The Way Forward: Survival 2100
The Survival 2100
plan calls for the continued pursuit of local resilience and the diversification
of local economies.
"Industrialised world reductions in material throughput, energy
use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet
the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet’s ecological means."
— Business Council for Sustainable Development
It’s not as if we’re unaware of the problem. Symptoms were
already so persistent two decades ago that a proclamation by many of the
world’s top scientists warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the
earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and
our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”2 This
assertion was echoed a dozen years later by the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment’s no less urgent warning that “human activity is putting such a
strain on the natural functions of the earth that the ability of the planet’s
ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”
One might think that humanity’s best science would be enough
to stimulate a decisive policy response, but the feeble effort so far has done
little to stem the cumulative cascade of dismal data. No national government,
no prominent international agency, no corporate leader anywhere has begun to
advocate in public, let alone implement, the kind of evidence-based, visionary,
morally coherent policy responses that are called forth by the best science
available today.
On the climate front, the first six months of 2010 were the
warmest ever recorded, and 2010 tied with 2005 and 2008 for hottest year in the
instrumental record. (This while we should have been experiencing modest
cooling—the world is just emerging from the longest solar minimum in decades.)
Earth and paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glikson posits that the world may be
experiencing the fastest climate change in 34 million years.
Some climate scientists are now stepping into the policy
arena. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows argue that the world will be hard-pressed
to stabilize greenhouse gases at 650 ppmv CO2e, which implies a 50 percent
chance of a catastrophic 4°C increase in mean global temperature, the
desertification of much of the world’s habitable land mass, dramatically rising
sea levels, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees by the end of the
century. Indeed, unless we can reconcile economic growth with unprecedented
rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6 percent per year), avoiding this
increase will require a “planned economic recession.”
Of course, climate change is just one symptom of generalized
human ecological dysfunction. A virtual tsunami of evidence suggests that the
global community is living beyond its ecological means. By one measure, the
human “ecological footprint” is about 2.7 global average hectares per person
(gha/capita), yet there are only 1.8 gha/capita on earth. The human enterprise
has already overshot global carrying capacity by about 50 percent and is
living, in part, by depleting natural capital and overfilling waste sinks.
In theory, Homo sapiens is uniquely equipped to confront
this self-made crisis. Four critical intellectual and emotional qualities
distinguish people from other advanced vertebrates. Humans have
- an unequaled capacity for evidence-based reasoning and logical analysis;
- the unique ability to engage in long-term forward planning;
- the capacity to exercise moral judgment; and
- an ability to feel compassion for other individuals and other species.
As noted above, despite decades of hardening evidence,
mainstream global society nevertheless remains in policy paralysis, stymied by
cognitive and behavioral barriers to change that have deep roots in both human
nature and global society’s culturally constructed economic growth fetish.
But what if mounting public pressure (think Occupy Wall
Street) or a series of miniclimate catastrophes finally overwhelms these
barriers? Assume the world community becomes fully motivated to deal
effectively with biophysical reality. Now the question becomes, What would
truly intelligent, forward-thinking, morally compassionate individuals do in
response to available data, the historical record, and ongoing trends?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment.