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 system
This 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 Images
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 Images
A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's 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 to "precipitous collapse - often lasting
centuries - have been quite common."
The independent 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-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center,
in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY
model was created using a minor Nasa grant, but the study based on it
was conducted independently. 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
record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse,
raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:
"TheBy investigating the human-nature
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."
dynamics of 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, and Energy.
These
factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial
social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed
on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification
of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These
social phenomena have played "a central role in the character 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:
"...The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:
accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but
rather has been 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."
"TechnologicalProductivity
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 compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."
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, Motesharrei 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 onAnother scenario focuses on the
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 note that this Type-L collapse is due to an
inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a
collapse of Nature."
role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with 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 most "detrimental
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:
"WhileHowever,
some members of society might raise the 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."
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
dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive
renewable resources and reducing population growth:
"CollapseThe
can be avoided and population can reach 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."
NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to
governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise
that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and
structural changes are required immediately.
Although the study
based on HANDY is largely theoretical - a 'thought-experiment' - a
number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science
for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and
energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years.
But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed
- This article was amended on 26 March 2014 to reflect the nature of the study and Nasa's relationship to it more clearly.
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