A week, it seems, is a long time in climate politics. On the streets, in parliament and on the airwaves, the clarion call of ‘climate emergency’ is beginning to penetrate.

Even the grumpiness of John Humphrys – recently defending his ‘right’ to fly to his place in the sun on the Today programme – could not drown out Ed Miliband’s (and the cross-party Climate Justice Commission from IPPR) call for the country to put itself on a war footing to fight climate change.

However, a decade is a short time in policy development and as the IPCC has pointed out, ten years is all we have to turn the world’s financial, economic and technological resources to the task of avoiding irreversible climate change. 

Collective action

People are scared. The impacts are present and real, whether written in the growing roll call of names of violent storms or in the voids carved by retreating glaciers and shrinking ice sheets.

We need policies that can convert our individual will into collective action in terms of society, economy and finance. 

The world’s economy has been stagnant since the financial crisis (itself just over a decade ago) with the predictable consequences that pessimism about the future brings. As economists know, economies are fuelled by sentiment, and the rise in nationalistic politics is fuelled by a negative view of the future.

Fearful of such effects, the world’s central banks mobilised trillions of dollars of capital to maintain the sense of wellbeing that comes from buoyant stock markets (aka. quantitative easing). 

John Humphrys’ riposte that somehow responding to climate change might spoil his fun is not so different from those who talk about the response to climate change in terms of potential losses and costs.

Transformative effect

When the world is on the up we are willing to take risks, make investments and hope for a share of a growing pie.

When the world is on a down, we fear losing what we have and cut our costs with the inevitable consequence that we are all worse off (what Keynes called the paradox of thrift – hoarding a quantity of money undermines its value as money). 

But responding to climate change is not the end of fun. Or holidays. It is about the need to create a financial and economic system that stays within the planet’s boundaries delivering progress that benefits the greater good without costing the next generation’s future. 

Optimism fuels invention. Optimism fuels change. Optimism finds ways to solve problems.  Climate change is a cause that needs optimism.

You don’t need to take my word for it. Those same people at the world’s central banks who bailed out the financial system also see a low-carbon transition as generating net positive long-term returns in growth and economic activity. 

Optimism and pessimism

There will always be winners and losers. That is just economics. But we can make sure that this transition has a positive transformative effect on our society, focusing on the things that matter, and moving away from only seeing wealth in terms of the value we extract from the world.

As I’ve said before, we make the markets and economies we deserve and right now they are not fit for purpose. 

It isn’t ideology to want a better future for your planet, although ideology can blind you to the solutions that could realise it.

The politics of climate change are not a question of right or left but about optimism and pessimism, the desire for or denial of the need for change. So maybe Ed Miliband really will save our bacon.

This Author

Bruce Davis is managing director of Abundance Investment, which advertises with The Ecologist.

Image: Ed Milliband, Flickr. 

At least £1 billion a year needs to be spent on traditional flood and coastal defences in the face of climate change, the Environment Agency has said.

But Environment Agency chairwoman Emma Howard Boyd warned “we cannot win a war against water” by building ever-higher flood defences, and efforts are needed to make communities more resilient to flooding.

Homes hit by flooding need to be “built back better”, with improvements such as raised electrics and hard flooring, while some communities may have to be helped to move in the face of growing risks of flooding and coastal erosion.

Investment

The warning comes as the government agency publishes its long-term strategy for managing the risk of flood and coastal erosion.

It is planning for the potential of up to 4C of warming, well beyond the 1.5C or 2C limits which have been agreed internationally and are seen as thresholds beyond which dangerous climate change will occur.

The Environment Agency (EA) also predicts that climate change and population growth are set to double the number of properties built on the flood plain over the next 50 years.

Ms Howard Boyd said urgent action was needed to tackle more frequent, intense flooding and sea level rises driven by rising temperatures, and called for more resilient homes and infrastructure.

An average annual investment of £1 billion will be needed over the next 50 years in England for traditional defences such as barriers and sea walls, which could be funded by a mixture of government and private sources.

Warnings

Without increased investment, flood damage to properties and infrastructure in England will significantly increase, the EA strategy says.

Alongside traditional defences, other measures to help communities become resilient to flooding are needed.

These could include temporary barriers, natural flood management schemes such as planting trees to slow the flow of rivers and sustainable drainage systems with ponds and areas where water can soak away into the ground.

This will deliver positive benefits for the environment as well, such as creating habitat for wildlife.

There should be effective flood warnings and emergency response will be needed, alongside designing and adapting new and existing properties to help them recover quickly from a flood.

Adapt

And with only a third of people who live in areas at risk of flooding believing their property is under threat, the agency wants to build a nation of “climate champions” educating youngsters through the curriculum about the risks of floods.

Launching the strategy at Brunel University in London, Ms Howard Boyd said: “The coastline has never stayed in the same place and there have always been floods, but climate change is increasing and accelerating these threats.

“We can’t win a war against water by building away climate change with infinitely high flood defences.

“We need to develop consistent standards for flood and coastal resilience in England that help communities better understand their risk and give them more control about how to adapt and respond.”

She urged: “More should be done to encourage property owners to build back better and in better places after a flood, rather than just recreating what was there before.

Erotion

“This could involve home improvements, such as raised electrics, hard flooring, and flood doors.”

But she also warned: “In some places, the scale of the threat may be so significant that recovery will not always be the best long term solution. “In these instances, we will help communities to move out of harm’s way.”

Environment Minister Therese Coffey said: “Flooding and coastal erosion can have terrible consequences for people, businesses and the environment.

“That’s why we are already providing £2.6 billion over six years, delivering more than 1,500 projects to better protect 300,000 homes But the threat of climate change will mean an increasing risk and preparing the country is a priority for the Government, and the nation as a whole.”

The Government will be launching a call for evidence to inform future action towards flood and coastal erosion risks, she said.

This Author

Emily Beament is the environment correspondent for the Press Association

Economic growth is picking up steam in the European Union. Over the next five years, the European Commission wishes to “foster growth and ensure sustainable prosperity by deepening the Economic and Monetary Union”.

While the economic outlook may sound promising, the view on the ecological horizon looks bleak. This was depressingly highlighted in the latest report from the innocuously named Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which showed, among other things, that a previously inconceivable million species is threatened with extinction.

“The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” cautioned IPBES chair Robert Watson. “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

Wellbeing

The IPBES report demands that policy-makers steer away from the limited paradigm of economic growth, replacing it with more holistic measures looking at quality of life instead.

Similarly, a group of prominent academics and policy specialists urge the EU not to deepen economic and monetary unity but, instead, to build a deeper ecological and human union. Rather than a Stability and Growth Pact, Europe needs a Sustainability and Wellbeing Pact, they argue in a letter (pdf) released on 9 May 2019, to coincide with Europe Day.

“We have to stop sacrificing the environment and people on the altar of GDP growth,” Nick Meynen, policy officer for environmental and economic justice at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). “The current economic system is pushing people and planet to burnouts. This is unnecessary, since so many economists are showing us that well-being within planetary limits and without economic growth is possible.”

The letter is the initiative of the EEB, Europe’s largest network of environmental organisations, with around 150 members in over 30 countries.

“Nothing is more important for Europe than system change to make sustainable wellbeing our number one priority – it’s time to act and make the transition we all so badly need,” Professor of Epidemiology Kate Pickett, who is a global ambassador with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and a signatory of the letter, told Meta.

In a bold shift away from the prevalent culture of quick fixes and partial remedies, the open letter, which garnered over 200 signatures, outlines a three-pronged strategy for boosting human welfare while safeguarding the environment upon which that welfare depends.

Three pillars of change

The first pillar of this expert vision is to replace the policy fixation on economic growth with a focus on human and ecological welfare. “Prosperity without growth is possible,” insists the open letter.

