Global Resources and Resource Justice—Reframing the Socioecological Science-to-Policy Landscape

Abstract

The lexical analysis of seminal policy-to-diplomacy documents from the socio-environmental discourse of the last fifty years of agendas has allowed examining the contextual affinities between resources, pollution, and health. The central role of resource stewardship, according to nature’s physical limits, is highlighted in the context of the boundary systems for the biosphere and societies, and the carrying capacity and inclusive systemic health (one health, planetary health, …). To reframe a rather fragmented conceptual and methodological landscape, this work proposes choices that consider core values, purpose, and best practice developments, allowing us to compare the dynamics of socioecological states across the planet and in specific social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. The prioritization of resource justice and responsibility becomes a societal project, embedding the economy in social and ecological frames through institutional reframing and tangible action on resource management, pollution control, and health outcomes. How? By recognizing the primacy of the law and economy of life—the adequacy between basic needs and accessible resources for all— over the rules and economy of the market through socioecosystemic checks and balances.

1. Introduction

Nature is our only hope… (Pisaro)

Collective inclusion into nature is perceived by human groups as a problem which they must overcome in order to exist as such [1].

Over the past 50 years, 75% of the global population continues to live in poverty, with 10% in extreme poverty. While the latter has been partially reduced, social inequalities have surged dramatically [2,3]. Similarly, the disparity between the total funds allocated to biodiversity protection—approximately $130 million per year—and environmentally harmful subsidies, amounting to around $2.5 billion annually, is striking [4]. Thus, although global wealth has increased, this has come at the expense of both nature and a significant portion of humanity.

Furthermore, the establishment of government-supported organizations, including financial institutions, corporations, and market service providers with over $20 trillion in assets—known as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures framework and Science-based Targets Network pilots—has paved the way for corporations to engage in nature-related actions [5]. For instance, green finance for conservation includes compensation mechanisms, which essentially act as permits to pollute and speculate via markets working towards the commodification of nature. Evidently, ecological priorities do not align with market priorities.

Notably, the report for the Club of Rome [6] raised critical political, economic, social, and environmental questions about the dominant economic model decades ago, focusing on the finite nature of physical resources. Similarly, the Stockholm Declaration [7] emphasized the close interdependence of human development and nature, highlighting the inseparability of social, environmental, and developmental concerns. This signifies that economic and governance systems exert both direct and indirect effects on ecosystems and the availability of essential resources, and in turn, the resulting externalities feed back into social and governance structures, influencing social relationships [8,9,10].

These reports have informed scientific and diplomatic efforts such as:

- The Rio Summit [11], which focused on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and later the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), though their political impact has been limited [12]. Specifically, SDG targets and indicators tend to overlook socioecological processes, exhibit a bias towards economic growth (primarily resource productivity, efficiency, and intensity), fail to monitor absolute trends in resource use, and downplay ecological goals. For instance, SDGs rely heavily on institutions responsible for unsustainable resource use [13];

- The development of the ecological footprint and, subsequently, the concept of planetary boundaries to quantify human pressures on the biosphere [14,15];

- Societal boundaries [16] to define the frameworks within which increasingly severe social inequalities occur, and how these can be bridged with genuine physical boundaries [17], the doughnut economics model [18], and carrying capacity modeling [19].

This rather fragmented conceptual and methodological landscape raises several research enquiries. For instance: what hidden or neglected issues exist within the evolving discourse of global agendas (Section 2)? How central is resource competition in shaping the framing of coupled human-natural systems (Section 3)? How have boundary concepts altered the perception of socioecosystemic approaches (Section 4)? How can boundary methodologies be made actionable and scalable, and why is translating carrying capacity into systemic (planetary) health variables the most parsimonious solution (Section 5)? Ultimately, how can we meet people’s basic needs while maintaining the life-sustaining capacity of natural systems? This fundamental law of human existence transcends market rules and is non-negotiable (Section 6).

