Six Out of Nine Planetary Boundaries Already Crossed

Six Out of Nine Planetary Boundaries Already Crossed

Editor’s Note: In 2015, a study developed nine indicators for planetary health, and corresponding nine threshold or boundaries. According to a recent study based on the same framework, six of the nine boundaries have already been crossed, while the other three are in the process of being crossed. This should come as a surprise to very few. The interesting fact about this new framework is that climate change is only one of the nine indicators in the new model, which is unlike in the mainstream environmental movement belief. This framework gives a much more holistic picture of the current ecological crisis than is common among the wider culture.


By Julia Conley/Commondreams

Scientists behind a new study on the crossing of the Earth’s “planetary boundaries” on Wednesday likened the planet to a sick patient, warning that six out of nine barriers that ensure the Earth is a “safe operating space for humanity” have now been breached.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and other international institutions analyzed 2,000 studies to update a planetary boundary framework developed in 2009 by the Stockholm Resilience Center, completing the first “complete check-up of all nine processes and systems that determine the stability and resilience of the planet.”

The boundaries for climate change and land use have been broken for decades as extractive industries have razed forests and planet-heating fossil fuel emissions have significantly increased since preindustrial times.

The “novel entities” boundary—pertaining to the accumulation of synthetic pollution from substances such as microplastics, pesticides, and nuclear waste—was quantified for the first time in the study, which was published in Science Advances.

Freshwater change—both “green” freshwater in soil and vegetation and “blue” freshwater in bodies of water—has also been breached, along with biogeochemical flows, or the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment, which can create ocean dead zones and algal blooms.

“We don’t know how long we can keep breaching these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm.”

The study marked the first time researchers quantified a control variable for the “biosphere integrity” boundary, which they found was breached long before the framework was introduced—in the late 19th century as the Industrial Revolution and other factors accelerated the destruction of the natural world.

Co-author Wolfgang Lucht called biosphere integrity “the second pillar of stability for our planet” next to climate change, and warned the pillar is being destabilized by humans “taking out too much biomass, destroying too much habitat, deforesting too much land. Our research shows that mitigating global warming and saving a functional biosphere for the future should go hand in hand.”

“This update on planetary boundaries clearly depicts a patient that is unwell, as pressure on the planet increases and vital boundaries are being transgressed,” said Johan Rockström, director of PIK. “We don’t know how long we can keep breaching these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm.”

The boundaries for atmospheric aerosol loading, or air pollution, and ocean acidification, are both close to being crossed, while the atmospheric ozone boundary is currently well below the “zone of increasing risk,” due to global initiatives within the Montreal Protocol, adopted in 1987.

The fact that the boundary for ozone depletion was once “headed for increasing regional transgressions” and slowly recovered, said co-author Katherine Richardson of the University of Copenhagen, shows that it is possible to bring the planet back from the boundaries that it’s close to crossing or that have been breached to a lesser degree, such as freshwater change.

“We can think of Earth as a human body, and the planetary boundaries as blood pressure,” said Richardson. “Over 120/80 does not indicate a certain heart attack but it does raise the risk and, therefore, we work to reduce blood pressure.”

The boundaries that have reached the highest risk level are biosphere integrity, climate change, novel entities, and biogeochemical flows.

The update to the framework “may serve as a renewed wake-up call to humankind that Earth is in danger of leaving its Holocene-like state,” reads the study, referring to relatively stable state the planet was in between the end of the last ice age—10,000 years ago—until the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The study, said global grassroots climate action campaign Extinction Rebellion, offered the latest evidence that policymakers must do everything in their power to “just stop oil”—ending approval for fossil fuel projects, subsidies for oil and gas companies, and policies that slow down a transition to renewable energy.

“We are not separate from the Earth,” said the group. “We ignore these warnings at our peril.”


Event alert: Planet Local Summit

Local futures is organizing its biggest and boldest event ever – the Planet Local Summit – which is set to begin this Friday! We are excited and honoured to welcome participants from 50 countries (and counting) to our livestream, along with our in-person audience in Bristol, UK.

If you haven’t already registered, there’s still time to book your attendance online and join like-minded localization community representatives from every corner of the earth.

In Bristol, the excitement is building, with a huge mural celebrating the Planet Local Summit unveiled in the city last week. Created by iconic local artists Silent Hobo and Inkie, the colorful 600 ft mural (pictured above) has been unveiled at the Tobacco Factory – Bristol’s biggest and most famous street art wall.

Local groups have also organized 10 pre-summit events to highlight the best of Bristol, including farm open days, community dialogues, and food tours.

You can find the full summit program here.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Land Change, Failures of Omission, and the Renaturing of Climate

Land Change, Failures of Omission, and the Renaturing of Climate

“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.” – Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.

By Rob Lewis, originally published by Resilience.org

Land change is a scientific term you’re not likely to hear in mainstream climate conversation, which is a shame, because what it refers to, the climatic effects of human damage to living landscapes, is a big part of the climate crisis. I talk in greater detail about land change and how it got left out of the climate narrative in an earlier Resilience piece, called Putting the Land Back in Climate. Here, I want to consider the effects of this omission, not only in the practical terms of climate policy, but in terms less definitive. What does it mean to our treatment of the land that it’s gotten to be left out of our picture of climate? Or another way of putting it: how does not knowing that our local landscapes hydrate, cool and stabilize our climates, affect our relationship with those landscapes or lack thereof?

But first I want to be clear that nothing here questions or counters the danger of carbon emissions, the greenhouse effect, or subsequent global warming. Land change should be seen as being in addition to these things, or more to the point, intimately entwined with them. The climate, when fully comprehended, emerges as a constellation of actors and effects, physical and biological, with an unimaginable complexity of feedbacks and signals. To reduce it all to quantities of carbon, and speak only of that, is to miss the thing itself.

So let’s quickly review what land change is and how it got left out the climate picture.

One way to think of land change is as original climate change. We began changing climates as soon as we started draining marshes and plowing soil, as observed in the time-worn adage: desert follows the plow, and seen now in deserts like those of the Middle East, which were once lush with marshlands and cypress-draped hills. The reason has to do with water cycles, which are largely invisible to us. We don’t see the roots underground, interlinking with extravagant webbings of soil fungi, soaking up spongelike massive quantities of water, around 600 liters per day for the average tree. Nor do we see the water evaporating from microscopic pores under the surfaces of leaves and needles, which like all evaporation, is profoundly cooling. And we don’t see the columns of vapor rising from trees and fields, feeding the clouds overhead to rain somewhere else and continue the cycle. Lastly, we don’t see the soil absorbing and holding that moisture, banking the landscape against drought and flood. Life not only sequesters carbon, it sequesters water as well. The two, it turns out, go hand in hand.

Scientists refer to this with the term evapotranspiration and know it to be fundamental to the hydration, cooling and moderation of local and regional climates. It follows then, that when we damage, or “change” land it dries out, heats up, and becomes prone to hydrological extremes like drought, floods and heatwaves. Sound familiar?

