Biodiversity threats from Red Lists are linked with patterns of international trade, identifying the ultimate instigators of the threats; developed countries tend to be net importers of implicated commodities, driving biodiversity decline in developing countries.

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Increasing population size and per capita impacts are making sustainability a difficult to goal to achieve; this Review explores possibilities for sustainable development.

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions.