Arquivo de etiquetas: Transição

Antropoceno XXII – A Fronteira do Ozono

All life on Earth depends on the extraordinarily thin layer of livable atmosphere which envelopes the biosphere in our Earth system. But above the atmosphere in the high atmosphere, roughly ten to fifty kilometers above ground, we have the stratospheric ozone layer.464

And the stratospheric ozone layer is a protective shield that enables life on Earth by reflecting back harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. So clearly the ozone layer is a planetary boundary enabling human prosperity and development on Earth.

The stratospheric ozone layer has for a long time been understood as being absolutely essential for living conditions on Earth. And in the early ’80s scientists started to observe something absolutely extraordinary namely a rapid, abrupt drop in the thickness of the ozone layer.461

This was a huge surprise, in fact scientists even thought it was an error in the scientific observations. But through fantastic research by top scientists in the interface between atmospheric research and chemistry soon it was proven that the reason for this depletion was that certain chemicals that we used as refrigerants, as solvents, propellants, the whole family of chlorofluorocarbons were moving up the atmosphere through high winds and reacting with ozone and – and breaking these molecules apart and thereby depleting the stratospheric ozone layer, threatening life on Earth, and particularly health for humans, by risks of rising skin cancer, cataracts and damage also on vegetation, food production systems on Earth.463

This led in the mid-1980s to the extraordinary step where the world gathered around a protocol, the famous Montreal Protocol, to ban chlorofluorocarbons from use in refrigerators. And this in turn has led to a success story where a boundary of ozone depletion was transgressed in the early ’90s and now we’re actually moving into a safe operating space, showing that humanity in fact can collectively as all nations on Earth work together to operate within a safe operating space.463

So we are moving in the right direction on ozone, but what is very important to recognize is that we’re still observing an ozone hole, particularly over the polar regions, and the classic ozone hole is in Antarctica, which is due to the combination of ozone depleting substances, continued emissions of chemicals, but also the fact that the sins of the 1980s are still haunting us because of the delay time in much of these chemical reactions, which is also a reminder that, uh, we need to apply the core thinking of planetary boundary theory which is a precautionary principle, because what we do today, which we sometimes do not even understand, can have a harmful effect on the Earth system, can actually come back and hit us many, many decades later.

I’ll give you a small example that comes from the Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who was one of the three scientists observing the depletion of the ozone layer in the early 1980s. The industry at the time had a choice of two molecules to develop the refrigerating chemicals that were used worldwide, either chlorine or bromine. And just so happened by pure coincidence that the industry chose chlorine. That was very lucky for humanity because it just so happens that chlorine has several magnitudes lower harmful effect on ozone. If the industry in the early ’80s instead has chosen, or rather in the early ’60s all the way up to the ’80s when we banned the chemicals, had chosen bromine as the carrier of refrigerating systems across the world we most likely would have had a catastrophic tipping point that would have undermined human development on Earth.464

So that’s an example of how close we were of what we can call a planetary scale disaster, and why thinking in terms of defining planetary boundaries is so essential. Science has come to a point where we are at a position where we can define a control variable, which we have chosen as the thickness of the column of ozone across the planet.

And this gives us a very good, robust, science-based definition of how much we must maintain in terms of ozone, and thereby also translating that to avoiding chemicals that can destroy the ozone layer.

Is the problem finally resolved? Well the answer is unfortunately no. The most damaging chemicals used in the early ’80s are not on the market any longer, but we’re using other types of refrigerants, and methane is a compound that also poses a threat to the stratospheric ozone layer, and we see other emerging novel entities that could actually threaten the ozone layer, reminding us that planetary boundary processes do interact, and one very strategic way of protecting the ozone layer is also to have a strong boundary on chemical pollution.

Antropoceno XXI – A Fronteira da Acidificação dos Oceanos

We’ll be talking about ocean acidification. What I’d like to do is touch on three things, first the chemistry of ocean acidification, the consequences of ocean acidification, and some of the connections, not just in the planetary boundaries framework but outside that as well.

So let’s start off with chemistry. The first slide here shows the carbon dioxide budget globally, and it comes from the Global Carbon Project based in Australia.451

And towards the left you can see the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by human activities like fossil fuel burning or cement production. That’s the arrow, the big arrow, going upwards. There’s another upward going arrow and that comes from the carbon dioxide emitted from land use change.

Of all of the carbon dioxide we emit to the atmosphere about half of it stays there, and that’s why carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing. But what happens to the other half? Well, about 25% or so goes into terrestrial ecosystems, that’s the downward going arrow to the trees, and the other 25% ends up going into the oceans.452

So what happens when you dissolve carbon dioxide in the oceans? Well the carbon dioxide forms a compound with water called carbonic acid, which then dissociates – that means it splits up and forms two ions – a proton H+ and a bicarbonate ion HCO3-. That can dissociate again, giving off another proton and a carbonate ion. And each time a proton is added to water it becomes a little bit more acidic. So, is that a global issue? Well, yes it is.

This particular image shows three different plots of ocean pH as a function of time.

The one on the far left is a pre-industrial case. And the color coding is proportional to the ocean pH, so you can see that the red colors are about 8.2, green colors are 8, the purplish-blue colors are 7.8-7.9.453

And you can see in the pre-industrial case most of the oceans were 8 or above in terms of pH. Present day it’s still around 8, but there are fewer areas which are above that. Predicted for the end of the century you can’t see any places at all with pH of 8.

Now that doesn’t sound like much, right? But keep in mind that a tenth, the 0.1 pH unit, is about a 26% increase in acidity of the oceans. So we’re talking about a lot. What are some of the consequences, uh, of ocean acidification?454

Well this plot shows a lot of different kinds of marine organisms, and it’s not so important, you can take a pause and look at more detail, but what you want to – to concentrate on first is increasing ocean acidity is going to the left in these plots, and calcification rate, that’s how rapidly organ– organisms in the ocean turn carbonate into a – into a shell is on the vertical axis going up.

And most of these plots either have a little bit of a – an inverse U-shape or it’s just going down, which means that most organisms in the oceans don’t like it when it becomes more acidic, they slow down the rate at which they make a hard shell out of the carbonate in the oceans. What does that mean really?

Well if you’re a coral reef you’re under stress from ocean acidification and other things like ocean warming and different kinds of pollutants. And you can go from the kind of beautiful, vibrant, very bio-diverse reef you see on the right to the kind of bleached reef you see on the  left as a result of those changes in the ocean, including ocean acidification.455

What are the implications and how rapidly can this happen? Well the graph on the top shows predicted increases, in carbon dioxide concentration for the atmosphere under a number of different scenarios into the future.

The bottom shows the aragonite saturation, that’s the point at which the equilibrium shifts from making aragonite, a kind of calcium carbonate, a soluble or an insoluble compound in the ocean, and that you can see will happen by the early mid-century for the southern ocean under most all of these scenarios into the future. So the point at which aragonite becomes soluble, or coral reefs might have a very, very difficult time, uh, existing at all, will be about mid-century or so, not too long from now.456

Now that’s not the only stressor that marine organisms are facing. It’s one of the more important ones, but if you look at some of the other ones, like ocean warming, and other kinds of pollution you can see that the oceans are facing multiple stressors.

And in particular, on this plot, if you looked at the hatched areas, much of the southern ocean and much of the north Pacific and Atlantic oceans, will be faced by a number of stressors including, uh, ocean acidification. And all of the organisms that live there will be in a much more stressed environment.458

You can get more detail about this, and other issues as well, in a book, Managing Ocean Environments in a Changing Climate. It tries to put all of these different stressors together and tells you how they fit with each other.

Which moves us into the connections part of the presentation. So you’ve seen this picture before, or at least some version of the picture.

This is the image of planetary boundaries. It’s not by chance, that ocean acidification and climate boundaries are right next to each other, because the driver for both is the same, how much carbon dioxide we emit to the atmosphere.

So this next to the last slide shows some of the connections between planetary boundaries, ocean acidification and the couple of other things, like food production. So you can see on the top we can produce food from terrestrial sources or on the bottom we can produce food from marine sources.

