New Reality [2]: New way of life with no way back, but perhaps a way forward?
[Note: all references in parentheses are adopted from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Reports Technical Summaries from either Working Group II (WGII) or Working Group III (WGIII), unless otherwise specifically noted]
We must find the courage and the care to face our new reality, to accept and nourish a new way of life. We can start by influencing perceptions of urgency (WGII TS.E.2.1). Perhaps this can be our zero step?
Very few people are yet able to believe the changes that have already happened. Even fewer can imagine the changes that are about to happen. And fewer still can accept the inevitability of the extinction of our species in the coming decades. We are choosing extinction.
Climate-induced mass extinctions are common in the paleo record (WGII TS.B.1.3). So, the phenomena we are already experiencing (and that we will not be able to adapt to) is not new. This has happened before and is now happening again in our lifetimes.
Is there now a way back to a stable climate regime?
No.
We are past the point of any sort of conventional adaptation. The changes that we are already experiencing are unprecedented over the millennia of our largely sedentary, urbanised civilisation. Temporal and spatial mismatches are already common in predator-prey, insect-plant, and host-parasite relationships and two-thirds of species are migrating to higher-latitudes and two-thirds of species have earlier spring life. We are seeing invasions of novel pests and pathogens into parts of the world with no historical experience (WGII TS.B.1.1). There is widespread loss of habitat-forming species, including trees, corals, kelp, and seagrass, and widespread temporal mismatch between trophic levels (WGII TS.B.1.5).
There are five major reasons for concern (RFC), describing risks associated with unique and threatened systems (RFC1), extreme weather events (RFC2), distribution of impacts (RFC3), global aggregate impacts (RFC4), and large-scale singular events (RFC5) (WGII TS.C.12). While the RFCs represent global risk for aggregated concerns about “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, there is not one single dangerous climate threshold across sectors and regions. RFC1, RFC2 and RFC5 include risks that are irreversible, such as species extinction. Once such risks materialise, the impacts persist even if global temperatures subsequently decline (WGII TS.C.12.1).
We are already observing shifts from carbon-sinks to carbon-sources (WGII TS.B.1.5) driven by increases in wildfires, tree mortality, insect pest outbreaks, peatland drying, and permafrost thaw which are all exacerbating self-reinforcing feedbacks between emissions from high-carbon ecosystems and warming (WGII TS.C.1.4). With extinction risk increasing disproportionately as warming increases from 1.5 C to beyond 3 C (WGII TS.C.1.5).
Indigenous homelands that steward more than 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity are already negatively impacted by the loss of ecosystem functions, replacement of endemic species, and regime shifts in landscapes and seascapes. The tangible heritage of indigenous knowledge that contains unique information sources about past changes and potential solutions to present issues is being lost. These losses have cascading impacts on cultural and linguistic diversity and food security, health, and livelihoods, with irreparable damages and consequences. Cultural losses threaten adaptive capacity and accumulate into intergenerational trauma and irrevocable losses (WGII TS.B.1.6).
Extremes are surpassing the resilience of ecological and human systems (WGII TS.B.2). Impacts with irreversible consequences are occurring on all continents (WGII TS.B.2.1). There are already abrupt and irreversible changes in forests (WGII TS.B.2.2), unfamiliar precipitation patterns (WGII TS.B.4.2) and unprecedented glacier melt (WGII TS.B.4.3) with heat stress conditions at the upper limits of labour productivity (WGII TS.B.5.3). More areas of the world are now suitable for transmission of vector-borne diseases previously restricted to equatorial regions of the world (WGII TS.B.5.5).
Complex human vulnerability patterns are shaped by past developments, such as colonialism and its ongoing legacy, are worsened by compounding and cascading risks and are socially differentiated (WGII TS.B.7.1) driven by underlying social determinants (WGII TS.B.7.3). Immobility, either forced or voluntary, represents an assertion of the importance of culture, livelihoods, and a sense of place (WGII TS.B.6.4). With the multi-dimensional phenomena being dynamic and shaped by intersecting historical and contemporary political, economic, and cultural processes of marginalisation (WGII TS.B.7).
