Elsevier, The Lancet, Volume 398, 9 October 2021
Humanity, and indeed all of life on Earth, is at a crossroads. Over the past several decades, the scale of human impacts on Earth's natural systems has increased exponentially to the point where it exceeds our planet's capacity to absorb our wastes or provide the resources we are using. The result is a vast and accelerating transformation and degradation of nature.1 This includes not only global climate change but also global scale pollution of air, water, and soil; degradation of our planet's forests, rivers, coastal, and marine systems; and the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth.