When coal and oil was discovered, a new cause of climate change entered the picture: emissions of greenhouse gasses. And early climate science treated it that way, as an additional cause, not the cause. Mediterranean-climate expert Millan Millan remembers that time, referring to it as a “two-legged” climate understanding—one leg for land change and hydrological effects and a second leg for carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect. So how then did we arrive at an official narrative which describes only carbon emissions as the cause of climate change? What happened to the land leg?

A clue can be found in the titles of the IPCC’s periodical Assessment Reports, such as the most recent assessment Global Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. What is meant by those last four words? The easiest answer is to think of the physical science basis is as the mathematic, or quantitative basis, the basis necessary for the computer modelling of climate. When CO2 emissions emerged as a climate threat, science immediately turned to computer modelling to ascertain and predict the effects. Carbon emissions, well dispersed in the atmosphere, proved highly amenable to such modeling, while the biological/hydrological processes of land change were the opposite. Though we can feel the effects of land-change, and are surrounded by it in the form of wastelands and vanished species, it is almost impossible to render in quantitative terms. The processes are too detailed, complex, varied and changing.

A good many scientists are currently working to resolve the matter, quantifying land change effects and bringing them into global computer models, and we can expect the next round of IPCC assessments to include some of this work. But that’s still five to six years off, and by then trillions will have been spent on industrial infrastructure causing how much land change?

This must be the first and most tragic effect of leaving land change and water cycles out of the analysis. Nature disappears, reduced to quantities of carbon, buried under tech jargon, sacrificed all over again for a new era of human device and progress. To the plow, the ax and cattle drive, we now add the solar farm, transmission corridor and a new generation of mines.

Environmentalism has suffered mightily from this formulation, and now confronts a kind of ecological Sophie’s Choice: either sacrifice the land or sacrifice the climate. It can be that stark. Consider the US state of Virginia, who’s recently passed climate legislation is resulting in thousands of acres of forest being cut for solar farms and transmission corridors, much of it to support data centers for tech corporations like Google and Microsoft. Meanwhile, those citizens who elect to protect their forests rather than sacrifice them for energy generation are labeled NIMBYs.

But there’s more. With this big industrial push comes a parallel push for what is being called “permit reform.” The Inflation Reduction Act, recently passed in the US, contains 1.2 billion dollars to staff up permitting agencies in an attempt to rush this infrastructure. And I noticed, when Senator Joe Manchin tried to attach a “permit reform” bill to the IRA, the official environmental opposition was carefully directed at only the permitting reform around fossil fuels. Presumably, they are for it when it comes to industrial infrastructure deemed “green” or “clean.” Thus, another dichotomy: big green working to take away permitting power from little green, the locals defending their own land bases. Ask yourself how long you think such contradictions can last.

There’s a personal dimension here as well. I know for myself, once I began learning about the biological, water-based aspects of climate, my view of climate and the natural world transformed. Muir’s oft-quoted observation, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” suddenly came alive. I discovered, over and over, that when I grabbed the thread called “climate” it was hitched to everything on Earth, part of something very much alive and capable of recovery. And with that my doom, not my worry and concern and grief, but that powerless sense of doom vanished. I stood on different ground, having come to know its power.

Now I see my surroundings, my climate-shed if you will, not as climatically helpless against rising CO2 emissions, but the very basis for climate healing and recovery. This is what happens when you bring the living land back into the climate equation, it comes alive. The land turns ally, and a new clarity emerges, with a very different set of priorities.

First, protect all remaining wild and semi-wild places. They are the last living links to the once cool, wet Holocene climate, which we can still save. Understand that where land is at its healthiest, so it’s climate function.

Second, restore the lands we’ve already damaged. Here is where hope literally grows. For buried within the sad fact that half of Earth’s land has been converted to human use, is the stunning comprehension of just how much land is available and waiting for restoration, bringing new carbon sequestration and water cycling to the climate system at game-changing scale.

Third, stop “changing” land. Housing developments, logging, road building, solar farming, all continue with no public awareness of the climate damage being done. Integrate land change into the environmental review process.

Fourth, slow down, cool down—the only thing that ever has reduced emissions. The land is telling it needs rest and recovery, not to be subjected to a new industrial revolution.

Do we really need decades of climate modelling to figure these things out? Might there be other ways of approaching this crisis?

We are not alone in this. For the land, though degraded, still retains its potential for regeneration. Given a little protection, ecosystems recover. Even the poorest soils contain ancient seeds of bygone life, awaiting only water. And in the field, the land’s enthusiasm for reemergence continually exceeds the expectations of those working to restore it. It turns out that regeneration, and the passion for regeneration, is in the very grain and fiber of all that surrounds us.

Those seeds are in us too. That’s the invitation. But only the land, and the processes of life, can bring the water.

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash

“Climate Endgame”: New Peer-Reviewed Paper Explores Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios

“Climate Endgame”: New Peer-Reviewed Paper Explores Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios

Editor’s Note: Global warming is a serious threat to our planet, and, along with mass extinction, wildlife population collapse, habitat destruction, desertification, aquifer drawdown, oceanic dead zones, pollution, and other ecological issues, is one of the primary symptoms of overshoot and industrial civilization.

This paper, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explores the prospect of catastrophic global warming, noting that “There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic… at even modest levels of warming.”

With outcomes such as runaway global warming, oceanic hypoxia, and mass mortality becoming more certain with each passing day, the justifications for Deep Green Resistance are only becoming stronger.


By Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, Kristie L. Ebi, Goodwin Gibbins, Timothy A. Kohler, JohanRockström, Marten Scheffer, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, and Timothy M. Lenton. Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; received May 20, 2021; accepted March 25, 2022

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). 2022 Aug 23;119(34):e2108146119.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2108146119.

~~

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.

How bad could climate change get? As early as 1988, the landmark Toronto Conference declaration described the ultimate consequences of climate change as potentially “second only to a global nuclear war.” Despite such proclamations decades ago, climate catastrophe is relatively under-studied and poorly understood.

The potential for catastrophic impacts depends on the magnitude and rate of climate change, the damage inflicted on Earth and human systems, and the vulnerability and response of those affected systems. The extremes of these areas, such as high temperature rise and cascading impacts, are underexamined. As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there have been few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts from warming of 3 °C or above (1). Text mining of IPCC reports similarly found that coverage of temperature rises of 3 °C or higher is underrepresented relative to their likelihood (2). Text-mining analysis also suggests that over time the coverage of IPCC reports has shifted towards temperature rise of 2 °C and below https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022EF002876. Research has focused on the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C, and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises are sparse.

A thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses (3), but even simpler “compound hazard” analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave (4). Recently, we have seen compound hazards emerge between climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic (5). As the IPCC notes, climate risks are becoming more complex and difficult to manage, and are cascading across regions and sectors (6).