The second prong focuses on tax reforms which will make European tax systems more progressive and shift the weight of taxation regimens away from taxing labour and towards taxing wealth and polluters. This would not only narrow inequalities but would also reduce waste and wastefulness.

The final pillar rests on formulating and implementing zero-waste strategies that bolster resource efficiency. This would involve transforming the EU into a truly circular economy in which waste is minimised from the inception stage and what waste is created is mostly recycled.

The EU and its member states have committed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The time is ripe to challenge both political and business leaders from the EU, a region struggling with over-consumption and excessive resource use, on their growth addiction.

“No longer can outdated economics and parochial politics trump the necessity of building an economy and institutions fit for people and planet,” concludes co-signatory Katherine Trebeck, who leads policy and knowledge at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and is a senior visiting researcher at the University of Strathclyde. “The world needs politicians and civil servants, in the EU and beyond, to act in accordance with scientific realities – a Sustainability and Wellbeing Pact is a vital part of pioneering policy-making aligned with the needs of today.”

This Author

Khaled Diab is a senior communications officer at the European Environmental Bureau, with a particular focus on the sustainable development goals, economic transition and environmental justice. Khaled is a veteran journalist with over 20 years of experience gathered in Europe and the Middle East. He is also the author of two books.

This article first appeared on Meta – the news channel of the European Environmental Bureau.

The echo from the streets of Europe and beyond is ‘system change, not climate change’. When climate activist Greta Thunberg met European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, she told him to talk to the experts, but what should they say?

We, over 200 system change experts from academia, civil society and cities, have some answers. Last autumn, a group of 238 scientists and 90.000 citizens asked for an end to Europe’s growth dependency and at a Growth in Transition conference in Vienna we made this more concrete. We look beyond increasing GDP towards a positive plan for a post-growth economy.

Our three key leverage points on how to launch a transition towards a thriving society within planetary boundaries advise policy-makers at European, national, regional and municipal levels on ways to confront the still worsening triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and inequality.

Let’s be honest. Neither the Paris Agreement nor the Aichi Biodiversity Targets nor the current tax regimes are capable of dealing with these existential threats. As a group of scientists just wrote in Science: “The current measures for protecting the climate and biosphere are deeply inadequate”.

Deep changes are not only needed, but also wanted. A recent and massive poll taken all over Europe showed that a majority of Europeans now consider that the environment should be a priority – even at the expense of growth.

Broad agreement was found on three major systemic changes. These three leaps are not excluding other solutions, but they all three are urgent, possible, needed, wanted and game-changing. They do require a visionary mindset and a can-do attitude. They require a mindshift away from incremental thinking, the mindset that has brought us to this point of crisis.

1) Dethrone King GDP, elect WELLBEING

People want to thrive in a living world. Policies catering to GDP growth often sacrifice people and planet alike, while policies towards well-being help us heal.

Prosperity without growth is possible. Growth by over-exploitation of resources, safety shortcuts and pollution drive both people and planet to burnouts. Examples from Bhutan to New Zealand and Barcelona show that putting social and environmental progress before GDP really works.

Demands to the European Commission:

• Turn the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) into a Sustainability and Wellbeing Pact (SWP).
• Change from “Jobs, growth and investment“ to “Wellbeing, jobs and sustainability“
• Establish a DG for Wellbeing and Future Generations led by the first vice-president

Demands to countries, regions and municipalities:

• Create a wellbeing and future generations portfolio at the heart of governance

 

2) From TAX HAVENS for the few to REDISTRIBUTION for the many

Tax wealth more and labour less. Tax pollution progressively and stop subsidising it.

Two post-war decades of +-90% top income tax rates in US & UK became a rate (far) under 50% now. Most EU countries followed, leaving the rich off the hook. As a result, inequality has been rising steadily and a growing feeling of (tax) injustice has spilled into social unrest and populism. The Gilets Jaunes uprising in France showed that you can’t tax pollution without a fair taxation system. Subsidies supporting pollution and resource overuse need to end immediately and pollution/carbon taxes must be used to promote welfare for the poorest.

Demands:

• Set top income tax rates above 80% for redistribution to low- & middle-income families.
• Tax air travel for redistribution to better and low to zero-cost public transport.
• Launch progressive carbon and resource taxes at the source and redistribute.
• Provide tax incentives for the use of recycled materials.

 

3) EFFICIENT products are good, SUFFICIENT solutions are great

Efficiency gains are important, but only the beginning of the solution.

Social and cultural exclusion can undo efficiency gains. We don’t need to sell more products, we need sufficient solutions that are long-lasting. Some companies already sell the service of having light, instead of the product of a light bulb, reversing the incentive from planned obsolescence to long lasting products. Barcelona’s zero-waste strategy includes advanced separate waste collection systems with smart waste containers to identify users and reduce residual waste as well as boost biowaste catchment – going much further than awareness raising, prevention, and support for reuse.

Demands:

• Support the development of better business models like the product-service economy.

• Implement zero waste strategies at all governance levels following the waste management hierarchy for operations and extended producers’ responsibility schemes.
• Decrease the VAT on labour-intensive services such as repairing.

• Leap from efficiency to sufficiency policies to make sustainable lifestyles the default.

 

These Authors

The six first signatories lead the drafting of this letter. All signatories come from academia, civil society and city governments.