In summary, the central issue of resource challenges, which dominated high-level science-to-policy international agendas in the 1970s, has been overshadowed by variations in the socioecosystemic discourse and research [20]. Competing concepts, associated terminology, and a proliferation of “beyond GDP” indicators have created a semantic landscape that has hindered effective science-to-policy coordination and action on resource stewardship and allocation. This essay aims to synthesize these developments through a socioecosystemic lens, identifying counterproductive redundancies, circumventing assessment bottlenecks, and offering recommendations for methodological choices and tools that will enable long-awaited comparative studies across both spatial and temporal scales.

2. Shifting Agendas—50 Years of Socioecological Myopia

In order to understand how these scientific, institutional, and diplomatic dynamics evolved over time, we have sketched the societal and geopolitical landscape of the 1972–2021 period (Figure 1) and dissected the elements of language and the evolution of associated discourse deployed over the last fifty years using the following five structuring themes: resources/scarcity, pollution/waste, social and economic development, justice, and health [21].

Based on an analysis of various scientific and diplomatic documents from 1972 to 2021 (Olof Palme’s Statement at the UN Conference on the Human Environment 1972 [22]; Stockholm Declaration 1972 [7]; Brundtland Report, 1987 [23]; Rio Conference Earth Summit, 1992 [11]; UNEP-IRP: UN Policy Coherence SDGs, 2015 [24]; UNEP Assessing Global Resource Use, 2017 [25]; UNEP Global Resources Outlook, 2019 [26]; NASEM, Sustainability Science, [2]; NASEM, Our Planet, Our Future, 2021 [27]), we aimed to understand how international institutions responded to social, economic, and environmental crises. A textometric methodology was employed to analyze these documents [21], leading to the identification of the following key points:

The most frequent words in these documents were as follows: resources, development, use, government, water, waste, land, technology, energy, organization, health, consumption, population, need, pollution, forest, food, and emission.

The theme of resources emerged as a central economic and political concern throughout the period analyzed.

Lexical context analysis revealed a consistent association between resources/energy and pollution, with the origins of pollution being diverse (industry, agriculture, and transport).

The relationship between pollution and health was a persistent theme across the discourses. The extraction-production-consumption-waste cycle has significant impacts on both human health and the environment. These consequences became more pronounced as institutional discourse and policies grew increasingly vague and permissive in favor of more politically palatable issues like well-being and efficiency—particularly from the 1990s onwards, with the onset of deregulation.

The connection between resources and health as a factor of justice and social equity was less explicitly expressed (see also [28]; however, it was implicitly acknowledged through repeated references to the impact of environmental degradation on health.

Concern over demographics, prominent in earlier texts, became more abstract in recent documents, often hidden behind less politically sensitive issues (e.g., Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, energy efficiency, and more general themes like climate and well-being).

In summary, the observed links between resources, global pollution, and health form the foundation of a socioecological deconstruction of current systemic crises (see also [29]). These crises are rooted in a lack of political coherence, the growing dominance of economics and finance in policy-making, and the limitations of technological solutions and the belief in infinite growth [3,30]. The transition from discourse to implementation has faltered, as political will, expressed over the past 50 years, has been unable to overcome institutional inertia and the expanding influence of unchecked economic and financial systems [31].

It was not until 2021 that the Nobel laureates [2,27] adopted a more radical stance, arguing that since GDP does not measure health, the increasingly evident relationship between global pollution and health could no longer be ignored. Their aim was to define clear priorities. Two such priorities emerged:

Firstly, the concept of commons, first introduced in the Brundtland Report [23], was reaffirmed in discussions at the US National Academies [27,32] and expanded into the notion of planetary commons [33], becoming a key institutional objective.

Secondly, Planetary Health emerged as a critical concept, further reinforced by joint initiatives between the American and Chinese academies [34].

