Planetary Boundaries

For any system to remain viable in the long-term, it requires a negative feedback mechanism to stay within limits. In an ecologically sound economy, these limits must include local and global planetary boundaries, such as the maximum amount of carbon emissions allowed in the atmosphere before runaway global warming occurs.

As the economy nears a planetary boundary for a particular resource or waste stream, the protocol modulates its reserve ratio. Consequently, the regeneration incentive grows as the resource becomes scarce, increasing its effective price. This incentivises regeneration activities, and disincents the use of the targeted resource or waste stream - in this case, carbon dioxide.

As economic participants, we agree to alter our consumption and regeneration behaviour to remain within limits and to aim for targets defined by the distributed governance of the commons. Via a distributed consensus mechanism, we collectively set targets and boundaries in any relevant economic sector. The system then automatically realigns incentives for the entire group to navigate towards or away from them. Instead of post-mortem analysis after boundaries have already been crossed, crisis can be averted by pre-emptive collective action well before critical limits are reached.