What If The Best-Case Scenario For Climate Change Were Better?

(Bloomberg) — In 2019, an ecologist at Oregon State University named William Ripple led the writing of an article declaring “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” and laying out “vital signs” of a planet in distress. More than 11,000 scientists around the world co-signed the article before its publication. (Bloomberg) — In 2019, an ecologist at Oregon State University named William Ripple led the writing of an article declaring “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” and laying out “vital signs” of a planet in distress.

More than 11,000 scientists around the world co-signed the article before its publication. Now, Ripple and colleagues argue the scenarios that climate experts use to grapple with the future aren’t adequate. In a paper published Tuesday in , they call for climate models to incorporate a new “restorative pathway,” one on which the world would not just slash greenhouse gas emissions but bring about greater ecological health and social justice in the process.

Climate scientists currently rely on five different scenarios of the future, a group known as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). Developed by an international team and used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these pathways track how global heating could play out in the years to come, based on how quickly countries cut emissions and on socioeconomic factors like population, education and technological development. In the current best-case scenario — SSP1 — the world reaches net zero around 2050.

In the worst-case (SSP5), the world accelerates the exploitation of fossil fuels, doubling emissions by 2050 and raising temperatures 4. 4C by the end of the century. The restorative pathway grafts ecological and equity goals onto the downward emissions curve of SSP1.

On the pathway, global croplands would decline by 2100, compared to expanding under SSP1, while per-capita gross domestic product would taper off, instead of rising as it does on the SSP1 trajectory. The new pathway could include “greater convergence of per-capita GDP, meat consumption, and energy use throughout the world” to promote equality between the Global North and Global South, the authors write. We asked Ripple to say more about the proposal.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. What is the restorative pathway? What we’re proposing is an environmentally and socially just scenario. And we’re doing this to address converging crises including climate change, biodiversity loss and social injustice.

We’re proposing something holistic — to have solutions to multiple challenges at the same time rather than work on them piecemeal. So we think that climate change is not a standalone problem, but it’s a symptom of a much larger problem. And the larger one involves economics, it involves social inequality and it involves nature conservation, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions that are so commonly talked about.

We haven’t done all the calculations on the exact reduction in emissions, but in general our scenario is similar to SSP1, with a dramatic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions as we move forward. How was it developed? We compiled a diverse set of Earth system variables for the last 500 years, including fossil fuel emissions, human population, GDP, land use, greenhouse gas emissions and temperature. Moving forward to 2100, we used SSP projections for some of the variables, but we differ in how we deal with future croplands and [the greenhouse gas] nitrous oxide.

How else is this scenario different from the existing SSPs? Compared to the SSPs, our scenario is less reliant on technological developments to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In addition, it places greater emphasis on addressing inequality in the over-exploitation of the planet, and we are projecting improved biodiversity in our scenario. And another major difference is what we project forward for GDP.

Our scenario stabilizes GDP over time rather than having it continuously go upward. What type of global developments or policies would be needed to achieve this scenario? Economically, there might be a global policy of a carbon tax, and that would do two things. It could reduce fossil fuel emissions and it could help redistribute wealth where the wealthy would be paying more carbon taxes.

We also are pushing for the conservation of nature, where we would be achieving more forest lands, and we’d be taking fewer lands out of nature and into cropland. What we are proposing for more equity globally is higher levels of education for girls and women, resulting in low fertility rates with higher standards of living. According to the paper, on this scenario, global GDP would stabilize and the top 10% of income would get more evenly divided among the population.

What would this look like for the global economy? Since business-as-usual isn’t working and infinite economic growth is problematic, we need to shift towards a post-growth economy where the quality of life and societal wellbeing are prioritized. We would need specialists in ecological economics to help plan an era of different economics. More stories like this are available on bloomberg.

com ©2024 Bloomberg L. P. .