Planetary Stewards for the Management of Planetary-Wide Risks
Discussion
James Quilligan:
"While commons remain the local and regional anchors of cooperation, planetary stewards will now manage planetary-scale risks, monitor biospheric health and well-being, coordinate emergency responses, and authorize public goods based on the useful energy that society has available and whether its use can be sustained over time (Odum and Odum 2001, 133--70). Rather than a world government that commands extraction or accumulates resources, the stewards would serve as a counterbalance to state sovereignty through the revaluation of cross-border energy systems. The skills and expertise of citizens, indigenous representatives, regional commons workers, and Earth systems researchers may qualify them to work in these institutions, along with scientific experts from various transnational and accountable bodies. Elected to these positions by local and regional publics, they would set ecological constraints, protect transboundary commons for health and safety, and act as cross-scale auditors for climate stability, biodiversity security, ocean integrity, atmospheric commons, planetary data, and monitoring systems (Richardson et al. 2023; Rockström et al. 2025).
To embark on these duties, there could be three departments:
- Planetary Commons Assembly (PCA)—created alongside the UN General Assembly to measure, set limits, and trigger corrective action as biophysical thresholds are breached
- UNTrusteeship Council (UNTC)—reestablished to guarantee equal decision-making on the security and provisioning of biophysical resources for Earth’s population
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—transformed into a board of accounting standards to provide input to bioregions and municipalities that act as trustees for planetary boundaries, and to states and corporations as their auditing authority
Citizen conventions that deliberate on biospheric issues may submit recommendations to these bodies (Archibugi 2008). Evidence-based reports may also be received from translocal assemblies, consisting of delegates from bioregions, youth and future generations, indigenous representatives, transnational civic movements, and scientific agencies. Experienced in ecological accounting for climate, forest, soil, water, and ocean systems, commons groups may develop digital governance hubs to manage the resources of their own regions using AI, Web4, or satellite tools. Similar technology may be used to track Earth systems health, community resilience, and biophysical energy flows. A further use of biophysical metrics is to bring the BRICS, G20, and G7 nations together with small states for deliberations on Earth’s ecological infrastructure. As the atmosphere, soil, water, plastics, biodiversity, and ecological limits become new trusteeships of governance, alongside peace and safety, this council would consider a hard ceiling for growth increases and the expansion of public welfare. They would start by examining biocapacity resilience as a window on planetary security, including mutual climate accounting, biodiversity credits, and planetary adaptation funds. Potentially evolving into a negotiating entity, the council may provide input to PCA, UNTC, and UNFCCC on the planet’s resource thresholds and its energy security across bioregions. In the meantime, the IMF, World Bank, and other banking, accounting, and financial institutions would base their biocapacity metrics on the rate at which energy is mobilized, transformed, and reinvested in the adaptive throughput of ecosystems (Cohen 1995, 161--364; Gilman 2025; Odum 2007, 209--20). Rather than a single currency maintained by the hegemonic reserves of a United States or China, this may lead to negotiations for a new monetary system based on the biopower rate of Earth’s resources (Liu, Yang, et al. 2021; Quilligan 2024, 12--13)."