Planetary boundaries and their role in assessing the environmental sustainability of organisations

Ongoing climate change is now widely documented and publicized, and its consequences for our lifestyles are becoming increasingly apparent. Over the last few decades, the joint efforts of the scientific, political and civic communities have led to the institutionalization of these changes and their management within international and regional governance bodies. This same trajectory of institutionalization characterizes the issues linked to the ongoing erosion of biodiversity, often described as the sixth mass extinction. These two dominant issues are indicative of an era described as the Anthropocene, in which humanity can be seen as a geological force influencing the climatic equilibrium. If humanity is capable of upsetting the balance, it can also be concerned with preserving it. A climatic equilibrium is nonetheless a complex object to grasp, and cannot be reduced to a greenhouse gas/biodiversity component. What about the water cycle, or the cycle of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus? What about the pollutants that industry discharges into the environment? And what about land use? Taking full note of the Anthropocene means recognizing the interconnection between the components of the Earth system and those of human systems. Planetary limits are a conceptual framework for assessing the Earth's habitability, which is gaining increasing notoriety in the media as new limits are exceeded. These new limits are being exceeded as much because of increasing anthropogenic pressures as because of efforts by the scientific community to define the indicators that make up the framework with ever greater robustness. While the founding research on this subject led to the first publication of the framework in 2009, numerous updates have since been proposed, both for the framework as a whole and for each individual limit. The purpose of this article is to retrace these successive evolutions in order to better understand what is at stake in the upward trend in the number of limits exceeded and, on this basis, to understand what it really means to "exceed a limit". In parallel with these efforts to construct and publicize the framework, a field of study dedicated to its operationalization has emerged. Indeed, the planetary limits framework represents a source of innovation for designing innovative tools for the environmental assessment of sub-global systems, in particular territories and the production of goods and services. Since the 2010s, the scientific community has been pursuing both the improvement and local application of the framework. The aim of this article is to give an account of these two projects, with an emphasis on the transition from one to the other, made possible by a profound paradigmatic renewal in environmental assessment: the absolute assessment of sustainability, which we will describe, and for which...