Dillman and colleagues33Dillman KJ Czepkiewicz M Heinonen J DavíÐsdóttir B A safe and just space for urban mobility: a framework for sector-based sustainable consumption corridor development.Global Sustainability. 2021; 4: e28Crossref Scopus (16) Google Scholar noted that allocating the remaining planetary capacity to cope with the various barriers among countries and smaller units is morally and mathematically challenging.

Steffen and colleagues20Steffen W Richardson K Rockström J et al.Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet.Science. 2015; 3471259855 Crossref PubMed Scopus (6576) Google Scholar stated that the planetary boundaries framework was “not designed to be downscaled or disaggregated to smaller levels

So far, smart city systems are being set up to appropriate and commercialize individual and community data. So far, communities are not waking up to the realization that a capacity they need is being stolen from them before they have it.”

Downscaling the planetary boundaries in absolute environmental sustainability assessments – A review

Our concept of ESJ assumes fair sharing of responsibilities among different actors, ensuring that those who are most responsible and capable do the most. For example, the Earth Commission has developed principles for sharing responsibilities for cities and companie

future work should calculate the Planetary Boundaries globally for each ecosystem first, and then downscale them by country.

and even at smaller scales

Discussion on how to downscale the climate change boundary has now become a political and equity issue more than a scientific issue. For example, how does one decide the allocation of the CO2 emissions? Should the past emissions be considered? Should the amount of emissions account for the current welfare of the countries, allowing less developed countries to emit more? Or, is it sufficient to calculate a global per capita value that is the same everywhere?

With an ecosystem focus, the boundaries are manageable (see also Section 3) because processes and feedback are better known. In this regard, the “Regime Shift Database” (https://www.regimeshifts.org/) is a very useful tool. It collects many regime shifts documented in socio-ecological systems and those that affect ecosystem services and human wellbeing, at different scales (global, sub-global/regional, local/landscape). This database contains information about drivers, feedback, ecosystem services involved, temporal and spatial scale, reversibility and confidence related to each observed regime shift.

Studies published so far either use a per-capita approach that assigns a value derived from the global threshold, whether it can have consequences on the stability of the Earth System or not, or they calculate a local boundary that ignores the global relevance of the concept. Only Zipper et al. (2020) have developed a framework for the regional application of the freshwater Planetary Boundary. This framework is able to combine both a fair share based on the global boundary and a local safe operating space based on locally relevant control and response variables. They divided the water Planetary Boundary into six sub-boundaries as per Gleeson et al. (2020), which reflect the different functions of water within the Earth System, and represent five different stores of water (atmospheric water, soil moisture, surface water, groundwater and frozen water). Each store of water can either have a boundary only at the global/local level, in which case only the relevant boundary will be used, or it can be relevant at both scales. In this case, if the control variable of the boundary is different for the global and the local scale, two boundaries will result, with two different control variables. If the control variable is the same, the more conservative boundary will be

The review is organized around three key questions:1-How can one downscale a global concept (with physical borders) for operability for a country (within political borders)? (Section 2).2-What is the role of interactions among different boundaries? (Section 3).3-Can the concept of ecosystem services help to downscale the Doughnut and define the life within the SJOS? (Section 4).

Yet few cities and companies currently have such targets.

Highlights•Downscaling seven of nine planetary boundaries indicators to the city scale-level.•Extended-Environmental Input-Output analysis is used to estimate cities’ footprints.•The Planetary Boundaries framework is a controlling tool for cities footprints.•City-level carbon footprint is higher than the national-level by 17%.

doughnut economics does questionthe dominant economic growth paradigm [1,14]. How-ever, Brand et al. [49] see the absence of upper limits onthe social foundation as a particular limitation of thedoughnut, proposing that ‘societal boundaries’ areneeded to address injustice and slow the metabolism ofsocieties that overshoot ecological boundaries. Indownscaling efforts, determining such societal bound-aries would require powerful local leadership and in-tensive public engagement to foster their legitimacywhile also helping to identify the social and culturalresources that can support collective self-restraint [49].Such engagement may also help to counter the interestsof powerful actors who oppose socioeconomic limits orbenefit from greater inequality [69].

Translating the ambition behind the doughnut to localaction is inherently political given the demand for socialand economic shifts that imply a significant redistribu-tion of power and resources [23,65]. Critical social sci-ence research highlights the need for principles tounderpin such decision-making processes, ensuring thatgovernance for sustainable development is transparent,accountable, and responsive, particularly to those whoare marginalised [49].

Thisraises questions about the mechanisms to coordinate andmonitor change across scales, as well as the challenge ofmaintaining coherence over time while wider prioritiesand goals may shift. Given this, and the plethora of localgovernance institutions and arrangements that exist,successfully deploying the doughnut will require re-newed attention to coordination across multilevel gov-ernance regimes [5,53].

he concept of planetary boundariesprioritising scientific expertise and discussed primarily inacademic debates [14], and the doughnut commonlyappealing to policy-makers and practitioners at nationalor subnational scales, neither has the traction acrossspatial scales that has been achieved through the steerby the UN in the case of SDGs.

If the doughnut is to bea practical tool for governance it will need to involve newconversations incorporating political institutions, civilsociety organisations, and the wider public

downscaling poses the additional complexity ofunderstanding place-based dynamic systems to identifypathways that are safe and just over time [26,37]. Incomparison to national processes, where issues are ad-dressed by separate government departments and siloedpolicy agendas [22], local institutions may be better ableto generate integrative place-based policy and action[43,44]. However, institutional capacity and integrationmechanisms may be needed to support these kinds ofpolicies [45]. Applications of the doughnut present fur-ther challenges in this regard because of a need to in-tegrate and respond to changing scientific knowledgeregarding non-linear change, tipping points, interactionsand feedbacks [35], for which it may be difficult toidentify the implications for local contexts.

Downscaling the doughnut may require more attentionto connectivity across scales than has been demanded bypast approaches to local governance for sustainable de-velopment. The task of downscaling global models in-tensifies established challenges around goal setting,indicator selection, data availability and ongoing mon-itoring [18,22,23,26,39] because it requires goal setting tobe informed by an understanding of context-specificsocial and ecological trends and how they interact toinfluence both local and planetary outcomes. There areparticular complications in incorporating a burden-sharing approach that explores the extent to which localactivity contributes to global trends and problems.