EASAC - Increasing Urgency for Transformative Change
The impacts of accelerating warming of the climate are causing much damage and loss of life in Europe and the rest of the world. At the same time, biodiversity loss continues and humanity’s consumption of the planet’s resources grows. There is little evidence that humanity has yet adapted its demands to the reality of a finite planet.
As a result, the boundaries that maintain a safe living space for humanity are increasingly being crossed.
This declining situation is despite huge expansions in ‘green’ technologies such as wind, solar, battery and others. In parallel with the incontrovertible evidence, political will to address these challenges in many parts of the word appears to be waning. A chasm is thus widening between the objectively defined needs for change towards a sustainable future, and public/political willingness to take appropriate measures, with disinformation widespread and special interests skilled at propaganda and greenwashing.
In this update of EASAC’s 2020 Perspective on transformative change, we present a clear picture of the challenges facing humanity, the inadequacies of current
measures, the growing risks, and options for more effective actions within the European Union. It is hoped that this can inform policy-makers that these issues are not overplayed and will not go away; and trigger debates and progress towards their solution.
We first summarise trends in the past 5 years (since EASAC’s 2020 Perspective) on a range of key indicators.
• Trends for climate change are negative – emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise, along with average temperatures and climate-related damage.
• The economic costs of climate extremes in the European Union totalled €162 billion over the past 3 years while more than 60,000 heat-related deaths occurred in Europe’s 2022 summer heatwave.
• On resource consumption, demand has continued to rise and recycling rates decline so that now circularity in the global economy is just 7.2% (lagging behind Europe’s around 50%).
• Biodiversity continues to decline and its future will depend very much on policies yet to be implemented.
Looking at our planet as a system, of the nine planetary boundaries that determine a safe operating space for humanity, six have been breached. The overall conclusion is thus that adverse trends related to planetary sustainability and long-term survivability continue. Indeed, some trends are worsening: for instance, the increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane are accelerating, while recycling rates have fallen.
Warming has already triggered natural positive feedback loops that, together with the increased emissions from forest fires suggest the Earth Systems may be evolving out of human control. The resulting risks of extreme scenarios are underestimated in climate models and thus overlooked by policy-makers.
This bleak picture may appear disappointing in view of the extensive public debates, international and national commitments, new regulations and market incentives that have taken place in recent years. We look at some of these measures and conclude that they have yet to be sufficiently implemented to reverse current negative trends. Green growth has had some beneficial impacts, but is insufficient to address the scale of the problem.
Undertakings to remove the massive subsidies to fossil fuels have yet to be honoured, the fossil fuel industry fights effectively to preserve its business, governments remain obsessed with gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of success, and there is little evidence of sufficient decoupling of economic growth from demand for energy and resources. A similar gap between countries’ commitments to reverse biodiversity loss and action is also seen.
We examine why the measures taken have had so little impact and point to the daunting obstacles that lie in the path of the transformative changes required, because they would involve systemic, synergistic, structural, political, practical, and individual changes. International studies identify barriers from legal systems, property rights and
excessive consumption, the short-term political cycle, the rise of autocracy and capture of democratic processes by powerful elites. The short-term pressures of business typified by private equity and political polarisation are incompatible with the holistic and long-term approach required to transform to a sustainable economy within planetary limits. Resistance also comes from our own innate characteristics that drive us to compete, consume and resist rational action to avoid threats that are not immediate such as catastrophic climate breakdown.
What then can be done? We point out that, first, we should stop underplaying the risks of our current trajectory. The risks of catastrophic climate breakdown are extremely high compared with those we are prepared to accept in other aspects of society. Proper recognition of these should add a sense of urgency to debate; indeed, there are
now rational reasons for considering the risks of societal collapse at regional and even global scales, and for better understanding how this may be avoided.
We summarise a range of policy options starting with the current economic system as its starting point. GDP should be replaced by indicators that avoid the perverse incentives that drive our economies to ever greater climate, biodiversity and resource impacts. Chief executives and shareholders should cease treating environmental
and social impacts as externalities for society to address; stakeholder capitalism could be an improvement, but may not be aligned with the broader issues of biodiversity loss, global inequality or the scale of global issues such as climate change. To redesign economic and social policies to a pathway towards well-being for all within planetary boundaries, political leaders should cease the perverse target of GDP growth and ask the following questions. Is the economy optimised for resilience? Is it improving the lives of the majority? Is it perceived as reasonably fair?
Does it protect our planet and the well-being of future generations?
We introduce the comprehensive lists of necessary changes that feature in international studies aimed at phasing out unsustainable activities, speeding up responsible and innovative ways of meeting human needs, and promoting social acceptance of the necessary transformations. Other approaches that introduce more radical changes are also briefly described: post-growth, de-growth and sufficiency.
We conclude by observing that the comprehensive post-COVID policies of the previous European Commission and Parliament (2019–2024) went further to address these issues than most other countries, and thus provide a strong foundation for the current Commission and Parliament on which to build. We point current policy-makers to
several areas on which EASAC has advised over recent years and which we will seek to support in our future work.