
Is Europe living within the limits of our planet?
Thie freshly publiched EEA-FOEN report explores two key questions related to Europe’s long-term environmental and climate ambitions: how to define a ‘safe operating space’ for Europe, and whether Europe’s environmental footprint is currently smaller or larger than its estimated ‘safe operating space’. A comparison of European footprints with European limits for the selected planetary boundaries shows that the European footprints exceed the European limits for three out of four Earth system processes, namely for the nitrogen cycle (expressed as nitrogen losses in this report) and the phosphorus cycle (expressed as phosphorus losses) — that is, for both biogeochemical flows considered — and for land system change (expressed as land cover anthropisation.