This chapter centers on the 1967–1968 “Swedish initiative” in the United Nations that led to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. The diplomatic initiative, underpinned by Swedish scientific expertise, and the Stockholm Conference’s four-year preparatory period marked the emergence of environmental diplomacy and global environmental governance, as well as the rise of North–South tensions over environment and development. The chapter also explains how the autumn 1967 environmental awakening in Sweden, prompted in part by a best-selling environmental polemic by biochemist Hans Palmstierna and an exposé on acid rain by soil scientist Svante Odén, set the stage for the UN intervention orchestrated by Swedish diplomats Inga Thorsson and Sverker Åström. Also that year, as examined in this chapter, the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) conference, hosted by the Meteorological Institute at Stockholm University, demonstrated Stockholm’s central place and Bert Bolin’s leading role in the growing international coordination of climate science.

This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

Previous research has established Sweden as a case of environmental exceptionalism: a pioneering country with the Stockholm Conference in 1972, a long tradition of nature interest and out of door practices, and early reforms such as a ban on CFCs (1989), a carbon tax (1991), and early and strong advocacy for cap and trade solutions on the European level, to mention a few. However, many indicators demonstrate that Sweden’s vanguard position is no longer obvious, a change perceptibly manifested in the timid performance of Sweden in hosting the Stockholm+50 two-day commemoration conference in 2022. The chapter offers an analysis of why small-state progressivism and attention to Global South interests was a rational choice for the nonaligned nation-state of Sweden in the Cold War. The chapter argues further that as this position is now eroding, it should be seen as a consequence of a wider shift in the political landscape with conservative populist nationalism undermining the electoral base for exceptionalism, policies that after the change to a conservative government in 2022 have accelerated.

This chapter offers a brief environmental history of modern Sweden. The focus is on identifying factors that can explain the role Sweden took as an early adopter of environmental conservation in the twentieth century and as a promotor of international cooperation and agreements. Environmentalism became a defining feature of civil society, and the political landscape from left to right absorbed environmentalism and climate change as relevant issues. This was propelled by a decisive “environmental turn” in the 1960s, where public intellectuals, artists, authors, and activists nurtured public support. A feature of Sweden’s environmental exceptionalism was “realist sustainability” in a corporatist tradition. The state made environmental reforms, while also protecting wealth-building industry, including extractivist industries central to the highly natural resource-based Swedish economy. Another key factor in the “Stockholm story” was the concentration of power – in politics, industry, organizations, science, and media – in the capital, which also started to cultivate its position in an increasingly globally competitive game where being green was a key component of success.

This chapter describes the continued, still ongoing, trajectory of the Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework and how it has co-evolved with the “Anthropocene,” another concept with Stockholm roots. During the course of the second decade of the new century, ethical aspects were increasingly taken on board. Will Steffen, former Director of the Stockholm-based International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), was the lead author of a second PB article in Science in 2015. Like the first Nature article in 2009, a sizable share of the co-authors had institutional involvement or other affiliation with Stockholm. This new iteration developed the ethical challenges of sharing the “safe operating space” inside boundaries among regions, nations, and societal groups. Steffen was also a member of the Anthropocene Working Group appointed by the Stratigraphic Committee to make the case for Anthropocene as a new geological era. The chapter articulates the significance of the overlap between the PB and Anthropocene processes and debates. These drew considerable interest from scholars in the social sciences and humanities, which helped make both issues concerns of epistemology and Weltanschauung.

This chapter provides a comprehensive narrative of the central role of Stockholm in the evolution of climate change science, one of the most significant scientific specializations relevant for global environmental governance.. With roots in Stockholm-based Svante Arrhenius’ still remarkably precise calculations in the 1890s of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, the narrative shows how Carl-Gustaf Rossby, after an initial career in the United States, returned to Sweden from where he managed to build and maintain institutions and networks on both sides of the Atlantic in the postwar decades and secure a stable base for a new understanding of the geophysics and chemistry of climate. Swedish climate science, including expertise in glaciology, became recognized as world-leading, with an early and firm institutional foothold being established at Stockholm University. Of global environmental relevance, it produced entrepreneurial science diplomats like Bert Bolin, a climate scientist and founding chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This trust-building combination of institutions, networks, and policies enabled the continued evolution of Stockholm-based innovative platforms for global environmental governance leadership.

