Academia
As peatlands burn and flagship carbon projects go up in smoke, our market-driven climate pledges are failing. Only recognizing the legal rights of nature, as constitutionally mandated, can pull us back from the brink.
The Kapuas River delta, formed by the Landak (left) and Kapuas Kecil rivers, looms out of thick haze on Aug. 27, 2026, in Pontianak, the provincial capital of West Kalimantan. (AFP/Dito)
Last year, the Stockholm Resilience Centre released its Planetary Health Check with a grim finding that barely registered in public debate: seven of Earth's nine planetary boundaries, the guardrails of our global life-support system, have now been breached.With ocean acidification confirmed as the seventh boundary crossed, only stratospheric ozone and atmospheric aerosol levels remain within safe thresholds. As Johan Rockstrom, who pioneered the framework in 2009, pointed out, more than three-quarters of the systems that keep our planet habitable are now destabilized.
This is far from an abstract scientific metric. It is tangible evidence of the "triple planetary crisis", runaway climate change, biodiversity collapse and rampant pollution, feeding into one another. These crises do not operate in silos. They form a single, unraveling system.
