Barfuss, WolframDonges, Jonathan F.Lade, StevenKurths, Jürgen2019-06-172019-06-172041-1723http://hdl.handle.net/1885/164074Optimizing economic welfare in environmental governance has been criticized for delivering short-term gains at the expense of long-term environmental degradation. Different from economic optimization, the concepts of sustainability and the more recent safe operating space have been used to derive policies in environmental governance. However, a formal comparison between these three policy paradigms is still missing, leaving policy makers uncertain which paradigm to apply. Here, we develop a better understanding of their interrelationships, using a stylized model of human-environment tipping elements. We find that no paradigm guarantees fulfilling requirements imposed by another paradigm and derive simple heuristics for the conditions under which these trade-offs occur. We show that the absence of such a master paradigm is of special relevance for governing real-world tipping systems such as climate, fisheries, and farming, which may reside in a parameter regime where economic optimization is neither sustainable nor safe.The authors are grateful for financial support from the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, the Stordalen Foundation (via the Planetary Boundaries Research Network PB.net), the Earth League’s EarthDoc program, the Leibniz Association (project DOMINOES) and the Swedish Research Council Formas (Project Grant 2014-589).application/pdfen-AU© The Author(s) 2018t http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/201810.1038/s41467-018-04738-z2019-03-24Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License