Planetary Commons in lieu of the Anthropocene ecological crisis: New PNAS research proposing an overarching global institution

 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2301531121

 The global commons remain the closest example of global governance where multiple states have agreed to govern some, but not all, large elements of the Earth system, namely parts of the geosphere (deep seabed), hydrosphere (high seas), cryosphere (Antarctica), and the atmosphere (the climate system), while largely omitting the biosphere, and including outer space beyond the Earth system (19–22). Despite their potential to be governed as collective elements of the Earth system, there are several concerns related to the continued usefulness of the global commons as they are defined and governed today. The core of the problem is that the global commons, like international law more generally, have been negotiated by states within the context of the Holocene epoch, mainly to regulate resource access and use, geopolitical interests, and environmental protection under assumptions of a continuously stable Earth system, abundant resources to sustain life indefinitely, and predictable and relatively minor environmental disruptions to which humans can easily adapt through incremental governance interventions (23, 24). Given this conceptualization, the political and legal construct of global commons is unable to recognize and address governance challenges of an interlinked, continuously changing, and disrupted Earth system (25, 26).

  Humanity is rapidly exiting this safe operating space, as six of nine planetary boundaries are now assessed as crossed, including those for climate change, biosphere integrity, land use, interference with biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as novel entities and freshwater change (7, 28, 42, 43).

 An earth system governance approach will require an overarching global institution that is responsible for the entire Earth system, built around high-level principles and broad oversight and reporting provisions. This institution would serve as a universal point of aggregation for the governance of individual planetary commons, where oversight and monitoring of all commons come together, including annual reporting on the state of the planetary commons. At present, the United Nations General Assembly, or a more specialized body mandated by the Assembly, could be the starting point for such an overarching body, even though the General Assembly, with its state-based approach that grants equal voting rights to both large countries and micronations, represents outdated traditions of an old European political order. Novel arrangements, such as weighted voting or the addition of a United Nations Parliamentarian Assembly or a Global Deliberative Assembly might be needed to make governance at the planetary scale more representative, legitimate, just, effective, and reflective (104).