Editor’s Note: Development projects have always destroyed local ways of living and nonhuman communities. Numerous examples attest to that. The government of Cambodia need not look very far. The Lower Sesan 2 dam it built despite resistance has collectively been decried by national and international organizations for numerous human rights and indigenous rights violations. The government of Cambodia itself placed a ten-year ban on damming Mekong in 2020. Despite this, the government has permitted the group responsible for Lower Sesan 2 to conduct geological studies for building the Stung Treng dam along Mekong river. Previous studies have already outlined the devastating effects it can have on the fisher communities.
It is no surprise that states prioritize profits over local communities in their decision making process. Organized political resistance is required for the local communities to stand a chance against such decisions that hughly impact their lives.
Cambodian authorities have greenlit studies for a major hydropower dam on the Mekong River in Stung Treng province, despite a ban on dam building on the river that’s been in place since 2020.
Plans for the 1,400-megawatt Stung Treng dam have been around since 2007, but the project, under various would-be developers, has repeatedly been shelved over criticism of its impacts.
This time around, the project is being championed by Royal Group, a politically connected conglomerate that was also behind the hugely controversial Lower Sesan 2 dam on a tributary of the Mekong, prompting fears among local communities and experts alike.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network where Gerald Flynn is a fellow.
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — A long-dormant plan to build a mega dam on the mainstream of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province appears to have been revived this year, leaving locals immediately downstream of the potential sites worried and experts confounded.
First studied in 2007, the 1,400-megawatt hydropower project, known as the Stung Treng dam, has reared its head in many forms, only to be canceled or scrapped. Finally, in 2020, Cambodia’s government announced a 10-year ban on damming the Mekong River’s mainstream, placing the Stung Treng dam and others on indefinite life support.
However, on Dec. 29, 2021, Royal Group — arguably Cambodia’s largest and best-connected conglomerate — wrote to the government, requesting permission to conduct a six-month feasibility study across a number of sites along the Mekong in a bid to revive the long-sought-after hydropower project.
The Ministry of Mines and Energy approved, and Stung Treng Governor Svay Sam Eang ordered district governors to cooperate with SBK Research and Development, a Phnom Penh-based consultancy hired by Royal Group, while they analyzed three sites for the dam between January and June 2022.
All the sites that SBK analyzed sit within or would affect the Stung Treng Ramsar site, a wetland of ecological significance that’s supposed to be protected by the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty to which Cambodia became a signatory in 1999.
Spanning some 14,600 hectares (36,100 acres), the Stung Treng Ramsar site stretches 40 kilometers (25 miles) up from the confluence of the Mekong and Sekong rivers, almost to the Laos-Cambodia border. It’s home to the white-shouldered Ibis (Pseudibis davisoni) and giant Mekong catfish (Pangasianodon gigas), both critically endangered species, and the Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris), which is globally endangered but whose Mekong population is considered critically endangered.
Sites analyzed by SBK Consultants for Royal Group’s Stung Treng dam. Map by Gerald Flynn/Mongabay.
The volleys of criticism that each study provoked has seen the Stung Treng dam shelved repeatedly. A 2012 study by the Cambodian Fisheries Administration’s Inland Fisheries Research and Development Institute found the Stung Treng dam would reduce aquatic food yields by 6% and 24% by 2030. This, the government’s own researchers warned, would lead to increased malnutrition and worse public health outcomes, especially among poorer, rural communities.
WWF’s Greater Mekong program then published an extensive brief in 2018 reiterating the threats posed by the Stung Treng dam to fisheries, agriculture, ecosystems and biodiversity.
By then, however, many of these fears had already been realized in the form of the Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam.
Also located in Stung Treng province, roughly 30 km (19 mi) from the Ramsar site, the Lower Sesan 2 was approved in 2012 before going online in 2018 after a tumultuous series of studies throughout the 1990s. Following funding issues, Royal Group stepped in as a financier to save the project, but this didn’t stop the Lower Sesan 2 from rapidly becoming emblematic of the numerous problems associated with dams on the Mekong and its tributaries.