Nick Meynen, Policy Officer Environmental and Economic justice, European Environmental Bureau
Maria Langsenlehner, Project Associate, EU-Umweltbüro
Kate Raworth, Author of Doughnut Economics
Patrick ten Brink, EU Policy Director, European Environmental Bureau
Toni Ribas Bravo, Ecology Group Coordinator, Barcelona en Comú
Halliki Kreinin, Research Assistant, Institute for Ecological Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Dr Jason Hickel, Anthropologist, University of London
Dr Katherine Trebeck, Policy & Knowledge Lead, Wellbeing Economy Alliance
Dr Lorenzo Fioramonti, Professor, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Dr Federico Demaria, Ecological Economist, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Dr Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor in Ecological Economics, University of Leeds
Dr. Marta Conde, President Researc & Degowth, Researcher Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Dr. Claudio Cattaneo Senior Researcher, Department of Environmental Studies,  Masaryk University, Brno Czech Republic
Riccardo Mastini, PhD Candidate in Ecological Economics and Political Ecology, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Dr. Christian Kerschner, Assistant Professor Modul University Vienna, AT and Masaryk University Brno CZ
Dr Giorgos Kallis, ICREA Professor, Ecological Economist,  Autonomous University of Barcelona
Dr Petter Næss, Professor of Planning in Urban Regions, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
John Barry, Professor of Green Political Economy Queen’s University Belfast
Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel, Political Economist and System Innovation scholar, University of Leuphana
Dr. Christoph Gran, Senior Economist, ZOE. Institute for Future-Fit Economies               
Jonathan Barth, Economist, ZOE. Institute for Future-Fit Economies;
Prof. Dr. Hermann Ott, University of Sustainable Development Eberswalde, Germany
Dr. Friedrich Hinterberger, SERI Sustainable Europe Research Institute and University of Applied Arts Vienna
Kate Soper, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, London Metropolitan University
Prof. Jean Gadrey, Economist, University of Lille, France
Prof. Kate Pickett, Epidemiologist and University Champion for Justice & Equality, University of York
Vincent Liegey, co-author of A Degrowth Project, engineer, consultant and interdisciplinary researcher, France / Hungary.
Dr. Miklós Antal, Ecological Economist, University of Leeds
Dr. Stefania Barca, senior researcher, Center for Social Studies – University of Coimbra
Dr. Andreas Novy, associate professor, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Mauro gallegati, prof economics, univ politecnica marche, ancona
Dr. Alexandra Köves, ecological economist, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Prof. Frank Moulaert, KU Leuven, Belgium
Julien-François Gerber, Assist. Prof. in Environment and Development, International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands
Elgars Felcis, sustainability scientist, University of Latvia and chairman of Latvian Permaculture association
Dr. Janis Brizga, NGO Green Liberty, Latvia
Prof. Tor A. Benjaminsen, human geographer, Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Dr. Nadia Johanisova, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Dr. Mihnea Tanasescu, Research Fellow in Political Ecology, Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Free University of Brussels (VUB)
Dr Eeva Houtbeckers, postdoctoral researcher, Aalto University, Finland
Fabricio Bonilla, Happiness Economics Researcher, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Dr Paul Ariès, authors of Degrowth or barbarity, director of the International “Observatoire de la Gratuité” (OIG), France
Dr Ivo Ponocny, Full Professor at MODUL University Vienna, Austria
Timothée Parrique, PhD Candidate in Political Economy. University of Clermont Auvergne (CERDI) and Stockholm University (SRC)
Dr. Matthias Schmelzer, researcher at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and at Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie
Dr. Dennis Eversberg, Junior research group leader, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany
Jan Blažek, Doctoral student in Environmental Humanities, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic
Dr. Alevgul Sorman, Ikerbasque Research Fellow, Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3)
Lilian Pungas, Research Assistant and PhD candidate, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany
Dr. Barry McMullin, Full Professor, Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland
Dr. Melanie Pichler, senior researcher, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna
Dr. Manuel González de Molina, Professor. Agroecosystems History Lab, Seville, Spain
Prof. Brent Bleys, Ecological Economist, Ghent University, Belgium
Christian Dorninger, PhD-candidate, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, and Konrad-Lorenz-Institute Klosterneuburg, Austria
Dr Panos Petridis, Researcher, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Austria
Dr François Briens, Researcher in socio-ecological economy and prospective studies, France
Dr. Martin Fritz, Researcher at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany
Dr. Vivian Price, Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Coordinator, Labor Studies, California State University, Dominguez Hils, California, USA
Dr Max Koch, Professor in Social Policy, Lund University, Sweden.
Logan Strenchock, Environmental and Sustainability Officer, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Prof. Matteo Villa, Associate Professor in Economic Sociology, University of Pisa
Ernest Aigner, PhD candidate, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Dr Lidija Živčič, Expert, Focus Association for Sustainable Development, Slovenia
Orsolya Lazányi, PhD candidate in ecological economics, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Dr. Erik Gomez-Baggethun, Professor in Environmental Governance, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Norway
Dr. Laura Horn, Associate Professor in Global Political Economy, Roskilde University, Denmark
Philippe Defeyt, Chairman, Institute for Sustainable Development, Belgium
Jacques Grinevald, Emeritus Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies (GIDS), Geneva
Dr Thomas Smith, Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Inge Røpke, Professor of Ecological Economics, Aalborg University, Denmark
Lucie Sovová, PhD candidate at the Department of Environmental Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic and Rural Sociology group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands
Dr. Hervé Corvellec, Professor of Management, Lund University, Sweden
Dr Hubert Buch-Hansen, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Dr Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden
Dr Moira Nelson, Associate Professor, Lund University, Sweden
Dr György Pataki, Associate Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Dr Alexander Paulsson, Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden
Dr Timothée Duverger, Associate Professor, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France
Prof. Francesco Gonella, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Dr Christos Zografos, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Dr Fabrice Flipo, Institut Mines-Télécom BS, France
François Jarrige, Historian, University of Burgundy, France
Dr Tuula Helne, Senior researcher, Kela (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland), Helsinki
Dr Anna Heikkinen, Senior Research Fellow, Tampere University, Finland
Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai, Political scientist, University of Kassel, Germany
Dr Jens Friis Lund, professor of Political Ecology, University of Copenhagen
Dr Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, assistant professor, Roskilde University
Dr Mladen Domazet, Research director, Institute for Political Ecology, Zagreb, Croatia
Edina Vadovics, Research director, GreenDependent Institute, Hungary
Olivier Malay, Researcher in economics, University of Louvain, Belgium
Ajda Pistotnik, Independent Researcher, EnaBanda, Slovenia
Dr Fausto Gusmeroli – Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Dr Ray Cunningham, Green House Think Tank, UK
Dr Janne I. Hukkinen, Professor of Environmental Policy, University of Helsinki, Finland
Dr Guy Julier, Professor of Design Leadership, Aalto University, Finland
Dr Lassi Linnanen, Professor of Environmental Management, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Finland
Piotr Barczak, Polish Zero Waste Association, Institute for Circular Economy, European Environmental Bureau, Poland
Philipp von Gehren, Researcher, Austrian Agency for Health & Food Safety
Dr Pasi Heikkurinen, Lecturer in Management, University of Helsinki, Finland; Adjunct Professor of Sustainability and Organizations, Aalto University, Helsinki; Visiting Research Fellow, University of Leeds, UK
Dr Toni Ruuska, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland
Ana Poças Ribeiro, PhD Candidate on Sustainable Consumption at Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University
Kristoffer Wilén, Doctoral student, Hanken School of Economics, Finland
Dr. Jean-Louis Aillon, M.D., Phd Candidate in Anthropology and Psychology (Università di Genova, Italy)
Dr. Tuuli Hirvilammi, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Prof. Dr. Ernst Worrell, Professor Energy & Resources, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Dr Anne Chapman, Co-chair, Green House Think Tank, UK
Nigel Cohen, Economist, Inclusivity Project, UK
Dr Andrew Mearman, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Leeds, UK; and Green House Think Tank.
Sigrid Stagl, Professor of Environmental Economics & Policy, WU – Vienna University of Economics, Inst Ecol Econ, Austria
Jennifer Hinton, Researcher,, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
Madis Vasser, Board member, NGO Estonian Green Movement, Estonia
Dr Miłosława Stępień, independent researcher, Poland
Prof.Bożena Ryszawska, Wroclaw University of Economics, Poland
Marcin Popkiewicz, physycist, Warsaw University, Poland. Author of ‘World at the Crossroads’, ‘Energy Revolution. But why?’ and ’Climate Science’
Jakub Rok, PhD candidate in economics, University of Warsaw, Poland
Dr Weronika Parfianowicz, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland
Dr Łukasz Drozda, Institute of Social Prevention and Resocialisation, University of Warsaw, Poland
Dr Maciej Kassner, Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
Dr Andrzej Tarłowski, Faculty of Psychology, University of Economics and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland
Dr Michał Czepkiewicz, Post-Doc researcher, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Iceland
Dr Maciej Grodzicki, Institute of Economics, Finance and Management, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
Angelina Kussy, Predoctoral Researcher, Dep. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Prof. Piotr Skubała, soil ecologist, University of Silesia, Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, Poland
Dr hab. Wiktor Kotowski, wetland ecologist, Professor at University of Warsaw, Faculty of Biology, Poland
Dr Zofia Prokop, evolutionary ecologist, Jagiellonian University, Faculty of Biology, Poland
Dr hab. Łukasz Michalczyk, evolutionary biologist, Faculty of Biology, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Eliza Kondzior, PhD student in Biology, Mammal Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Dr Barbara Pietrzak, ecologist, assistant professor, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw, Poland
Dr. Kasia Piwosz, aquatic microbial ecologist, Scientist, Institute of Microbiology Czech Academy of Sciences,
Dr. Anna Urbanowicz, molecular biologist, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Poland
Mateusz Leźnicki, researcher in Philosophy of Law, PhD candidate, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Legal Studies, Poland
Dr. Piotr Zieliński, evolutionary biologist, Faculty of Biology, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Dr. Piotr Bentkowski, Inserm / Sorbonne Université, Institut Pierre Louis d’Epidémiologie et de Santé Publique,
Prof. dr hab. Kazimierz Rykowski Forest Research Institute, Warsaw, Poland
Dr hab. Agnieszka Pajdak-Stós, aquatic microbial ecologist, Faculty of Biology, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Dr hab Paweł Koperski, hydrobiologist, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw, Poland
Prof dr hab. Jan Marcin Węsławski, marine ecologist, Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Dr hab. Anna Muszewska, biologist, Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Dr Barbara Stępień, postdoctoral researcher, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics,
Jakub Kronenberg, Social-Ecological Systems Analysis Lab at University of Lodz, and the Sendzimir Foundation, Poland
Paweł Koteja, biologist, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Dr Michał Pałasz, Institute of Culture, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Dr Mateusz Płóciennik, assistant professor (ecology, palaeoclimatology), Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, University of Lodz, Łódź, Poland
Prof. dr hab. Jan R.E. Taylor, ecologist and ecophysiologist, Institute of Biology, University of Białystok, Poland
Dr Ernst von Kimakowitz, Direktor, Humanistic Management Center; Humanistic Management Network, Switzerland
Dr hab. Karol Zub, Associate Professor, Mammal Research Institute PAS, Białowieża, Poland
Igor Siedlecki, biologist, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Dr Joanna Tusznio, Faculty of Biology, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Krakow, Poland
Dr hab. Łukasz Kaczmarek, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Prof. dr hab. Jan Kozłowski, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Łukasz Berlik, independent researcher, Natural Society of Opole Voivodeship, Poland
Dr Beata Czyż, ecologist, University of Wrocław, Poland
Dr hab. Maria Niklińska, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Anna Gromada, Social and Economic Policy Advisor, the Kalecki Foundation, the UN and the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Jacek M. Szymura, biologist, Institute of Zoology and Biomedical Research, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Anna Hauler, PhD candidate, hydrobiologist, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw, Poland
Dr Maria J. Golab, ecologist, Institute of Nature Conservation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Paulina Kramarz, evolutionary ecologist, Faculty of Biology, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Krakow, Poland
Alek Rachwald, forest ecologist, Forest Ecology Department, Forest Research Institute, Raszyn, Poland
Elisa Plazio, PhD student in Ecology, Faculty of Biology, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Krakow, Poland
Dr Justyna Kierat, melittologist and evolutionary biologist, independent environmental educator, Krakow, Poland
Dr hab. Krzysztof Pabis, marine ecologist, entomologist, Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, University of Lodz, Łódź, Poland
Bogusław Pawłowski, prof., biological anthropologist, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Wrocław, Poland
Dr Jerzy Parusel, Upper Silesian Nature Heritage Centre, Katowice, Poland
Dr Aleksandra Walczyńska, evolutionary biologist, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Prof. dr Andrzej Dyrcz, University of Wroclaw, Poland
Kamil Bartoń, ecologist, Institute of Nature Conservation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Assoc. Prof. Tymon Zieliński, Institute of Oceanology PAN, Poland
Jan Sowa, Ph.D., member of Committee of Cultural Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Dr hab. Władysław Polcyn, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Prof. dr hab. Michał Grabowski, Faculty of Biology & Environmental Protection, University of Lodz, Poland
Dr Rafał Ruta, biologist, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Wrocław, Poland
Prof. Wiesław Babik, biologist, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Prof. dr hab. Andrzej Elżanowski, biologist, University of Warsaw, Poland
Prof. Jukka Heinonen, University of Iceland
Dr hab. Ewa Bińczyk, prof. UMK, Faculty of Humanities, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland
Prof. Michal Woyciechowski, evolutionary biologist, Faculty of Biology, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Dr hab. Sławomir Mitrus, Institute of Biology, University of Opole, Poland
Dr Mateusz Iskrzyński, physicist (postdoc), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria
Dr hab. eng. Marcin Kadej, biologist, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Wrocław, Poland
Dr. Adam Ostolski, sociologist, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Poland
Marta Połeć, Institute of Culture, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Dr Bartłomiej Gołdyn, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.
Dr Zygmunt Dajdok, biologist, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Wrocław, Poland
Kornelia Sobczak, PhD Candidate, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland
Prof. dr. Dariusz Tarnawski, Institute of Environmental Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Wroclaw, Poland
prof. dr hab. Monika Kostera, Jagiellonian University and Södertörn University, Poland
Dr. Romina Martin, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden
Dr. Krzysztof Kujawa, Institute for Agricultural and Forest Environment, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Dr Ryszard Kulik, Workshop for All Beings, Poland
Prof. dr hab. Edward Gwóźdź, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Prof. dr hab. Hanna Kmita, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan Poland
Dr Sarah Cornell, associate professor, sustainability sciences, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of Ancient Futures, co-director of The Economics of Happiness, founder and director of Local Futures,
Anja Lyngbaek, Associate Programmes Director,  Local Futures, Denmark
Edward Langham, Research Fellow, Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, Bristol, UK
Julian Jones, Distinguished Fellow, Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, Bristol, UK
Richard Hellen, Director, Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, Bristol, UK
Dr Martin Oetting, Managing Director, Omnipolis Media, Berlin, Germany
Dr Luca Coscieme, Research Fellow, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Dr. Ingo Fetzer, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Arthur Perrotton, Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Bengi Akbulut, Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
Dr Tim Daw, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Drago Župarić-Iljić, Assistant Professor, University of Zagreb
Dr. Ivan Murray, Ecological Economic Geographer, University of the Balearic Islands
Dr.sc. Jelena Puđak, Institute of social sciencies Ivo Pilar, Zagreb, Croatia
Andro Rilović, Research Assistant, Institute for Political Ecology, Zagreb, Croatia
Tomislav Medak, PhD Candidate, University of Coventry, UK
Dr Marija Brajdić Vuković, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Dr Karin Doolan, University of Zadar, Croatia
Jere Kuzmanić, Assistant, Department of Urban Planning, , Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture, Geodesy, University of Split, Croatia
Prof. Dr Susana Paixao, Environmental Health Specialist, Instituto Politécnico de Coimbra, Portugal
Jan Mayrhofer, Policy Officer, European Youth Forum
Predrag Momčilović, PhD Candidate and researcher, Platform for theory and practice of commons, Belgrade, Serbia
Sara Fromm, Research & Degrowth, Barcelona, Spain
Dr Susan George, President of the Transnational Institute, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Lisa Hough-Stewart, Communications and Mobilisation lead at Wellbeing Economy Alliance
Dr Jorge Riechmann, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Dr Giacomo D’Alisa, Center for Social Studies University of Coimbra
Dr Richard Lane, Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University
Dr Eva Friman, Director & Researcher, Swedesd, Uppsala University
Dr Tim Jackson, Professor, University of Surrey, UK
Jonas Van der Slycken, PhD Candidate in economics, Ghent University, Belgium
Dr Monica Verbeek, Executive Director, Seas At Risk
Arnaud Schwartz, National secretary of France Nature Environnement & member of the European Economic and Social Committee
Michel Dubromel, President of France Nature Environnement
Jeremie Fosse, President, eco-union, Spain
Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, researcher at the University of Valladolid, Spain
Dr Leho Tedersoo, Research Professor, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Estonia
Dr Mart Külvik, Professor in Biodiversity and Environmental Planning, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Estonia
Dr Mihkel Kangur, Senior Researcher of Paleoecology, Tallinn University, President of Estonian Geographical Society, Estonia
Dr Aleksander Pulver, Lecturer, School of Natural Sciences and Health, Tallinn University, Estonia
Prof. John Sweeney, Emeritus Professor of Geography, Maynooth University, Ireland
Dr Triin Vihalemm, Professor Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia
Dr Irmak Ertör, Postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain

It’s no coincidence that the intensification of the climate crisis has occurred in parallel with the far-reaching privatisation of the global economy.

The neoliberal project of reorganising every corner of society to adhere to the competitive logic of the “free market” has systematically undermined the collective action needed to avert runaway climate change.

The capitalist project of ensuring the profit motive dominates the production of every good and provision of every service has afforded the fossil fuel industry life-support lasting decades longer than it should have ever been allowed.

Fuelling denial

Fossil fuel companies like Exxon and Shell knew about the climate breakdown their extraction would induce before everybody else. They didn’t just refuse to change their business model. They actively funded climate change denial to suppress the authority of the science. Why? Fossil fuels are still profitable.

Even as fossil fuel share prices begin to fall, they remain among the assets with highest returns for investors. Left to market forces and the profit motive, private energy companies will continue the exploration and extraction of new fossil fuels as the world around them burns.

A new report published by campaign group We Own It, ‘When We Own It: A model for public ownership in the 21st century’, offers the starting points of a response to the rampant privatisation that has precipitated climate breakdown and wider social crises like inequality.

The report comes in response to the Labour Party’s consultation on democratic public ownership. It draws on best practice case studies from Brazil to Barcelona to call for public ownership of water, energy, public transport and the Royal Mail.

‘When We Own It’ is clear in its framing of the problem: “Private energy companies fail to invest in our green energy future.” Significant here is the tense of the claim. The assertion is not that private companies have failed in the past tense (though they incontestably have) but that they fail in the continuous.

Public ownership 

In other words, failure to invest in decarbonisation is essential to a private energy sector. There is no redemption arc for private energy companies. It is their necessary pursuit of private profit which blocks investment in a renewables sector tending towards abundant, decentralised energy production.

The alternative is public ownership of key services locally, regionally and nationally to shift the energy sector’s focus towards renewables in a transition to a zero-carbon economy.

The report’s first point in support of public ownership is that “publicly owned companies can put their purpose or mission ahead of profit.”

Currently, private companies are preoccupied with returning sizeable dividends to shareholders. Social and environmental concerns are necessarily secondary.

With participatory democratic control, and with no shareholders to be satisfied with profits, publicly owned services are free to prioritise the common good.

Collective responses 

As well as structuring profit out of the equation, the report argues that public ownership provides the space “to build collective responses to the huge challenges we face.”

Individualist and consumerist strategies to address climate breakdown have emphatically failed. The public have not taken to voluntarily reforming their lifestyles and consumption habits to save the planet.

Even if they did, consumer choices within capitalist “free markets” will never be enough to fully decarbonise society. Our economy has fossil fuel extraction structured into its fundamental logic.

Only a collective response mediated through democratic ownership can transform the economy to marginalise fossil fuels and embrace renewables on the necessary timescale.

Alongside a just energy transition, one of the most exciting ambitions ‘When We Own It’ is an integrated public transport system. Public ownership of trains and buses is already popular with the promise of cheaper, faster and more connected services.

The radical expansion of integrated public transport across the country and continents also provides a key opportunity to lock the economy into zero-carbon infrastructure while marginalising short-haul aviation.

New duties

Grand ambitions aside for a moment, we should be clear that in the context of the climate crisis we seek to address our models of public ownership must be intentionally directed to solve these problems.

Done carelessly, we could easily extend public ownership across the economy while maintaining fossil fuel extraction. State-owned oil companies including from Saudi Arabia to China, Malaysia, Venezuela and Kuwait make this abundantly clear.

The report recommends required duties for public companies. For example, they may have a duty to decarbonise or promote biodiversity. With this explicitly enshrined duty, the public can hold their companies to account and themselves set targets commensurate with the crises they seek to address.

After decades of failure by private companies to do anything towards tackling climate breakdown, the responsibility to take action must now exclusively sit in the hands of the people. ‘When We Own It is an apt name for this report. It can no longer be a matter of ‘if’ but ‘how soon’ with discussions of public ownership.

A future our democratic, public ownership of our shared resources is in sight. To fully address the climate crisis, it must now be inevitable.

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-founder of Labour for a Green New Deal and co-director of climate change campaigns at People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh.

Conservation bodies active in peatland restoration across the UK were in Westminster last week to explain the vital role of their work in the fight to slow climate change.

A group of organisations met MPs and Peers to highlight the valuable public benefits of healthy peatlands and how restoring and protecting them can help to tackle catastrophic climate change.

Restoration project

Pennine PeatLIFE, a major peatland conservation project led by the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Partnership in collaboration with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and Forest of Bowland AONB Partnership, hosted the parliamentary reception. 

The reception was co-ordinated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) UK Peatland Programme, and brought together partnerships working across the UK, representing a wealth of expertise and over 100,000 hectares of restored peatlands.

Julian Sturdy MP (York Outer) and Rishi Sunak MP (Richmond) sponsored the event and talked about their visits to Pennine PeatLIFE sites in their own constituencies.

Environment Minister, Thérèse Coffey said: “I was delighted to speak to the Pennine PeatLIFE event. The UK’s three million hectares of peatlands are an invaluable resource in our natural environment, providing carbon storage, clean water, flood mitigation, natural habitats, and land for agriculture and recreation.

“Four large-scale peatland projects across England are benefitting from £10 million of Defra funding, to restore over 6,000 hectares of degraded peatland between now and March 2021. It was great to see the fruits of that investment and meet some of the people behind this essential work.”

Healthy peatlands

The undervalued moorland landscape of upland areas of the UK can capture and store vast amounts of carbon, locking it in to stop it contributing to further climate change.

However if they are left to degrade, peatlands will release their stored carbon into the atmosphere. Dried-out, damaged peat is also vulnerable to fire, as can be seen with the wildfires that have taken hold on moors across the country.

Public benefits of healthy peatlands are not restricted to tackling climate change. Seventy percent of our drinking water comes from upland catchments, they host internationally important biodiversity of plants and animals, and they ‘slow the flow’ of water which can reduce the impact of flooding.

Rob Stoneman, Chair of Pennine PeatLIFE, said: “With the industrial revolution the UK began what Greta Thunberg refers to as a ‘mind-blowing historical carbon debt.’ We think that we should be leading a new industrial revolution, one that reduces emissions and addresses climate change as the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.

“Healthy peatlands are central to this climate change revolution, and we must continue to invest in their conservation.”

Carbon storage

Rob Brown, owner of Howesyke Farm in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, spoke about his experience as a landowner: “On my farm 950 acres of peatland have been restored for the public benefit.

“Thousands of tonnes of CO2 have been saved from entering the atmosphere and downstream the benefits include cleaner water and reduced impact of flooding.

“We need to create more opportunities for land managers to undertake peatland restoration and support the delivery organisations, such as AONB and National Park teams, through blended public, private and charitable funding solutions.”

Paul Leadbitter, Peatland Programme Manager at the North Pennines AONB Partnership, said: “What many people see when they look at our moorlands are vast expanses of a harsh and relatively inaccessible habitat, seemingly without much growing there.

“However these peatlands and the plants that grow on them are the engines of carbon storage in our upland landscape.”

Innovative practices 

Pennine PeatLIFE is funded by the EU LIFE programme with match funding from Yorkshire Water, United Utilities, Northumbrian Water and the Environment Agency.

The North Pennines AONB Partnership and IUCN UK Peatland Programme have also received funding from innovative funders and grant-makers such as the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to further develop peat restoration programmes in the UK.

The UK Peatland Strategy sets out an ambitious target of two million hectares of peatland in good condition, under restoration or being sustainably managed by 2040.

IUCN UK Peatland Programme Director, Clifton Bain, said: “There is great momentum and expertise in the UK peatland sector and we have made real progress towards our targets. Long-term funding is needed to maintain this momentum and realise the many benefits healthy peatlands provide us with.