More species and ecosystems face conditions that exceed the limits of their historical experience (WGII TS.C.1). Mass tree mortality, coral reef bleaching, declines in sea-dependent species, and mass mortality (both human and non-human) from heatwave events (WGII TS.C.1.1). Natural adaptation faces hard limits (WGII TS.C.1.2). Space for nature is shrinking (WGII TS.C.1.3).
Ecosystem integrity is threatened by the positive feedback between direct human impacts (land-use change, pollution, overexploitation, fragmentation, and destruction) and climate change (WGII TS.C.2.1). Warming pathways that increase global temperatures over 1.5 C imply severe risks and irreversible impacts in many ecosystems (WGII TS.C.2.5). Climate change impacts on marine ecosystems will lead to profound changes and irreversible losses in many regions with negative consequences for human ways of life, economy, and cultural identity (WGII TS.C.2.4). Increasing frequency and severity of extreme events will decrease recovery time available for ecosystems. Irreversible changes will occur from the interaction of stressors and the occurrence of extreme events, such as the expansion of arid systems or total loss of stony coral and sea ice communities (WGII TS.C.2). Invasive plant species will expand both in latitude and altitude. Risks of climate-driven emerging zoonoses will increase (WGII TS.C.2.2).
Climate change will increasingly add significant pressure on all components of food systems undermining all dimensions of food security (WGII TS.C.3) including increasing malnutrition through reduced nutritional quality, access to balanced food, and inequality (WGII TS.C.3.4), and will reduce the effectiveness of pollination as species are lost or the coordination of pollinator activity and flower receptiveness is disrupted. Emissions will continue to negatively impact air, soil, and water quality, exacerbating direct climatic impacts on food yield (WGII TS.C.3.5), and climate change will increasingly compromise food safety through various forms of contamination, including impacts of higher temperatures and humidity expanding the risk of aflatoxin contamination at higher latitudes (WGII TS.3.6) — including across the world’s major food-producing regions.
The exposure of many coastal populations and associated development to sea-level rise is high, increasing the risks and is concentrated in and around coastal cities and settlements (WGII TS.C.5.2). Projected impacts reach far beyond coastal cities and settlements, with damage to ports severely damaging global supply chains and maritime trade, with local to global geo-political and economic ramifications. Compounded and cascading risk, such as tropical cyclone storm surge damage to coastal infrastructure and supply chain networks will increase (WGII TS.C.5.4). Exposed and vulnerable coastal communities will face adaptation limits even at low warming levels. Deltaic cities and settlements characterised by high inequality and informal settlements are especially vulnerable (WGII TS.5.5).
Climate change is already having adverse impacts on wellbeing and mental health arising from exposure to extreme weather events, displacement, migration, famine, malnutrition, degradation or destruction of health and social care systems, and climate-related economic and social losses, and anxiety and distress associated with worry about climate change. This is particularly impacting children and adolescents (WGII TS.C.6.2).
As climate risk rapidly intensifies, the need for planned (or forced) relocation will increase to support those who are unable to move voluntarily. This will have implications for traditional livelihood practices, social cohesion and knowledge systems that have inherent value as intangible culture as well as introduce new risks for communities by amplifying existing and generating new vulnerabilities (WGII TS.C.7.3). Climate change increases the risks of violent conflict, primarily intrastate conflicts (WGII TS.C.8.3).
Compound, cascading risks and transboundary risks give rise to new and unexpected types of risks (WGII TS.C.11), including emergent risks from maladaptation and unintended side effects of mitigation(WGII TS.C.11.10). Estimates of global economic damages and losses increase non-linearly with warming and are larger than previous estimates (WGII TS.C.10.2). Interconnectedness and globalisation have established pathways for the transmission of climate-related risks across sectors and borders, through trade, finance, food, and ecosystems (WGII TS.C.11.6).
Are we adapting proportionately to the threat of near-term extinction?
No.
The majority of climate risk management and adaptation being planned and implemented is incremental (WGII TS.D.1), with many funding, knowledge, and practice gaps remaining (WGII TS.D.1.3). The greatest adaptation gaps exist in projects that manage complex risks, for example in the food-energy-water-health nexus or the inter-relationships of air quality and climate risk. Most financial investment continues to be directed narrowly at large-scale hard engineering projects after climate events have caused harm (WGII TS.D.1.4).