Even now, nearly four years after the dam’s completion, pro-government Cambodian and Chinese outlets continue attempting to resuscitate the Lower Sesan 2’s image, which was tarnished by the sheer scale of human suffering and environmental degradation it’s been linked to.
The Stung Treng Ramsar site could be compromised by Cambodia’s hydropower ambitions. Image by Gerald Flynn/Mongabay.
Royal Group maintains the dam is a success and says the project supplied 20% of Cambodia’s energy demands in 2020. But before the project was even finished, it came under fire from the United Nations, numerous NGOs both international and domestic, as well as thousands of affected residents displaced by the dam’s 30,000-hectare (74,000-acre) reservoir.
Since the dam’s completion, Human Rights Watch has branded the Lower Sesan 2 “a disaster” in a 137-page report released last year, calling the dam’s developers responsible for multiple human rights violations, abuses against Indigenous peoples, and a drastic decline in fisheries, along with failing to actually live up to its projected power generation targets.
Haunted by the Lower Sesan 2, the residents of the Stung Treng Ramsar site’s islands were deeply concerned when they saw SBK Research and Development engaged in geological studies and learned the prospect of the Stung Treng dam had returned again.
“The local authorities came round at the start of the year,” says Mao Sareth, chief of the Koh Khan Din fishing community in the south of the Stung Treng Ramsar site. “They told us they want to build a dam that’ll be 7 meters [23 feet] high and will affect 163 families — it’s going to be huge, 1,400 MW, that’s what they told me.”
Mao Sareth, chief of the Koh Khan Din fishing community in the south of the Stung Treng Ramsar site. Image by Nehru Pry/Mongabay.
Sareth is reluctant to discuss the details of the proposed dam, hinting that people have warned him against discussing the project with journalists. But for the 72-year-old, the number of families who would be affected if the Stung Treng dam goes ahead would be much higher than what SBK’s consultants suggested, although the consequences for each island would vary depending on whether the dam was built up or downstream of their community.
“There are 144 families in our village alone, with plenty more spread across the islands and there are hundreds of islands here, full of people who farm and fish,” Sareth says. “Of course we’d be affected if they build the dam, lots of communities would be flooded, everyone relies on agriculture here, the dam would destroy our crops.”
Already at the mercy of water released or withheld by dams upstream in Laos, Sareth says his community exists in a fragile balance, eking out an existence that hinges on access to fish from the water and crops nourished by it. The Stung Treng Ramsar site’s ecosystem, he says, has held the community together, with only seven families leaving last year to find day-laborer work in Thailand.
“Most people try to stay and find a new market for their crops,” Sareth says. “They can take food from the river — they can survive here.”
But Sareth is no stranger to defeat at the hands of hydropower developers, and knows that if the government decides to break its own ban on Mekong dam building, then it will be his community that suffers.
“We protested the Don Sahong dam in Laos because we knew it would hurt our people, our livelihoods, but our protests made no difference — they finished the dam anyway,” he says. “Then we protested the Lower Sesan 2 dam, but again, it made no difference, we had no results, only losses. We lost so much when they opened the water gates, crops, livelihoods, everything.”
Life on the Mekong River is changing and residents struggle to keep up. Image by Nehru Pry/Mongabay.
Dammed and damned
Meanwhile, 12 km (7.5 mi) further upstream, the ecotourism and fishing communities on the island of Koh Snaeng say they fear a way of life could be erased by new hydropower projects.
Fifty-two-year-old Lim Sai is one of the estimated 1,000 people living across the four villages that make up Koh Snaeng, which straddles the Mekong within the heart of the Stung Treng Ramsar site, roughly 30 km from the Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam.
