PARIS – French luxury and lifestyle business Kering, which owns brands including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, has published the first in a series of white papers on the concept of Planetary Boundaries in conjunction with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL).
The Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework was first introduced in 2009 as a science-based guidance system for human development on earth. The concept was developed by a group of environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Will Steffen from the Australian National University. The group wanted to define a ‘safe operating space for humanity‘ for the international community, including governments at all levels, international organisations, civil society, the scientific community and the private sector, as a precondition for sustainable development.
Marie-Claire Daveu, chief sustainability officer and head of international institutional Affairs at Kering, told Apparel Insider: “It’s an important step towards understanding the insights and opportunities that the Planetary Boundaries framework can provide business. Right now there is little understanding about how a companies’ impacts contribute to natural resource limitations globally and this is essential – we all need to stay within our own business ‘boundaries’ and contribute to meaningful change at a global level.
“The Planetary Boundaries framework is a fundamental element to include when designing the agenda for managing and mitigating our global environmental challenges. As businesses we need to go far beyond our single, individual issues and contribute to meaningful change at a global level.”
The fundamental principle on which the PB framework rests is that our actions are undermining the relatively stable conditions of the past 12,000 years. This unique period of stability of the climate, and of the earth system as a whole, known as the Holocene epoch, has allowed humanity to develop agriculture, settlements and the complex societies we have today.
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