(James Carville's (political strategist for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign) famous phrase "It's the economy, stupid!" targeted voters' wallets, but the slight adjustment above targets our lungs, water, and our children's future)

The concept of Gross Domestic Product was developed in 1934 by economist Simon Kuznets and adopted as the global metric for economic performance in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference.

Ever since, GDP has fueled our obsessions: economic growth, stock markets, borders, geopolitical power, national security, and, nowadays, tariff wars, bunker buster bombs, and killing drones — yet lacks any measure of well-being.

Amid our busy schedules, we take for granted the ledger that truly matters: the health of Earth's biosphere — that thin, delicate layer of life clinging to this rock in space. Our "living skin", less than 20 km thick, is where all life exists.

Yuval Harari rightly reminds us that "there are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

The economy is a human story; the biosphere is the story, absolutely independent of our imagination - and it writes itself with or without us. To our dismay, it does not negotiate. Fashionable tariff wars don't bring it to the bargaining table. No compromises! Hubris and power are useless here.

The biosphere is the sole environment for our imagination, investments, and projects; it's our life support system. Yet we're dismantling it in plain view.

According to scientists, we face the greatest threat the planet has confronted since civilization emerged.

Global temperatures have already surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, painting a grim picture.

According to the WWF, wildlife populations have declined by 70 percent since 1970. Plastic now outnumbers fish in many parts of the oceans.

In the Amazon, the dry season has lengthened by 4 to 5 weeks over the last 40 years. If this continues, we'll face six-month dry seasons within 2 to 3 decades - conditions under which rainforests cannot survive, warns respected Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre. "If the dry season reaches 5 months, the rainforest becomes a savannah. And once it starts, it's irreversible", adds the scientist.

In the 1990s, the Amazon absorbed 1.5 billion tons of CO2 yearly; now it hardly manages 500 million tons.

Severe droughts once occurred every 20 years. Since 2005, four catastrophic droughts have struck (2005, 2010, 2015-2016, and 2023-2024 - the worst in history).

Thawing permafrost in Siberia, Canada, and Alaska could release 200+ billion tons of CO2 and methane by the end of this century - a time bomb under our pillows.

Combined with Amazon collapse, the total carbon release would render cooling impossible.

Earth has endured six mass extinctions - all natural. This would be the first caused by a single species: us.

Drowning in information yet starving for wisdom, we're burning our lifeboat and crafting the first self-deleting civilization.

This November, as leaders gather in Belem, Brazil - ground zero of the Amazon - for COP30, we face a final exam. This is likely to be our last narrow corridor to draw road maps that honor physics over politics. For the Amazon. For us all.

This is not prophecy; it is physics. Simple as that.

It's the biosphere, stupid!

 Texto original disponível AQUI.

As opiniões expressas nesta publicação são de responsabilidade do autor e não representam necessariamente o pensamento da instituição nem devem ser atribuídas ao Centro Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (CEBRI), aos seus integrantes ou aos seus apoiadores.