PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Environ. Sci.

Sec. Biogeochemical Dynamics

Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1643879

This article is part of the Research TopicWhat’s Ahead: Navigating the Future of Environmental ScienceView all 6 articles

Navigating Earth's Biogeochemical Dynamics: Integrating Elemental Cycles, Anthropogenic Pressures and Planetary Boundaries

Provisionally accepted
  • University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Anthropogenic activities increasingly disrupt Earth's biogeochemical cycles, threatening the integrity and resilience of critical planetary systems. This perspective paper highlights the pivotal role of biogeochemical cycles in global sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and water scarcity, underlining feedbacks that exacerbate ecosystem degradation and diminish Earth's self-regulating capacity. Advances in integrated Earth system models demonstrate the necessity of capturing nutrient interactions to accurately predict ecosystem productivity and carbon sequestration, particularly under nutrient-limited conditions. The emergence of novel entities introduces unprecedented vulnerabilities to elemental cycles, with their long-term impacts and planetary boundary exceedances still poorly understood. These challenges, coupled with nutrient boundary exceeding and ongoing climate change, regional variability and nonlinear and cascading responses emphasize an urgent need for interdisciplinary research, enhanced monitoring, and robust regulatory frameworks, supported by advances in modeling, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

Keywords: Climate Change, pollution, biogeochemical cycles, novel entity, Planetary boundaries

Received: 09 Jun 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Slaveykova. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Vera I Slaveykova, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

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