Similarly, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, along with the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health (in collaboration with UN institutions, NGOs, the World Bank, the EU, academic institutions, and Ministries of Health from several developing nations), has advocated for solutions to the issues of soil, water, air, and other types of pollution, as well as their associated health impacts [29].

In conclusion, the analysis revealed erratic developments across global institutions and programmes, where key interdependencies—such as those between resources and waste, pollution, social and economic development, justice, and health—emerged by default. In addition, the transition from discourse to action has been hindered by economic priorities and political inertia. The next section will focus on the centrality of resources in socioecosystem dynamics and discussions.

3. The Global Resources

In the previous section, we discussed how resource availability is a historical constant, acting as the “nutrients” of social ecosystems [35]. Resources are essential for sustainable societies, and the SDGs are largely about redistributing them [26,31,36]. However, the way humans conceptualize resources is problematic. This section explores the current state of resource governance, emphasizing the complexities of resource definition, scarcity, and distribution.

Resources are not simply natural entities but socially constructed through technology, law, and culture. What societies consider a “resource” changes over time [37], and there is constant debate over how to mobilize them. One problematic idea is that human societies can indefinitely circumvent material limitations in a world of finite resources—a dangerous gamble. This realization has led to a focus on measurable stock levels, but the utility of these figures is limited without clear assessments of needs [38].

The perception of finite resources has been a central concern since Meadows’ Limits to Growth [6], yet many nations continue to operate under the assumption that technology or market mechanisms will resolve resource constraints. To set up a metric, it was necessary to distinguish resources, a subjective and controversial notion, and reserves, a category objectified by the criteria of extraction, production, and marketing, sometimes manipulated by strategic communication. However, the ratios that divide the identified reserves by the consumption of the current year have no other meaning than to know whether the actors manage to control the stocks or must invest in the discovery or development of new reserves, hence ill-informed debates about resource scarcity. Price variations are indicators of supply–demand imbalances and act as levers for investments.

In terms of the economics of resource scarcity, Scarcity is not just about physical shortages but is also influenced by perceptions of dependency and fear of depletion [39,40]. The complex interplay of old scarcities like fertile land, water or energy with new scarcities such as biodiversity loss and environmental degradation reflect the political, social, organizational, institutional, and economic determinants of scarcity. They raise concerns about the future availability, accessibility, utility value, and distribution of resources [41]. Furthermore, institutional structures often exacerbate scarcity by creating profitable shortages and overexploitation of resources leading to impaired freedom, social inequality, and environmental degradation [42].

These significant barriers are likely to have their roots in the maldistribution of rents from natural resources and the effective supremacy and protection of exclusive property rights (material and immaterial). The absence of an international competition law represents an additional factor [43]. What precedes highlights the asymmetry between the dominant market rules (supply and demand) and the necessary adequacy between the vital resource needs of populations and the maintenance of the life-support capacity of natural environments on which societies depend. That asymmetry further reflects the ongoing process of ecological colonization driven by developed countries [44].

Resource governance has largely been restricted to economic and market logic, with natural resources being merely considered as fluxes of values and exploited with no consideration of environmental or social costs [36]. The demographic and market pressures and the global “rush” on natural resources have led to chronic socioecosystemic deficits or debts, reflected in food–health–environment–poverty imbalances http://www.worldometers.info/ (accessed on 9 September 2024).

Two diverging scenarios of resource geopolitics can be distinguished.

Resources disputes and wars, highlighting historical relationships between market structure, international trade, and military conflict. These are coupled with the protection and control of resource sites and routes, have increased resource demand, as greater wealth tends to follow industrialization and associated shortages, and reflect factors such as substitution effects and technological pressures, governance and the regulation of prices and quantities, and much more [45,46].

Resources and peace, advocating for global cooperation, guarantee access to critical supply in the long run [47,48].

Provisioning reliable, accessible, affordable, and sustainable resource services, energy in particular [49,50,51], faces challenges due to contradictory injunctions concerning decoupling issues, low-carbon transitioning in context-dependent environmental and social externalities, renewable energy capacities, scaling challenges, and competing interests for critical minerals, land, and food production, to name just a few.

