Johan Rockström

Johan Rockström is executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and teaches natural resource management at Stockholm University. While working with a team of scientists from around the world he identified a set of nine planetary boundaries that can guide humanity's development in order for future generations to thrive on this planet without causing irreversible environmental change. He also quantified these boundaries, which has allowed for them to become adopted as a new framework to guide sustainable growth and to become a central aspect of setting the UN's Millennium Development Goals. We can use his guidelines to determine the negative effects social structures may have on the earth, which will allow the possibility of humans to prosper while living in sync with the planet's natural systems.