Climate Crisis and the Tragedy of the Commons
Environmental thinkers of the 1960s often reached for the image of Spaceship Earth to capture the unique and fragile environmental conditions on which life on Earth depends. Diplomat Adlai Stevenson, economists Barbara Ward and Kenneth E. Boulding, and the inventor and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller, who popularized the idea in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), invoked this metaphor to envision humanity aboard a single vessel sailing through the void of space. All on one voyage, on one ship. There is no second ship waiting in orbit, no rescue boat for the selected few. The stock of resources on board is finite. No resupply is possible. Survival depends on prudent use of common resources, collective stewardship, and vigilant maintenance of the ship and its life-support systems.
The metaphor of Spaceship Earth conveys a simple truth – there is no backup planet, no alternative habitat, no exit for humans. Regardless of arbitrary political divisions or differences in wealth, we share a destiny as a species. Our well-being and survival hinge on environmental conditions, natural resources, and planetary systems: a stable climate, sufficient amounts of fresh water, healthy oceans, fertile soil, and rich biodiversity. These planetary systems are large, shared across time and space, transcending individual life or generations, yet vulnerable to human harm. Overuse, depletion, and damage do not remain contained; they ultimately rebound upon all.
The message from the Spaceship Earth crew is clear: care for the shared environment. Use resources sustainably, wisely, and with restraint. Act not as plunderers, spoilers, or vandals but as stewards of a common world. Cooperate, make rules, and respect them for the collective good. If you don’t, your only home will become the site of its own undoing.
Pollution sink as a common-pool resource
The thin atmospheric shell that envelops our planet is one of the essential planetary systems that makes Earth habitable, shielding life from radiation, enabling the water cycle, and regulating climate and temperature. The atmosphere serves as a key repository for greenhouse gases, accumulating and retaining them over time, shaping the Earth’s energy balance and climate system. Anyone can deposit greenhouse gases and other pollutants into this global common sink. Because human activities can significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and release other harmful air pollutants (e.g., ozone layer-depleting hydrofluorocarbons), and because their effects are felt worldwide, regulation is necessary.
To use a term from resource economics, the atmosphere’s capacity to retain greenhouse gases is a common good. As a distinct type of good, different from private, public, or club goods, common goods have two key characteristics: they are non-excludable, and they are finite or rivalrous. Non-excludability means that it is impossible to prevent someone from using it. In the case of the atmospheric sink, it means that it is hard to prevent someone from polluting, and also that no one can be insulated from its impacts. When the USA, China, or Elon Musk put thousands of tons of CO₂ into the air, this gas does not stay in the place where it was emitted or within national borders. It increases the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in our one shared atmosphere.
Finite means that one person’s use of a good reduces the amount or quality available to others. In the case of the atmospheric pollution sink, it means that adding waste by some makes less space for someone else’s waste, and that the pollution sink can be depleted. In the case of greenhouse gases, a political decision was made to define overuse by the concentration of CO₂ that will keep global warming between 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial levels. These thresholds are derived from scientific expertise and climate modeling. They mark the point beyond which climate impacts are expected to become severe, widespread, and potentially irreversible, with dangerous consequences for both nature and human societies.
Commons Dilemma
Due to the two characteristics – non-excludability and rivalry – common goods can face what has become known as the tragedy of the commons. This phrase was popularized by American ecologist Garret Hardin in a short but influential article, The Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968. Hardin argued that common resources are bound to be depleted because users tend to act in their own individual, short-term interests, seeking to extract the maximum possible benefit from the shared resource pool. When this strategy is chosen by most, the result is the rapid overuse of the commons. Even when some actors attempt to introduce rules for collective use, the rational choice for a self-interested individual is to ignore such rules, fearing that restraint will merely allow others to capture the benefits. In Hardin’s view, the tragedy of the commons is inevitable unless the commons are privatized or put under state control.
American economist Elinor Ostrom disagreed with Hardin’s parable. In her view, the users of common resources do not face tragedy but a dilemma: they can act independently and take as much as possible for personal gain, thereby overusing the resource in the short run and ending up with a collective tragedy. Alternatively, they can cooperate and devise an effective system of collective use that allows everyone to obtain a fair share while safeguarding the sustainability of the resource for the future. Ostrom’s pathbreaking empirical research, for which she was awarded the Nobel prize in 2009, demonstrated that in many real-world contexts, users do not behave as plunderers. Instead, they are capable of coming together to create effective systems of rules that regulate collective use and secure the equitable and long-term benefits of common resources for all.
Based on studies of Swiss grazing pastures, Japanese forests, Spanish irrigation systems, and other cases, Ostrom outlined an institutional model of commons governance that can successfully avoid the tragedy. Sustainable collective management emerges when it is clear who may use the resource, where its boundaries are, when rules governing use match local circumstances, and when the users have a say in shaping and changing them. Successful arrangements also depend on monitoring that makes misuse visible, on proportionate sanctions that discourage abuse, and on ways to resolve conflicts quickly and fairly.