“In general, we know if we protest, we’ll face consequences, we know there’ll be problems — maybe even lawsuits,” Sai says. “You can get sued for speaking out, so if the government doesn’t see the dams as a problem, then ordinary people like us have no tools to affect our future.”
Sai is a lifelong resident of the island and has seen it adapt in the face of an uncertain future. Koh Snaeng residents pivoted from fishing to farming when the first dams further upstream in Laos and China began to change the flow of the river upon which the island is situated. Then, as the climate crisis intensified and Cambodia’s rains became less reliable, residents again shifted their focus, this time to ecotourism.
Throughout these changes, Sai has worked in local government. But despite this role, he says his community has been largely ignored by the national authorities.
“They [the national government] only built a road connecting National Road 7 to the ferry that brings people to Koh Snaeng last year, we’ve been asking for one for around decades,” he says by way of example. “Maybe it was because we had the commune elections coming up this year and they knew we wouldn’t support them.”
Sai says the island is still very much reliant on the river and that he feels the latest hydropower study hasn’t factored his community into the decision.
Residents from Koh Khan Din were invited to a meeting in the Cambodian capital where representatives of Royal Group discussed the matter of relocation and compensation in June, but Sai says he only found out about this through others.
“The dam would have a huge impact, not just here, but all the way down to Phnom Penh, even in Vietnam — it would affect the water flows all the way downriver,” Sai says.
Lim Sai has seen Koh Snaeng pivot to ecotourism as fishing and farming become less reliable on the Mekong. Image by Nehru Pry/Mongabay.
Ma Chantha, 29, serves as the deputy of Koh Snaeng’s tourism community and says that when residents saw SBK’s consultants drilling samples from the riverbed earlier this year, they came to her with their fears.
“People are very worried, they think they’ll lose their houses to floodwaters or be displaced,” she says, noting that the community-based ecotourism project spans both Koh Snaeng and the neighboring island of Koh Han, with roughly 2,750 residents participating in the project since its inception in 2016.
“We hope the video and the campaign are successful, or helpful at least, in stopping hydropower construction here, because people will see that there are ecotourism destinations worth protecting here,” Chantha says. “This kind of advocacy has given the people here a chance to stand up for their communities, I hope that makes people change their mind about building the dam here.”
“People are very worried” says Ma Chantha, who depends on ecotourism on Koh Snaeng. Image by Nehru Pry/Mongabay.
Conflicting narratives
But while communities rally to stop the Stung Treng dam, there is little clarity over whether the project will go ahead. In March, government-aligned outlet The Phnom Penh Post reported that the dam had been “okayed in principle,” but offered little beyond the approval for the feasibility study to substantiate this.
Chantha and Sai of Koh Snaeng, as well as Sareth of Koh Khan Din, all agreed that they had been told in recent months that the project wouldn’t be going ahead, although none could provide any documents to verify this either.
“I’m happy if they really canceled it,” Sai says. “Then we can continue to use the river for fishing and tourism, but I only believe in the cancelation about 40% and even if they cancel it now, it could always happen later.”
Chantha says there’s been no official announcement of cancellation and that it may just be rumors spreading among hopeful residents. Sareth says a letter from August 2022 issued by the Ministry of Environment confirms the cancelation, but couldn’t produce the letter to show Mongabay by the time this story was published. Still, he says he’s confident it exists.
When questioned about the dam and the supposed cancellation, environment ministry spokesperson Neth Pheaktra denied having any information. Srey Sunleang, a senior ministry official responsible for freshwater wetlands and Ramsar sites, declined to comment.
Heng Kunleang, director of the Department of Energy at the Ministry of Mines and Energy, did not respond to questions sent by email, while Khnhel Bora, director of SBK Research and Development, says he’s also unaware of any cancellation.
Hanna and Pianka did not respond to questions sent via email, while Kith Meng, who is also president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce and an adviser to Prime Minister Hun Sen, could not be reached for comment.
