhile, realistic inspiring future scenarios can be developed by bringing diverse thinkers together in environments where time, space, and immediate outcomes are not pressing.

The Anthropocene signifies the start of a no-analogue trajectory of the Earth system that is fundamentally different from the Holocene. This new trajectory is characterized by rising risks of triggering irreversible and unmanageable shifts in Earth system functioning. We urgently need a new global approach to safeguard critical Earth system regulating functions more effectively and comprehensively. The global commons framework is the closest example of an existing approach with the aim of governing biophysical systems on Earth upon which the world collectively depends. Derived during stable Holocene conditions, the global commons framework must now evolve in the light of new Anthropocene dynamics. This requires a fundamental shift from a focus only on governing shared resources beyond national jurisdiction, to one that secures critical functions of the Earth system irrespective of national boundaries. We propose a new framework—the planetary commons—which differs from the global commons framework by including not only globally shared geographic regions but also critical biophysical systems that regulate the resilience and state, and therefore livability, on Earth. The new planetary commons should articulate and create comprehensive stewardship obligations through Earth system governance aimed at restoring and strengthening planetary resilience and justice.