Start the Earth System Governance that Integrates “Climate-Altering Technologies”

2020 ◽  
pp. 2075006
Author(s):  
János PÁSZTOR
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Emissions Reduction ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Security Risk ◽  
Average Temperature ◽  
International Panel ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Decision Making Processes

Addressing climate emergencies requires a radical social change, and an “earth system” governance approach that combines different factors (including technologies that affect climate). As the Paris Agreement has been reached for four years and came into force for three years, there is a growing recognition that the global average temperature rise cannot be limited to 1.5–2∘C only by emissions reduction or existing carbon removal measures. The reason is that the world has not taken enough actions to deal with the crisis. As reported by IPCC (2018), hundreds of millions of people worldwide are already experiencing the harsh consequences of climate change, from storms to floods, to heatwaves and droughts [IPCC. 2018. “International Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees.” https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 (accessed November 5, 2019)]. According to Spratt and Dunlop (2019), as the climate change intensifies, all sectors of society have realized the need to avoid the risks brought by climate change and to deal with the severe disasters that already exist [Spratt, David, and Ian Dunlop. 2019. “Existential Climate-related Security Risk: A Scenario Approach.” https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0b2c0c79dc4344b279bcf2365336ff23b.pdf (accessed November 5, 2019)]. This raises some profound questions. For instances, should people consider a new responsive measure that is compatible with the natural system which sustains life on the earth, and within the limits of the earth’s tolerance? What forms of decision-making might we need, to help us make the smart collective choices needed for a world where no risk-free options remain? Are familiar governance and decision-making processes still suitable for the goals? Who will make the decisions to promote this transformation? If people really want to change the way they make decisions, they may need to create new forms of governance and decide how this transformation begins and which authority is subject to.

scholarly journals Politics of Strata

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 211-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Power Source ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The Third ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways.

Dryland Degradation and Expansion: Implications for Mexican Policies from the Earth System Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Gabriel Lopez Porras
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Land Degradation ◽  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Sustainable Land Management ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
The Earth

Despite international efforts to stop dryland degradation and expansion, current dryland pathways are predicted to result in large-scale migration, growing poverty and famine, and increasing climate change, land degradation, conflicts and water scarcity. Earth system science has played a key role in analysing dryland problems, and has been even incorporated in global assessments such as the ones made by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. However, policies addressing dryland degradation, like the ‘Mexican programme for the promotion of sustainable land management’, do not embrace an Earth system perspective, so they do not consider the complexity and non-linearity that underlie dryland problems. By exploring how this Mexican programme could integrate the Earth system perspective, this paper discusses how ’Earth system’ policies could better address dryland degradation and expansion in the Anthropocene.

scholarly journals Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (33) ◽  
pp. 8252-8259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Steffen ◽  
Johan Rockström ◽  
Katherine Richardson ◽  
Timothy M. Lenton ◽  
Carl Folke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Global Economy ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Behavioral Changes ◽  
Earth System ◽  
New Governance ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
Average Temperature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Potential Threshold

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

scholarly journals Organizing in the Anthropocene

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg ◽  
Lauren Rickards ◽  
James Freund
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Introductory Article

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth–human relations.

Contentious Capitol Climates

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-90
Author(s):  
Michael Méndez
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Climate Governance ◽  
Disadvantaged Communities ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Contemporary Climate

Describes the tension between global environmental protection and a local focus on the most disadvantaged communities. The chapter analyzes the development of California’s landmark climate change legislation: Assembly Bill (AB) 32. It illustrates the contentious nature of defining climate change and how the entanglements of diverse knowledges and worldviews shape contemporary climate governance and decision-making processes.

scholarly journals Energy Transition and Climate Change in Decision-Making Processes

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (23) ◽  
pp. 13404
Author(s):  
Georgios Tsantopoulos ◽  
Evangelia Karasmanaki
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Fuel Technology

Humans have been using fossil fuels for centuries, and the development of fossil fuel technology reshaped society in lasting ways [...]

scholarly journals A Thought Experiment on Sustainable Management of the Earth System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Wolfram Barfuss ◽  
Jonathan F. Donges
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Optimal Control ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
Safe Operating ◽  
Qualitative Decision

We introduce and analyse a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of climate change. In it, each generation can choose between just two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as this one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyse this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Despite the simplicity of the setup, we find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches.

1. Making Sense of Earth’s Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Wilderness Preservation ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Environmental Discourses ◽  
Nature Preservation

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.

scholarly journals Deep-time organizations: Learning institutional longevity from history

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Hanusch ◽  
Frank Biermann
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Design Principles ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Initial Design ◽  
Earth System Governance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Temporal Interdependencies

The Anthropocene as a new planetary epoch has brought to the foreground the deep-time interconnections of human agency with the earth system. Yet despite this recognition of strong temporal interdependencies, we still lack understanding of how societal and political organizations can manage interconnections that span several centuries and dozens of generations. This study pioneers the analysis of what we call “deep-time organizations.” We provide detailed comparative historical analyses of some of the oldest existing organizations worldwide from a variety of sectors, from the world’s oldest bank (Sveriges Riksbank) to the world’s oldest university (University of Al Quaraouiyine) and the world’s oldest dynasty (Imperial House of Japan). Based on our analysis, we formulate 12 initial design principles that could lay, if supported by further empirical research along similar lines, the basis for the construction and design of “deep-time organizations” for long-term challenges of earth system governance and planetary stewardship.

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