An Earth System Treaty is a proposed global legal agreement, to be negotiated, signed and ratified by member countries of the United Nations.
Once declared, it will also be available for voluntary signature by individual citizens, corporations, communities, nongovernment bodies and other groups, organisations and agencies worldwide, so that everyone has a chance to affirm their commitment to a habitable Planet and the safer future it provides for humans and other life.
Unless we first agree to survive, we probably won’t. The aim of the Treaty is to provide an international legal framework for protecting and restoring the Earth System that maintains life on the planet, so that humans can inhabit it indefinitely.
It is a global instrument for achieving human survival and wellbeing and for caring for the planet that affords those benefits. It will proclaim goals, standards and boundaries that everyone can follow and abide by.
Several forms of global treaty have been proposed, but none so far manages to encompass all ten of the catastrophic threats that constitute the present human emergency, or to integrate their solutions.
Most versions refer chiefly to climate change and environmental decline, but overlook questions such as population, food, nuclear weapons, global poisoning, advanced technologies and misinformation. Unless all ten megathreats are included, human civilisation will remain at risk.
Depending on the outcome of the UN process, a truly effective Earth System Treaty may embody:
- A universal ban on nuclear weapons
- An international plan to combat climate change
- An international plan to restore forests, soils, fresh waters, oceans, atmosphere and
biodiversity to sustainable levels able to support humans and all wildlife.
- An international agreement to operate a circular economy and end waste
- A plan for a renewable world food supply sufficient for all
- A plan to end chemical pollution in all forms.
- A plan to lower the human population voluntarily to a sustainable level.
- A global plan to anticipate and prevent pandemic disease.
- A Global Technology Convention to oversee the safe development and introduction of
advanced sciences and technologies and minimise the harms they cause.
- A World Truth Convention to verify honesty in public discourse
- An Earth Standard Currency
- All 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The idea behind the treaty is that all signatory nations bind themselves to accepting its standards and to promoting them in their own societies and industries.
Asking individual ‘Earth Citizens’ also to sign the Treaty will muster the enormous power and genius of grassroots humanity to implement it – as well as signalling that individuals, as well as nations and corporations, are also expected to play their part in saving humanity on a habitable planet.
Above all, an Earth System Treaty will seek to keep human activity within safe boundaries set by the operation of the Earth System itself, as shown in the following diagram from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Humans are already in the danger zone for six of the nine key areas.
