Facilitating the Planetary Boundaries Fresco at the Stockholm Resilience Centre

Written by Elise van Breda
Published on: September 17, 2024

Can you believe it? We facilitated a workshop on the Planetary Boundaries Framework at the renowned Stockholm Resilience Centre!

When my partner Joy van Breda and I first started exploring the science behind the Planetary Boundaries a few years ago, we never imagined we would end up facilitating a workshop on it at one of the institutes behind the framework itself. But last week, we had the exciting opportunity to pilot a Planetary Boundaries Fresco workshop session at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

We were nervous about leading a workshop on a framework developed by some of the participants themselves (including Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Ingo Fetzer, and Uno Svedin). However, seeing how well everyone received the workshop was incredibly rewarding, and we got great feedback to help us further improve the tool.

This workshop originally came from France, and we are really grateful to the creators and the community for making it available in English for international deployment (a big thank you to Arthur de Lassus, Jacques Lamoine and Agnès Pondaven). Since we picked up the tool in May, we have worked hard to improve the English translation, refine the pedagogy, and ensure the science is spot-on. Simplifying complex science is tricky, and some of the nuances were lost during the translation from English to French and back. We enjoyed going over every card and link thoroughly, which helped us even better understand planetary boundary science. Facilitating the workshop at the institute was the perfect chance to pilot some of these changes and gather valuable feedback.

We didn’t want to waste precious printer ink, so we used paper clips to attach the updated texts to the cards, making it feel like a real workshop pilot! All in all, it has been such a rewarding experience, and we are excited to implement the feedback and continue raising planetary awareness and promoting biosphere stewardship with our fellow English facilitators Ash Goddard and Mahi Patki. A huge thank you to the Stockholm Resilience Centre for hosting us, to Tim Daw and Antoine Bonel for tirelessly promoting and making this workshop possible, and to all the participants for making it a great session, including those who had already left when we took the group picture!

Everyone interested in the workshop should check out our upcoming online sessions. Sign up to meet cool people and learn something new!

Elise van Breda

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