Why the focus on lower-end warming and simple risk analyses? One reason is the benchmark of the international targets: the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 °C, with an aspiration of 1.5 °C. Another reason is the culture of climate science to “err on the side of least drama” (7), to not to be alarmists, which can be compounded by the consensus processes of the IPCC (8). Complex risk assessments, while more realistic, are also more difficult to do.

This caution is understandable, yet it is mismatched to the risks and potential damages posed by climate change. We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes (9). Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear and result in an even larger tail (10). Too much is at stake to refrain from examining high-impact low-likelihood scenarios. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to consider and prepare for infrequent, high-impact global risks, and the systemic dangers they can spark. Prudent risk management demands that we thoroughly assess worst-case scenarios.

Our proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda aims to direct exploration of the worst risks associated with anthropogenic climate change. To introduce it, we summarize existing evidence on the likelihood of extreme climate change, outline why exploring bad-to-worst cases is vital, suggest reasons for catastrophic concern, define key terms, and then explain the four key aspects of the research agenda.

Worst-Case Climate Change

Despite 30 y of efforts and some progress under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to increase. Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).

Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 (15), carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon (16), and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity (17, 18). These are likely to not be proportional to warming, as is sometimes assumed. Instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Such changes are evident in Earth’s geological record, and their impacts cascaded across the coupled climate–ecological–social system (19). Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another (20). Temperature rise is crucially dependent on the overall dynamics of the Earth system, not just the anthropogenic emissions trajectory.

The potential for tipping points and higher concentrations despite lower anthropogenic emissions is evident in existing models. Variability among the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) climate models results in overlap in different scenarios. For example, the top (75th) quartile outcome of the “middle-of-the-road” scenario (Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3-7.0, or SSP3-7.0) is substantially hotter than the bottom (25th) quartile of the highest emissions (SSP5-8.5) scenario. Regional temperature differences between models can exceed 5 °C to 6 °C, particularly in polar areas where various tipping points can occur (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119#supplementary-materials).

There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered. For instance, recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming (23). Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.

Recent findings on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) (14, 24) underline that the magnitude of climate change is uncertain even if we knew future GHG concentrations. According to the IPCC, our best estimate for ECS is a 3 °C temperature rise per doubling of CO2, with a “likely” range of (66 to 100% likelihood) of 2.5 °C to 4 °C. While an ECS below 1.5 °C was essentially ruled out, there remains an 18% probability that ECS could be greater than 4.5 °C (14). The distribution of ECS is “heavy tailed,” with a higher probability of very high values of ECS than of very low values.

There is significant uncertainty over future anthropogenic GHG emissions as well. Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5, now SSP5-8.5), the highest emissions pathway used in IPCC scenarios, most closely matches cumulative emissions to date (25). This may not be the case going forward, because of falling prices of renewable energy and policy responses (26). Yet, there remain reasons for caution. For instance, there is significant uncertainty over key variables such as energy demand and economic growth. Plausibly higher economic growth rates could make RCP8.5 35% more likely (27).

Why Explore Climate Catastrophe?

Why do we need to know about the plausible worst cases? First, risk management and robust decision-making under uncertainty requires knowledge of extremes. For example, the minimax criterion ranks policies by their worst outcomes (28). Such an approach is particularly appropriate for areas characterized by high uncertainties and tail risks. Emissions trajectories, future concentrations, future warming, and future impacts are all characterized by uncertainty. That is, we can’t objectively prescribe probabilities to different outcomes (29). Climate damages lie within the realm of “deep uncertainty”: We don’t know the probabilities attached to different outcomes, the exact chain of cause and effect that will lead to outcomes, or even the range, timing, or desirability of outcomes (, 30). Uncertainty, deep or not, should motivate precaution and vigilance, not complacency.

Catastrophic impacts, even if unlikely, have major implications for economic analysis, modeling, and society’s responses (31, 32). For example, extreme warming and the consequent damages can significantly increase the projected social cost of carbon (31). Understanding the vulnerability and responses of human societies can inform policy making and decision-making to prevent systemic crises. Indicators of key variables can provide early warning signals (33).

Knowing the worst cases can compel action, as the idea of “nuclear winter” in 1983 galvanized public concern and nuclear disarmament efforts. Exploring severe risks and higher-temperature scenarios could cement a recommitment to the 1.5 °C to 2 °C guardrail as the “least unattractive” option (34).

Understanding catastrophic climate scenarios can also inform policy interventions, including last-resort emergency measures like solar radiation management (SRM), the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight (35).

Whether to resort to such measures depends on the risk profiles of both climate change and SRM scenarios. One recent analysis of the potential catastrophic risk of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) found that the direct and systemic impacts are under-studied (36). The largest danger appears to come from “termination shock”: abrupt and rapid warming if the SAI system is disrupted. Hence, SAI shifts the risk distribution: The median outcome may be better than the climate change it is offsetting, but the tail risk could be worse than warming (36).

There are other interventions that a better understanding of catastrophic climate change could facilitate. For example, at the international level, there is the potential for a “tail risk treaty”: an agreement or protocol that activates stronger commitments and mechanisms when early-warning indicators of potential abrupt change are triggered.

The Potential for Climate Catastrophe

There are four key reasons to be concerned over the potential of a global climate catastrophe. First, there are warnings from history. Climate change (either regional or global) has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies (37) and in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history (38). The current carbon pulse is occurring at an unprecedented geological speed and, by the end of the century, may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions (39, 40). The worst-case scenarios in the IPCC report project temperatures by the 22nd century that last prevailed in the Early Eocene, reversing 50 million years of cooler climates in the space of two centuries (41).

This is particularly alarming, as human societies are locally adapted to a specific climatic niche. The rise of large-scale, urbanized agrarian societies [editors note: civilization] began with the shift to the stable climate of the Holocene ∼12,000 y ago (42). Since then, human population density peaked within a narrow climatic envelope with a mean annual average temperature of ∼13 °C. Even today, the most economically productive centers of human activity are concentrated in those areas (43). The cumulative impacts of warming may overwhelm societal adaptive capacity.

Second, climate change could directly trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international conflict, or exacerbate infectious disease spread, and spillover risk. These could be potent extreme threat multipliers.

Third, climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. This is the path of systemic risk. Global crises tend to occur through such reinforcing “synchronous failures” that spread across countries and systems, as with the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (44). It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

The potential of systemic climate risk is marked: The most vulnerable states and communities will continue to be the hardest hit in a warming world, exacerbating inequities. Fig. 1 shows how projected population density intersects with extreme >29 °C mean annual temperature (MAT) (such temperatures are currently restricted to only 0.8% of Earth’s land surface area). Using the medium-high scenario of emissions and population growth (SSP3-7.0 emissions, and SSP3 population growth), by 2070, around 2 billion people are expected to live in these extremely hot areas. Currently, only 30 million people live in hot places, primarily in the Sahara Desert and Gulf Coast (43).


