UMass Amherst Economist Juan-Camilo Cárdenas Selected for Future Earth’s ‘Earth Commission’
Juan-Camilo Cárdenas, professor of economics, has been named to the second cohort of the Earth Commission, a broad group of international researchers from the natural and social sciences appointed by the global research network Future Earth, tasked with exploring some of the planet’s most pressing issues. Cárdenas’ research focuses on the potential of human groups to solve problems of collective action and cooperation, especially for the self-governed management of ecosystems that support life and the economy.
“The commission will have a mandate to work on a second assessment on how to design safe and just pathways within the eight planetary boundaries,” says Cárdenas, who earned a doctorate in resource and environmental economics from UMass Amherst. “In this phase, there will be a strong emphasis on the political economy associated with the concepts of justice, governance and economics.”
Last May, the inaugural Earth Commission launched the Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries for climate, biodiversity, freshwater, nutrients and aerosols — an operating space for human activity and a proposed roadmap for societal transformation. These quantified boundaries were published in Nature and provide one of the most holistic measurements of Earth’s finite limits, marking a significant change in understanding of how to protect people and the planet. The commission’s second major study has been accepted for publication and is expected to be released this May.
Building on this foundation, Cárdenas and 22 colleagues from around the world will refine and expand on the first commission’s findings by quantifying boundaries for new Earth system domains such as novel entities (including toxic substances) and the ocean, increasing its focus on the just transformations necessary across all of society, and highlighting the justice, governance and economic requirements for those transformations.
These renewed avenues of exploration will consider the complex interactions between natural and social systems, justice and human well-being to enhance the holistic Earth system boundaries framework in four key areas: safe and just boundaries; transformation pathways; justice, governance and economics; and translation, actors and agency.
In addition to his appointment at UMass Amherst, Cárdenas is a professor of economics at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and director of the Sustainable Development Goals Center for Latin America and the Caribbean. He is a member of the WWF Colombia board of directors, the Advisory Board of the Center for Behavior and the Environment RARE and former Scientific Board member at the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics in Stockholm.