Transcript From Sustainability to Resilience? How Best to Communicate

From Sustainability to Resilience
How Best to Communicate Great
Challenges?
Wolfgang Brauner
([email protected])
Darmstadt University of Technology
EFSSI, WKU, July 22, 2011
A communication experiment
• Goal: How best to communicate a dilemma
(predicament)?
• Part I: From sustainability to resilience
• Part II: Great challenges: Triple crunch of peak
energy, economic contraction, and global
climate disruption
• Part III: What exactly and how best to
communicate this?
Problems have solutions;
predicaments have outcomes
Thesis: Too little, too late
• Environmentalism has failed: Growing
unsustainability (Speth 2008) – footprint
• History: UNCHE, Stockholm 1972 – UNCED, Rio
1992 – Rio +20, 2012
• The window of opportunity has closed
• From prevention to mitigation to adaptation?
• Beyond sustainability and resilience
• Inspirational realism: Inviting people into
reflection (and action?)
“It’s the End of the World As We
Know It (And I feel Fine)” (REM, 1987)
• Das Ende der Welt wie wir sie kannten: Klima,
Zukunft und die Chancen der Demokratie,
Claus Leggewie & Harald Welzer, 2009
• Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the
Truth About Climate Change, Clive Hamilton
2010
• The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis
Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the
Birth of a New World, Paul Gilding, 2011
Connecting the dots: 2010/2011
• UNEP director Achim Steiner to UNSC, Wed, July
20, 2011: Global climate disruption is
accelerating and threatening world security
• Increasing frequency and severity of extreme
weather events: Pakistan flooded, Russia
burning, droughts, floods (Nashville 2010),
storms, heat waves in the US
• Famine in the Horn of Africa threatening 10
million people
• Christian Parenti 2011: Tropic of Chaos: Climate
Change and the New Geography of Violence
World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity
(November 1992)
• “Human beings and the natural world are on a
collision course. Human activities inflict harsh
and often irreversible damage on the
environment and on critical resources. If not
checked, many of our current practices put at
serious risk the future that we wish for human
society … and may so alter the living world that it
will be unable to sustain life in the manner that
we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we
are to avoid the collision our present course will
bring about.”
“How serious is the threat to the
environment?
• Here is one measure of the problem:
• All we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate
and biota and leave a ruined world to our
children and grandchildren is to keep doing
exactly what we are doing today, with no
growth in the human population or the world
economy.”
• James Gustave Speth 2008: The Bridge at the
Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment,
and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability
Counterproductive denial
• “In these circumstances, refusing to accept
that we face a very unpleasant future
becomes perverse. Denial requires a willful
misreading of the science, a romantic view of
the ability of political institutions to respond,
or faith in divine intervention (Hamilton:
Requiem for a Species, 2010: xiv)
From future to present (past) tense –
High time to change paradigms
• Challenge & response (Toynbee): From
problem/solution to predicament/outcomes
• Traditional/still preponderant frame: ‘It’s
much worse than we thought, but if we do x,
y, z … we will be OK.’
• New frame: ‘It’s much worse than we
thought, we have done too little, and now we
are out of time, resources and institutional
capacity to avoid major changes
We are in the midst of a gathering
perfect storm
• Nexus: Population and economic growth &
resource depletion & environmental
degradation & economic contraction
• Deepening crises & escalating conflicts over
dwindling resources
• Triple crunch: Energy, economy, environment
(3 Es)
• Unprecedented: Next 20 years will be nothing
like the past 20 years – hardly prepared
What we are facing
• Accelerating overshoot of carrying capacity
• Peak oil (2006) = peak energy (peak
everything)
• The end of economic growth (Heinberg 2011)
• Runaway global climate disruption (GCD):
Locked in for +2.3˚C, likely +4 by 2060
• From abundance to scarcity
Traditional responses within
sustainability frame (mostly failed)
• Lifestyle changes (conservation, efficiency,
curtailment) vs. greenwashing, licensing effect
• Getting the policy mix right
• Technology will save us … (renewables)
• Building social movements (350.org)
• Steady-state economy vs. growth imperative
• De-growth vs. growth fetishism
• Environmental education vs. functional
differentiation
New responses within resilience frame
• It is too late to avoid mutually reinforcing
deepening crises and escalating conflicts
• Preparing for what’s in the pipeline
• Building local, community-based resilience
• Local, decentralized production of food,
energy, water
• Transition Towns
• Sharon Astyk (Casaubon’s Blog)
Typical critical responses of my
students
•
•
•
•
•
•
This is alarmist!