Fig. 1.

Overlap between future population distribution and extreme heat. CMIP6 model data [from nine GCM models available from the WorldClim database (45)] were used to calculate MAT under SSP3-7.0 during around 2070 (2060–2080) alongside Shared SSP3 demographic projections to ∼2070 (46). The shaded areas depict regions where MAT exceeds 29 °C, while the colored topography details the spread of population density.

Extreme temperatures combined with high humidity can negatively affect outdoor worker productivity and yields of major cereal crops. These deadly heat conditions could significantly affect populated areas in South and southwest Asia (47).

Fig. 2 takes a political lens on extreme heat, overlapping SSP3-7.0 or SSP5-8.5 projections of >29 °C MAT circa 2070, with the Fragile States Index (a measurement of the instability of states). There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming. If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.


Fig. 2.

Fragile heat: the overlap between state fragility, extreme heat, and nuclear and biological catastrophic hazards. GCM model data [from the WorldClim database (45)] was used to calculate mean annual warming rates under SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5. This results in a temperature rise of 2.8 °C in ∼2070 (48) for SSP3-7.0, and 3.2 °C for SSP5-8.5. The shaded areas depict regions where MAT exceeds 29 °C. These projections are overlapped with the 2021 Fragile State Index (FSI) (49). This is a necessarily rough proxy because FSI only estimates current fragility levels. While such measurements of fragility and stability are contested and have limitations, the FSI provides one of the more robust indices. This Figure also identifies the capitals of states with nuclear weapons, and the location of maximum containment Biosafety Level 4 (BS4) laboratories which handle the most dangerous pathogens in the world. These are provided as one rough proxy for nuclear and biological catastrophc hazards.

Finally, climate change could irrevocably undermine humanity’s ability to recover from another cataclysm, such as nuclear war. That is, it could create significant latent risks (Table 1): Impacts that may be manageable during times of stability become dire when responding to and recovering from catastrophe. These different causes for catastrophic concern are interrelated and must be examined together.


Table 1. Defining key terms in the Climate Endgame agenda

Term Definition
Latent risk Risk that is dormant under one set of conditions but becomes active under another set of conditions.
Risk cascade Chains of risk occurring when an adverse impact triggers a set of linked risks (3).
Systemic risk The potential for individual disruptions or failures to cascade into a system-wide failure.
Extreme climate change Mean global surface temperature rise of 3 °C or more above preindustrial levels by 2100.
Extinction risk The probability of human extinction within a given timeframe.
Extinction threat A plausible and significant contributor to total extinction risk.
Societal fragility The potential for smaller damages to spiral into global catastrophic or extinction risk due to societal vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and maladaptive responses.
Societal collapse Significant sociopolitical fragmentation and/or state failure along with the relatively rapid, enduring, and significant loss capital, and systems identity; this can lead to large-scale increases in mortality and morbidity.
Global catastrophic risk The probability of a loss of 25% of the global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades).
Global catastrophic threat A plausible and significant contributor to global catastrophic risk; the potential for climate change to be a global catastrophic threat can be referred to as “catastrophic climate change”.
Global decimation risk The probability of a loss of 10% (or more) of global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades).
Global decimation threat A plausible and significant contributor to global decimation risk.
Endgame territory Levels of global warming and societal fragility that are judged sufficiently probable to constitute climate change as an extinction threat.
Worst-case warming The highest empirically and theoretically plausible level of global warming.

Defining the Key Terms

Although bad-to-worst case scenarios remain underexplored in the scientific literature, statements labeling climate change as catastrophic are not uncommon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called climate change an “existential threat.” Academic studies have warned that warming above 5 °C is likely to be “beyond catastrophic” (50), and above 6 °C constitutes “an indisputable global catastrophe” (9).Current discussions over climate catastrophe are undermined by unclear terminology. The term “catastrophic climate change” has not been conclusively defined. An existential risk is usually defined as a risk that cause an enduring and significant loss of long-term human potential (51, 52). This existing definition is deeply ambiguous and requires societal discussion and specification of long-term human values (52). While a democratic exploration of values is welcome, it is not required to understand pathways to human catastrophe or extinction (52). For now, the existing definition is not a solid foundation for a scientific inquiry.We offer clarified working definitions of such terms in Table 1. This is an initial step toward creating a lexicon for global calamity. Some of the terms, such as what constitutes a “plausible” risk or a “significant contributor,” are necessarily ambiguous. Others, such as thresholding at 10% or 25% of global population, are partly arbitrary (10% is intended as a marker for a precedented loss, and 25% is intended as an unprecedented decrease; see SI Appendix for further discussion). Further research is needed to sharpen these definitions. The thresholds for global catastrophic and decimation risks are intended as general heuristics and not concrete numerical boundaries. Other factors such as morbidity, and cultural and economic loss, need to be considered.

We define risk as the probability that exposure to climate change impacts and responses will result in adverse consequences for human or ecological systems. For the Climate Endgame agenda, we are particularly interested in catastrophic consequences. Any risk is composed of four determinants: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and response (3).

We have set global warming of 3 °C or more by the end of the century as a marker for extreme climate change. This threshold is chosen for four reasons: Such a temperature rise well exceeds internationally agreed targets, all the IPCC “reasons for concern” in climate impacts are either “high” or “very high” risk between 2 °C and 3 °C, there are substantially heightened risks of self-amplifying changes that would make it impossible to limit warming to 3 °C, and these levels relate to far greater uncertainty in impacts.

Key Research Thus Far

The closest attempts to directly study or comprehensively address how climate change could lead to human extinction or global catastrophe have come through popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth (53) and Our Final Warning (10). The latter, a review of climate impacts at different degrees, concludes that a global temperature rise of 6 °C “imperils even the survival of humans as a species” (10).

We know that health risks worsen with rising temperatures (54). For example, there is already an increasing probability of multiple “breadbasket failures” (causing a food price shock) with higher temperatures (55). For the top four maize-producing regions (accounting for 87% of maize production), the likelihood of production losses greater than 10% jumps from 7% annually under a 2 °C temperature rise to 86% under 4 °C (56). The IPCC notes, in its Sixth Assessment Report, that 50 to 75% of the global population could be exposed to life-threatening climatic conditions by the end of the century due to extreme heat and humidity (6). SI Appendix provides further details on several key studies of extreme climate change.

The IPCC reports synthesize peer-reviewed literature regarding climate change, impacts and vulnerabilities, and mitigation. Despite identifying 15 tipping elements in biosphere, oceans, and cryosphere in the Working Group 1 contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, many with irreversible thresholds, there were very few publications on catastrophic scenarios that could be assessed. The most notable coverage is the Working Group II “reasons for concern” syntheses that have been reported since 2001. These syntheses were designed to inform determination of what is “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system, that the UNFCCC aims to prevent. The five concerns are unique and threatened ecosystems, frequency and severity of extreme weather events, global distribution and balance of impacts, total economic and ecological impact, and irreversible, large-scale, abrupt transitions. Each IPCC assessment found greater risks occurring at lower increases in global mean temperatures. In the Sixth Assessment Report, all five concerns were listed as very high for temperatures of 1.2 °C to 4.5 °C. In contrast, only two were rated as very high at this temperature interval in the previous Assessment Report (6). All five concerns are now at “high” or “very high” for 2 °C to 3 °C of warming (57).