Royal Group’s track record on developing dams is so far limited to the 400-MW Lower Sesan 2, which was a joint venture with China’s state-owned Hydrolancang International Energy and Vietnam’s state-owned electricity utility, EVN International. In this partnership, Royal Group is believed to have been responsible for financing, rather than building, the dam.
The fate of Koh Snaeng and the Stung Treng Ramsar site remains unclear. Image by Gerald Flynn/Mongabay.
‘Beginning of the end’
Ian Baird, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin who specializes in studying hydropower development across Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, says he’s heard rumors of the Stung Treng dam project being resurrected. While it remains unclear exactly what would be built or where and how, he says, the project is a significant threat to the Mekong region.
“The Ramsar Convention is quite weak as governments can really do as they please in Ramsar sites, but Cambodia has been more responsive to international conventions than its neighbors and historically more concerned than others about international criticism, compared with Laos or Vietnam,” Baird says, pointing to Cambodia’s 2020 moratorium on Mekong dam building — a move that other Mekong Basin countries have not followed.
“But this is one of the reasons why exposing the problems related to the Lower Sesan 2 is very critical, because it’s the same developers,” Baird says, adding he’d hoped the failings of Royal Group’s first hydropower project would ward the government off from approving another.
If the Stung Treng dam gets the go-ahead, Baird says it would be more damaging than the controversial Don Sahong dam and the Xayaburi dam — both on the mainstream of the Mekong in Laos — and more significant than the soon-to-be-completed Sekong A dam on the Laotian stretch of the Sekong River, a key tributary that flows from Vietnam, through Laos and into the Mekong River in Cambodia.
“There’s a lot of reason for concern here, if it goes ahead, well – it’s the beginning of the end,” Baird says. “The Mekong is dying a death by a thousand cuts, I’ve watched it for years, and honestly, it’s sad, but what can you do?”
Residents point to Royal Group’s history in Stung Treng province as a reason to be fearful, adding that a new, significantly larger hydropower project could have even wider-reaching impacts.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if they go ahead with it,” says Sai from Koh Snaeng.
Featured image: A lone boat heads up the Mekong River through the Stung Treng Ramsar site. Image by Gerald Flynn/Mongabay.
Editor’s note: Every time a corporation or state puts forward a development project to further reinforce existing structures of power, it is done under the guise of “economic prosperity.” Those most affected by the project are brought forward as one of the beneficiaries of the so-called economic progress. In reality, their ways of life and livelihood are destroyed, making them more and more dependent on the larger economy and, thus, on the state. The nonhumans are left unmentioned. The same claims are being made about the Uinta Basin Railway. As is mentioned in the article, there is little probability that the railways will be used for anything except transporting fossil fuels.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. DGR does not endorse all of the ideas expressed here. We do not believe solar, wind or geothermal energy are a viable – or even an ethical – alternative to fossil fuel. Regardless of that, we do agree with the author’s analysis of the Uinta Basin Railway contributing to further climate change.
This is a call to action. Stop this project before it starts. Get involved in an organization to Stop the Unita Basin Railway. Or get involved in fighting for what you love, start your own organization. Spread the word!
The Uinta Basin is home to a diverse set of creatures from endangered black-footed ferrets to plants that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, such as the Uinta Basin hookless cactus and Graham’s beardtongue.
But the basin also sits atop pockets of crude oil and natural gas, which are being extracted: to transport these fossil fuels to the Gulf Coast, local governments and oil companies are planning to invest up to $4.5 billion to construct a new railway through it.
Although the project has been approved, construction hasn’t begun and it’s not too late for U.S. President Biden to keep his climate pledges and stop the new railway, a new op-ed argues.
The Uinta Basin, named after the Ute Tribe, is located in Northeast Utah and Western Colorado, about 200 miles from Salt Lake City. Streams from the Uinta mountains roll through the basin into a tributary of the Colorado River – supplying 40 million people with water throughout the drought-ridden West. Plants that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, such as the Uinta Basin hookless cactus and Graham’s beardtongue, flourish in the Uinta Basin. The ecosystem also harbors endangered species such as the sage grouse and black-footed ferret.