“The United Nations General Assembly has declared the next decade the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

“Restoring degraded ecosystems is a proven measure to tackle climate change and the peatland community in the UK can help meet this commitment through innovative restoration practices and its established ethos of partnership working.”

This Article

This article is based on a press release from the North Pennines AONB Partnership. 

Image: Lancashire Peat Partnership.

A declaration of climate emergency has been a long time coming. Too long.

There is frighteningly little time left to prevent an ecological and human catastrophe.  But for the thousands of activists and scientists who have dedicated themselves to environmental and climate justice, this is still an important milestone.

Now the imperative is to turn words in to action, demanding urgency, energy and commitment from the highest levels in Government. 

Critical ambition

Our planet is warmer now than at any point in the last 800,000 years and it is heating, fast.

The challenge for whoever is resident in No. 10 is to listen to the overwhelming body of science, telling us we have no time to waste and to move to zero net carbon emissions well before 2050.

Only this scale of reduction will give us a chance, in the real world, of preventing the run-away escalation of global temperatures that would see humanity inundated by too much water and damned by too little as the ecological systems that underpin our survival are destroyed.  

Addressing those who sit today in Westminster, those who declared this climate emergency, I recall the words of a previous leader who faced a similar existential threat: “Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest of warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. 

“The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences … We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now”. So warned Winston Churchill on 12 November 1936.

A sea-change

We need a sea-change in the thinking, ambition and action of our political classes, across businesses and how we run our economy and, yes, in the way each of us live our lives. We need to declare war on our addiction to carbon. 

How must we act? The full list of measures is long, but we can summarise, creating a “Manifesto to Combat Climate Change” for our Government, which appears either unwilling or unable to create its own.  

We need to see massive, nation-wide investment in renewable energy, directing the billions currently being spewed on mis-guided, poor value projects like HS2 toward wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

And, let’s be clear: renewable energy does not mean nuclear, it does not mean fracking, it does not mean the cutting of forests to be shipped vast distances to burn in power stations. 

New homes should have the insulation; the solar panels; the water saving; the structures necessary to eradicate the bleeding of greenhouse gases that currently account for 14 percent of the UK total.

Natural solutions

Likewise, we must ensure the rapid delivery of the necessary infrastructure to support electric vehicles and zero carbon travel; investing massively in cheaper, better public transport, encouraging people away from their cars by giving them a genuinely viable alternative.

We need to close polluting industries, giving those workers and communities dependent on them better alternatives, not least in the huge expansion of renewable energy. We need to tax and rapidly eradicate our use of fossil fuels, phasing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. 

And along with these measures we must turn to nature as a fundamental part of the solution. A massive increase in the planting of trees in our towns and cities, but also creating far larger areas across our country of rich, biodiverse forested land; cooling our atmosphere, sucking in carbon and delivering oxygen, along with a home for wildlife to slow and halt the cascade of species extinctions that also threatens our survival.

Government is falling woefully short on its current tree-planting target of 20,000 hectares each year, and the CCC’s call to increase forest cover to 17 percent of UK land does not go nearly far enough.

Let’s get serious, rewilding the UK and doubling the cover of natural forests within the next 10 years. 

Ecocidal inaction

I hear people shout: Cost! Economy! Jobs! But those who have argued against action on these grounds fail to see the alternatives, fail to see the reality.

There are vast numbers of jobs to be had in adopting this approach to our climate emergency. The renewable energy sector in the USA has had one of the fastest rates of job creation of any industry and the same can be true here.  

Let’s once again reflect on exactly what failure to act would mean. As I write this, extreme weather events are forcing millions of people from their homes across the world.

Since 2008 an average 21.7 million people, 59,600 every day, 41 every minute have been driven from their homes as our addiction to carbon has brought increasingly severe and common floods, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires.

While our oceans are becoming rapidly warmer, more acidic and more hostile to life and countless terrestrial species struggle to survive as our world heats up. We, in the UK, are not immune to these impacts – they will damn us too. 

Activism works

Our economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of our natural environment. The destruction of our environmental security would ultimately also see the end of our economy. In the final analysis, we have no option but to act. 

What about the will of the people? 

The UK parliament’s acknowledgement of the climate emergency took place at this late hour because of the pressure applied by the Extinction Rebellion activists, the school climate strikers, the years of work by NGOs including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the work of a tiny number of parliamentarians, most notably, the impressive Caroline Lucas. 

What this proves is that consistent advocacy and civil disobedience does work. People in the UK are waking up to the crisis and demanding so much more than empty words the government has seen fit to force feed us: 63 percent of the British public recognise that we are in a climate emergency. 

We can take hope that Westminster has become the first parliament in the world to declare a climate emergency, but now let’s hold our MPs to account; let’s make sure they act with the vigour, determination and impact the environmental crisis demands.

Existential threat

The UK can set off a wave of action from other nations around the globe.

This can be a historic vote and given the UK’s historically high carbon emissions, it is right that it should be leading the way. 

Climate change arguably presents the most damning existential threat yet seen in our world, but it is not too late to take action.

Nor is it too late for such action to succeed. Borrowing the words of the truly inspirational Greta Thunberg: “Activism works, so act”.  

This Author

Steve Trent is co-founder and executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). 

Image: Gareth Morris, Extinction Rebellion. 

A huge number of people – 350,000 and counting  – have downloaded Jem Bendell’s paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. 

Here I want to develop one thing that Bendell talks about: social collapse. 

But first, for those who have not read his research paper, there are three key truths Bendell tells.

Three truths 

Firstly, climate change has been moving much faster than scientists predicted. Things are going to get very bad within the lifetime of some of us now living. We don’t know and can’t know how bad, or how quickly this will happen.

Everyone that Bendell speaks with bases their predictions on their political beliefs. That’s true of everyone I talk to too.

Bendell chooses to think that social collapse is inevitable, catastrophe probable and extinction possible. That’s my guess too.

A second truth: scientists have, for many reasons, been under constant pressure to downplay the dangers and extent of climate change, and not to scare the mob.

Non-governmental organisations have constantly colluded with governments and corporations to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, and to push solutions that will not solve it. Scientists and NGOs do this because their funders demand that. 

A third truth: Bendell says it is hard, at first, to accept what is coming. I have found that too.

Climate politics

I first got involved in climate politics because I’m a freelance writer and in 2004 I decided to write a book about climate change. I thought it would be interesting and there would be a market, God forgive me.

I got involved with a climate action group – the Campaign against Climate Change – and started reading. Several months later I began having the same nightmare most nights for months. In that nightmare I was trying to tell some people something, and they were not listening.

What was happening is that I was understanding the implications of what I was reading. One reason is that I take science seriously, and I understand numbers. The other is that I already understood social collapse. 

That was bad enough. For the next four years I knew what would happen if we did not act. Then at the end of the UN climate talks in 2009, on a Friday lunchtime in Copenhagen, I read the text of the agreement Barack Obama had just made the other governments agree to.

That text ended the Kyoto agreement and said that henceforward no government would have to make compulsory cuts in emissions. Every government could choose what cuts or increases they wanted. The Paris talks in 2015 extended that to 2035.

I understood what Obama had done immediately. That text ended the possibility of action for a generation. Since then, I have understood social collapse is coming.

Memories

Two memories keep coming back to me. In one I am six years old. Mr. Dillion is my father’s best friend in Ludhiana, the city in Indian Punjab where we live.

Mr. Dhillon tells me the during partition his parents hid a Muslim under their house – under the porch, I think. Mr. Dhillon is above me, smiling down. I understand he is proud, and that there is some terrible tragedy in the air around him. He tells me they saved the Muslim’s life. I have few memories from that age, but that one I have remembered.