A Sample Research Agenda: Extreme Earth System States, Mass Mortality, Societal Fragility, and Integrated Climate Catastrophe Assessments

We suggest a research agenda for catastrophic climate change that focuses on four key strands:

  • Understanding extreme climate change dynamics and impacts in the long term
  • Exploring climate-triggered pathways to mass morbidity and mortality
  • Investigating social fragility: vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and risk responses
  • Synthesizing the research findings into “integrated catastrophe assessments”

Our proposed agenda learns from and builds on integrated assessment models that are being adapted to better assess large-scale harms. A range of tipping points have been assessed (58–60), with effects varying from a 10% chance of doubling the social cost of carbon (61) up to an eightfold increase in the optimal carbon price (60). This echoes earlier findings that welfare estimates depend on fat tail risks (31). Model assumptions such as discount rates, exogenous growth rates, risk preferences, and damage functions also strongly influence outcomes.

There are large, important aspects missing from these models that are highlighted in the research agenda: longer-term impacts under extreme climate change, pathways toward mass morbidity and mortality, and the risk cascades and systemic risks that extreme climate impacts could trigger. Progress in these areas would allow for more realistic models and damage functions and help provide direct estimates of casualties (62), a necessary moral noneconomic measure of climate risk. We urge the research community to develop integrated conceptual and semiquantitative models of climate catastrophes.

Finally, we invite other scholars to revise and improve upon this proposed agenda.

Extreme Earth System States.

We need to understand potential long-term states of the Earth system under extreme climate change. This means mapping different “Hothouse Earth” scenarios (21) or other extreme scenarios, such as alternative circulation regimes or large, irreversible changes in ice cover and sea level. This research will require consideration of long-term climate dynamics and their impacts on other planetary-level processes. Research suggests that previous mass extinction events occurred due to threshold effects in the carbon cycle that we could cross this century (40, 63). Key impacts in previous mass extinctions, such as ocean hypoxia and anoxia, could also escalate in the longer term (40, 64).

Studying potential tipping points and irreversible “committed” changes of ecological and climate systems is essential. For instance, modeling of the Antarctic ice sheet suggests there are several tipping points that exhibit hysteresis (65). Irreversible loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet was found to be triggered at ∼2 °C global warming, and the current ice sheet configuration cannot be regained even if temperatures return to present-day levels. At a 6 °C to 9 °C rise in global temperature, slow, irreversible loss of the East Antarctic ice sheet and over 40 m of sea level rise equivalent could be triggered (65). Similar studies of areas such as the Greenland ice sheet, permafrost, and terrestrial vegetation would be helpful. Identifying all the potential Earth system tipping elements is crucial. This should include a consideration of wider planetary boundaries, such as biodiversity, that will influence tipping points (66), feedbacks beyond the climate system, and how tipping elements could cascade together (67).

Mass Morbidity and Mortality.

There are many potential contributors to climate-induced morbidity and mortality, but the “four horsemen” of the climate change end game are likely to be famine and undernutrition, extreme weather events, conflict, and vector-borne diseases. These will be worsened by additional risks and impacts such as mortality from air pollution and sea level rise.

These pathways require further study. Empirical estimates of even direct fatalities from heat stress thus far in the United States are systematically underestimated (68). A review of the health and climate change literature from 1985 to 2013 (with a proxy review up to 2017) found that, of 2,143 papers, only 189 (9%) included a dedicated discussion of more-extreme health impacts or systemic risk (relating to migration, famine, or conflict) (69). Models also rarely include adaptive responses. Thus, the overall mortality estimates are uncertain.

How can potential mass morbidity and mortality be better accounted for? 1) Track compound hazards through bottom-up modeling of systems and vulnerabilities (70) and rigorously stress test preparedness (71). 2) Apply models to higher-temperature scenarios and longer timelines. 3) Integrate risk cascades and systemic risks (see the following section) into health risk assessments, such as by incorporating morbidity and mortality resulting from a climate-triggered food price shock.

Societal Fragility: Vulnerabilities, Risk Cascades, and Risk Responses.

More-complex risk assessments are generally more realistic. The determinants of risk are not just hazards, vulnerabilities, and exposures, but also responses (3, 72). A complete risk assessment needs to consider climate impacts, differential exposure, systemic vulnerabilities, responses of societies and actors, and the knock-on effects across borders and sectors (73), potentially resulting in systemic crises. In the worst case(s), a domino effect or spiral could continuously worsen the initial risk.

Societal risk cascades could involve conflict, disease, political change, and economic crises. Climate change has a complicated relationship with conflict, including, possibly, as a risk factor (74) especially in areas with preexisting ethnic conflict (75). Climate change could affect the spread and transmission of infectious diseases, as well as the expansion and severity of different zoonotic infections (76), creating conditions for novel outbreaks and infections (6,77). Epidemics can, in turn, trigger cascading impacts, as in the case of COVID-19. Exposure to ecological stress and natural disasters are key determinants for the cultural “tightness” (strictness of rules, adherence to tradition, and severity of punishment) of societies (78). The literature on the median economic damages of climate change is profuse, but there is far less on financial tail risks, such as the possibility of global financial crises.

Past studies could be drawn upon to investigate societal risk. Relatively small, regional climate changes are linked to the transformation and even collapse of previous societies (79, 80). This could be due to declining resilience and the passing of tipping points in these societies. There is some evidence for critical slowing down in societies prior to their collapse (81, 82). However, care is needed in drawing lessons from premodern case studies. Prehistory and history should be studied to determine not just how past societies were affected by specific climate hazards but how those effects differ as societies change with respect to, for example, population density, wealth inequality, and governance regime. Such framing will allow past and current societies to be brought under a single system of analysis (37).

The characteristics and vulnerabilities of a modern globalized world where food and transport distribution systems can buffer against traumas will need to feature in work on societal sensitivity. Such large, interconnected systems bring their own sources of fragility, particularly if networks are relatively homogeneous, with a few dominant nodes highly connected to everyone else (83). Other important modern-day vulnerabilities include the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation. These epistemic risks are serious concerns for public health crises (84) and have already hindered climate action. A high-level and simplified depiction of how risk cascades could unfold is provided in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3.

Cascading global climate failure. This is a causal loop diagram, in which a complete line represents a positive polarity (e.g., amplifying feedback; not necessarily positive in a normative sense) and a dotted line denotes a negative polarity (meaning a dampening feedback). See SI Appendix for further information.

Integrated Catastrophic Assessments.