By all accounts, the Uinta Basin is a beautiful ecological haven. Unfortunately, however, it sits atop pockets of crude oil and natural gas, which are being extracted. To transport crude oil to the Gulf Coast where it will be refined, local governments and oil companies are planning to invest $1.5 to $4.5 billion to construct a new railway through the basin.
View of Christmas Meadows in the High Uintas Wilderness Area. Image by Brandon Rasmussin via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
The Uinta Basin Railway is a proposed 88-mile stretch of train tracks that will blast through mountains, reroute 443 streams, bulldoze through endangered sage grouse habitat, appropriate private property and even fragment a roadless area in the Ashley National Forest. According to the U.S. Forest Service Chief, “a railway does not constitute a road.” The railway is projected to quadruple the region’s oil extraction from 85,000 up to 350,000 barrels of oil per day – resulting in an increase in air pollution, noise pollution, habitat degradation and a greater risk of water pollution, train derailments and wildfires. The region already suffers from chronic air pollution, falling below federal standards for ozone pollutionset by the Environmental Protection Agency.
By quadrupling fossil fuel extraction in the Uinta Basin, construction of the railway is projected to increase U.S. carbon emissions by 1%. Escalating climate change will bring more wildfires and more drought to the region – at a time when the Biden administration should be actively trying to reduce carbon emissions to prevent further climate change-fueled catastrophes.
Uinta Basin is freckled with small cities and towns such as Vernal, Duchesne and Jensen. The region’s economic history can be summarized as a series of boom and bust cycles due to its reliance on fossil fuels. The whims of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the fluctuations of oil prices determine the quality of life for many people in the Uinta Basin. These fluctuations often send communities into periods of growth and stretches of economic depression that threaten small business and family security.
Proponents of the Uinta Basin Railway claim that its construction will diversify the economy of the region by connecting it to the global market. However, there is little evidence that the railway will be used to transport anything but oil to or from the region, especially because at least 130,000 barrels of oil per day will have to be transported to recoup the cost of construction. This will only cause harm and exacerbate boom and bust cycles.
If the railway is constructed, the communities of the Uinta basin will not gain a diversified economy. But there are viable options to re-stimulate and stabilize the economy of the region without large-scale ecological destruction. In the Uinta Basin there are potential sites for geothermal energy production and wind farms, and the entire region is suitable for solar energy production. Additionally, the region’s state parks and Ashley National Forest attract anglers, hikers and outdoor enthusiasts – accommodating a growing tourism industry.
Although the Uinta Basin Railway has been approved by the U.S. Forest Service and the Surface Transportation Board, construction hasn’t begun. It’s not too late to stop this catastrophic project from happening. President Joe Biden has made it a priority to address the climate crisis. To uphold his commitment to a livable climate and to safeguard our country’s biodiversity, the president should now backtrack on the Uinta Basin Railway and cancel the project from moving forward.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition (Coalition) has filed a petition with the Surface Transportation Board (Board) requesting authority to construct and operate an approximately 85-mile common-carrier rail line connecting two termini in Utah’s Uinta Basin near South Myton Bench and Leland Bench to the national rail network. The construction and operation of this proposed project has the potential to result in significant environmental impacts. Therefore, the Board’s Office of Environmental Analysis (OEA) has determined that the preparation of an EIS is appropriate pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The Uinta Basin Railway is a preliminary public private partnership(PPP). A PPP is used for collaboration to fund, build and operate infrastructure projects. This financing scam allows a project like the Uinta Basin Railway to move forward faster.
The public funds authorized for use on the railway come from mineral lease fees. Oil and gas are minerals for which producers pay a mineral lease fee to the federal government as part of the Mineral Lands Leasing Act of 1920. The government then gives part of those funds back to the state to be used within communities where the minerals are extracted.