The Partition between India and Pakistan was not ancient history then. It was seven, one year older than me. What Mr. Dillion told me was important to him because no one else he knew, just his parents, had done that.

A million people, more or less, had died in a few weeks in Punjab. Half of them were Hindus and Sikhs killed by Muslims. Half were Muslims killed Hindus and Sikhs.

I grew up knowing that it is people like us, people all around us, who do the massacres. And that very few of us are lucky enough to be Mr. Dhillon’s parents. And that he was telling me to try to follow their example. 

Terrible famine 

In the other memory I am twenty-three, a young anthropologist beginning my first fieldwork, in the town of Lashkargah in southwestern Afghanistan.

Walking back to the only hotel in town for my supper, I pass a teenage boy standing on the side of the road. He says something quietly. I am well past him by the time I understand what he said. I am so proud of myself. It is the first Pushtu sentence I have understood outside of a lesson. But I am too embarrassed or shy to go back to him.

He said: “I am hungry”. 

To the north of Lashkargah a terrible famine was beginning. I understood within weeks that boy was a refugee from that starvation. That famine, I know now, was caused by drought caused by climate change. Like every famine it was also caused by inequality and cruelty.

In the North of the country the government delivered foreign aid grain. The district officers put armed soldiers around the piles of grain in the middle of the towns to prevent the hungry getting the food. The poor sold their land at knockdown prices to the rich to buy wheat from the district officers at five and ten times the usual prices. Those with no land to sell died. 

Endless grief

My friend Michael Barry asked some starving people why they did not storm the grain piles. One of them said: “The King has planes. They will come and shoot us down.”

Those were Russian planes, flown by pilots trained in America. US Aid knew what was happening to their grain aid. I know that because the wife and daughter of the man who ran US Aid told me so as I drank scotch in their nice house in Kabul. They were upset because they could not get their husband and father to do anything.

I have told that story many times since, in many ways. I will go on telling it, boringly, until the day I die. I tell it to make an important point about what serious climate change will feel like – and what it already feels like for many millions.

No one dared to storm those piles of grain. But when the ‘leftist strongman’ Daoud, the King’s cousin, staged a coup two years later, no one would die for the King. The famine had left him with the mark of Cain. And when the communists staged a coup against Daoud four years after that, no one fought for Daoud, the King’s cousin, either. 

The story of Afghan politics after that is endlessly complex. But the direction is clear: war after war, betrayal after betrayal, endless grief. Always in the background, the failure of the rains, across all of Central Asia, for decades. 

Social collapse

It would be wrong to reduce the Afghan tragedy to climate change. There was much else involved, many great powers, unspeakably murderous invasions by Russia and the United States, and dishonest greedy resistance leaders. But as time goes on, in our world, climate change becomes more and more of a driver of such tragedies.

The massacres at Partition and the Afghan tragedy are not what most people in Britain mean when they say ‘social collapse’. Bendell himself is clear enough: “Starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war.” He’s right.

But what most people mean is what you see over and over in the dystopian movies. There are little groups of savages wandering the roads, scavenging and fearful, making tentative friends to keep the dark at bay. That is not remotely what it’s going to be like. 

That fantasy of disorganized savages goes back to the ugly ruling class British thinker Hobbes in the seventeenth century. He believed that only the firm supervision of the state prevented a war of all against all.

This is a long running fantasy among all elites, because their deepest fear is that the rest of us will loosen their iron grip. It is fantasy that still appeals to people who grew up in privilege. It is the fantasy that informs the Pentagon, who warn us that climate change will mean “civil unrest”. I cannot imagine a world so degraded that we did not react to runaway climate change with civil unrest.

Millions dead

The most influential promoter of this view of ‘social collapse’ has been Jared Diamond. Many of my friends love his book Collapse, because they see it as a warning about climate.

But in fact he tells one historically inaccurate story after another about how civilisations fell into dark ages because they strained the environment too far. Most of these stories are actually about how a population overthrew tyranny and went back to living in smaller scale, more egalitarian communities. (See Questioning Collapse by Patricia NcAnany and Norman Yoffee.)

But that’s not what we are going to face either. We have enough experience of horror in modern history to know what the ‘social collapse’ of climate change will look like. Consider the middle of the twentieth century, when sixty million were killed. Probably a small number compared to what we will face, but useful for thinking on. 

Of those sixty million, think of the killing fields of Stalingrad. The six million dead Jews and Gypsies. The two or three million who died in the Bengal famine because the government of Atlee and Churchill decided they needed the Indian railways to move war material, not grain.

There were one million famine dead in northern Vietnam because the Japanese army made the same decision. The three million or so dead in the North China famine. Then there were the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (The US Air Force bombed two cities, because although the first bomb won the war, they still had another design of bomb to test.)

Or think about the fire bombings of almost all Japanese cities which killed far more people than the atom bombs, mostly in more painful ways. And there were all Stalin’s deportations and camps. The murdered at Partition in India. The many millions dead in actual uniforms, which seems so old fashioned now. The tens of millions raped here and there.

Green inequality 

All these numbers are approximate, you understand. No one was counting properly. 

Almost none of those horrors were committed by small groups of savages wandering through the ruins. They were committed by States, and by mass political movements. 

Society did not disintegrate. It did not come apart. Society intensified. Power concentrated, and split, and those powers had us kill each other. It seems reasonable to assume that climate social collapse will be like that. Only with five times as many dead, if we are lucky, and twenty-five times as many, if we are not.

Remember this, because when the moment of runaway climate change comes for you, where you live, it will not come in the form of a few wandering hairy bikers. It will come with the tanks on the streets and the military or the fascists taking power.

Those generals will talk in deep green language. They will speak of degrowth, and the boundaries of planetary ecology. They will tell us we have consumed too much, and been too greedy, and now for the sake of Mother Earth, we must tighten our belts. 

Then we will tighten our belts, and we will suffer, and they will build a new kind of gross green inequality. And in a world of ecological freefall, it will take cruelty on an unprecedented scale to keep their inequality in place. 

Our grandchildren

Our new rulers will fan the flames of new racisms. They will explain why we must keep out the hordes of hungry homeless the other side of the wall. Why, regrettably, we have to shoot them or let them drown.

Why, unfortunately, we are running out of food for the refugee camps in the desert the other side of the wall or across the channel. Why the people on this side of the wall who look like the people on the other side of the wall are now our enemies. Why we have to go to war.

It is easy to hear those voices, because they are all around us now.

I think a lot about my grandchildren. Bendall’s timing is, I think, right: “In the lifetime of those now living,” he says. Not in twelve years. I think that is possible, but unlikely. In the lifetime of my grandchildren, very probably.  Of course I worry they will die. But that’s not really what I fear. More I worry about what they will have to watch and have to do to survive.

The usual version of the wandering savages is not just a mistake. It’s a lie that conceals the state. But it also conceals what Mr. Dhillon told me. It was our neighbours, he was telling six-year-old Jonathan. Because it was something important to him, and something I needed to know. It will be your children, or your grandchildren.

Becoming the perpetrator

If you look at the places where people are living social collapse, what you see is that anybody can become the perpetrator. Anyone who knows the recent history of Syria understands why someone might find themselves in a Christian death squad, a Hezbollah death squad, an ISIS death squad, a Kurdish spotter calling in American death on the heads of Sunni Muslims, an American special forces, a Russian pilot, a medic with the White Helmets saving lives, a soldier in the Free Syrian Army, an Assadist nurse saving lives in an emergency room, a prisoner in an Assadist torture camp, an interrogator or a father holding his dead child on the shores of the Med.

Anyone who has lived through the last forty years in Afghanistan or Somalia understands the same. There are so many accidents of birth and experience. There but for the grace of God go I.  