Systemic barriers constrain the implementation of adaptation options, including limited resources, lack of private sector and citizens engagement, lack of political leadership, and low sense of urgency (WGII TS.D.1.5).
Prioritisation of options and transitions from incremental to transformational are limited due to vested interests, economic lock-ins, institutional path-dependencies, and prevalent practices, cultures, norms, and belief systems (WGII TS.D.1.5). For example, finance has not targeted more vulnerable countries and communities (WGII TS.D.1.6). Closing the adaptation gap requires moving beyond short-term planning to developing long-term, concerted pathways and enabling conditions for ongoing adaptation, including political commitment, persistence, and consistent action across all scales of government (WGII TS.D.1.7).
There are limits to adaptation resulting from the interaction of adaptation constraints and the speed of change. Hard limits have already been reached. Surpassing these hard limits causes local extinctions and displacements if suitable habitats exist. Otherwise, species existence is at very high risk (WGII TS.D.2). The potential for reaching further adaptation limits depends on emissions reductions and mitigating global warming (WGII TS.D.2.5). Available adaptation options can reduce risks, but they cannot prevent all changes and should not be regarded as a substitute for ambitious and swift reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that offer more adaptation options and pathways (WGII TS.D.4.4).
Evidence of maladaptation is increasing highlighting how inappropriate responses to climate change create long-term lock-in of vulnerability, exposure, and risks that are difficult to change. Decreasing maladaptation requires attention to justice and a shift in enabling conditions to address the many reasons that it occurs (WGII TS.D.3), including inadequate diversity of knowledge systems, short-term, fragmented, single-sectoral and/or non-inclusive governance, planning, and implementation (WGII TS.D.3.1).
Indigenous knowledge is a powerful tool to assess interlinked ecosystem functions across terrestrial, marine, and freshwater systems, bypassing siloed approaches and sectoral problems, and offers an intergenerational context for adaptation solutions that is essential to avoid maladaptation (WGII TS.D.3.2). Incorporating the principles of recognitional, procedural, and distributional justice in decision making (WGII TS.D.3.4) enables forward-looking adaptive pathway planning and iterative risk management that can address current path-dependencies and reduce maladaptation (WGII TS.D.3.3). Integrated approaches such as water-energy-food nexus and inter-regional considerations of risks can reduce the risks of maladaptation building on the integration of indigenous and local knowledge (WGII TS.D.3.4).
Integrated, multi-sector, inclusive, and systems-oriented solutions alleviate competition and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation and reinforce long-term resilience and equity (WGII TS.D.5.6). Approaches that integrate the adaptation needs of multiple sectors such as disaster management, account for different risk perceptions, and integrate multiple knowledge systems are better suited to addressing key risks (WGII TS.D.10.3) and pursuing ‘low-regrets’ anticipatory options (WGII TS.D.10.4).
Multi-level governance opens inclusive and accountable adaptation space across scales of decision making, improving development processes through an understanding of social and economic systems, planning, and experimentation, and embedded solutions including processes of social learning (WGII TS.D.6). Prospects for addressing climate-change compounded coastal hazard risk depend on the extent to which societal choices, and associated governance processes and practices, address the drivers and root causes of exposure and social vulnerability — many of which are historically and institutionally embedded.
Drawing on multiple knowledge systems with deliberate experimentation, innovation and social learning helps to widen choices and reconcile divergent worldviews, values, and interests that can unlock the productive potential of conflict for transitioning towards pathways that foster climate resilient development and remove governance constraints (WGII TS.D.7.6). The greatest gaps between policy and action are in failures to manage adaptation of social infrastructure and failure to address complex interconnected risks (WGII TS.D.8.3).
Deep-rooted transformational adaptation opens new options for adapting to the impacts and risks of climate impacts by changing the fundamental attributes of a system including altered goals or values and addressing root causes of vulnerability. These transitions call for transformations in existing social and socio-technological and environmental systems that include shifts in most aspects of society (WGII TS.D.11) including system-wide transformations in ways of knowing (epistemologies), acting (practices), and lesson-drawing (higher-order learning) to rebalance the relationships between humans and nature. Governance measures that transparently accommodate science and indigenous knowledge can act as enablers (WGII TS.D.11.4). Factors motivating (or constraining) transformative adaptation actions include risk perception, perceived efficacy, socio-cultural norms, myths and beliefs, previous experience of impacts, levels of education, and awareness (WGII TS.D.11.5).