Climate change will unfold in a world of changing ecosystems, geopolitics, and technology. Could we even see “warm wars”—technologically enhanced great power conflicts over dwindling carbon budgets, climate impacts, or SRM experiments? Such developments and scenarios need to be considered to build a full picture of climate dangers. Climate change could reinforce other interacting threats, including rising inequality, demographic stresses, misinformation, new destructive weapons, and the overshoot of other planetary boundaries (85). There are also natural shocks, such as solar flares and high-impact volcanic eruptions, that present possible deadly synchronicities (86). Exploring these is vital, and a range of “standardized catastrophic scenarios” would facilitate assessment.

Expert elicitation, systems mapping, and participatory scenarios provide promising ways of understanding such cascades (73). There are also existing research agendas for some of these areas that could be funded (87).

Integration can be approached in several ways. Metareviews and syntheses of research results can provide useful data for mapping the interactions between risks. This could be done through causal mapping, expert elicitation, and agent-based or systems dynamics modeling approaches. One recent study mapped the evidence base for relationships between climate change, food insecurity, and contributors to societal collapse (mortality, conflict, and emigration) based on 41 studies (88).

A particularly promising avenue is to repurpose existing complex models to study cascading risks. The resulting network could be “stress tested” with standardized catastrophic scenarios. This could help estimate which areas may incur critical shortages or disruptions, or drastic responses (such as food export bans). Complex models have been developed to help understand past large-scale systemic disasters, such as the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (89). Some of these could be repurposed for exploring the potential nature of a future global climate crisis.

Systems failure is unlikely to be globally simultaneous; it is more likely to begin regionally and then cascade up. Although the goal is to investigate catastrophic climate risk globally, incorporating knowledge of regional losses is indispensable.

The potentially catastrophic risks of climate change are difficult to quantify, even within models. Any of the above-mentioned modeling approaches should provide a greater understanding of the pathways of systemic risk, and rough probabilistic guides. Yet the results could provide the foundation for argumentation-based tools to assess the potential for catastrophic outcomes under different levels of temperature rise (90). These should be fed into open deliberative democratic methods that provide a fair, inclusive, and effective approach to decision-making (91). Such approaches could draw on decision-making tools under uncertainty, such as the minimax principle or ranking decisions by the weighted sum of their best and worst outcomes, as suggested in the Dasgupta review of biodiversity (92).

An IPCC Special Report on Catastrophic Climate Change

The IPCC has yet to give focused attention to catastrophic climate change. Fourteen special reports have been published. None covered extreme or catastrophic climate change. A special report on “tipping points” was proposed for the seventh IPCC assessment cycle, and we suggest this could be broadened to consider all key aspects of catastrophic climate change. This appears warranted, following the IPCC’s decision framework (93). Such a report could investigate how Earth system feedbacks could alter temperature trajectories, and whether these are irreversible.

A special report on catastrophic climate change could help trigger further research, just as the “Global warming of 1.5 °C” special report (94) did. That report also galvanized a groundswell of public concern about the severity of impacts at lower temperature ranges. The impact of a report on catastrophic climate change could be even more marked. It could help bring into focus how much is at stake in a worst-case scenario. Further research funding of catastrophic and worst-case climate change is critical.

Effective communication of research results will be key. While there is concern that fear-invoking messages may be unhelpful and induce paralysis (95), the evidence on hopeful vs. fearful messaging is mixed, even across metaanalyses (96, 97). The role of emotions is complex, and it is strategic to adjust messages for specific audiences (98). One recent review of the climate debate highlighted the importance of avoiding political bundling, selecting trusted messengers, and choosing effective frames (99). These kinds of considerations will be crucial in ensuring a useful and accurate civic discussion.

Conclusions

There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such “endgames” at even modest levels of warming. Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, from preparation to consideration of emergency responses. This requires exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other cascades. We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best way to expand our research horizons to cover this field. The proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda provides one way to navigate this under-studied area. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.


This open-access scientific paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) or a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

Appendix and references available here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash.

Covid, climate, and ‘dual metabolic rupture’

Covid, climate, and ‘dual metabolic rupture’

Editor’s note: While it’s true that “it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems”, the real root of human destructiveness lies further back in history, when groups of people started agriculture, building cities and forming human supremist ideologies that disconnected human cultures from all other living beings.

This article originally appeared in The Ecologist.
Featured image: “Unless” by Nell Parker


By Neil Faulkner

We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.

“Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilisation as climate change.”

Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace wrote this in 2015. But he and many colleagues have been issuing increasingly urgent warnings since the 1990s that globalised agribusiness is breeding and spreading new, deadly, fast-transmission viruses.

The urgency around pandemics began to ramp up around the same time calls for climate action became mainstream. Many of us have been focused on the climate emergency – and nothing here should be taken to imply we were wrong – but the last year has taught a sharp lesson: deadly pathogens pose an equally menacing threat to human civilisation.

Catastrophe

Since the first United Nations COP conference on global warming in 1995, the climate emergency has got much worse. Carbon emissions have accelerated from 26 billion tonnes in 1995 to 37 billion tonnes in 2018. Atmospheric concentrations have risen from 350ppm in 1990 to 410ppm today. Half the increase in average global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since 1995. The average volume of Arctic sea-ice has roughly halved in the last 40 years. Whatever the metric, the same story.

The effects are all around us. More frequent and more intense heat-waves are causing increases in wildfires, droughts, and desertification. Rising and warming seas are causing heavier rainfall, more serious flooding, more frequent mega-storms, and the inundation of coastal areas. These changes are driving the world’s sixth mass extinction, with species loss running at 1,000 times the normal rate. Climate change is destroying livelihoods, increasing disease, displacing people.

We stand on the brink of critical tipping-points when incremental shifts lead to sudden and irreversible lurches in the Earth’s ecosystem. Among the potential tipping-points are: abrupt collapse of the West Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the East Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet; thawing of Arctic permafrost and release of methane gas; rapid deforestation of the Amazon; and failure of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Some scientists fear a ‘global cascade’ of interacting tipping-points.

The failure of the global political elite is systemic. It is not that we do not know what to do. It is not that the wrong policies have been adopted. It is that the economic and geopolitical system – the current world order – cannot deliver the radical action necessary.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), representing the world’s leading industrial economies, considered the pre-pandemic global growth rate of three percent to have been too low. Yet such annual growth rate means a doubling in the size of the world economy every quarter century.

The fossil-fuel corporations plan to extract twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas between now and 2030 than can be burned if we are to restrict global temperature rise to the 1.5ºC ‘aim’ of the Paris Agreement.

This ‘aim’ is not ambitious enough: most climate scientists predict severe damage to the Earth’s eco-system with this level of warming. But even this ‘aim’ falls well below the ‘pledges’ of the COP participants, which, even if implemented, are expected to result in a disastrous 3ºC of global warming. Many leading scientists think we are heading for at least 4ºC of global warming.