Climate Change as a Tragedy of the Commons
Sadly, the atmosphere is not governed as a grazing pasture in the Swiss Alps or as a forest in Japan. It remains, by and large, a freely accessible no man’s land, appropriated free of charge and used without binding limits. There is no collective, all-encompassing system of rules and emission limits binding for all that reflects the global commons nature of the atmospheric carbon sink.
There were attempts to create a system that would limit the use by the largest emitters. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 under the UNFCCC framework, included obligatory emission reduction targets for 40 developed countries (the goal was to get to 5% below 1990 emission levels). While ambitious and consistent with the historic responsibility of the industrialized Global North for climate change, the Kyoto Protocol did not create a global system. More tragically, many industrialized countries that were bound to reduce emissions chose to defect. Faced with the Ostromian dilemma between individual interests or collectively imposed limits, they opted for Hardin’s “rationality” – self-interested, short-term-oriented, benefit-maximizing behavior that refuses restraint for the sake of others.
The Paris Agreement, the current framework for regulating emissions, departs even further from attempts to establish an effective system of collective governance of our shared atmospheric pollution sink. While most countries are parties to the agreement (with the exception of Iran, Libya, Yemen, and the United States, whose infamous second withdrawal will take effect in 2026), the Paris framework merely asks states to set their own nationally determined contributions to emission reductions. To function as a system of effective global commons governance, it would need to move beyond voluntary pledges toward a regime that clearly defines the available carbon budget, sets overall emission limits, allocates allowances to countries according to principles of fair share, monitors use, enforces compliance, penalizes free-riding, and embeds climate action within a multilevel and participatory governance structure.
The EU’s Green Deal climate policy can be described as a form of commons governance. It includes binding EU-wide emission-reduction goals, nationally binding targets for member states, reporting requirements, and sanctions in case of non-compliance. The EU, however, remains a small club of just over two dozen countries. Its share of global greenhouse gas emissions has fallen to approximately 6 percent in recent years, down from higher levels in previous decades due to consistent reductions. Meanwhile, emissions from the largest emitters, China, the United States, and India, continue to rise. While both China and India plan to reduce emissions after 2030, the United States, under Donald Trump, has effectively cancelled all climate change mitigation policies. At the same time, emissions produced by the world’s richest one percent (responsible for nearly 16 percent of global CO₂ emissions in 2019) are rising, driven by technological inventions and luxury consumption, while remaining largely outside monitoring systems and regulatory control.
Globally, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. In 2025, the annual average CO2 concentration reached 426.6 ppm, the highest level in more than two million years. This concentration places humanity well beyond the safe operating conditions identified by Earth system science, which was set at 350 ppm. With CO₂ emissions still rising, keeping global warming below 1.5°C has become nearly impossible. At current emission rates, the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C will be exhausted before 2030 (as illustrated by the carbon clock). The 1.5°C threshold has long been regarded as critical for preventing permafrost thaw, large-scale ice-sheet loss, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and biodiversity collapse. Crossing this threshold substantially increases the likelihood of dangerous climate change marked by extreme, intense, and unpredictable weather events that threaten the health, safety, and well-being of millions of people worldwide.
Freeriding on a Titanic?
A warmer world and its potentially dangerous weather conditions are a tragedy of the overuse of our common pollution sink. This tragedy arises from uncoordinated and largely unregulated actions by individual states and social groups, the disproportionate use of common resources by some, and the unwillingness of all relevant actors to adopt collective solutions. These choices are not inconsequential – they accumulate into harms that are ultimately borne by all. They represent serious ethical failures by the commoners. As users of the shared atmospheric pollution sink, all actors have duties to prevent the destruction of its utility, to cooperate in establishing collective institutional frameworks for its sustainable and equitable use, and to refrain from free-riding.
Can this tragedy still be averted? According to the IPCC’s latest assessment, limiting global warming to around 2°C requires greenhouse gas emissions to peak immediately, decline by roughly one quarter by 2030, and reach net zero in the early 2070s. Achieving this trajectory demands far stronger international cooperation and effective commons governance. This is now both an ethical and an urgent existential demand. The choice is no longer accidental but conscious and deliberate: to cooperate, or to accelerate collective demise. Either we board Spaceship Earth, transforming ourselves from uncoordinated plunderers into cooperative stewards of a shared world. Or we remain on a Cruiseship Titanic, where some linger on the upper decks, sipping cocktails by heated pools, confident that privilege will secure them access to the lifeboats, and some reject collective rules under the naïve belief that the vessel is unsinkable even as it steams at full speed toward an iceberg.
The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.