There is now only limited opportunity to widen the remaining solution space and take advantage of many potentially effective, yet unimplemented options for reducing society and ecosystem vulnerabilities (WGII TS.E.1). Enabling conditions are diminishing and opportunities for successfully transitioning systems for both mitigation and adaptation are already limited (WGII TS.E.1.1).
The pursuit of plural development trajectories in different contexts and solutions that are equitable for all requires opening the space for engagement and actions to a diversity of people, institutions, forms of knowledge and worldviews — this could enable societies to alter institutional structures and arrangements, development processes, choices and actions that have precipitated dangerous climate change, constrained the achievement of the SDGs, and limited pathways to climate resilient development (WGII TS.E.1.7).
Reorienting existing institutions to become more flexible (including through institutional reform) and inclusive is key to building adaptive governance systems that are equipped to take long-term decisions (WGII TS.E.2.6), including the meaningful involvement of multiple actors and assets, alongside multiple centres of power at different levels that are well integrated; vertically and horizontally (WGII TS.E.2.7).
Prevailing ideologies or worldviews, institutions, and socio-political relations influence development trajectories by framing narratives and limiting possibilities for action. Perceptions of urgency encourage communities, businesses, and political leaders to undertake transformative adaptation and mitigation measures more quickly and to prioritise climate action (WGII TS.E.2.8).
Governance arrangements and practices are presently ineffective to reduce risks, reverse path-dependencies, and maladaptation, and facilitate climate resilient development (WGII TS.E.5), for example, industry has so far been largely sheltered from the impacts of climate policy and carbon pricing due to concerns about carbon leakage and reducing competitiveness (WGIII TS.5.5). Institutional fragmentation, under-resourcing of services, inadequate adaptation financing, uneven capability to manage uncertainties and conflicting values, and reactive governance across competing policy domains (that further reinforce fragmentation and separation narratives), collectively lock in existing exposures and vulnerabilities, creating barriers and limits to adaptation (WGII TS.E.5.1).
Greater coordination and engagement across levels of government, business and community serves to move from planning to action, and from reactive to proactive adaptation inclusive of all societal actors helps to secure credibility, relevance, and legitimacy, while fostering commitment and social learning, as well as equity and well-being, and reduces long-term vulnerability across scales (WGII TS.E.5.3).
Can we do anything?
Yes.
We can be bold and ambitious, we can be kind and caring, we can be gentle with ourselves and with all life, and we can choose to work to expand people’s choices for a fairer, sustainable future.
I am calling on Member States and private sector “leaders” to look at how their governance systems can evolve, particularly given the increased occurrence and intensity of disasters. In an age of complex risk, with cascading impacts, we must break down siloed thinking and replace it with an all-of-society approach (adapted from GAR2022: Our World at Risk | UNDRR).
The United Nations Secretary-General’s Report “Our common agenda” states that our very future depends on solidarity and working together as a global family. That now is the time to re-embrace global solidarity. That now is the time to renew the social contract. That now is the time for inclusive and meaningful listening conversations.
It implores us: more listening, more participation, more conversations. And building from the words in the UN Charter, it calls on us to renew the principles and practices of collective action, to explore a future in ways that will make it worth living in, and for. Encouraging people to discuss what are the most essential and valued public goods with a system-wide approach putting people at the centre. A better way of listening to people. Finding a different way to be together. A new ecology of communication.
In responding to these calls for difference in the Decade of Action, spaciousness and activities for transformative change can contribute side-by-side with all other efforts to address the following essential global needs in the context of the urgency of knowing that we are beyond the point of adaptation:
0. Shift in perception
1. New paradigm of cooperation and solidarity
2. Understanding and acting on the systemic nature of the challenges
3. Focusing on human dignity and leaving no one behind
4. Rethinking the global distribution of wealth
0. Shift in perception
Shifting perceptions on the urgency and irreversible nature of the existential threat we face is the critical missing step to shift everything. Together we must find ways across the numerous institutional and societal processes to be quicker to mutually learn that the choices that we are making to continue to pursue current trajectories of change and continue to not challenge deeply the embedded habits, assumptions and relationships are the exact choices that are resulting in our inability to be able to manage ex-post the increasingly catastrophic and irreversible consequences of those choices. This requires a shift in perception to open spaces welcoming all contexts and establishing a tonality for it to be possible for many more questions to be able to be asked. This is investing in flexibility for unprecedented possibilities and practices to be bold and ambitious, humble, curious, and caring in the Decade of Action and beyond.
