Operationalized Planetary Boundaries framework to inform decision making for countries, cities and businesses

Over the past few centuries, human-induced effects on the global environment have escalated. Further pressure on the Earth System could destabilise critical planetary processes and trigger abrupt or irreversible environmental changes that would be harmful or even catastrophic for human wellbeing. There is an urgent need for concerted global efforts to reduce environmental impacts and guarantee a safe operating space needed to support global sustainable development and wellbeing of humankind.
But how do we know what is "safe operating space"? The Planetary Boundary (PB) framework defines boundaries for nine fundamental global processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system and jointly define a global "safe operating space" in which human society can develop and thrive.
Since its introduction in 2009, the PB framework has generated considerable interest within the policy, governance, and business community to inform efforts toward global sustainability. It has provided input to the United Nations' seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and has informed EU policy, as well as national policies and targets in individual countries.
Although the PB framework was initially designed to inform global scale decisions, some recent examples show a growing interest in applying the PBs within sub-global scales (e.g. country, city, company) to inform strategic planning and operational decisions. However, translating planetary boundaries from global to sub-global levels involves numerous challenges. In this project (commissioned by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment), we access and evaluate existing options to translate the PB framework to the sub-global level and propose several practical solutions and potential ways forward.