A while ago we talked about a new framework for sustainability. It's the Stockholm Resilience Centre's wedding cake model of society above the environment and the economy above society. It says that there is no society beyond the environment and that the economy is the engine that runs the society.
The interpretation of the inner and outer rings is a little different, but this framework is also used to tackle climate change and the ideas are broadly the same. The idea that human economic and social activity cannot go beyond the outer ring and the stresses from climate change are interpreted in a similar way. The framework used for climate change has previously been described here.
https://www.su-re.co/post/vision-opportunity-space-and-climate-resilient-pathways-explained
The outer ring of the environment in the SDGs is called carrying capacity, and in the idea of carrying the world, it falls within the framework of the environment in the sustainability framework. Its outer workings push into the inner space through biological or physical stresses. The innermost frame is filled with social stresses, including the economy, and any expansion of that frame will narrow the space for resilience outside of it. The economy is the engine that keeps society running, but it also creates a lot of causal stresses. If we think of the earth as the outer frame, we can't go any further out than that at the moment, so it is impossible to increase the outer frame under the pressure of the inner stress. In such a situation, when we destroy the environment, the physical and biological stresses on the outside increase, and the resilience space in the middle decreases.
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