1. New paradigm of cooperation and solidarity
We need to build a new Social Contract and foster greater solidarity and meaningful relationships of trust, care, and compassion between all people at all levels: international, regional, national, and local. Through the multiple, simultaneous actions to achieve a just transition towards higher levels of vitality and quality of life for all life, there is an opportunity for a paradigm shift to reassert the role of multilateral cooperation and strengthen systemic governance and partnerships with a spirit of solidarity and complementarity to address the overlapping, complex, transboundary, and existential challenges that we all now face.
This is not a time and a space for asking: what is in it for me?
This is a time and a space for asking: what are the possibilities for us, for all of us?
2. Understanding and acting on the systemic nature of the challenges
The outcomes of multiple recent UN high-level and intergovernmental processes have made clear that we must go beyond incrementalism, as have the multiple ongoing crises: the conflict in Ukraine, the COVID pandemic, and in global food and energy systems. We must go beyond the quest for clear and distinct ideas and measurable solutions, to seek out a more ecological, transformative, and creative understanding of the inter-relationships in every aspect of life.
Focusing on spaciousness for the implicit (premises, assumptions, presuppositions, worldviews, ideologies) and the conditions of the systems to change will build our understanding of the systemic nature of the challenges and enable everyone across the world to become more able to perceive the urgency of our situation and the interdependencies of every action.
3. Focusing on human dignity and human complexity
We need to be able to make choices that enable human dignity to thrive — offering social protections, delivering inclusive basic access to ‘justice’ and ensuring just transitions, and opening new civic and supportive spaces for social learning to lay the foundations for navigating in solidarity our shared, stochastic future. This is a new contract fully representative of people’s complexity and the importance of different ways of knowing and being and of place that builds trust in institutions, attracts people-centric finance, and closes the gaps between peoples and between people and state.
4. Rethinking the global distribution of wealth
Comprehensive and coordinated efforts to rethink and act on the global distribution of wealth including tax reform, pricing mechanisms and the role of market-distorting subsidies, antiquated colonialist and inappropriate exchange values, and incentives and lobbying that maintain and continue to amplify unjustifiable inequities and separations between people. Correcting market failures by redistributing wealth to where finance is most needed and away from where it is most concentrated through pricing and targeted regulatory mechanisms begins with examining underlying assumptions, premises and epistemologies that are constraining change. Which takes us back to our zero step and the mutual learning possible in shifting perceptions.
Perhaps we can move beyond intellectually and emotionally narrow and naively optimistic interpretations of biospheric conditions, which are now no longer stable enough for somatic or genotypic change or adaptation, and begin emphasising caring, weirdness, play and love?
And maybe we can reduce the epistemological constraints that retard our collective ability to add the contexts necessary to ensure the distribution of potentiality for change (flexibility) across systems for re-pattering to meet the complexity that we all exist within in ways that nourish the vitality of life?
Perhaps we can stimulate the flexibility and freedom to find our way out of our stuckness into new/ old social arrangements not rooted in metaphors of domination, eminence and violence?
Maybe we can explore the possibilities of Heterophenomenological Intergenerational Polycultural Playful (HIPP) governance approaches and ways of being in communication that allow space for mutual learning in this final time that we have together?
That might be nice.
That might be gentle.
🦆
This is the 2nd in the New Reality series and was published on the 2022 International Day of Disaster Reduction as a provocation and exploration of what we know about what is happening, what we know about what we are doing that isn’t working, and what we can possibly do.
The 1st essay in the New Reality series is “New Reality: Hysteresis, Perceptions and Spaciousness” and is available here: https://medium.com/@scott42195/new-reality-hysteresis-perceptions-spaciousness-afd4091a8f44