Metabolic

The term ‘metabolic rift’ has been used by some radical commentators, like John Bellamy Foster, to describe what is happening. I prefer ‘rupture’ because it better captures the violence of a corporate capitalist system that is out of control and tearing apart human societies and natural ecosystems.

Metabolism is a scientific word to do with how chemical changes reconfigure energy and sustain life. All of us need to get science-wise, to understand what is happening to our planet, to get a handle on what I am calling the ‘Dual Metabolic Rupture’.

Humans are part of Nature. On the one hand, we are animals with material needs and organic form. On the other, our actions impact upon the rest of Nature, sometimes degrading it, sometimes remodelling it, always having an effect.

All the products of human labour are therefore part of Nature. Everything we do to provide ourselves with a livelihood involves drawing upon the resources of Nature and refashioning them into new forms.

These processes are not reversible, but they may be repeatable. If a glacier melts because the temperature rises, the water of which it is formed flows away. If a new glacier forms in the same place when the temperature falls again, it must be comprised of another body of water. In Nature, as in Society, everything is process and motion.

The energy involved in natural processes is a constant: it can be endlessly recycled, but it cannot be destroyed, so whatever you do, it will still be there in one form or another. This is one of the basic laws of physics (known as ‘the First Law of Thermodynamics’).

It follows that human beings may interact with Nature in ways that are ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’ – where energy is recycled in essentially repetitive ways – or in other ways that cause a metabolic ‘rupture’ or ‘rift’ – where energy is reconstituted as a destructive force.

Let us take two contrasting examples. A hoe-cultivator who harvests a garden plot of cassava, feeds the tubers and leaves to her pigs, and then lets them roam to manure the plot, is engaged in a recycling of energy that is ecologically sustainable.

Corporations that extract oil, refine it into petroleum, and then sell it to other corporations to burn in jet engines are doing something quite different: theirs is not a renewable process, but a release of carbon waste into the atmosphere and a permanent remodelling of the Earth’s metabolism.

The basic rhythms of pre-capitalist societies were determined by the cycle of the seasons. But capitalism is a system of competitive capital accumulation hard-wired by the profit motive for exponential growth.

The former were always essentially local or regional, so that what happened in one place had limited impact in others: the latter is now a fully globalised system which has the whole of humanity and the entire global environment in its grasp.

In the end, it is simple: it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems.

But that’s not all it’s doing.

Anthropocene

The system – let’s define it: globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism – is blind to everything except the balance sheet, the bottom line, the annual profit.

The lords of capital have turned the Earth – its lands, its waters, its minerals – into private property. They have commodified its ecosystems and appropriated its bounty. And in their wake they spew waste and pollution that become ‘externalities’ for which others must pay.

Where to start? The catalogue of devastation is so long. Forests are cut down, wetlands drained, soils eroded. Water extraction turns farmland into desert. Chemicals are dumped in oceans, lakes, and rivers. Toxins leak into groundwater. Fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides contaminate food supplies.

Landfills overflow with synthetic waste. Nuclear power plants melt down and fill air, land, and sea with carcinogenic particles. A chemical smog fills urban streets and poisons children on the way to school. Plastic waste degrades into trillions of microscopic specks that infect every living organism.

Now, from deep within this mayhem, a second titan of destruction has emerged to stand alongside the mega-threat of climate change: pandemic disease.

Both titans are formed of trillions of tiny particles. Climate change is driven by atoms of carbon dioxide – tiny particles of dead organic matter pumped into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. Pandemic disease is driven by microscopic parasites – tiny particles of living organic matter that breed, spread, and evolve by infecting the bodies of animals.

But that does not mean Covid-19 is a natural disaster, any more than carbon pollution. Nor is it an Act of God or a ‘Chinese’ conspiracy. Covid is a human-made catastrophe, as much an artefact of the Anthropocene as global warming.

I agree with colleagues who argue that the Holocene is over. This is the term we have used to describe the last 11,700 years of Earth history, since the end of the last Ice Age – until now. From around 1950, and at an accelerating rate since, the Earth system has been undergoing radical change as a result of human action. We have entered a new geological era in which Anthropos (the Greek word for human) is the primary agent of change. The primary form of change is metabolic rupture.

Covid-19 is a pandemic disease of the Anthropocene’s metabolic rupture.

Pandemic

Mainstream commentary on the pandemic is refracted through a neoliberal prism. Attention focuses on immediate problems and proximate causes. I am not talking about serial liars like Johnson and his third-rate cabinet of public-school toffs and corporate spivs. I am talking about more honest commentators keen to see through the spin and smoke-cloud that shields a corrupt and incompetent political class.

But it is not enough to expose the negligence, crony capitalism, and eugenicist experiments of the Tories – the failure of test-and-trace, the lack of PPE, the locking down too late and lifting too early, the discharging of the sick into care homes, the spreading of the virus in schools and universities, and so much more.

It is necessary, but not enough. The narcissistic charlatan who runs the government might eventually be thrown out. But so what? There is a much bigger issue: the metabolic rupture between corporate agribusiness and natural ecology that has created the multiple global incubators of new deadly diseases.

In 1950, a large proportion of the Earth’s people were peasant farmers, predominantly in the Global South. As recently as 1980, only 20 percent of China’s population was urban; the proportion today is 60 percent. A growing number of those who remain in the villages, moreover, have been transformed into wage-labourers.

The advance of corporate agribusiness is relentless. As I write, the Hindu-chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi is facing an uprising of small farmers whose livelihoods are threatened with destruction by neoliberal ‘reform’. So desperate is their plight that record numbers of India’s small farmers have been committing suicide.

As well as destroying traditional communities, agribusiness is expanding into the wilderness, uprooting forests, destroying the diversity and balance of natural ecologies, and replacing them with vast monocultures. Half the habitable surface of the Earth is now devoted to agriculture, with millions of acres added every year.

Much of the crop-land produces animal feed for the hundreds of millions of cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry being fast-fattened for the global supply-chains that loop the world. The mega-complexes of Big Farm’s industrialised animal production are laced around and between the mega-slums of the Global South’s ever-growing urban proletariat.

This is what links a remote bat-cave in hinterland China with the morgues of New York and London. Big Farm batters down natural ecology, destroying diversity and firebreaks. Viruses that would have burnt themselves out in the forest for lack of carriers adapt to a new ecology of monoculture, animal factories, and slum cities; they mutate and evolve and then achieve fast-track transmission through mass concentrations of the same species.

The global supply-chains of giant transnationals with operations in half a dozen countries and markets in a thousand cities do the rest.

Once a new variant is established, it replicates by the trillion at hyper-speed, throwing up chance mutations, testing new ways of spreading. The disease becomes endemic and chronic – embedded in human society – and continues to evolve, waging a relentless life-or-death struggle against lockdowns and vaccines by constant shape-sifting in its efforts to breach the defences.