The examples below illustrate the efforts certain institutions or organizations are making to secure global cooperation and tackle some of the above-mentioned difficulties or bottlenecks.

The New Zealand Resource Management Act [52] is a pioneering reform in environmental law creating an integrated natural-resource-sustainable management system at the apex of the country’s legislative hierarchy to direct all other policies, standards, plans, and decision making. It illustrates how integrated resource governance can serve as an overarching principle spanning national interest.

The International Resource Panel (IRP), UNEP, is an independent group of scientific experts that was established in 2007 by the UN under the auspices of UNEP to help countries to use natural resources without compromising the present and future human needs. The Panel’s specific mission is to contribute to assessing the environmental impacts across the entire life cycle through a better understanding of how to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation (e.g., [26]). The IRP reports express, year after year, the pragmatic vision and exhaustive expertise that the Panel has developed, with no or insignificant effect on business as usual.

The Natural Resources Governance Framework, an initiative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, has provided a “set of principles, standards, and tools for assessing natural resource governance and promoting its improvement” [53] through transparency, liability, controllability, responsibility, and responsiveness.

There is little if any cross talk between such institutional achievements, and there is no agreed upon assessment methodologies or instruments. To that end, Fairbrass et al. [54] have proposed a guide for natural capital assessment. The Natural Capital Indicator Framework organizes a large number of variables into a set of key and headline indicators based on the Four-Capital model of wealth creation (e.g., natural capital stocks of ecosystem and commodity assets, ecosystem flows from natural capital, and human inputs and outputs in the form of benefits and residuals).

A similar lack of synergy is at work among the myriad of local nature-based solutions alternatives to business as usual [55,56]. In addition, such initiatives are often disconnected from broader policy frameworks, further hindering progress.

As for open questions and challenges. Several key issues emerge from this analysis.

Are we consistently dealing with the binary opposition between exhaustible and renewable resources (biotic or abiotic)? The exploitation of the former must be reasoned in relation to the substitutes, while the exploitation of the latter is conditioned by the management of their stocks.

Ultimately, can societies live on a base of exclusively renewable resources, energy in particular? The challenge is enormous, because the quantitative ratio of exhaustible versus renewable resources raises questions about the capacity of exclusive renewable energy options to offer a choice other than voluntary sobriety as a way of life [39]. Therefore, the integrated management of resources—in particular, water and energy—becomes a challenging issue for ecological sustainability in the context of a circular economy, equitable technological progress, and social welfare [47,57].

How can we close the circle regarding resource distribution, ownership, and development? The unequal distribution of resources, in quantity and quality, is at the origin of rents, which have ambiguous relationships with economic development and remain a source of tension and geopolitical conflict [58,59]. Thus, history shows examples of resource mobilization, in which the abundance of resources translated into less development in the better-endowed countries. The explanations provided focus largely on the political economy. The colonial and post-colonial strategies of global economy domination generated skewed relationships between stakeholders to the detriment of local communities and with pernicious environmental consequences [60]. We expect these unjust and unsafe resource policies to operate in the same way on biological resources. Who owns nature has become the last political and economic frontier.

How can we enforce the right to benefit equitably from natural resources and income derived therefrom? The maldistribution of rents from natural resources is grounded in institutions and the political economy, despite the fact that, in most national constitutions, natural resources are common property resources. The supreme status of human rights in international law grants people equal and non-discriminatory access to common property resources [61,62,63]. In addition, the right to an adequate standard of living provides leverage to the imperative redistribution of incomes and resources within societies [64].

What levels of accessible resources need to be fairly allocated in the coming two decades while maintaining the life-support capacity of the Earth system [3,17,64]? The discussion on resources and war versus resources and peace indicates that the second scenario and its potential socioecosystemic benefits is unlikely in the present geopolitical context. Moreover, a series of international agreements have become obsolete [46] and there are serious concerns about resource justice in the coming critical decade [31].

