Abstract
The claim that climate homeorhesis—non-equilibrium steady-state dynamics that underlie Earth’s long-term habitability—depends on an integrated biosphere–climate system capable of acting on its own is central to debates surrounding the Gaia hypothesis. This paper presents a proof of concept suggesting a minimal form of planetary agency based on a simple biosphere–climate system model operating through active inference. This means that the internal states of the system (biosphere) will appear to infer shifts in net incoming solar radiation (external states) through its boundary states, i.e. by integrating past and current surface temperatures (sensory states) and actively changing greenhouse forcing (active states) to maintain climate trajectories within geophysiological bounds. When surface temperature is altered by solar fluctuation changes, the system adjusts greenhouse and albedo parameters to restore expected climate trajectories, analogous to correcting sensory prediction errors in biological systems. Perturbing active states (e.g., imposed changes in albedo) does not reduce inference precision. Inference robustness decreases when the system’s degrees of freedom increase. Active inference falls, and thus climate homeorhesis fails when there is no biosphere activity (lifeless planet) or when it is decoupled from the climate system. Predictive behaviour operates within the range of solar constants consistent with life’s presence on Earth (~ 4 Ga to ~ 1.5 Ga expected in the future); outside this range, inference fails, undermining a putative form of planetary agency.
Subjects
- Climate sciences
- Ecology
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Prof. Michel Crucifix and Dr. Anselmo Gracia-Cantu for their helpful discussions. S.R. thanks Benjamin Rothman for his eternal support.
Funding
K.F. is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust (Ref: 226793/Z/22/Z). L.D. was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche, Luxembourg (Project code: 13568875) and (EP/S023925/1).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download DOCX )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rubin, S., Heins, C., Mitsui, T. et al. An elementary form of agency at planetary-scale.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-61878-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-61878-9
Keywords
- Climate homeorhesis
- Non-equilibrium steady-state (NESS)
- Gaia hypothesis
- Autopoiesis
- Free energy principle
- Synchronisation map
- Biological autonomy
Source: Ecology - nature.com
