Allocating planetary boundaries to large economies: Distributional consequences of alternative perspectives on distributive fairness

•Downscaling PBs to the national level increases their policy relevance.•We use allocation approaches from the climate change literature on effort sharing.•Diverging equity considerations play out differently for countries and PBs.•Environmental footprints of EU, US, China & India are mostly higher than scaled PBs.•Methodology and results can inform national target setting for global SDG ambitions. The planetary boundaries (PBs) framework proposes global quantitative precautionary limits for human perturbation of nine critical Earth system processes. Together they define a global safe operating space for human development. Translating the global limits to the national level increases their policy relevance. Such translation essentially divides up the global safe operating space. What is considered fair distribution is a political decision and there is no globally agreed principle that can be applied. Here, we analyse the distributional consequences of alternative perspectives on distributive fairness. We scale the global limits of selected PBs to resource budgets for the EU, US, China and India, using three allocation approaches from the climate change literature. Furthermore, we compare the allocated budgets to 2010 environmental footprints of the four economies, to assess their performance with respect to the selected PBs. The allocation approaches are based on (1) current shares of global environmental pressure (‘grandfathering’); (2) ‘equal per capita’ shares, and (3) ‘ability to pay’ to reduce environmental pressure. The results show that the four economies are not living within the global safe operating space. Their 2010 environmental footprints are larger than the allocated budgets for all approaches and parameterisations analysed for the PBs for climate change and biogeochemical flows, and, except for India, also for the PB for biosphere integrity. Grandfathering was found to be most favourable for the EU and US for all PBs, and ability to pay as least favourable. For climate change and biogeochemical flows, ability to pay even resulted in negative resource budgets for the two economies. In contrast, for China and India, equal per capita allocation and ability to pay were most favourable. Results were sensitive to the parameterisation. Accounting for future population growth in the equal per capita approach benefits India, with lower budgets for the EU, US and China, while accounting for future economic growth in ability to pay benefits the EU and