And the things that connect them are our planetary boundaries. So you see chemical pollution, for instance, from production of food on land might negatively influence coastal areas where we farm or fish, uh, for food. And nitrogen and phosphorus cycling, and what we’ve been talking about so far in terms of ocean acidification, the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere.

And the important thing with this slide is to realize that all of these processes are fundamentally connected with each other.

You can’t really pull one apart and look it all by itself. Having said that though we’ll like to do a little bit of a reminder of what the ocean acidification boundary actually is.459

It’s written in terms of aragonite saturation, that is, it’s a chemical equilibrium, and this might be a poster child for planetary boundaries in the fact that that’s a very, very easy boundary to define, because it is a chemical equilibrium.

If you add a little bit more carbon dioxide to the oceans aragonite becomes saturated, or unsaturated, so this is probably the easiest to define of all the planetary boundaries, and you can see on this slide exactly what it is.

Antropoceno XX – a Fronteira das Alterações Climáticas

In this lecture we provide scientific evidence why climate change is a planetary boundary, and the basis for defining the boundary for climate change.

It originates, not surprisingly, from the fantastic scientific explorations of our recent paleoclimatic conditions on Earth, again the stable climatic state we’ve had in the Holocene, shown here over the past 2000 years of reconstruction of temperature which varies at a maximum of +/- 1 degree or 2 degrees Celsius.

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And as you see at the end the extraordinarily rapid pace of temperature rise in the world over just the past 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution, and our initial large scale emission of greenhouse gases from our industrial development.

This is the basis for the fundamental evidence that builds up the arguments around climate change. It becomes even more dramatic if you connect the past with the future, which is shown in the next graph showing the IPCC projections up until the end of this century.

And it’s absolutely extraordinary to see the Holocene stability which is again this churning up and down with a +/- 1 degree Celsius, and the fact that we are today heading on average along a pathway that will take us to in the order of 4 degrees Celsius warming during this century. And I think it’s absolutely clear just from this graph that we are at risk of pushing ourselves very rapidly outside of the Holocene stability.442

Now up until today we have already increased global average temperature levels within the order of 0.8-0.9 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years.

What you see here is the distribution of that heat across the planet based on modeling and observations, and what you see is that in fact many regions in the northern hemisphere have actually even more warming already today, which is for example affecting one of the regulating systems, namely the polar regions in terms of its feedbacks in the stability of the Earth system.

The next insight building up the evidence for a climate boundary is that sea level rise is occurring at the pace of the projections we have or even faster. In fact much of the evidence today points at the risk of us underestimating the pace of sea level rise, particularly because we’ve underestimated the rate of melting which potentially could be irreversible in parts of Antarctica.443

We’re also seeing unfortunately increasing robust analysis looking into the future that we’re following what I would actually call a disastrous pathway that leads us on average to three, four, potentially even higher, warming in this century. And that is coming out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last, the most recent 5th assessment.

And here you see the synthesis graph showing the different scenarios to the future. The red line is the pathway that takes the world towards a totally undesired not Holocene-like state of 4 degrees C warming, and we know unfortunately that we’re following this path. So this is again increasingly showing that we need to do something very rapidly in putting a boundary on climate change to avoid moving outside of a desired state.445

The next piece of analysis is related to the risk of tipping points and risk. And here science is advancing in a very profound way. We’re understanding the climate system much, much more in detail, and particularly how the climate system interacts with the other planetary boundary processes such as land, water, oceans, and biodiversity.

And this graph may seem a little bit complex, but it’s a really important insight that is coming out of the three last IPCC assessments. So what you see here is a risk assessment shown in red ambers, which has become a seminal and very famous set of graphs, of the risk analysis of the 3rd assessment to the left, the 4th assessment in the middle, and the most recent 5th assessment to the right. And what I want you to look particularly to is the column furthest to the right in each assessment which has a small darkened little block attached to it, which is the assessed risk from science of large scale discontinuities.446

To put it in simple language, the risk of human-induced catastrophic tipping points. So this is the risk of us destabilizing the entire monsoon system, or irreversibly melting the Greenland ice sheet. And if you look carefully in the third assessment the risk of such large-scale discontinuities was assessed to occur at a point where the warming reached in the order of 4 degrees C. So on the Y-axis you have average temperature at which we risk these kind of catastrophic tipping points. But as knowledge advances, as our understanding of [how] the complex Earth has evolved, just a few years later in 2007 with the fourth assessment, as you’d see if you look carefully the threshold at which catastrophic tipping points can occur is down in the range of 2-3 degrees C.447

And now in the most recent 2013 fifth assessment you see that the assessment from science is that these kind of large-scale discontinuities could actually occur even lower – in the order of 2 degrees C warming. And the reason why this is occurring is that we’re understanding more and more about resilience, about the risks that we have surprise and thresholds in the Earth system. And this to me is the most fundamental piece of evidence showing that a planetary boundary approach on climate is absolutely necessary because for one, at already very low temperature rises we today have evidence enough to say that the likelihood of large scale catastrophic changes is highly probable. And secondly, it’s highly uncertain. It’s so complex that we need to apply a precautionary principle where a boundary position is a position of safety beyond which we enter this area of uncertainty. And just to really hammer that point home, when you translate the latest assessment of the IPCC, our 5th assessment in terms of risk, something absolutely astonishing falls out.

We are today, in 2014, at a concentration of greenhouse gases for all gases, so carbon dioxide plus the other gases including methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and the short-lived climate forcers, including soot and sulfates and organic carbon, we are at 450 ppm.

Now we have taken the data in the IPCC and just translated them in probability of reaching different degrees at 450 ppm, and that is shown in this graph.

So on the X-axis you have temperatures and on the Y-axis you have the probability of reaching that degree of temperature at 450 ppm, at our current concentration of greenhouse gases. And look at the point which I’ve put on this graph which is 6 degrees C. I’ve taken an extreme warming, 6 degrees C is something totally outside of anything we can imagine, it’s an uninhabitable planet, it’s a degree of warming which any person, even a climate skeptic, would agree is totally unacceptable for humanity.

What’s the probability at 450 ppm according to the latest IPCC that we reach 6 degrees C Well on the Y-axis you see that the probability is a staggering 1.6%. Now what does a percentage, a probability of 1.6% mean? Well to give you and equivalent it would be the same as accepting that we have 1,500 aircrafts crashing every day. So it’s a probability level for catastrophic events, which in in any other sector of society would never, ever accept.

In fact, some of  the large reinsurance companies after the IPCC released its report, clearly pointed out that we’re reaching a point of risk which goes beyond the point where they potentially can no longer issue, insurances because they can not be liable for the large scale costs that would be incurred if these kind of catastrophic events would be allowed to happen. So we’re entering truly a danger zone with regards to climate.

This is shown clearly in the next slide here on our analysis of how much forcing we are loading on the climate system. So what you see here is the last half million years how we are able to reconstruct in a very, very adequate way how much greenhouse gases we have in the atmosphere, how much forcing that includes. Forcing is the amount of watts, the energy that is trapped per square meter because of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And look at the future.

What you see here is how we are rapidly moving out of the Holocene, moving out into a forcing and temperature rise which is way, way outside of the Holocene equilibrium. Now when we all take all this science together and synthesize it to define the boundary, we then apply our theory of a safe operating space, an uncertainty zone, and a danger zone, and we find that the science indicates that at the range of between 350 ppm and 450 ppm the science is well in agreement that here we have a risk of crossing catastrophic thresholds. And therefore we apply the boundary at the safe lower end of that uncertainty which is 350 ppm for carbon dioxide. And there you have it, that’s the way we place the boundary for climate change.

Antropoceno XVIII -As Fronteiras do Planeta

Justification for the planetary boundary selection

What makes a planetary boundary process a planetary boundary process?  Well, the key criteria that have to be fulfilled is that it’s an environmental process that is part of regulating the ability of the Earth system to remain in our current desired state, the Holocene equilibrium that has enabled human development of the past 10 000 years. 421

Together with scientists across the world we plunged into this challenge over several years of enquiry to try and identify what are all the environmental processes that qualify to this criterion of being absolutely fundamental in regulating the resilience and stability of our desired state of the planet? And the result is nine planetary boundary processes.