Such considerations help us to reframe the social and economic problems according to nature’s physical limits linked to social trends and pressures. The socioecosystemic reframing is introduced in the next section, and it extends a previous analysis proposed by Binder et al. [20].

4. Boundary Approaches in Socioecosystemic Context—Coupled Human–Natural Systems

Planetary Boundaries: The concept has been widely endorsed by the UN and other international and national bodies, agendas, and scholars. It is focusing on the Earth’s buffering capacity, which is threatened by human activities that affect primarily the biosphere, namely the interdependencies between the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, and the living. They constitute the self-regulating functions and cycles of the biosphere, those on which the ecosystem services depend.

The buffering capacity, when investigated through planetary boundaries, consists of a system of thresholds or tipping points defining the safe versus risk range values (updated by Rockstrom et al. [65]). The majority of the global scale boundaries have presently been transgressed.

As for the merits of the planetary boundary approach, one can put forward a better understanding of the Earth system and safeguarding of the planetary commons [33]. Conversely, boundary values remain controversial for land use change or fresh water variables, as do the quantification of biodiversity loss, functional biosphere integrity, and global pollution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries [66]. Furthermore, concerns have been raised about using boundaries in isolation. Also, there is the issue of whether economic and political control and management through thresholds would be meaningful. For example, the land use change boundary alone would not take into account soil degradation or soil loss processes. Including a tenth boundary, the net primary production, as the measure of accessible biomass, has been proposed [67]. Last but not least, the area of planetary boundaries has been viewed as an evolving concept to be used with precaution, while the social sciences have challenged the unidirectional thinking of the approach [16], arguing for the need to elaborate not only a safe but also a just Earth system.

Two of the above limitations require some additional consideration.

Firstly, compiling interactions and connections between boundaries is essential. It would allow, for instance, interlinking pollution and water resource degradation, or the nexus between land use change, water boundary, and biomass production. In this sense, our analysis has showed that individual boundaries can be aggregated into two major pressure subsystems of the biosphere, namely food systems and global physico-chemical pollution [68,69]. In this sense, the soil–water–biomass system is conceived as a major primary resource matrix [70].

This clarification can radically change the way tools for alternative environmental evaluation are developed to inform resource policies and decision making with broad poverty, health, and economic development implications. For example, when addressing energy transition concerns [71,72], thermal transition is exclusively at stake. However, food security is about metabolic energy and, therefore, stands out as the most urgent energy transition issue for most of humanity.

Secondly, nowadays, planetary boundaries integrate some of the just Earth system boundaries by considering three justice criteria for a safe space for humanity, namely interspecies, intra-, and inter-generational justice [65].

Taken together, the ensuing social dimensions are finally understood as a societal boundary system. The system is examined below:

Societal boundaries: Earth system justice aims to ensure that societies can live within biophysical boundaries in ways that enable a fair access to essential resources and interrelated needs and services [71]. Just access to material resources concentrates on universal needs, such as food, water, energy, and infrastructures (e.g., housing, transport, etc.). This is based on international human rights principles extending to procedural and substantive factors (i.e., distributive, corrective, and restorative justice), consisting of principles of equal distribution, meeting the minimal needs for all, and limiting excess resource use [17]. They are likely to alleviate the unequal impacts of pollution, epidemics, and access to land, but also to address the responsibilities for environmental degradation and disparities between countries, communities, and social and racial groups [44].

Operationalizing the Earth justice framework targets access and allocation means, such as (1) access to information in decision making and to civic space, legal remedies, minimum resources, and services, as well as (2) the allocation of risks and harms, along with corresponding responsibilities for each of them. For example, access indicators have been established in order to quantify the key material needs for food, water, energy, and infrastructure at two levels: escape from poverty and enabling a dignified life [72]. Once evaluated, the minimum needs are integrated with the current levels of consumption figures and converted into planetary boundaries. In addition, Stewart-Koster et al. [73] have specifically evaluated the basic access to water within the safe and just Earth system. This has been carried out based on eight groups of river basins across the world, according to a range of access levels and as function of available surface and ground water. Together, these examples illustrate the necessity to systematically assess the adequacy of needs versus resources in the Earth system.

