In 2009 a group of Earth-system scientists led by Johan Rockström proposed nine “planetary boundaries”: limits on climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, land use, freshwater, ocean acidification, ozone, aerosols, and novel chemicals. Inside them, they argued, is a “safe operating space for humanity,” the conditions of the relatively stable Holocene that let agriculture and cities develop.
The framework has been revised twice. A 2023 update led by Katherine Richardson, the first to quantify all nine, found six already transgressed. The first annual Planetary Health Check, published in September 2025, put the count at seven, with ocean acidification newly over the line. Only stratospheric ozone and aerosol loading remain inside their safe zones.
Why a tool project cares
Ivan Illich made the same structural argument about tools in 1973, before anyone had measured the Earth system this way. In Tools for Conviviality he said that every tool, institution, and technique has natural scales, and that past a certain threshold it stops serving its ends and starts undermining them. He called the work of finding those thresholds “counterfoil research.”
Planetary boundaries are that idea worked out at the largest scale we have. They are also a useful correction to a habit common in technology work: treating a limit as a problem to engineer around. The boundaries framework treats limits as information. They tell you the shape of the space you have to design in.
Limits as a brief
For Counterfoil, this suggests three working questions to ask of any tool in the catalogue:
- What does it draw down? Energy, materials, attention, maintenance labour. A tool that only works while something is being used up has a built-in expiry.
- Can it run at small scale? Tools that only make sense at global scale tend to need global supply chains, global platforms, and global rules to keep running.
- What happens when it stops growing? Some tools are fine at a steady state. Others are built on the assumption that next year there will be more users, more data, and more capacity.
None of these questions is new. Illich asked versions of all three, and E. F. Schumacher asked them in Small Is Beautiful the same year. What is new is the evidence: the boundaries work turns “we may be overreaching” into a measured, published, annually updated finding. That changes the starting point. A limit is not something a good design hopes to avoid; it is part of the brief.
Note on figures: the boundary counts are from the sources below and will change as the Planetary Health Check is updated each year. Check the latest report before quoting a number.
Sources
- Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality.
- Richardson, Katherine, Will Steffen, Wolfgang Lucht, Jørgen Bendtsen, Sarah E. Cornell, Jonathan F. Donges, Markus Drüke, Ingo Fetzer, Govindasamy Bala, and Werner von Bloh. “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries.” Science Advances 9, no. 37 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458.
- Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, Marten Scheffer, Carl Folke, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. “A safe operating space for humanity.” Nature 461, no. 7263 (2009): 472–475. https://doi.org/10.1038/461472a.
- Stockholm Resilience Centre. “Seven of Nine Planetary Boundaries Now Breached.” Stockholm Resilience Centre. September 24, 2025. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/news–events/general-news/2025-09-24-seven-of-nine-planetary-boundaries-now-breached.