And I can tell you that this enquiry was extremely challenging, and we turned every stone of evidence to see what are the processes that could qualify to play this role? And we were actually ourselves surprised that there were only nine processes rather than 20 or 30 processes.

And this was put out, and it’s been put out for scrutiny for several years, and there’s so far not been any scientific suggestion of adding a tenth or eleventh process, or taking away one of the nine. So we’re today quite confident that if humanity can manage these nine processes within safe boundaries we have a very high likelihood of enabling a prosperous future for humanity on a stable planet.422

Among these nine processes we have different types of planetary boundary processes, some of which have scientific evidence of planetary scale tipping points, some of them which do not have evidence of planetary scale tipping points, but which under the hood of the Earth system regulate the stability of those who have global scale tipping points, or that they have themselves sub-planetary scale tipping points at the ecosystem or biome scale, which if they cross tipping points at enough places in the world simultaneously could cause an impact at the planetary scale.

And this is why we define them as different categories of planetary scale and slow variables, which do not have evidence of global scale tipping points. And scientific evidence exploring the paleo record of how oceans have developed in the geological history of Earth indicates that oceans have large scale planetary level tipping points related to acidification, which makes oceans qualify as a planetary scale boundary process.423

The planetary boundary process is an environmental process that is fundamental in regulating the ability of planet Earth to remain in the Holocene-like state. And the scientific enquiry here has then been exploring and deepening our understanding of what are the different processes that determine, for example, the ability for the climate to stay stable; for our polar regions to stay as they are today for the ability of our forests and oceans and land areas to continue to produce both food, air quality, and fresh water as it has been doing for the past 10 000 years. And in doing that and sharing that analysis with international leading scientists across the world the result is nine planetary boundary processes.

Now what is fundamentally important to recognize is that to be and to fulfill the criterion of a planetary boundary process does not require that that process is associated with a planetary scale tipping point. The key is what are the processes that regulate the ability of the entire planet to stay in the Holocene? But among the nine processes that we’ve identified, three of them have evidence of planetary scale tipping points, as shown in this graph.424

That is the climate system. Clearly we know that in the past history of the Earth system the climate system has been pushing the entire planet in and out of glacial and interglacial periods, for example.

Ocean acidification is another such process where we see paleoscientific evidence that the entire ocean can go from anoxic to oxic events, so basically oxygen-free or oxygen-rich states, that the ocean can actually flip between different stable states.

And clearly the stratospheric ozone layer, which is the protective layer in the upper atmosphere, which protects the entire biosphere from harmful radiation from the Sun.

But then we have, perhaps more surprisingly, six processes that science now believes qualify as planetary boundaries but which don’t have planetary scale tipping points. And they fulfill the criterion for two reasons. One is that they play a fundamental role in regulating whether or not the large-scale processes potentially could cross a tipping point. So for example land use systems, fresh water use, and biodiversity, which are fundamental in providing the capacity of land areas to be carbon sinks, and if that ability is not there climate system would very rapidly cross a tipping point. And another example is the ability of land areas to sequester and keep nutrient flows intact as a way of regulating the amount of different pollutants in the air.

So among the processes which have this ability of operating under the hood of the Earth system and regulate its ability to stay in the Holocene we’ve identified four, which are biosphere processes forming part of planetary boundaries.

One is the interference, or the way we manage the large biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, which together with carbon are the big cycles in the world.

Atmospheric aerosol loading, which is the amount of soot and pollutants in the air, which in turn regulates the stability of the large rainfall systems, for example in tropical regions, such as the monsoon.

Global fresh water use, which is one a significant greenhouse gas, as water vapor, but also the fundamental role of water as the bloodstream of the entire biosphere, regulating the amount of biomass which in turn regulates the amount of carbon in the entire Earth system.

Land use change, which is the fundamental fabric for all living species on Earth.

And biodiversity, the genetic diversity from animals and vegetation and trees, forests, which overall determine the ability of the biosphere to cope with and adapt to changing conditions on Earth.

Now finally we also identify that there is most likely one final ninth planetary boundary, which we originally defined as chemical pollution, and increasingly talk of as new entities.

This is the recognition from increasing evidence, despite its complexity, that the cocktail of chemical accumulation in the biosphere could potentially cause major shifts in for example the genetic composition of species on Earth, which could be a tipping point in terms of life conditions on Earth.

So overall therefore nine planetary boundaries: three of which have evidence of large scale tipping points; climate, stratospheric ozone layer, and ocean acidification; four boundaries which operate a little bit more at the smaller scale but regulating the Earth system: biodiversity, land, water, nutrients, and fresh water; and two boundaries which are very heavily anthropogenically caused: both air pollution, which we call aerosol loading, and chemical pollution.

Now are there tipping points among these that operate below planetary scale? And the answer is yes, so that’s the second criterion why even those that do not have planetary scale tipping points qualify as planetary boundaries.

For example, biodiversity loss is increasingly shown to be involved in tipping points at ecosystem scale. And in the Anthropocene we see the risk that we can have tipping points occurring in so many places in the world that they aggregate into becoming a planetary concern.

So it’s not necessarily so that a system has to have one tipping point at the planetary scale, you can have multiple tipping points, and if they occur in enough places simultaneously they actually add up to a potential influence and impact factor at the Earth system as a whole. So there you have it in a nutshell where the planetary boundaries originate from.

Antropoceno IX – Imaginar o antropoceno

The recognition that humanity is now a force of change at the planetary scale, the evidence that we’re putting exponential and never seen before levels of pressure on the planet is probably the most important message from science to humanity.

So of course it raises the question whether in fact we’re standing on solid scientific grounds when we, based on this evidence, conclude from science that we’ve entered a whole new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.251

The reason why this is important is far away from only being a question of semantics, of whether we in school teach our children that we are in the Anthropocene rather than the Holocene. It is of profound importance because if we recognize that we are in the Anthropocene, if we recognize that we are in the driving seat of changing, and defining the conditions for world development, it also profoundly shifts our attention in terms of economic growth, in terms of social well-being, in terms of development.

So, it is important to look into, a bit deeper, what are the different discussions? What’s the case behind the onset and our thinking on the Anthropocene?

But I would argue, that there’s no doubt whatsoever that this citation holds. That in this current era, whether or not we have an onset of the Anthropocene, over the last hundred years or the last fifty years, the 21st century is in no doubt a situation for humanity where we are defining what nature is.  There’s no untouched, virgin system or piece of nature anywhere left in the world. Everything is influenced by and interconnected between humans. That’s why we never anymore talk about environmental systems and social systems. We talk of social-ecological systems.252

But it should also be recognized that the notion of the Anthropocene has really taken off. It is a notion that has gone way beyond just the scientific domain. It is true it originates from science, and has been articulated very eloquently, and based on the latest evidence from science, but is also increasingly recognized outside of science, in both popular literature and in movies and media, and in different debates around development in the future. So, it’s truly something that is increasingly recognized as a core part of our development paradigm. It, for example, opened the entire Earth Summit in 2012 where the United Nations gathered world leaders in the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. The “Welcome to the Anthropocene” film was the starting point of that summit. One major question is, ‘So when in fact did we enter the Anthropocene?

And this graph, which looks quite detailed, and is worth really looking into a bit more profoundly, shows that humanity has of course had an enormous influence on the Earth system for millennia, particularly over the last ten thousand years. Since we entered the Holocene, we invented agriculture eight thousand years back which was the starting point of a transformation at very large scale based on plowing land, cutting forests, starting to take out fresh water from our rivers, and starting to anthropogenically manage the Earth system. We’ve transformed 40% of land areas into agriculture. That has occurred over thousands of years. So many scientists argue that the Anthropocene in fact starts, and as the onset, with the invention of agriculture eight thousand years back.254

But then we have the very important evidence that up until very recently all these changes that have occurred for thousands of years had very little impact on the Earth system as a whole. And this graph summarizes all those pressures and shows that it’s not until we enter the last hundred years, from the 1900s onwards, fifty years into the larger, let’s say going to scale with our Industrial Revolution, that we start seeing the curves bending upwards.

This to me is an argument, which many scientists share, that the onset of Anthropocene in fact is more recent. Even though we have managed large tracts of land and water over millennia, it’s not until just the last fifty, sixty years that the exponential pressures start rising, from the point of the great acceleration in the mid-1950s.

Now the reason why this is important to recognize is again taking one step back to just remind ourselves that the Holocene, portrayed here in terms of ice core data in both the Arctic and Antarctica, has been so extraordinarily stable. So we have this, this sleeping, stable Earth system, which for ten thousand years has remained very stable and also in a predictable way providing a good support for human development. And it’s only then in the last fifty, sixty years that the curve starts moving away from this stable condition. Now to set the exact onset date is not easy, of course. And just let me share with you a few propositions, which are shown in this very nice summary of the different suggestions.255

One is a very exact point, namely the 16th of July 1945. This was the moment of the so-called Trinity experimental detonation of the first nuclear weapon. This US experiment of the nuclear detonation is according to geologists a potential onset point for the Anthropocene because the stratigraphic conditions for geological epoch is in fact that it does leave a layer, a traceable layer, in the sediments that geologists in the future could trace back. And in fact a nuclear detonation would provide such stratigraphic evidence to the future.

So that would be 1945. I would argue that the strongest candidate though is 1955, which is the point when we start the acceleration of human pressures, which shown – which manifest themselves in the exponential curves of pressures. But this is just to give you a few examples of the debates going on within science with regards to the onset of the Anthropocene.

But the conclusion is actually not subject to very large uncertainty, I would argue. Whether it started eight thousand years back, or 16th of July 1945, or in the mid-1950s, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that we as humanity today constitute the overriding force of change on planet Earth superseding the pace and magnitude of the natural changes, which have occurred over the past millions and billions of years, but today the change is in pace and magnitude unprecedented. And this is the Anthropocene. And whether we like it or not we now have the opportunity to take responsibility in Anthropocene, and attempt to navigate this into what we could call a good Anthropocene, allowing ourselves for sustainable development within a safe operating space.256

Antropoceno VIII – Imaginar o futuro

We’re all living in the Anthropocene today, and I believe that there’s no way that our children will not be living in the Anthropocene, that we have, at least in the terms of centuries, we have transformed the planet in such a way that there’s no going back.

So if we’re going to talk about how we want to live, or anyone wants to talk about how we’re going to live in the future, we have to imagine living in the Anthropocene.242

And what I think is that we haven’t thought enough about living in the Anthropocene, and unfortunately we lack thinking about how we would like to think we would live in the Anthropocene. And there’s a paucity of, especially thinking of more positive visions, of what the Anthropocene could mean.

And this doesn’t mean that the Anthropocene is good, but it is, and good for people, but it means that we have to think about how we can make the Anthropocene, whoever “we” is and whatever “good” means, as good as it can be for us.

So one of the ways I like to think about the Anthropocene is through also popular representations of the future, and, at least in the English-speaking world, there’s been a boom in dystopian literature in the last ten years. And it’s interesting when you try to look through different visions of the future, of how rarely you see positive visions of the future. And these range from, things like, embodied in stuff like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a novel and a movie, to “Mad Max,” and all these other films about a collapsed world where the biosphere is severely degraded, and humanity in on the way out, and there people are just struggling to survive.243

In another sense you have this, with the widespread exception of the Anthropocene, there’s been an idea we’re living on engineered Earth, and these futures often downplay the fact of how much we have transformed the planet, but how much we rely upon the biosphere to keep our civilization functioning, which is absolutely essential.

And we need to, in this sense, have more futures that try and think about both how humanity can better fit with the biosphere, and what could it look like if the world didn’t collapse?

There are some visions of this. An old one from California in the ’70s is Ernest Callenbach’s book Ecotopia, which tried to imagine a sustainable society.

But one of the challenges of this kind of thinking is these are often kind of more, locally-based, little sort of, pocket utopias that don’t think about the rest of the world, of what’s going to happen to people who don’t already live in rich countries, and don’t have lots of land.

And then there’s sort of more sort of visionary work, which is very much only in the science fiction world, of thinking about how people could really be planetary engineers, say for example, works by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson thinking about transforming the planet.

But I think as more sustainability scientists, and as people on the planet we need to think about what are ways that we can imagine desirable social-ecological futures? And I think there’s many different things with the Anthropocene that we’re not really thinking enough about.

One of them is that the Anthropocene challenges us to think about there needs to be new ways of thinking about global social integration, because if the world has become a social-ecological system, our webs of global trade, migration are radically changing the planet. And we need to think about the ways in which all the difference in the world can be done to support the biosphere that underpins all our wealth and well-being. Due to these really big differences on the planet we can expect surprises, as we’ve seen so far in the 21st century. We can expect new types of migration, new types of diasporas, new social identities, and new social movements, and new types of economics, and we should be trying to envision what are 244ways we could live on the planet more positively rather than just thinking about what are the dangers to the status quo. Because I think we really need to have a new world and we need some pluralism in how we think about a new world to move forward. And this takes lots of work.

I think a good place to start, or my place to start, is to think about the basic definition of sustainable development, which is generally, something to do with that we need prosperity, there’s an economy that exists within some kind of society, where we need to have fairness, and this is supported by the biosphere, which needs to be sustainable. And I think three, maybe utopian, but reasonable ways of thinking about what would be good for the world, that a lot of people would agree with, and can at least be a starting point for discussion.

Fairness is something that your, who your parents are doesn’t dominate your life chances, and that the world, offers opportunity for all the children who are born in it.231

That is prosperous, that people have an opportunity to live fulfilling lives, and that the current civilization isn’t eliminating the possibilities for people to have good civilizations in the future.

And of course how are we doing today? I think as everyone is aware, our world today is very prosperous, it’s the most prosperous it has ever been. But it’s also extremely unfair in that this prosperity isn’t shared around the world, and it’s not sustainable.

So prosperity, we’re now richer as a planet than we’ve ever been before. People live longer, people are higher educated, and this development is broad-based around the world. However, we’re also hugely unequal. This figure shows, a bit complicated, people’s incomes, in different countries, in different 5% steps, and the total income distribution in the world. And what this shows is that the richest 20-35% of the people living in Uganda, Mali and Tanzania are poorer in terms of income than the poorest people living in Denmark – that the world is tremendously unfair, and this is not a good world.

And finally with sustainability. There’s many different ways of thinking about sustainability, but we know lots of things about how the world works, and we’re not on good trajectories. This graph is a recent graph showing that how from based on looking at IPCC scenarios for the future of just climate change we’re on a very bad trajectory, and that we don’t have to be on that trajectory as a world, but we are on this one so we need to change.

However, we also know that there’s a lot of capacity to have a better planet, that looking at what contributes to human well-being and inequality is showing by actually having a fair world could greatly increase the well being of the planet. We know that by transforming the way we farm, eat, and distribute our food, we could support many more people with the same amount of farmland we have today. And we also know that, as people more and more move to cities, we have lots of opportunities in building new cities and building new urban environments to provide environments that are better for people and nature as people move around the planet.

So there’s a lot of latent capacity. I believe there’s a lot of evidence for having a good Anthropocene, but the challenges, how do we reach this?

And I think we need to have more integrated research that tries to better unite these three, sort of pillars of the Anthropocene, of trying to have more fair — think about how fairness, prosperity, and sustainability can reinforce one another.

But I think as I was talking about in terms of how the 21st century is likely to be surprising, we need to think more about also resilience, that we have to be planning for surprise, maintaining diversity, and keeping our capacity to self-organize to enable us to experiment our ways towards a better Anthropocene because no one knows what that exactly will look like.

And I think it’s also very much we need to kind of keep thinking in these — we need to have these visions of the world, and I think it’s important to look to literature, film, and art to get inspiration to move towards a more beautiful and fun world, not just something that provides income and opportunity to people, but is really an inspiring place to move towards, to enable our transition towards a better Anthropocene. And I think this, expansion of the possible ways of living is very important, because without this when we have transformation, when we have shocks, we’re less likely to be able to use those to move towards a better world, and we have much more opportunity to end up in these bad futures we’ve been envisioning.

So in conclusion, I really believe that we need to have more thinking by more people and more diverse groups of people about what a desirable Anthropocene would look like, and what are some pathways to achieve it. And I think one of the things, to come back to what I’ve said at the beginning, is to try and imagine in fiction, in film, in all sorts of visual representations: what would a world that’s probably going to be warmer, has different animals in it, and has different amounts of nutrients flowing through it, what kind of world would, could that be?  Not would it be, but could it be. And what kind of world would you like it to be that we think we can achieve? And what are kind of things that people can do to work towards this?

And I think there’s no way we’re going to get a blueprint, but by having a diversity of visions from different perspectives; from Asia,  from indigenous perspectives, from urban perspectives, from rural perspectives; we can work towards a vision of a better future. And while dystopias tell us where not to go, they often give us little guidance about where we should strive for, and I think to try and get these stories of thriving, of fairness, of justice, of reconciliation between people, and between people and nature, is something that’s vitally needed.

And I urge everyone who’s listening to this to think about, both for themselves, and trying to think about how we can encourage and spread more desirable positive visions, whatever your definition of positive and desirable is.

Antropoceno VII – O pensamento não linear e a complexidade

So I’m Garry Peterson. I’m a professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. And, I come from an interdisciplinary background, but one of my areas in which I’ve particularly worked is on resilience, and trying to apply resilience to environmental management and governance.

And why I work on resilience is I think resilience is actually a very key idea for working in the Anthropocene. And I think it provides a very useful framework or operating system for organizing our thinking of how to live in the Anthropocene because it has a dual nature of both thinking about sustaining what we want to sustain, to keeping what we want to keep, and building capacity to adapt or transform into something 231better.

Also resilience is very different from a lot of conventional ways of approaching the environment. And these conventional ways are not wrong or bad, but they don’t always fit with especially the world we live in today.  A lot of the ways we think about managing the environment derive, from ideas of optimization and efficiency, which really work well in situations where we know how the world works and we can control what’s going on.

However, in many ways we live in a world, which is increasingly uncertain and surprising and difficult to control. And this is the domain of resilience thinking. Some of which has a lot of thought behind it, and some, especially in these areas of how to deal with really uncertain and uncontrollable situations, there needs to be a lot more work. So what do I mean by conventional management?

Well I think people may or may not have heard about maximum sustained yield, but it’s one of the basic ideas in a lot of natural resource management, which is the idea we want to maximize what we can get out of something over a long period of time. And this is sort of embodies this kind of optimization type approach, and this really works well, when we know how the world works we can control things, and we can optimize it and do really well over time.

However, this view of the world is really key. It depends upon that the world works in kind of a linear way, and I like this figure for thinking about it, meaning that if we hit the world, if the world is changed, that the consequences of that change diminish in time and space. So if a tree falls in the forest that’s important for a moment, but it doesn’t have a big effect further away. And after some years the forest is back to as it was. And that’s true for many things in the world.232

But it’s also not true for many things in the world. In many cases the impact of some action is actually larger far away and over a longer period of time than immediately. And I’m sure everyone can think of cases of this. But one place where I work where we think is a really, excellent example of this, is the Arctic. As many people and animals in the Arctic have very high levels of persistent organic pollutants in their body fat. And that’s because industrial pollution from industries in Europe, especially Asia and North America, are transported by processes to the Arctic and then are biomagnified by animals that live in the Arctic, and then eaten by people who live in the Arctic. And so people who live in what many people would consider almost a pristine environment have some of the highest levels of industrial pollutants in their bodies. These effects are distant in time and space from where they occurred.

And this type of situation is very common, maybe not as common as simple cases but is common in many places where people have transformed the planet and made novel connections. And this is what we’re having more and more in the Anthropocene. And what this suggests is that we need to have different ways of approaching uncertainty and controllability as first, rather than as viewing management as a solution we have to think of it as a sort of a proposition or idea. And if we accept that we don’t know everything about how everything works, and that even if we do know how things work, it’s like they’re going to change over time, it suggests that our management should be viewed much more, rather than answers, as a learning process where we kind of test different ideas, see what works, but we’re really thinking about having some pluralism and change in what we do.233

And this is a lot of types of approaches people have developed these ideas of thinking about adaptive management or experimental management, but there needs to be learning embodied in managing nature. And this is quite different from how most things work.

The other one is that controllability in a diverse world, often you can’t tell people what to do. When rivers cross borders, when carbon dioxide is mixed in the atmosphere to impact all the people of the world, we need to work on ways in which – how do we bring people together? – to agree upon stuff. And when we recognize that it’s not also just about balancing interests, that sometimes a compromise may be ecologically or socially impossible.

We need to think about processes that can build social learning, not just understanding how things work, but shared agreement and trust among people to improve the ability of people to act collectively. And this is again a really different, focus away from a kind of technocratic approach to management to enabling what kind of institutions, (and) what types of actions enable social learning.

So this kind of comes into sort of what in resilience thinking we would say is sort of three big kind of areas for action.

One is trying to develop new understanding to cope with uncertainty, the unknown, and the evolution of new things. We need to think about social, technical, and institutional ways to enable learning.

If we also have novelty though, we also need to build resilience to the unexpected, we need to be prepared for the unexpected, both to be able to cope with shocks, but also to take advantage of potentially positive surprises.234

And finally, I think and maybe most important of all, we need to develop capacity to navigate change. And this is basically so that the learning and change can be very traumatic and people – I mean everyone, myself, you want to keep doing things the way you want to do it, and the way you’ve been used to doing things. But in a changing and transforming world that’s not necessarily an option for us, but we need to make sure there’s some kind of broad social capacity to enhance the ability of people to navigate change, especially people who are maybe marginalized or having change imposed upon them. And what are fair, just and desirable ways to do this is a huge area of research.

So just to finish up, I think it’s also useful that resilience has become a very popular word in the past decade as people have tried to understand and live in the turbulent era were are in.

But I think a lot of this linear thinking gets into the way people think about resilience. And I think if you hear people talking about something that is “resilient,” it should be maximized or good, it’s not really thinking about resilience in a good way. I think resilience thinking is about trying to understand dynamic change, understanding all sort of different processes that interact at different levels that mean you can’t ever sit still even if you want to.

And we need to both have institutions, and ways of managing that embrace uncertainty, and diversity to cope with novelty and surprise. We need to have approaches that navigate rather than, just optimize resilience. And these have to deal with the fact that increasing the resilience of one thing can decrease the resilience of something else. And we have to understand how we deal with these trade-offs, and that we need to have discussions not just about increasing resilience, but what type of resilience do we want to increase? Of whatever is desired it can be increased, but there’s lots of ways that, dysfunctional, undesirable things, such as, for example, our current fossil fuel economy are amazing resilient.

And we need to understand how to undermine the resilience of these things. And it’s this kind of understanding what creates, destroys, trades-off resilience that really needs to be developed in as a resilience thinking for navigating the Anthropocene.

Antropoceno VI – conceito e suas aplicações

Science increasingly shows that the Holocene is our desired state; the state that is stable and able to support human development in a world soon to become 9 billion people. Now the drama is that the evidence on the human pressures on the planet point at the risk of us moving out of the Holocene.221

And in fact it’s gone so far that science today indicates that we are entering a whole new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Anthros for us humans, 7 billion people multiplied by our industrial metabolism today constitute a force of change, which is in pace and magnitude larger than the geological forces of change that has been pushing the planet in and out of ice ages over the geological history of Earth.

This is indeed a tremendous change in the way we are managing and taking responsibility for our Earth system. And the large changes are increasingly so well documented, not only in terms of the scientific data but also in terms of what we see around ourselves, in terms of deforestation, overfishing, overwhelming use of unsustainable fossil energy sources, and the expansion of many times unsustainable urban developments. So this is the notion and the recognition that our pressure is translating into an entirely new geological epoch.222

The definition of the Anthropocene is important. It is actually not a small thing to change all the books and the definitions we have learned in school in terms of the geological epoch we’re in.

In fact it’s so significant that the institution that defines which geological epoch we’re in, of course the United Kingdom’s, Great Britain’s, Royal Society has put up a whole committee which is currently working on exploring whether we have evidence enough to redefine our epoch to the Anthropocene as a new geological era of man and the dominant force of change on Earth.223

I think it’s important to recognize that in the Anthropocene we must simply relate to the new challenge of navigating what I’ve called a 3-6-9 world. On average science points in the Anthropocene that we’re moving towards a 3 degrees Celsius warming in this century. Again, this is a place we haven’t been over the past 3 million years. We are in the sixth mass extinction of species, the first mass extinction to be caused by human beings, another species in the world. One of these six, by the way, is when we lost the great, large dinosaurs some 65 million years back. And we are committed to 9 billion people.

And that this 3-6-9 world is the world of Anthropocene, which we now need to navigate in terms of finding sustainable development. It’s a world where we cannot exclude rising risks of abrupt, sudden extreme events. Science clearly shows today that already at 1 degree Celsius warming, and the environmental changes we see today in ecosystems we see a larger frequency and impact in terms of heat waves; in terms of influence and effects on rainfall patterns; and in terms of abrupt extreme events, such as the impacts of hurricanes, such as the impacts of sudden extreme weather events, related both to flooding and to droughts.224

It’s a reality where global changes in Anthropocene affect local conditions, and we can no longer separate what happens locally from the global change. And therefore we need to interact across all levels in societies in order to be able to provide prosperity.

It sounds challenging to think of economic development in a large urban area having today to relate to the complex changes in the Earth system, but that is the reality. We can not develop a city, a household, an agricultural system today, planning for fresh water, clean air, ecosystem support, without also understanding that we’re changing the planetary system because it hits back on that local scale, across different scales in the world.

Now another insight of the Anthropocene is the recognition that the Earth system has stayed within very narrow bands for many of the environmental processes that we discussed, as key for sustainable development.

This is one graph showing that over the past 400,000 years, for methane and carbon dioxide, we stay within a very narrow band of just +/- a few hundred ppm on carbon dioxide, in fact never exceeding 280 ppm carbon dioxide over the entire last 500,000 years, and similarly for methane. And we just look, for example, on the situation where we are today, we are seeing that we are vastly moving out of the graph of the maximum/minimum carbon dioxide fluctuations over the past half million years.225

So we’re truly in the Anthropocene performing an experiment, which is way outside of the stability domain we’ve had on the planet for the last several million years, and that these limit cycles are really important because the Earth system tries itself to apply its biogeochemical processes to stay within very narrow bounds for carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, fresh water, temperature, and that this is a key insight in terms of also our world development.

We also must, as we increasingly recognize, connect these very, very narrow bands of limits within which the Earth system has evolved, the pressures that we’re putting on the system, to the risk of abrupt changes.226

And this is one example of a very seminal piece of work led by colleagues by the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research showing what are the big systems that could actually tip over a tipping point and abruptly change the conditions for life on Earth. For example, that would destabilize the Southeast Asian monsoon systems; for example, that the western Arctic ice sheet abruptly and irreversibly melts, holding several meters sea level rise; for example, that we shift the entire Atlantic thermohaline circulation system, which would make many parts of the northern temperate zones uninhabitable; or that we knock over the Amazon rainforest to a point where it turns into a savannah. These are the challenges we now must incorporate in our development paradigm.

It links also to health. If we start moving along the worst scenario on climate change, which is the red curve shown here that takes us towards 4 degrees C, we must then also recognize that infectious diseases, crop pests and diseases, heat waves and droughts, food insecurity, will increase in the world as temperatures rise, and also reach completely new geographical regions which never had these kind of impacts previously.

And now we have projections that would take us 2, 3, 4, 5, potentially 6 degrees C degrees outside of that range. This is a situation where we now must address how can we bend development back towards Holocene-like conditions, even though we are in the Anthropocene? And that we want to avoid a situation where we let unsustainable development go unbounded, which could take us to a transition into a completely new stable hot state of the planet which would not support the modern world as we know it.

So to conclude, the challenge for humanity is to recognize that the Holocene is our desired state, we’re moving into the Anthropocene, placing us in the driving seat, but we still have a choice. We can navigate ourselves away from the largest risks that the Anthropocene pose. Is this increasingly understood? I would argue yes. And the last slide here shows examples of media outside of science welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene. And The Economist has this wonderful citation in its issue welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene, which I think is a good reflection of how science feels today in the face of these global risks. And it says exactly as follows, “That when reality is changing faster than theory suggests it should a certain degree of nervousness is a reasonable response.”

And I think that is one of the guiding principles for sustainable development in the Anthropocene that precaution must be operationalized as a guiding principle for human development.

The antropocene V – Holoceno e Antropoceno

Where we introduced the big picture, the science behind the evidence showing that we can welcome humanity to the Anthropocene, the Quadruple Squeeze on planet Earth, and the Great Acceleration of the human enterprise.

This coming week, we’ll now explor211e the Anthropocene in much more depth, digging ourselves into the different perspectives and visions on the Anthropocene. Professor Garry Peterson, one of our senior head researchers in regime shifts at the Stockholm Resilience Centre will be joining us this week. And please don’t miss our first hangout at the end of this module.

To understand the human predicament in the globalized phase of environmental change, in a situation where we recognize increasingly that the Earth system self-regulates its stability and that it could push itself away from its current stable state if we trigger the planetary system too far. We must explore something profoundly important in order to help us in the pursuit of global sustainable development, namely to identify what is the desired state of planet Earth?212

We often illustrate it in the following way, namely showing in different cups the stable states that an ecosystem, or in this case the entire planetary system, can reside in. So one of the largest and most important questions for science today is what is the desired state of planet Earth to support the modern world as we know it? And what is really exciting is that science increasingly shows that we have an answer to this question.

And the answer originates, not surprisingly, from paleoclimatic data on ice cores. Now you’ve probably seen this set of data, the fantastic evidence going all the way back almost 1 million years, here at the ice core data going back 800,000 years, showing temperature variability over this period, and the twisting and churning of the Earth system in and out of two stable states; namely, the deep glacial states, the cold, lower points in these graphs that often have a duration of roughly 120-150,000 years, separated by relatively short periods of interglacial warm periods where we have essentially an ice-free state of the planet with ice in the caps.213

Now what is really interesting with this graph is to look particularly at the last two interglacial periods. You see the label Eemian, and then you see the label Holocene. Holocene is the period that we are in right now, the period where we’ve been for the past 10,000 years. But the last time we had a warm interglacial is the Eemian, roughly 120,000 years back. Now this period is interesting because over several thousand years it was two degrees warmer than what we have today in the Holocene. And research shows quite clearly that during that period of 2 degrees Celsius warmer than what we have today in the world of the Holocene, sea levels were in the order of 4-6 meters higher than today.

And this is to me an enormously clear reminder that the Earth system actually has stayed over very long periods of time within very narrow bands of environmental boundaries or levels, and that even small changes can lead to very, very abrupt and large shifts in life conditions on Earth, in this case manifested at sea level rise.214

What you also observe from this curve is something quite extraordinary. On the Y axis you see that temperatures on average change with only +/-4 degrees Celsius, and that’s the difference between having two kilometers of ice above our heads, and the warm, lush environmental conditions that we are so used to in the world of today.

So this is one reminder of the extraordinarily important insight that the environmental conditions on Earth vary and that we have stable states. But let’s not go into trying to answer the question of what is our desired state.

Then we can go into exactly the same data, which is shown here, but only over the past 100,000 years. So this is the last 100,000 years on Earth, again on the Y axis showing variability of temperature, a good proxy of how it was to live on Earth. And what you’ll see now is that this was indeed over almost the entire period a very jumpy ride for humanity indeed.215

We were hunters and gatherers during this period. We were a few million people and we had a very rough time because predominantly because of these enormously rapid jumps between very cold and very warm periods.

