Like many factors exercising environmental stress on the Earth, space debris is growing at an exponential pace. Immediate action is required to mitigate the growing risk of collision and assure a sustainable use of Space - a common good - in the future. The Green Species project by Professor Camilla Colombo of the Politecnico di Milano tries to tackle such issues. And for this project Colombo received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council. Green Species, “Robust control of the space debris population to define optimal policies and an economic revenue model for sustainable development of space activities”, will define an interdisciplinary approach for the modelling of space debris and the elaboration of estimates about its evolution. A probabilistic model of space debris taking into consideration all physical, economic and political variables will be developed. The innovative aspect is that the project will incorporate the management of the debris by means of a robust controller applied to the space debris model, described as a complex dynamic system. The ideal feedback control actions will be converted into policies and guidelines through quantitative indicators, to evaluate both the environmental impact and the social and economic benefit of space missions in the journey to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Green Species will also propose a new economic model for the definition of a credit system for a sustainable space leveraging on global climate management approaches. The project will allow the creation of the Space Sustainability Lab for advanced modelling and control of the debris through high-performance computing and virtual reality. Green Species was selected among more than 2,200 proposals received by the ERC. If we consider that this year only 14.4% of the projects submitted have obtained funding this is a great result for the Politecnico di Milano.