It is worth noting that societal boundaries have additional dimensions that embrace contrasting behavioral aspects, such as trust, immoderation, and prestige. Since human needs expand with knowledge, technology, and material richness, one needs to stress the following two issues:

Firstly, freedom has largely been linked to the abundance of resources, a colonial- and industrial-era-lasting imprint that persists under a variety of geopolitical strategies [60,74].

Secondly, the essence of power systems relies on the multidimensional logic of unbridled rush and competition on resources, and the mantra of productivity and concentration (i.e., low-cost nature and labor; [3,64,75]).

In summary, societal boundaries could serve as tools to promote societal self-limitation, with specifications being debated according to sociocultural determinants implying institutional reframing of how goods, services, etc., are produced, distributed, and consumed [16]. Stated otherwise, the knowledge and actionable capacity of designing economies as social projects at the junction between nature and societies are gaining ground. Emerging approaches, outlined in

Table 1. Contrasting and complementary socioecosystemic frameworks dealing with different aspects of carrying capacity and emphasizing the internalization of social and ecological costs.

Methodology and Refs.	Ecosystem Condition	Social Condition	Observations
Safe and just Earthsystem (PB and SB) [17,65,72].	Planetary boundaries, a tipping points system: biosphere functional integrity, natural ecosystem area, surface and ground water, nitrogen and phosphorus, aerosols, ocean acidification, and climate. Defines risks levels.	Access and allocation levels of minimal needs, such as food/nutrition, hygiene and water, energy, housing, and transport. Next: living conditions, healthcare, and education.	Prescriptive, from global to national scales. Some countries develop the PB approach to assess natural capital states.
Earth for all 2022 (Club of Rome) [3]	Energy, crop, and food sectors’ production. Effects of human economy on climate, nutrients, forests, and biodiversity, according to planetary boundaries.	Sectors: well-being, population, output–consumption, public, labor market, demand, finance, reform delay, inequality, and social tensions.	Non-prescriptive. A total of 11 synthetic parameters (>100 variables and 80 fixed parameters, including feedback effects).
Carrying capacity (HANDY model, offering a single end indicator combining several factors and variables) [19]	Earth system variables: nature capacity with regeneration and depletion rates and levels (non-renewable stocks, regenerating stocks, and renewable flows). Associated with sink processes and considered as ecosystem services. Next: atmosphere and chemistry, land, ocean and sea ice, aerosols, carbon cycle, and vegetation dynamics.	Human system variables (levels, rates of change, and distributional inequality)—fertility, mortality, migration, health, GDP/capita, material and energy per capita, and waste and emissions per capita, etc. Next: demographics, water use, agriculture, energy, trade, industry, construction, and transportation.	Non-prescriptive. A minimal model with bidirectionally interacting variables not tested so far in real life contexts. Indicators of progress: 1. Reduce per capita consumption and pollution; 2. Stabilize the population; 3. Reduce inequality in resource consumption and the production of waste, emissions, and pollution.
Quality of life (GUMBO model) [76,77]	Ecosystem services and goods assessment and conversion to monetary values. Simulate carbon, water, and nutrient fluxes. Virtual prices for each service. Includes variations of local to global policy settings concerning the rates of investment across natural, social, human, and built capital.	Quality of life indicators for human needs, such as identity, freedom, subsistence, reproduction and care, security, understanding and participation, spirituality, and creativity.	Non-prescriptive. A total of 930 variables, with 1715 parameters in a global model, integrating dynamic feedback between technologies, economy, well-being, and ecosystem goods and services within a dynamic Earth system.
Eco-civilization [78,79,80]	Gross ecological product (GEP), a measure of the aggregate monetary value of ecosystem-related goods and services flows in a given region in an accounting period (Market and non-market prices, value of marginal product, and proxies using measures of avoided or replacement costs). Alternative approach: resources, environmental pressure (pollution), and environmental governance.	Social life and public services (population growth and density, physicians and medical beds, rural and urban housing, public transportation and road area, park area, public libraries, and college student figures).	Non-prescriptive. Regional analyses. Spatially explicit integrated ecological–economic modeling that predicts the flow of ecosystem services and economic valuation.
Resources-Planetary Health Integrates ecosystem, social, and people’s health; dynamic dashboard of interactions and interdependencies between variables. [31,81]	The state of the ecosystem capital: four core accounts for land use change, water and rivers, biocarbon, and ecosystem infrastructure. Territorial potential for biophysical entities measured as ecological value, with intensity of use and health index as a common denominator, and proxies for ecosystem services and biodiversity. An instrument to understand territorial trends, identify degradation risks, and the impact of public policies and economic activities on the ecological potential.	Public health core indicators and universal health coverage; Equitable access and allocation of resources for all. Universal social protection (education, health, shelter, employment, revenue, …).	Non-prescriptive. Local to global. Annual accounting period. Experimental transposition of the UN system of environmental accounting adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 2021. As a complement to the current national accounting system. Objective for stakeholders: no net social and ecological degradation.

Note: The role of non-prescriptive assessment instruments in analyzing socioecological trajectories is crucial in a world characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability. These tools help trace the dynamic interactions between social and ecological systems, especially when cumulative shocks, such as pandemics, climate crises, technological shifts, and fluctuating societal trust, produce far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences.

, explore additional and complementary contributions to the field, including the Club of Rome report 2022, the carrying capacity (HANDY model), the GUMBO model and quality of life, the ecological civilization, and resources–planetary-health frameworks.

Table 1 hints, therefore, to the following issue: what if the carrying capacity was the most likely common denominator for assessing socioecosystemic boundaries? This idea is developed in the next section.

5. Synthesis—Socioecosystems as Carrying Capacity, a Debt and Inclusive Health Repair System

The rapid degradation of socioecosystems over recent decades underscores the growing burden of socioecological debt [82]. This debt comprises the unpaid costs of environmental degradation and social inequality, which, though not immediately visible, accumulate and lead to significant economic, ecological, and political risks if left unaddressed. Integrating these unpaid costs into measurable frameworks is essential to prevent further socioecological crises and facilitate timely responses.

The notion of socioecological debt can be understood in terms of health assessments, where the health of socioecosystems is evaluated based on their state of degradation or improvement. The current state of Planetary Boundaries offers a way to visualize this, functioning as a global “health bubble” that links the well-being of individuals, societies, and the planet [31]. This health-focused approach calls for a rethinking of economic health, urging the inclusion of real social and ecological costs into decision-making, legislation, and policy frameworks.

To build this debt-cost-health reframing, it is crucial to examine inclusive health frameworks, such as One Health, Planetary Health, Ecohealth, and Global Health [83,84,85,86]. These frameworks emphasize a holistic view of health that connects ecosystems, human well-being, and societal function. Among them, One Health and Planetary Health are prominent, both aiming to integrate multiple systems—economic, legislative, ecological, and societal—into a unified policy approach. They align with SDGs and climate agendas, and ambition integrating policy, legislation, finance, sectoral activities and institutions, and coordinating capacity building, knowledge, and data spheres. However, these frameworks often overlook the critical dimension of social health, which deals with issues like equity, justice, and social cohesion.

The question arises: is there a unifying principle that can bridge the diverse socioecological approaches? Carrying capacity is likely the most effective concept for integrating nature and human systems. It provides a systemic understanding of the maximum population size and level of resource consumption that an environment can sustain without leading to irreversible degradation [19]. In essence, carrying capacity reflects the health of both the planetary and societal systems, serving as a combined measure of ecological and social sustainability.

