The world faces twin challenges: delivering a decent standard of living for everyone, while living
within our environmental limits. These two interwoven concerns are depicted by Oxfam’s
‘doughnut model’, which provides a visual representation of a space between an environmental
ceiling (the outer edge of the doughnut) and a social foundation (the inner edge), where it is
environmentally safe and socially just for humanity to exist.
Oxfam’s new paper – ‘Is South Africa Operating in a Safe and Just Space?’ – applies this
concept to South Africa in order to assess the country’s performance across a range of
environmental and social domains. It identifies where policy interventions are most needed to
help develop a ‘safe and just’ society and economy.
Background
The original doughnut model, developed by Kate Raworth, former Oxfam senior researcher,
focused on a global perspective (Raworth, 2012). This incorporated earlier work from a team of
leading earth system scientists including Johan Rockström, Will Steffen, the Stockholm
Resilience Centre (SRC) and the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI), who identified a
range of environmental domains that are critical for the continued safe operation of the planet
(Rockström et al, 2009). In their paper ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating
Space for Humanity’, they highlighted the risk of crossing critical thresholds in the Earth’s
biophysical processes and sought to identify planetary boundaries, or tipping points, beyond
which vital Earth systems would become unpredictable and/or unsafe.
Though not without its critics, the planetary boundary approach has been used by the UN and
the European Commission, and by many civil society organisations. In 2013, the SRC and SEI
sought to develop a methodology to apply this approach at a national level, using Sweden as an
example (SRC and SEI, 2013). In 2015, the planetary boundaries were updated by Steffen et al
(2015).
Changes within these processes, driven by human activity, are already causing severe adverse
impacts on weather systems, as well as our ability to produce food and the availability of fresh
water. The boundaries for planetary loss of biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle have already
been breached, while the climate change boundary is dangerously close to being breached.
The updated report from Steffen et al. shows that the safe limit has also now been breached in
regards to the phosphorus cycle.1

Raworth’s work combined this ‘environmental ceiling’ with a proposed ‘social foundation’ below
which it was ‘unjust’ for people to fall. The combination of environmental ceiling and social
foundation is presented diagrammatically in what has become known as the ‘Oxfam doughnut
model’ (Figure 1).