Human living patterns are now a force powerful enough to affect the natural Earth systems that support our existence, new research has found.
In just the past 60 years, global humanity's use of energy and resources and its impact on natural systems including atmosphere, oceans and forests, have accelerated at an unprecedented rate, according to a new report from Australian and Swedish climate researchers.
Australian National University researcher Professor Will Steffen said the period from 1950 onwards has been a "Great Acceleration", where the human imprint on the planet was much greater than the preceding 200 years of the Industrial Revolution.
Extraordinary increases in population, energy use, fertiliser, water consumption and other planet-impacting activities have coincided with dramatic rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss and other factors that signal a decline in planetary resilience since the end of the World War II, Prof Steffen said.
Continuing those patterns of development - particularly as Asia and Africa become more urbanised - will be unsustainable.
"We are starting to destabilise our own planetary life support system," Prof Steffen said.
Prof Steffen, lead researcher on the new paper produced with scientists from Sweden's Stockholm University, said humanity's new ability to shape the planet represents the start of a new epoch in the Earth's history - the Anthropocene era.
The report concludes that in little over two generations humanity has become "a planetary-scale geological force".
"Hitherto human activities were insignificant compared with the biophysical Earth system and the two could operate independently. However it is now impossible to view one as separate from the other."
The release of the Great Acceleration paper, published on Friday in the journal Anthropocene Review, coincides with the publication of another piece of research co-authored by Professor Steffen in the respected journal Science.
The second paper identifies nine global systems, such as fresh water supplies, soil fertility, forest loss and atmospheric carbon dioxide, that societies rely on.
It finds that four of the nine key systems have crossed "planetary boundaries" into risky territory.
Prof Steffen said in 2010, developed nations were responsible for the lion's share of consumption - accounting for 74 per cent of global GDP but just 18 per cent of the population.
However data showed China was now the largest emitter of CO2 globally, and only about 30 per cent of those emissions could be attributed to production for western consumption.
"Certainly today it's still true that the bulk of the consumption is in the west but it's changing," he said.
"If China and India follow the same development pathways we did then you're going to get the same environmental outcomes - a lot more pressure on the global environment."
Professor Steffen said alternative development patterns could still maintain living standards for a growing global population.
"The present direction we are going economically and technologically is leading us into problems that will erode our own wellbeing," he said.
"We have to recognise that this issue is not about saving the Earth or saving the environment - it's about saving us."
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