And of course there are right choices and wrong ones. The differences matter, and there are rivers of blood between them. But you cannot assume you, or anyone you love, will come out on the right side. That is part of the tragedy.

Syria. Afghanistan. Somalia. Darfur. Southern Sudan. Somalia. Eritrea. Iraq. Haiti. Congo. There are invasions in the history of many of those countries. Not all. Mostly American invasions. Not all. There is serious climate change already in all of them except Congo. The climate change is not the main thing driving the collapse in most of them. Yet.

Except for Darfur and Chad. What is happening there is insanely complex, and partly driven by a proxy oil war between China and the US. But the rains failed in Darfur and Chad in 1968, and they have never properly returned. Some years are better, some years threaten famine. At heart what has happened there is a war between herders and farmers for disappearing grass.

Socialist solutions

Never expect a pure climate change horror. Always it will arrive dripping with the blood and excrement of capitalism and empire. 

Scientists and environmentalists have discovered the problem of climate change. They have told us all about it. Brilliant. Without them we would march uncomprehending into hell. And now most people know. This is a great achievement.

But scientists and environmentalists are conservative people. The green movement is mostly white, mostly posh, mostly in the rich north. The deep wish of many environmentalists is to be a small business person. 

Most of the those suffering now are in the global south, or they are poor, or people of colour in rich countries. But the movement against climate change is still small in the poor countries.

The solutions we need are socialist solutions. The kinds trade union activists have always liked. We need a hundred and fifty million climate jobs now to rewire the world. Not business jobs, but public sector jobs.

Political alternative

Yet the unions have done little about climate change until almost yesterday. The socialists have done far less.

There are two possible reactions to this divide. One is to slag off the other side. Socialists, anarchists and trade unionists point out that Extinction Rebellion is a bunch of posh people who do not understand climate justice. Environmentalists point out that socialists and trade unionists have done nothing. 

Another political alternative is emerging, though. I have been part of what unions did, and small as it was, I can hear student strikers all over the world repeating what we said. They talk about a Green New Deal and climate jobs because that’s the only solution that makes sense. I heard Greta Thunberg call for a general strike last week. 

This is breakneck, eyeballs out time for every union climate activist in the world. We have solutions. Tell everyone. Even more, get your mates out the door.

Another piece of news from last month. The coordinator of Friends of the Earth Mozambique wrote that everyone there understands now that the cyclones are climate change. Maybe she exaggerates. But many people there now know this. This knowledge can transform the world. 

Climate jobs 

When the famine hit Bengal in 1943 the Indian National Congress, the opposition to the British colonial government, did nothing. The links are complex, but that’s why they had the partition massacres four years later.

When the famine hit northern Vietnam early in 1945, the tiny bands of communists in the mountain jungles came down into the city and led crowds trying to seize the grain silos. Within a year they controlled the North.

Until now those who suffer most have mostly blamed God, under various names. 

I have a dream. In Mozambique, or South Africa, or anywhere, those who suffer collapse march on the American embassy. They demand the small amounts of money they need to survive on the land. And they demand eight million climate jobs in the United States. For Americans. And a million climate jobs in South Africa.

I have often mentioned this dream in front of audiences of NGO people and environmental activists. It goes down like a lead balloon. They know they cannot bite the hand of the funders. But also they fear the rage of the mob.

Uncertainty 

Imagine a million victims of the storms, or a million farmers who have watched their crops die. Imagine their rage on the streets. Anything could happen. 

The soldiers could mow down the crowd. The soldiers could fire on the crowd. Or not. The crowd could lynch the people in the embassy, or not. The black people of Washington DC could march on the White House.

Here’s another thing about uncertainty. Maybe we have time. But more important, there is no one tipping point, then feedbacks and runaway climate change. There are many tipping points, each worse than the last. 

The key factor is the basic driver of the feedbacks – carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and gas. The more of that, the more the feedbacks. The end-Cretaceous mass extinction that wiped out land dinosaurs was terrible. But the end-Permian mass extinction was far worse than the other great extinctions in geological history, because the drivers were worse. 

At each point we can act to slow down and reduce the damage. That’s the good news. It doesn’t mean we will be OK.

Military dictatorship

But also remember that social collapse is not the end. Remember Darfur. The rains failed there in 1968. There was drought, rape, murder, revenge, hunger and starvation. People buried the dead and got on with living and made peace for a while. Repeat. 

Then in 1985, in the midst of the first really bad famine, the people rose up in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. They stormed the grain silos, the workers came out in a general strike, and the military dictatorship fell. Many of the crowd storming the grain silos were refugees from the famine in Darfur and the West.

The main opposition, the Umma, led by al_Mahdi, a graduate of the University of Oxford and the grandson of the Mahdi, came to power. His government would not, or could not, give people what they needed. There was another military dictatorship, more hunger, civil war in the South and Darfur.

To read what it was like to live in those times makes your head hurt and your stomach lurch. So think what it would be like to live through those times. 

Now, the people of Sudan have moved again. It started in December, in Atbara, the old center of the most strongest union, the railway workers, and the communist party. The protests started because the government tripled the price of bread.

Now people are demonstrating all across Darfur too. They march to surround the military garrisons. In the center of Darfur, the crowds march from the many camps for displaced persons, marching on the army, demanding the abolition of the militias, the opening of the prisons, above all the right to return to their land.

Despair and rage

People have learned in fifty years. The leadership of this uprising lies with Sudan Professional Association, an alliance of new unions of doctors, teachers, veterinarians, lawyers, pharmacists and others.

This is because people do not trust al_Mahdi’s Umma, the communists or Turabi’s Islamists any longer. The crowds in Khartoum surround the military headquarters, nonviolent, because they know they must bring over the ordinary soldiers to their side. They have been hundreds of thousands and are now at least a million. They know they cannot permit a transitional military government.

I don’t know how it will turn out. No one knows. But there are two lessons. One is about what happens when collapse comes to where you are. People survive, and endure. They learn and come back again.

The other is that if those people in Darfur and Sudan, or in the other Darfurs elsewhere and those to come, make it their business to halt climate change, they can change the world.

I don’t want to sound hopeful here. The lesson of Bendell’s paper is that wisdom only begins when we let in the grief, despair and rage of understanding the climate tragedy. But what we are seeing in the climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion and all the rest, is that hope can only begin when we allow the grief and rage to course through us.

Life and death

I know why people want to go off grid, run for the hills, live in bioregional communities. But they are so wrong. They abandon the people of Khartoum, Shanghai, the Mekong Delta, Birmingham, London, New York, New Orleans, Mumbai, Kolkota. Shame on them.

Maybe many are going to die. I don’t want to say extinction is impossible. I read James Hansen’s book six years ago. There is a terrifying chapter in there. But there is a good way to die. I learned that when I was an AIDS counsellor in London for six years, back before we had the drugs to keep people alive.

I watched how my patients died, and how the gay men I worked with died. The former drug injectors and the heterosexuals mostly died in lonely shame. Sometimes I was the only person they could talk to.

But the gay men who were out, who had been part of gay liberation, they died for the people around them, the people who would follow them. They were not stoics – that kind of fake courage would be no use to the others. They showed panic and despair.

But they also showed, by the way they lived, you can do this too. And the other men of their community, and the lesbians, and their families, held them. And because of that strength they won the drugs that let so many who followed live.

They had politics. They had love. They died well. Die like that. And try to live like Mr. Dhillon’s mother and father. 

This Author 

Jonathan Neale is a writer and editor of One Million Climate Jobs. He blogs with Nancy Lindisfarne at Anne Bonny Pirate, and was secretary of the Campaign Against Climate Change for several years. 

Image: ‘Blood of our Children’, Downing Street. Tom Dorrington, Extinction Rebellion.