Warning

This – the pandemic diseases created and spread by corporate agribusiness – is then layered over societies mired in poverty and stripped of public health-provision by neoliberal ‘structural adjustment programmes’, privatisation, and austerity cuts.

The epidemiologists have been warning of the dangers for a quarter of a century. There have been dozens of outbreaks of different viruses or variants, all involving a similar basic mechanism: the introduction of a wild-animal virus, its transmission and evolution through factory-farm complexes, a jump from animal to human, often in mutant form, and rapid global spread through transnational supply-chains.

The warning, endlessly repeated, was that, sooner or later, one of the new diseases created by neoliberal capitalism would take off. But there is no profit in pandemic precaution.

The improvised plague cemeteries; the body-bags in the morgues; the patients breathing through ventilators; the traumatised and exhausted health workers; the everyday folk left grieving; the jobs lost, businesses gone bust, homes lost to the bailiffs; the swelling toll of mental breakdowns; the loneliness, the shrivelled lives, the sense of desolation and despair: all this and more amount to so many ‘externalities’ for the profit machine.

The machine carries on. It is being recalibrated. Some businesses may be shutting down, but big capital is highly mobile. The money moves at click-key speed. It flows from a place where profits are down to another where they are up.

America’s 660 billionaires, for example, are doing just fine right now. Since March last year, their wealth has increased 39 percent, from just under $3 trillion to more than $4 trillion today. It is the rest of us, of course, who pay for the system’s ‘externalities’.

Those ‘externalities’ now take the form of a Dual Metabolic Rupture between humanity and the planet, as industrial pollution destroys our ecosystem, and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogen. We are the inhabitants of a new geological age – the Anthropocene – in which globalised, financialised monopoly-capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.

What happens next depends on what we do. The imperative to get active has never been greater.


Neil Faulkner is the author of A Radical History of the World and co-author of System Crash: an activist guide to making revolution.

The Problem

The Problem

The Problem

by Lierre Keith
From the introduction to the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.


“You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.”

—Bill Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground.

A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On energy reserves less than a small bag of M&M’s and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she flies thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. Every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins.

A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her energy reserves are meant to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, when she will give up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species’ future. But in some areas, the female’s weight before hibernation has already dropped from 650 to 507 pounds. Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably open, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her.

The Aldabra snail should weigh something, but all that’s left to weigh are skeletons, bits of orange and indigo shells. The snail has been declared not just extinct, but the first casualty of global warming. In dry periods, the snail hibernated. The young of any species are always more vulnerable, as they have no reserves from which to draw. In this case, the adults’ “reproductive success” was a “complete failure.” In plain terms, the babies died and kept dying, and a species millions of years old is now a pile of shell fragments.

What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair?

We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That’s 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There’s no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman’s excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We’ve all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?

There are voices raised in concern, even anguish, at the plight of the earth, the rending of its species. “Only zero emissions can prevent a warmer planet,” one pair of climatologists declare. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, states bluntly that global warming has passed the tipping point, carbon offsetting is a joke, and “individual lifestyle adjustments” are “a deluded fantasy.” It’s all true, and self-evident.

“Simple living” should start with simple observation: if burning fossil fuels will kill the planet, then stop burning them.

But that conclusion, in all its stark clarity, is not the popular one to draw. The moment policy makers and environmental groups start offering solutions is the exact moment when they stop telling the truth, inconvenient or otherwise. Google “global warming solutions.” The first paid sponsor, Campaign Earth, urges “No doom and gloom!! When was the last time depression got you really motivated? We’re here to inspire realistic action steps and stories of success.” By “realistic” they don’t mean solutions that actually match the scale of the problem. They mean the usual consumer choices—cloth shopping bags, travel mugs, and misguided dietary advice—which will do exactly nothing to disrupt the troika of industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy that is skinning the planet alive.

As Derrick has pointed out elsewhere, even if every American took every single action suggested by Al Gore it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent. Aric tells a stark truth: even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average American’s annual one ton of garbage production, “your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That’s thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste.”

Industrialism itself is what has to stop.

There is no kinder, greener version that will do the trick of leaving us a living planet. In blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones. Could it be done more “efficiently”? Sure, we could use a little less fossil fuels, but it still ends in the same wastelands of land, water, and sky. We could stretch this endgame out another twenty years, but the planet still dies. Trace every industrial artifact back to its source—which isn’t hard, as they all leave trails of blood—and you find the same devastation: mining, clear-cuts, dams, agriculture. And now tar sands, mountaintop removal, wind farms (which might better be called dead bird and bat farms).

No amount of renewables is going to make up for the fossil fuels or change the nature of the extraction, both of which are prerequisites for this way of life. Neither fossil fuels nor extracted substances will ever be sustainable; by definition, they will run out. Bringing a cloth shopping bag to the store, even if you walk there in your Global Warming Flip-Flops, will not stop the tar sands. But since these actions also won’t disrupt anyone’s life, they’re declared both realistic and successful.

The next site’s Take Action page includes the usual: buying light bulbs, inflating tires, filling dishwashers, shortening showers, and rearranging the deck chairs. It also offers the ever-crucial Global Warming Bracelets and, more importantly, Flip-Flops. Polar bears everywhere are weeping with relief.

The first noncommercial site is the Union of Concerned Scientists. As one might expect, there are no exclamation points, but instead a statement that “[t]he burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) alone counts for about 75 percent of annual CO2 emissions.” This is followed by a list of Five Sensible Steps. Step One? No, not stop burning fossil fuels—“Make Better Cars and SUVs.” Never mind that the automobile itself is the pollution, with its demands—for space, for speed, for fuel—in complete opposition to the needs of both a viable human community and a living planet. Like all the others, the scientists refuse to call industrial civilization into question. We can have a living planet and the consumption that’s killing the planet, can’t we?

The principle here is very simple.

As Derrick has written, “[A]ny social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition unsustainable.” Just to be clear, nonrenewable means it will eventually run out. Once you’ve grasped that intellectual complexity, you can move on to the next level. “Any culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable.” Trees are renewable. But if we use them faster than they can grow, the forest will turn to desert. Which is precisely what civilization has been doing for its 10,000 year campaign, running through soil, rivers, and forests as well as metal, coal, and oil. Now the oceans are almost dead and their plankton populations are collapsing, populations that both feed the life of the oceans and create oxygen for the planet.

What will we fill our lungs with when they are gone? The plastics with which industrial civilization is replacing them? In parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 48 to 1. Imagine if it were your blood, your heart, crammed with toxic materials—not just chemicals, but physical gunk—until there was ten times more of it than you. What metaphor is adequate for the dying plankton? Cancer? Suffocation? Crucifixion?

But the oceans don’t need our metaphors. They need action. They need industrial civilization to stop destroying and devouring. In other words, they need us to make it stop.

Which is why we are writing this book.


THE DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE BOOK
Strategy to Save the Planet:

https://deepgreenresistance.net/en/resistance/the-problem/the-problem/