UN Secretary General António Guterres has
described our efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change as “a
damning indictment of failed climate leadership”. Its consequences, he notes,
include “human suffering, towering economic losses, and the accelerating
erosion of life on Earth.” The Secretary General certainly has a point,
for the world as a whole is marred by structural inequality, accelerating mass
extinction across the web of life, and the wholesale destruction of ecosystems
whose services used to help and protect everyone.
Meanwhile, climate change continues its
relentless advance. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is being bleached for the fourth
time in six years. Spring flowering and tree lines are advancing quickly northwards,
along with diseases, invasive species and trophic calamity for breeding birds. The
hot and catastrophic year of 2021 was the fourth in five years in which
catastrophes driven by global heating crossed the US$ 100 billion insured loss
threshold.
The list goes on and on, but against all
this Guterres envisions that “making peace with nature is the defining
task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone,
everywhere.” The hunt is now on for
the next generation of books and projects to explore and give flesh to this
defining task: ending the war and building a new peace with nature. But it is
already clear that this is not a simple matter.
The causes of ‘war’ between people and nature lie in our recent world-conquering societies, business models and technologies.
The causes of ‘war’ between people and
nature lie in our recent world-conquering societies, business models and
technologies. The key change occurred when a critical proportion of people gave
up living from local production using muscle power, to live instead from global
production using machines. Raymond Dasmann in 1973 described this as ‘ecosystem
people’ becoming ‘biosphere people’. But it then took industrial revolutions
and empires to put us on a path to colliding with boundaries of global
sustainability. And it took the post-war global economic expansion since 1950
to put the process into overdrive.
There was no particular reason in the 1950s
to suspect that humans might be able to damage major Earth systems. Their
existence was anyway barely suspected. Particular values, forms of society and their side-effects were allowed
to become deeply and widely entrenched. Those side effects included pollution
and the replacement of wilderness by plantations and settlements, while they
also homogenised human cultures and neglected the value of diversity.
Thoughtful people soon began to choke on this, and waves of environmental
activism have come and gone ever since. Each left a ‘concerned institution’
behind them: UNEP in 1972, for example, and the Rio Conventions on
biodiversity, desertification and climate change in 1992.
Millions of young and professional people are now fearful and angry enough to risk arrest … in seeking an end to what is now called the ‘climate extinction emergency’.
The current wave of activism began in late
2018 with Greta Thunberg and the launch of Extinction Rebellion. Millions of
young and professional people are now fearful and angry enough to risk arrest
and discomfort, even to renounce childbirth, in seeking an end to what is now
called the ‘climate extinction emergency’. Apex institutions across the world
reacted by recognising the emergency in formal declarations, and by trying to
accommodate demands for system change. This involved a lot of wriggle and ‘blah
blah blah’, as Greta put it, but also real interest in finding transformative
solutions. Can the global advance of unsustainable economic growth really be
halted? Is this attempt any different from those of the past?
What is new is that ‘science’, a massive
social machine for creating reliable knowledge, can now describe the true
condition of the living world in real time, in detail and with immense
computing power. It has confirmed that the emergency is very real, so denial
cannot now be taken seriously. Also, the pace of environmental change, natural
disasters, and the patterns that connect them, cannot now be concealed. And
many young voters and influential older people are now willing to be arrested
and prosecuted for non-violent direct action. Thus the game has changed.
But the more we know, the more alarming it
all becomes. The last five years have taught us that Earth systems have tipping
points. This behaviour is typical of all complex systems, which resist change
for a while but then tip suddenly from one stable state to another. This is
exactly what now seems possible in oceanic, equatorial and Arctic systems. The
implication is that events may move beyond human influence during the middle
years of this century, leading to a chaotic and wholesale breakdown of Earth’s
climate and life systems.
Fearing such runaway changes, governments
pledged in the late-2015 Paris Agreement to limit global mean surface
temperature rise, first to 2 C and later to 1.5 C. This is hard to do, hard to
measure, and tipping points and dated deadlines make naïve planning very
uncertain. But we do know we have to slash global net GHG emissions and
recapture GHGs as fast as possible, and that the art of the ‘possible’ is
itself changing to give us a glimmer of hope.
The Covid pandemic has shown that many things are possible that were once inconceivable. New technologies allow us to uncouple energy from GHG emissions, and are fast being adopted. As explained in Surviving Climate Chaos, there are new ways to work out the true value of nature-based and community-based solutions in resisting and adapting to climate change, while slowing mass extinction and preserving ecosystem services. And new movements have arisen to promote regenerative, carbon-capturing and biodiversity-friendly farming systems at vast scale.
These and other efforts could allow the
best public investments to be chosen consistently, along with the right
regulations to guide private investments. Applied widely and quickly, they
could reverse the rise of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, and postpone
tipping points long enough for our economic systems to be changed. This could
win us another few years in which to make the solutions permanent. For this is
a race measured in days, months, bold innovations and unexpected breakthroughs.
Here we can learn vital lessons…
We have to assume that we will win it, and
survive the century with the biosphere battered and transformed, but still able
to support people and other life on Earth. But we must also ask what we want
our relationships with each other and with nature to look like afterwards. This
is the essence of the quest for peace with nature, as there is little point in
surviving just to launch another war. Here we can learn vital lessons from the
many other cultures that have struggled in the past to control their own urges
to neglect the rules of ecology.
Many survived a lot longer than we now seem likely to, by creating and using their own traditional ecological knowledge. We can learn many things from them, including a sense of humility and respect for nature which is, in the end, far more powerful than we are. We can also learn from them many specific techniques for living well and sustainably. And we can combine these with our own ecological knowledge, and some of our best technologies, to build a new, durable and life-enhancing future. Thus the living world might be saved.
Surviving Climate Chaos: by Strengthening Communities and Ecosystems
Julian Caldecott is Director of Creatura Ltd, an environmental consultancy, and has a background in wildlife research and conservation in tropical rainforests. Since 2000 he has led evaluations of major aid investments for the EC, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, the UK, and the World Bank, focussing on climate change, biodiversity, ecosystem...
Latest Comments
Have your say!