Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for irreversible collapse?Natural and social scientists develop new model of how perfect storm of crises could unravel global systemShare94819Share563EmailThis Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty ImagesA new study sponsored by Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.Noting that warnings of collapse are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history. Cases of severe civilisational disruption due toprecipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common.The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary Human And Nature DYnamical (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supportedNational Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.It finds that according to the historical recordeven advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan,and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.By investigating the human-nature dynamicsof these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, andEnergy.These factors can lead to collapse when theyconverge to generate two crucial social features: the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity; and the economic stratification ofsociety into Elites [rich] and Masses (orCommoners) [poor] These social phenomena have played a central role in thecharacter or in the process of the collapse, in all such cases over the last five thousand years.Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with Elites based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather hasbeen controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensatefor the increased efficiency of resource use.Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput, despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid. In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:.... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to notethat this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a lossof workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding thatwith a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the mostdetrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners, allowing them to continue business as usual despite the impending catastrophe. The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:While some members of society might raisethe alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory so far in support of doing nothing.However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramaticallyreduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:Collapse can be avoided and population canreach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 05:08:42 +0000
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