The Utah Permanent Community Impact Fund Board manages these funds and has granted $27.9 million to the Seven County Infrastrucutre Coalition for planning and studies in the environmental clearance process.
The private industry will pay an anticipated $1.2-$1.5 billion for construction, operation and maintenance of the railway. This financing will be paid through contracts and service fees for use of the railway.
Editor’s Note: DGR does not support solar and wind “alternatives”. They are not alternatives to the energy and ecological crisis, but rather a part of it.. They do not “replace” natural gas and fossil fuels, not only because the so called renewable energy are not as potent an energy source as fossil fuel, but also because they rely on fossil fuel for basic operation. They contribute to the abuse, exploitation and plunder of nature. There are mountains of resources to support this. More dangerously, they lead us to false solutions, putting our much needed revolutionary energies into projects which only contribute to the problem. We are firmly opposed to these technologies.
The value of this article lies in exposing how these “green” technologies are being introduced in reality. Despite the bright green lies in this article, it is important to gain understanding on how these technologies are wrecking havoc across the globe. The beauty of nature is defended strongly in this article. The “violent mechanization of [the] daily view of the natural world” is acknowledged to be a deep concern, indeed it is “extremely disturbing”. In the spirit of solidarity and internationalism, we call for coalitions to ask important questions on these “green” and “alternative” technologies, and to continue the ecological resistance to protect the wild.
My Greek friends in the large island of Euboea and Boeotia (Central Greece) are telling me — and the world — that a “hurricane” of solar and wind technologies are wrecking their lives and the countryside.
I am all for solar and wind alternatives to the Earth-warming fossil fuels. The faster they replace dangerous petroleum, natural gas, and coal, the better. The world is in real danger from anthropogenic climate chaos. Climate nemesis is hanging over the planet like the sword of Damokles.
Nevertheless, Greece has been abusing solar and wind energy. Instead of placing solar panels on the roofs of houses and buildings, the local Greek municipal governments and the Ministry of the Environment are licensing private companies to install solar panel arrays on archaeological sites, wetlands, valleys, and mountains.
The situation with wind turbines, some of which are gigantic and 200 meters tall, is worse. Private companies flatten mountain tops, clear cut forests, dig up valleys and mountain sides for the construction of large cement foundations for their monster wind turbines. They act like the ruthless coal companies in Kentucky and West Virginia.
Euboea
In Central Euboea, there’s an exquisite wetland named Kolobrextis. This wetland supports a number of threatened and endangered species. It is close to an archaeological site. And yet both the archaeological service and the Ministry of the Environment permitted the installation of numerous solar panels in the region of Kolobrextis. Local citizens appealed these illegal decisions, but without success.
They said:
“We consider the wetland our natural inheritance, which cannot be sacrificed on the altar of the interests and profits of a corrupt and unethical market.”
On July 17, 2022, Evi Sarantea, an artist and environmentalist from Euboea, sent the following letter to her friends:
“[Government authorities licensing windfarms] intend to destroy the last dense fir forest left in Central Evia [Euboea]… They already destroyed Southern Evia. They authorized the placement of more than 800 wind turbines in an extensive archaeological site. Some of those wind turbines were about 185 meters tall. And this happened after Northern Evia was incinerated last year. Don’t let this HUBRIS win. ALL the Municipalities and 150 agencies of the island [of Euboea] are 100 percent opposed to the installation of these monsters – with a life span of only 20 years. They will irreversibly and tragically destroy the ecosystem and the formation of the soil which is several tens of millions of years old.”
Boeotia
Boeotia is a prosperous region with rich mythology and history. Its poleis (city-states) Orchomenos and Thebes date from the Bronze Age. Thebes gave Greece god Dionysos and the superhero Herakles and the great lyric poet Pindar.
