Fundamentally, a framework such as planetary boundaries is inevitable – a necessity if we want to successfully navigate our future through the rising risk landscape of the Anthropocene. For millennia, humans exploited the environment and advanced societies, agriculture and in due course modern industry, while still remaining a relatively small world on a big planet. Sure, we experienced local and regional environmental problems, even collapse, but these never caused impacts at the Earth system scale – until we entered the Anthropocene in the 1950s, exponentially raising the human pressures on all Earth systems: from species loss, to overuse of water, degradation of land, eutrophication of water ways, depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, to destabilising the climate system. And it was not until we were several decades into the Anthropocene that we started seeing signs of having reached a saturation point. We saw the first signs of hitting the biophysical ceiling of the capacity of the planet to uphold life support systems. We enter the new millennium with a novel scientific insight: we as humanity are at risk of destabilising the entire planet, thereby undermining the ability to support future generations on Earth.