From Planetary Boundaries to Regional Action: Remote Sensing Within Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessments

Accelerating environmental degradation and the continued overshoot of planetary boundaries highlight the urgent need for scientifically grounded sustainability assessments that operate across scales. While the planetary boundaries framework provides a global reference for safe environmental limits, its translation to regional and local contexts remains a methodological and practical challenge. In response, this study presents a novel scalable framework for conducting regionally explicit assessments of absolute environmental sustainability, grounded in the planetary boundaries framework. The central objective is to enable scientifically robust and globally comparable evaluations that remain sensitive to local environmental and socioeconomic conditions. The method integrates historical environmental datasets, and satellite-based Earth observation, to assess environmental impacts at the regional scale. A structured three-step process is introduced: (1) regional thresholds are derived from historical reference conditions; (2) thresholds are validated using Earth observation; and (3) environmental impacts are quantified against the validated thresholds to detect transgressions. The framework was tested in the urban core of Kiruna, northern Sweden, across five planetary boundary indicators. The results reveal substantial boundary transgressions, most notably for genetic diversity, which reaches 269 extinctions per million species-years, and for land system change, where the regional threshold is fully exceeded. These findings illustrate both the analytical value and the methodological challenges of applying planetary boundaries at fine spatial scales. Kiruna, northern Sweden, was selected as a case study due to its role as a European mining center, its location within Sámi territories, and the overlap between resource extraction and settlement. The case study illustrates the difficulty of applying planetary boundaries at fine spatial scales. This highlights the need for careful interpretation and improved calibration when downscaling global thresholds to local conditions. Ultimately, the framework reveals the potential and limitations of regionalizing planetary boundaries, highlighting the importance of methodological transparency and contextual nuance in sustainability assessment.