In July 2022, however, citizens in Central Greece spoke about widespread vandalism and ecological and cultural destruction of mountains sacred in Bronze Age Greece and classical times: Parnassos, Helicon, Cithaeron, and Parnetha.
Hesiod, born in Ascra, a village of Boeotia and second poet only to Homer, was inspired to write his epics on the birth of the gods and rural life by the Muses, goddesses of learning. The inspiration took place on Mt. Helicon.
Sowing wind turbines
And now, in 2022, more than three thousand years after Hesiod, the Greek government serving its debt masters in the European Union and the United States, especially Germany, is blowing up sacred nature in order to dig the giant wind towers from Germany very deeply into fertile land and mountains.
This fast-paced degrading of archaeological sites, and destruction of the natural world in Greece (mountains, forests, wetlands, and land) is socking the Greek people. They don’t know or suspect the reasons behind the vandalism. The government is promising cheap energy prices for their cooperation. But the prices of energy keep increasing.
The citizens are accusing their government of corruption. It allows profiteers and an immoral and unchecked market to undermine and destroy the natural world. This new ugly mechanical and shining solar icons will be throwing people in doubt about climate change and the means of fighting it. They will remember petroleum and coal with nostalgia and pleasure. In essence, this unchecked and nature-deforming energy development will be giving a bad name to solar and wind energy.
The citizens of Boeotia mentioned “the permitting of 38 large wind and solar parks consisting of hundreds of wind turbines and thousands of solar panels.”
Spoiling beauty – and much more
This prospect of the violent mechanization of their daily view of the natural world is extremely disturbing. The citizens of Boeotia complain that,
“Probably all the mountains and forests of Boeotia are slated for attacks from the energy industry. This would transform the natural world beyond recognition. Beekeeping would be abandoned; cattle raising outside of animal farms would also come to an end; cultivating the land for food, tourism, and relaxation in the countryside will be undermined, and eventually abandoned. Trees, bushes, wild animals, and birds are in immediate danger. Wind turbines on the top of mountains will decimate eagles, falcons, and other birds of prey, already under stress of extinction.”
This unnecessary tragedy adds considerably to the unhappiness and debt misery of the Greeks. They are bound to see the finger of Germany behind this onslaught on their few surviving pleasures: walking to the woods in the mountains and forests and valleys; seeing the rare birds of wetlands; and paying their respects to the quiet and beauty spread above the ruins in archaeological sites.
Stop this madness
My advice to the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis would be to break with the humiliations of the debt. Stop paying the illegal and odious debt. Return to the drachma. And reindustrialize your country. Stop using the German wind behemoths. Build your own wind-electricity generating machines to fit the country’s ecological and climate needs. Indeed, design and build all technologies at home.
Greece used to worship the Sun god Helios and Aiolos, the god of the winds. Yes, Greece needs to stop using fossil fuels, but it also needs to use solar panels only on the rooftops of houses and buildings. And should there be a need for windfarms, always plan and act in the context of ecology, biodiversity, and culture. If the windfarms cannot be used without harm, forget about them. Don’t use them in Greece.
Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.
Ship of Stars
they abducted the stars
got masses of people
to believe in separate Gods
this went on and on
for millennia
till masses of people
forgot that the star-beings
are pulsating with lights
how the stars literally
guide us, birds at night,
us in our dreams, astral travel
forgetting the star-beings,
masses of people
became mis-guided
embroiled in dis-asters
dis- and ster-
“away from the stars”
if i could find a statistic
that shows dis-asters have increased
in modern times as the masses became less
aware of, conscious of, less guided by the stars
i would footnote that
so instead
you’ll have to step outside or
look out a window or
find the lights within
and then you’ll remember
who star-beings are
and
what star-beings do
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a verbiage experiencer, in other words, he’s into etymology, writes about his experiences and to encourage people to learn from direct experiences, not just head knowledge; you know, actions and feelings speak louder than words. He’s also a publisher and enjoys gardening, talking, listening, looking… His recent book is Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest: inside looking out. Find out more at his website: www.allbook-books.com
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.