The reviewed frameworks (outlined in Table 1) illustrate varying strengths in their ability to model sustainability, assess risks, and integrate feedback loops between different variables. For example, the physical aspects of carrying capacity are addressed through models like Planetary Boundaries, Earth system models, and environmental (e)valuations. On the social side, frameworks consider indicators of fair access to resources, quality of life, and mechanisms that balance market forces with commons management.

The analysis suggests that carrying capacity has been transgressed in multiple ways, as evidenced by the diverse methodologies examined. While this heterogeneity poses challenges in achieving a unified framework, it also offers a range of tools for addressing different aspects of socioecological sustainability.

In moving forward, the next section will explore ways to harmonize these diverse approaches and develop a more comprehensive understanding of socioecosystemic sustainability.

6. Future Directions—Stewardship of Natural Resources to Meet Basic Human Needs and Maintain Life-Sustaining Capacity of Natural Systems

In the spirit of the present analysis, choices should be dictated by the respective capacity of such methodologies to achieve the following:

(1)

Inform the common interest, while implementing good practices in public policies and economic practices (see also [87]). For example, making food systems and forestry practices regenerative has become an absolute priority in a just transition process [36,47];

(2)

Enable the performance of simultaneous comparative evaluations of socioecological states and dynamics, i.e., assessing carrying capacity trends, across the planet at different geographical scales.

In that double perspective, the following can constitute the matrix of future developments:

Firstly, global resource stewardship must become the norm in assessing human activities and institutional systems. Priorities should focus on soil, water, and biomass, combined with collectively making decisions on resource extraction and waste emissions (such as in context extraction and consumption caps).

Secondly, considering current Earth system limits and the state of economic and social challenges, revisiting wealth allocation and redistribution mechanisms from market to state levels could provide a pathway toward a safe and just Earth system. The consequence will be a substantial transformation of business as usual.

Thirdly, in the light of the above objectives, research work and science-to-policy developments (cf. Table 1) should focus on the following aspects:

-

The Earth for all protocol, designed for global, regional, and national trends modeling. The free availability of the Earth for all game, with a user-friendly interface, could help a broader range of stakeholders and scholars run the model with highly profitable methodological benefits.

-

The resources–planetary-health toolbox, designed to assess the ecological, social, and public health indicators and to model the interactions among them [31,81]. The toolbox enables local- to national-scale annual reporting and integration into national accounts. The tool can be enriched by the just Earth system protocol (e.g., [72]). For local resource sectors or categories, the Ostrom approach, at the crossroad of institutional management and community-based natural resource stewardship [8], is tailored for collective responsibility, the enforcement of social norms and institutions, and conflict prevention or mitigation in areas as diverse as land use and tenure systems governance, food security, or fair access to water and forest services.

At the heart of these efforts is the interaction of resource justice and systemic health. In a preventive perspective to guide political and economic decision making, equality, fundamental rights, and shared responsibility [64,88] go hand-in-hand with sustainability values, namely functional, contextual, emotional, cognitive, and economic values [89]. Integrating these principles can help balance welfare state initiatives with commonfare community approaches according to legal precepts and frameworks on planetary justice, as advocated by scholars like Biermann and Kalfagianni [90]. They can strengthen real life achievements from the local level [55,57] to the inspiring Resource Management Act of New Zealand [52].

To unlock the full potential of these recommendations, big data systems must be made FAIR—Feasible, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible ([91], see also [54,72,81]). The coordination of international bodies and national public policies on data systems and dedicated platforms is still far from reality. If it were, its implementation would allow us to work out meaningful and coherent standards and taxes, rules and good practices of investment, the full cost of products and activities, and, thus, the amortization of unpaid socioecological capital. Such instruments are a must in financing the restoration and conservation of nature, payments for ecosystem services, covering ecological and financial risks, making effective the conditionality of public contracts, and much more.