This chapter demonstrates how Sweden as a state, and in particular Stockholm as a city, has played an oversized role in the emergence of global environmental governance since the mid-1960s, with the 1972 Stockholm Conference on “the human environment” as a defining event. The chapter argues that “human” is a key word to identify the set of properties of Swedish society that can explain Sweden’s vanguard role, including strong popular movements, widespread social trust, robust social institutions, the high status of knowledge and research, and a rational positioning of Sweden as a progressive, nonaligned advocate of small state cooperation bringing advantages for both the country and its capital city. It is thus a counternarrative that is presented, in contrast to many conventional environmental narratives of decline, with theoretical and historiographical implications not only for environmental history but also for the understanding of what “environmental progress” might mean on the international level. The chapter identifies four “con”-words – contributing, connecting, convening, and contributing.

This prologue sets out the rationale of a book-length study of Stockholm as a central place in the rise of global environmental governance. The main reason is necessity. Ever since the 1970s, the importance of the 1972 UN Conference on “the human environment” has been underscored in the scholarly literature. However, precisely how this importance grew and why and how it was linked to Stockholm and Sweden have never been very well articulated. The prologue explains how the book intends to fill this gap with a rich “Stockholm story” based on primary sources. It also elaborates on the rationale of the book’s title. “The human environment” is a play on the multiple meanings of the words “human” and “environment.” Stockholm institutions and Swedish politics provided a human environment for work in science, diplomacy, and activism that engaged a highly international community of insightful human beings and their institutions and networks. Sharing many humane values, these actors have been turning threatened nature into planetary governable objects and hence a prerequisite for global environmental governance.

This chapter elaborates upon the latter part of the Stockholm Conference preparation period, including key Swedish science diplomacy interventions and the production of three landmark scientific reports on climate change, acid rain, and environmental monitoring. It also recounts the efforts of Maurice Strong and Barbara Ward to reconcile the emerging North–South divide ahead of Stockholm by organizing a meeting of development economists in Founex, Switzerland. The drafting of the Stockholm Declaration, as well as other aspects of the actual Conference, its parallel events, and its final outcomes, are examined. The chapter also explores other important early-1970s developments in Stockholm related to the Conference and the ongoing institutionalization of international climate science. These include the environmental turn at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences embodied by the launch of the journal Ambio in 1972, a large donation to the Academy by a Swedish industrialist that led to the establishment of the influential Beijer Institute, and the convening of another major GARP Conference in Stockholm in 1974.

This chapter explores epistemic and organizational developments during the 1980s in fields such as climate and Earth system science, which today underpin global environmental governance. Operating within wider scientific networks and coordinating with organizations like United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the Rockefeller Foundation, Stockholm-based individuals and institutions played decisive roles in international processes that took place at the interface of science and politics, also resulting in new institutions. The chapter explains how the Beijer Institute, led by Gordon Goodman, and Bert Bolin’s Meteorological Institute at Stockholm University helped orchestrate pivotal meetings in Villach, Austria, and Bellagio, Italy, that directly contributed to the 1987 Brundtland Report, provided impetus for the establishment of the IPCC in 1988, and increased the political stakes of climate change. The foundational stories of several Stockholm-based science and sustainable development-oriented institutions established during this period – the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, the Stockholm Environment Institute, and the re-constituted Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics – are also elaborated.

There is nowadays no shortage of books on the Arctic – and this is the last chapter of yet another one. What is different at the end of the read? To answer that question, let me start with a reflection on the understanding we had when we embarked upon writing this book. Despite the rich diversity of publications on the topic, it is possible to discern a few major lines of analysis in the growing body of literature on contemporary Arctic change. One such approach consists of attempts to map and take stock of state-of-the-art knowledge on multiple dimensions of environment, climate, and social conditions in the region. In this category we find the rising genre of “assessments,” many issued by the Arctic Council, of for example: biodiversity, pollution, human health, snow and ice, climate adaptation, impacts of climate change, and a range of other topics. The Arctic Human Development Reports (Einarsson et al., 2004; Fondahl & Larsen, 2014) also belong here, typically broad, multi-authored, anchored in new research, and accessible for wider policy and professional audiences. An attempt to synthesize this broad strand of knowledge was the Arctic Resilience Report (Carson & Peterson, 2016). It compiled an impressive amount of data from many knowledge areas and established better understanding of complex relationships but had less to say about how to interpret this new knowledge and how to use it to address the challenges.