It’s an interesting period because we were modern humans during the entire phase, so we had the same ability, both physically and intellectually, to develop civilization as we know it.216

Recent genetic paleoanthropological data shows in fact that the cold point that you might there at roughly 75,000 years back when we had hundreds of meters lower sea level than today and most of the fresh water in the world tied up as ice in the polar regions, we’re probably down to only 15,000 fertile adults on Earth. We were hidden in the Ethiopian highlands and we had a very rough time of survival. We were essentially extinct. And we go through this entire very tough period and enter then this final stable phase which is shown in a circle here which we have learned in school to call the Holocene.

The Holocene is an extraordinarily stable phase for human development. In fact temperatures vary with only +/-1 degrees Celsius. And even though the genetic diversity has been around for millions, often hundreds of millions of years, it is now that everything we know in terms of ecosystems, nature, the biosphere, settles in.

This is where the rainforest, the coral reef systems, the temperate forests, all the wetlands, settle in and establish themselves very permanently in the state that we know. It is now the rainy seasons become predictable. It is now in the northern temperate zone we know that we have almost every year a hundred days of temperature, which allows us to grow food. It is now in the tropical regions we have a hundred days of secure rainfall, allowing ourselves to be able to produce food. And not surprisingly we barely enter the Holocene and what do we do?218

We embark on the most important invention of all time; we invent agriculture. And the exciting thing is that we invent agriculture right at the start of the Holocene in at least four different places simultaneously on Earth. And because we didn’t have SMS or e-mail or chat rooms it’s absolutely proven that this occurred entirely independent of each other, and because of the stable environmental conditions on Earth.

We go into the civilizational development starting off with agriculture, the Mesopotamian empires, the Egyptian empires, the Maya, the Chinese, the Latin American civilizations develop all the way to the great acceleration in the mid-1950s. We’re three billion people and then off we go in the Great Acceleration. We’re 7 billion people today, committed to 9 billion people.

And the scientific conclusion of this single graph is as simple as it is dramatic, that the Holocene is the only stable state of the Earth that we know can support the modern world as we know it.

We can live outside of the Holocene, the planet isn’t bothered, but we would probably not have any chance to support the modern world as we know it, soon with nine billion co-citizens.219

Now this simplifies life tremendously for humanity because we know the Holocene very well. We can define very well the environmental conditions that we need to fulfill in order to remain stable in the Holocene. We understand the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, the big ecosystems, and this helps us tremendously in defining global sustainability.

Now the proof that we have had major problems during this period are shown in this graph showing the very large exodus that we were triggered or forced to embark on during periods of often very, very cold, dry, and food security-wise challenging situations for humanity. We also know during this period from data from Greenland that the jumps in temperature could be 10-15 degrees Celsius over just periods of decades.

In fact we have 25 such abrupt shifts over just the past 100,000 years, as evidence that it was a very, very difficult ride for humanity during this cold period before entering the Anthropocene.

So overall we need to recognize that the biomes and ecosystems in the world sustain and support the Holocene state of the world. That systems such as rainforests that regulate the carbon sinks in large parts of the rainforest systems, and the rainfall systems regionally; that we have coral reef systems that also regulate the resilience in the ocean, and the ability to circulate heat, and the ability to take up carbon dioxide; the large permafrost regions holding vast amounts of methane; the temperate forest regions that provide a canopy that reflects back heat back into space through its darker colour, but also massive carbon sinks; the systems on the savannahs which in turn regulate large parts of heat fluxes, rainfall trajectories, and also carbon sinks; are all systems that together form part of regulating the stable state of the Holocene.130a

And the conclusion is that we understand the Holocene, we need to preserve the Holocene, and the Holocene is the state that we know can support human development in the future.

The Antropocebne III – The Quadruple Squeeze

130aIn this lecture I’d just like to lay out to you what are the driving forces that explain why we’ve ended up in this new juncture with rising global environmental risks.

And it arises from what I’ve called a planetary squeeze, originating from four different large driving forces, the so-called quadruple squeeze from the world on planet Earth.

This squeeze arises from four different areas. And the first one is clearly population pressure. And population pressure is not about just the numbers, but it’s worth laying them out. We were three billion people at the point where we started the great acceleration of human pressures on the planet in the mid-1950s. We’re today seven billion people and we’re on our way, in fact committed, to nine billion people in only less than forty years, by 2050. But you see that absolute main driving force which is coupled to human population is not about numbers, it’s about affluence, it’s about what we call the 2080 dilemma, that the bulk of the global environmental problems that we face today are caused by the rich minority that stepped onto the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. And the vast majority of co-citizens on Earth, the poor co-citizens in our world, have actually contributed very little to the damage and degradation we see so far.

But we’ve just now come to juncture, which is absolutely unique. It is now we’re starting to see the positive opportunity of eradicating poverty in the world, of eradicating hunger in the world, of having the majority, in fact the projection shows that we are moving from a world with 1.52 billion middle income citizens in the world to a world with 4, 5, 6 billion people with an average income equivalent to the developed nations in the world.

This is enormously positive, it’s an enormous opportunity, it’s even a right to development, but of course poses enormous challenges if we continue on an unsustainable route.

The second pressure is the one that we almost always focus on when we talk about global environmental change, namely human-caused climate change. Here we also have a dilemma related to three numbers.

The first one is 450 ppm, the concentration of greenhouse gases that normally is translated from science as the point beyond which we risk very damaging and even dangerous temperature rise.

The dilemma is that we have reached 450 ppm. 2014 is the year when we reach 450 ppm for all greenhouse gases. We are already in a danger zone. In fact science shows that we should try to stabilize at 400 ppm or below, meaning, to put it a bit bluntly, that even if we shut down the world today we are in a danger zone, and all projections show that emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise in the world.

And the dilemma is that the pathway we’re heading is toward 560 ppm and beyond, which is a level way beyond anything that science stipulates as safe.

So this is the climate pressure. And you would have wished that this in fact, the largest ever environmental experiment to be performed on planet Earth, human-caused destabilization of the energy system in the atmosphere, would occur on a resilient and strong planet, you would have wished to have a strong, experimental object when you punch the system so hard as were doing when we are emitting greenhouse gases.

But unfortunately we now know from science that over the last fifty years we have undermined the ability of the Earth system to cope with climate change faster than ever before. The United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the first global health control of the world’s ecosystems, show very clearly that over the past fifty years we’ve lost approximately 60% of the ecosystem functions and services that not only support human well being directly, but also which regulate the capacity of the Earth system to buffer, for example, climate change. One of them being, for example, the carbon sinks in ecosystems and oceans that we’ll come back to throughout the course.

But this is not enough. Not only do we have a climate crisis and an ecosystem crisis, the space within which we can operate safely is reduced by the insights that we can no longer exclude abrupt, sudden changes, what we’ll be calling “tipping points” or “thresholds.” And these tipping points and thresholds mean that the space, in terms of how many resources we can utilize on Earth, reduces very drastically. And it arises from the insight that we’ve always assumed that we can predict changes in the Earth system, such as in the oceans, and in forests, and lakes, and ecosystems in a predictable way, and that things change slowly and linearly.

But science now shows that that is the exception. The rule is surprise, very long periods of in fact very limited change, because systems have an in-built resilience to deal with change, just like you can see a boxer in a boxing competition getting one punch after the other and still standing. But then suddenly comes that final punch which means a knockout. Exactly the same type of abrupt knockouts is what we’re seeing in the biosphere.

And these are the four driving forces that changes the situation for humanity on Earth, that our precious Earth system is subject to a population, climate change, ecosystem, and the insights of surprise, which reduces the space for human development on Earth.

Now what are some of the examples behind this evidence?

Well the first one is on affluence. And this is data from the OECD showing the quite dramatic projections until 2050, where we’ll be nine billion people, shown here on the x-axis, and the green big area here shows the projected economic growth for the world. Can you imagine?

The world is projected to have a three times larger world economy in just 2050. The reason for this is predominantly shown in the red and yellow boxes, which shows the very positive trajectories for the world’s developing nations. Almost 500% GDP growth over the next thirty years. This is the affluence driving force.

