Confronted with the stark realities of accelerating climate change, many feel helpless to respond. We lose sight of human agency and the many futures it can imagine and create. Political choices are constrained by existing realities but we need to think beyond them to restore hope for a sustainable world.
A good way to address such passivity is to analyse what factors are driving climate change and then to map out scenarios of different futures based on them. A hopeful vision of alternatives is thereby built into the portrait of such pathways.
One compelling effort to set out plausible trajectories of change is made in the Great Transition Initiative, organised by the US-based Tellus Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Led by the physicist Paul Raskin and the ecologist Gilberto Gallopin, they convened a scenario studies group in 1995 on global challenges and possibilities.
Their work culminated in a reasoned and referenced essay published in 2002 setting out a broad historical, conceptual and strategic framework for contemplating the future. It is based on their suggested shift from the modern era to a planetary phase of civilisation. Twentieth-century transnational precursors – world wars, global depression, United Nations, Cold War, nuclear threat – heralded the macro-shift, which took off in earnest after 1980. Strands of global connectivity – economic globalisation, digital technology, ecological destabilisation, far-flung cultural influence – multiplied in those years.
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On the basis of these driving forces, they portrayed three main scenarios of change entitled Conventional Worlds, Barbarisation and Great Transitions. Each scenario was subdivided into two possible outcomes.
Since then, their work has expanded into a worldwide network of analysts and advocates working on the basis of these alternative futures, creating an intergenerational perspective on how climate change can be measured. Their sophisticated yet accessible modelling of potential change is easily located online.
They are not making prediction. We are ignorant about the future, know it will be surprising and understand it is subject to human choices and agency not yet made or activated. Wisely, they offer instead informed stories of what might be, a taxonomy of how history might unfold.
The two variants here are an authoritarian fortress world in which the more privileged states erect barriers against the rest; and breakdown, in which it is all against all
In that spirit, they define Conventional Worlds as governed by today’s dominant forces of globalisation: economic interdependence deepens, dominant values spread, and developing regions gradually converge toward rich-country patterns of production and consumption. The two variants here are market forces dominance, a libertarian neoliberalism; and policy reform, a centrist effort to direct markets towards sustainable change.
Out of control
Barbarisation explores the very real risk that Conventional Worlds strategies prove to be inadequate for addressing mounting environmental and social stress, and problems spiral out of control, leading to a general crisis and the erosion of civilised norms. The two variants here are an authoritarian fortress world in which the more privileged states erect barriers against the rest; and breakdown, in which it is all against all.
Great Transitions examine worlds that transcend reform to embrace new values and institutions in pursuit of a just, fulfilling, and sustainable civilisation. The variants are eco-communalism, a localised anarchism on a global basis; and a new paradigm combining global and ecological values going far beyond unsustainable capitalist growth.
Twenty years on, Paul Raskin is deeply pessimistic about current trends. Even though the conventional world of market forces is even more dominant, he argues, “a political economy rooted in globalised capitalism and a state-centric order is ill-adapted for managing the interdependencies and instabilities it generates, as illustrated by feeble official responses to mounting perils”. This is the contradictory world graphically portrayed by the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in Sharm el Sheik: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
There is a fateful choice. It is between a world in which barbarisation fills most of the political vacuum; or in which there is a continuing contest between conventional worlds and great transitions to hold it at bay
Simultaneously, the globalising trends in play since the 1980s have nurtured a worldwide sense of solidarity and co-operation, including prefigurative and anticipatory local resistances to climate breakdown in calls for system change, not climate change; but these are not yet transformed into a movement capable of tackling the wholesale ecological challenges now so apparent to achieve any great transition.
In this setting, there is a fateful choice. It is between a world in which barbarisation fills most of the political vacuum; or in which there is a continuing contest between conventional worlds and great transitions to hold it at bay.
“The future is always present, as a promise, a lure and a temptation,” according to Karl Popper. These valuable scenarios challenge us to activate the ones we hope to see prevail.