This is so depressing!
You are too negative/pessimistic!
You are too one-sided/biased!
Where are the solutions???
Are you telling us there is nothing that can be
done … ?
My response to my students’
responses
• Psychological preference for optimistic vs.
pessimistic messages (cognitive dissonance:
confirmation bias, backfire effect)
• Tension between scientific communication
and more activist discourses
• Potential and limits of the medical analogy to
the interdependence of diagnosis & treatment
The tone makes the music
On the link between style and content
• All communication is contingent and
selective: What and how to communicate?
• Framing matters: Cognitive dissonance and an
invitation to reflection and action
• On the potential and limits of “enlightened
self-interest”
The Five Stages of Grief (DABDA)
(Kuebler-Ross 1969)
•
•
•
•
•
Despair
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Requiem for a Species
(Clive Hamilton 2010)
• Despair – misreading of science, political
romanticism, divine intervention
• Accept
• Act – “democratizing survivability”
Conclusion
• The future is the place where we will spend
the rest of our lives
• The next 20 years will be very different from
the last 20 years
• “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
• “We have met the enemy – and it is us.”
Pogo
Global, big-picture analysis: Resilience
in the face of the triple crunch
Scenarios: Science or science fiction?
The 3 unwise monkeys: Mizaru,
Kikazaru, Iwazaru
Ostrich politics (ostrichism)
World society is structurally incapable
of an adequate response
Energy, population & economic growth
Catching up?
The global economy is a Ponzi scheme
Mutually reinforcing feedbacks driving
systemic collapse
Core contradiction: Infinite growth on
a finite planet: Unsustainability
Catch-22: Collapse of complex
societies due to diminishing returns
Examples of exponential growth
More exponential growth
Synopsis of exponential growth:
Get used to the hockey stick
Overshooting carrying capacity
How many planets do we have?
Global societal collapse (Clugston)
Peak oil: Enjoy it while it lasts!?
Unidentified Oil Fields (UOFs)
(Sweetnam, DOE, April 2009)
Global peak oil projections summary:
2012 oil crunch, 2015 cluster; 2020
Most countries past their peak
From exponential growth to
exponential decline (ca. 6%)
A very short history of peak oil
Global energy consumption &
population growth
Peak oil = peak population (optimistic
scenario)
Peak population (conservative
scenario)
“My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a
jet plane, his son will ride a camel.” (Saudi saying)
Peak oil means peak energy
Peak energy = the end of growth
(energy flows pre-peak oil)
Energy flows post-peak oil
Peak oil hits the economy like a bus
Renewables won’t cut it and
technology won’t save us
We are accelerating in the wrong
direction; immediate U-turn unlikely
Worse than the worst case: Every data
point exceeds the worst-case scenario
10 Indicators (NOAA 2010)
Cancun is where international
conferences go to die
Carbon budget (Schellnhuber 2009)
The later we peak, the more we must
cut
Temperature rise by mid-century
(Climate Tracker, September 2010)
Multiple synergistic tipping points
Impacts associated with temperature
rise
Mega droughts on BAU emissions
(NCAR, October 2010)
Plausible 2060 temperature scenario
with feedbacks (Hadley 2009)
Key references
• Gilding, Paul 2011: The great disruption: Why the climate crisis will
bring on the end of shopping and the birth of a new world
• Hamilton, Clive 2010: Requiem for a species. Why we resist the
truth about climate change
• Heinberg, Richard 2011: The end of growth: Adapting to our new
economic reality
• Kuebler-Ross, Elisabeth 1969: On death and dying
• Martenson, Chris 2011: The crash course: The unsustainable future
of our economy, energy, and environment
• Speth, James Gustave 2008: The bridge at the edge of the world:
Capitalism, the environment, and crossing from crisis to
sustainability
• Full list of references available upon request