The climate driving force is very well articulated in the latest scientific update from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here are just some key findings.

On the left-hand side you see the very dramatic scenarios to the future, which takes us all the way to the end of this century, and the possible trajectories in terms of the temperature rise. The red curve, the curve which we certainly do not want to end up with, is the curve that on average takes us to 4 degree C warming, a place where we haven’t been for the past four million years. The blue curve is if we would be able to bend the emission of greenhouse gases over the next 5-10 years and take us to a safe future below two degrees warming. But look at the black dots on this graph, and I really recommend you to study this graph particularly, if you have a chance. The black dots are observations. We’re following the disastrous 4 degree C pathway. So this is why we have such a large squeeze on climate.

On ecosystems, I’m just taking one example here, we’ll come back to this, which is showing the risks of deforestation. We’re learning more and more for rainforests, and this is an example from the Amazon rainforest, that if we cut down large tracts of rainforest, that combined with climate change, means that we dry out the entire system. And that is very dangerous for rainforests because the majority of the rain in rainforests is self-generated. You need a very, very large canopy of trees, which evaporate water, self-generates rainfall. But when you open up these systems they self-dry and can cross the tipping point and become savannahs.

So this is an example of the risks we take because this undermines freshwater supply to big cities, it undermines the ability to produce food, and therefore is an enormous risk with regards to livelihoods. It also makes us lose one of the large global carbon sinks.

And finally the risk of tipping points, which is moving from this example of a beautiful biodiverse marine coral reef system, supplying livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people in coastal regions worldwide, which we know today can abruptly shift over and become dead zones. For example, triggered by long, long periods of overfishing, eutrophication, sediments from agriculture, global warming, the system loses resilience slowly but surely, becomes vulnerable, but then a trigger, such as a linear event means that the whole system due to bleaching topples over and becomes permanently locked in a desertified state.

We’ll come back to the following graph which is a very dramatic piece of research showing that if we continue losing biodiversity at this pace by mid-century we can no longer exclude a global tipping point in terms of loss of genetic diversity on Earth. And if we lose that biodiversity we would lose the basis for human development and world prosperity as we know it.

So this is just some of the flavors of the science, why we can today say we are subjecting our own Earth, the basis for our own world development, to a quadruple squeeze of population affluence, climate, ecosystem crisis, and the understanding that we can no longer exclude abrupt tipping points that can lead to sudden changes that permanently puts us in a very undesired situation.

This is the challenge we’re facing, and this is what we need to navigate if we are really thinking about future generations.

Fronteiras XI – Tudo Está Ligado

A questão do aquecimento global tem sido vista como um processo linear, onde por efeito das emissões de Carbono e outros gases com efeito de estufa, o planeta tem vindo a aquecer. Os estudos estimam, que desde o início da Revolução Industrial, a temperatura média tenha aumentado no planete, em média, pelo menos 1 grau centigrado. Estima-se actualmente esse aquecimento, que é superior em determinados pontos, esteja a gerar o degelo das calotes polares, com efeito no aumento médio do nível das águas do mar, alterações no clima, com uma cada vez mais elevada ocorrência de eventos extremos, secas, inundações, ventos ciclónicos, etc.

A resposta que está a ser equacionada é que estes eventos podem ser preparados e a resposta, em situação de crise, podem remediar os danos. A questão é que não só estes eventos podem ocorrer sem que sejam detetados com antecedência, como podem gerar eventos em cascada, como quebrar gerais de produção de alimentos, alterações nos perfis dos factores de risco na saúde pública, novas espécies invasoras. O que temos vindo a perceber é que estes fenómenos estão interligados e geram efeitos em cascata, quer localmente, quer regional, ou em vários pontos do planeta.

Estes eventos extremos desafiam a tomada de decisões e capacidades de coordenação em vários níveis e ameaçam deixar os atores envolvidos em impases e situações de tensão para a a qual não existem respostas preparadas

Estas crises conhecem fronteiras e caracterizam-se por quando eclodem apanhar as partes interesasdas desprevenidas, ampliando os seus efeitos.

Fronteiras X – Crises sem fronteiras

As crises ecológicas súbitas podem gerar efeitos sociais devastadores e recomendam uma revisão nos processos de gestão de crises.

Actualmente assistimos a uma lista de crises. Guerras no Médio Oriente, a expansão do Estado islâmico no norte de África, Migrações intensas na Europa, Tensões na Ucrânia, problemas financeiros na Europa. Outras, menos visíveis ou notadas, são por exemplo epidemias súbitas, como a gripe asiática ou a epidemia de dengue no Rio de Janeiro, em 2008. Estamos perante crises locais, com efeitos regionais com impactos globais.

Será que estamos a lidar com esta crise de forma adequada? Até que ponto estes fenómenos estão ligados e exigem uma abordagem global? Quasi os efeitos que estas crises estão a ter nos diferentes níveis de resposta.

São processos a escala múltipos, que geram efeitos múltiplos e que exigem respostas integradas.

A ciência tem vindo a chamar a atenção para os pontos de ruptura e os limites do planeta e adverte que se verifica uma incapacidade das nações para lidar com os desafios de todo o planeta enfrentar o que se poderá vir a gerar com uma grave mudança das condições ambientais, com o seu potencial efeito em gerar crises sociais. Uma questão que tem merecido, na sociedade uma certa falta de atenção. Uma falta de atenção na academia e nos decisores políticos

Fronteiras IX – Ferramentas da Transição

Estando claro que existem condições para compreender os problemas que enfrentamos há que pensar em que tipo de ferramentas são necessárias para entender e conduzir as tendências de mudança que estão presentes.

Os velhos instrumentos de planeamento, em que as condições de partida e de chegada são estáveis, não nos servem para trabalhar sobre a mudança. Estamos a trabalhar sobre a transformação em diferentes sistemas, bio-fisicos, societais, económicos, tecnológicos, que ocorrem em ritmos acelereado. Há que procurar trabalhar sobre a resiliência dos grupos e seres humanos e suas organizações.

Isso exige uma profunda mudança no nosso sistema de conhecimento (aprendizagem e trabalho), no nosso paradigma de desenvolvimento económico, que deve passar a incorporar de forma mais central e explicita os limites do conhecimento e da sua ação na relação com as fronteiras do planeta.

A ideia do antropoceno é a de que já que são os humanos que conduzem o planete, eles devem fazê-lo dentro dos limites que assegurem a sobrevivência da espécie humana. Deveremos demonstrar que compreendemos os processos de transição para assegurar uma sustentabilidade global.

Fronteira VIII- Limites da ação humana

Vimos que vários ecossistemas do planeta carregam as marcas de ação dos seres humanos, em extensão e qualidade diferenciadas, é certo, mas ainda assim presentes. Sabemos que os padrões de produção, consumo e crescimento da população desafiam os limites do planeta. São estes os limites da ação dos seres humanos. Quais são os limites que enfrentamos:

O primeiro limite da ação é o nosso conhecimento. Somo na verdade a primeira geração que toma consciência de que a ação dos seres humanos produziu uma aproximação aos limites do planete. Não podemos pois ignorar que a nossa ação é sempre uma opção entre o modelo da insustentabilidade que nos conduziu até aqui ou procuramos um modelo que nos pernita transitar para um modelo de sustentabilidade biosocioambiental. Conhecemos isso e negar não é uma opção.

O segundo limite da ação é o da sua escala. Sabemos que a magnitude dos problemas e a sua complexidade é esmagadora. Mas também sabemos que as suas soluções são locais, variadas e que será esse somatório de boas práticas que permitirão resolver os diferentes problemas. É necessário procurar as sinergias positivas, para as pessoas e para o planete. Muitas dessas soluções são de natureza local e giram em torno de questões como a da agricultura, pescas, energia, da segurança alimentar. São soluções práticas para problemas globais que podem ser partilhados e experimentados em diferentes locais e escalas.

O terceiro limite é o da confiança no ser humano. Há razão para ter confiança e esperança no ser humano. Ele é inovador, adaptável, está preparado para resilver questões em conjunto. Há na diversidade de conhecimento uma elevada capacidade de resolução de problemas.