Urban Climate Governance in the Amazon

The Earth System is facing boundaries to high anthropogenic pressures and, to create a safe operating space on Earth, the Planetary Boundary (PB) Framework has estimated nine global boundaries1 (Rockstrom et al. 2009). Although this framework, provides us with a “planetary playing field”, Raworth (2012) points to its missing “social dimension”: It describes a safe, but not necessarily a just operating space. With the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, Steffen et al. (2015) updated the PB Framework and placed it into the social context of the SDGs but did not provide pathways for just development inside the boundaries. Related to the planetary boundaries are tipping elements: subsystems of the Earth system that can be switched into a different state by small perturbations (Lenton et al. 2008). The Amazon is a tipping element: a combination of global warming and local land use change threaten its future and might turn the tropical forest into dry savannah (Nobre et al. 2016). Because of their potentially large impacts on the ecosystem and human well-being, planetary boundaries and their tipping points are of concern for policymaking and require a restructuring of governance arrangements to increase the resilience of socio-ecological systems (Folke et al. 2010).