Editor’s note: Activists and environmentalists in the Philippines take extreme risks by speaking out to protect land and water. The Philippines has consistently been ranked as the most dangerous country in the world for environmental defenders. This story includes reference to 68-year-old environmental defender Daisy Macapanpan, who was arrested on what appear to be trumped-up charges for resisting the Ahunan pumped hydroelectric dam. This repression is merely the beginning.
Deep Green Resistance has collaborated with grassroots activists in the Philippines for many years. Some of our allies are involved in this fight, and are raising funds to print educational materials, hold events, and support community activism against the Ahunan hydro project by providing expertise, assisting in connections with lawyers, help getting international media coverage, and more. You can donate to these community organizers via PayPal to this email address. This story has not previously been reported in the international press.
MANILA — Casino billionaire Enrique Razon, one of the richest men in the Philippines, is planning a $1.1 billion hydropower dam which threatens Laguna De Bay, the largest lake in the nation and one of the largest in Southeast Asia, as well as the community of Pakil and rainforests on the flanks of the Sierra Madre mountains on the lake’s east bank.
Prime Infrastructure Capital corporation’s Ahunan Pumped-Storage Hydropower Project would destroy nearly 300 hectares of rainforest, leach toxic chemicals into Laguna De Bay, and could jeopardize the water supply for more than 20,000 residents of the area.
Local residents fear that the project could worsen typhoon flooding and lead to landslides, will destroy natural pools that are used in religious practices, and that the region’s frequent earthquakes could damage the dam and reservoir — which is planned to be built on Mt. Inumpong which rises above their community and that is riven by three major fault lines — leading to catastrophic failure.
Despite widespread community opposition, the project is set to break ground in 2023. Community organizers allege that illegal drilling is already taking place and that the Philippe army is guarding the site.
On June 11th, 68-year-old environmental defender Daisy Macapanpan, one of the leaders of the community opposition, was arrested in her home for “rebellion” after delivering a speech against the project. allegedly by 40 police officers with no warrant. She was released on August 10th on bail. Illegal detentions and arrests of environmentalists are common in the Philippines, which has also been ranked as the deadliest country for environmental defenders.
On August 8th, following extensive pressure from the communities and allegations of illegal conduct, the Municipal Councils and Chieftains of four directly impacted communities revoked a previous “no objection” resolution in favor of the project that had been in place since September 2021.
On August 23rd, the Department of Energy and Natural Resources Environmental Management Bureau and the community of Pakil dispatched representatives to investigate allegations on ongoing illegal construction.
Community organizers gathered in Pakil in August 2022 to resist the Ahunan hydroelectric dam project.
Pumped-storage hydropower is unlike regular hydropower dams, which block a river’s flow to produce electricity. Instead, pumped hydro storage (PHS) is an energy storage method. It depends on finding (or engineering) a site where two sizable reservoirs or natural water bodies at significantly different elevations can be connected by pipes. To store energy, operators pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir, and to use the stored energy, let it run back down through electrical power generation turbines.
According to the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What we Can Do About It, pumped-storage hydropower dams kill fish, distribute invasive species, destroy riparian vegetation and harm wetlands, decrease water quality, block aquatic migration, and contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. The book also states that “these facilities lead to more fossil fuels being burnt” because of inefficiencies in the process.
The Ahunan Pumped-Storage Hydropower Project would produce 1,400 MW of electricity at full flow, none of which would go to the local community. Prime Infrastructure Capital corporation and the Philippines Department of Energy call the project “clean energy.”
The fish who live in Laguna De Bay are an important source of food for the 8.4 million people living in the surrounding communities. A petition to halt the project has been signed by more than 6,000 of the 15,000 voting-age residents closest to the proposed project.
The World Commission on Dams estimates that at least 40 million to 80 million people have been displaced by dams.
