This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

This chapter explores epistemic and organizational developments during the 1980s in fields such as climate and Earth system science, which today underpin global environmental governance. Operating within wider scientific networks and coordinating with organizations like United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the Rockefeller Foundation, Stockholm-based individuals and institutions played decisive roles in international processes that took place at the interface of science and politics, also resulting in new institutions. The chapter explains how the Beijer Institute, led by Gordon Goodman, and Bert Bolin’s Meteorological Institute at Stockholm University helped orchestrate pivotal meetings in Villach, Austria, and Bellagio, Italy, that directly contributed to the 1987 Brundtland Report, provided impetus for the establishment of the IPCC in 1988, and increased the political stakes of climate change. The foundational stories of several Stockholm-based science and sustainable development-oriented institutions established during this period – the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, the Stockholm Environment Institute, and the re-constituted Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics – are also elaborated.

There is an enduring connection within the human consciousness between forests and climate, whereby forests are understood to influence climate and that clearing the woods or planting trees changes climate. From several centuries, this idea exploded onto public awareness with the belief that clearing forests improved climate. The drive for climate betterment gave way to concern for a decline in rainfall as the forests were cleared, and the nineteenth century saw repeated calls in all reaches of the world to reforest denuded lands to increase rainfall. Meteorologists, however, dismissed an influence of forests on climate, and the science of forest meteorology was forgotten. Now, forests are again recognized for their climate benefits. Like our forebears, we again talk of purposely using forests to improve climate. Protecting existing forests, restoring degraded forests, and planting new forests are seen as critical to solving the climate problem. That the biosphere is fundamental to, not separate from, climate is a core tenet of the newly emerging Earth system science. This realization is not new. It is borne from the long, controversial chronicle of forests and climate change.

Forests regulate climate through exchanges of energy and materials with the atmosphere. The idea that forests affect climate is not new. A vigorous debate about deforestation, reforestation, and climate change began during European settlement of the Americas, spreading to all regions of the world before collapsing in the early 1900s. The story of forests and climate change is told as being scientifically wrong and advanced for political, economic, or cultural reasons, but it has not been told from a modern scientific perspective. In fact, it represents the foundation for the interdisciplinary study of Earth as a system. Many of the questions posed in today’s study of climate change and climate solutions have their origins in the forest-climate question. The multicentury controversy over forests and climate change is a narrative in which purposeful modification of climate is longstanding, but by felling or planting trees. Earth system science is a centuries old idea, conceived in the long-held belief that forests influence climate and doomed to fail by the disciplinary specialization of the sciences. Narrow-mindedness prevented a vision of the world as an interconnected system.