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In 2016, one of the most frightening scientific papers I have ever read was published. Looking at four different global CO2 emission scenarios, Clark et al. projected shocking future long-term sea level rises. The low-end (or best-case) scenario of 1,280 picograms of carbon emitted (cumulative from the year 2000) is all but guaranteed; it is modelled to lead to temperature increases that reach the 2°C guardrail that the UNFCCC Article 2 declared necessary ‘to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. The results of this scenario: sea level rise of 25 metres within 3,000 years (see figure), which would completely submerge cities such as New York, Mumbai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Cairo to name a few. Up to 1.3 billion people will be directly affected by coastal submergence. If, on the other hand, we instead followed the high-end emissions scenario, which is looking increasingly likely as we continually fail to reach emission targets, global sea level is projected to rise up to 52m. This would occur in less than 3,000 years – which constitutes sea level rise rates of metres per century. For comparison, sea level rise during the entire history of human civilisation is estimated between 2 and 5m (in the last 6,000 years). Therefore, the next few thousand years will involve unprecedented sea level rise, and the rate and magnitude of it will strongly depend on policy decisions being made now.
Image taken from Clark et al (2016). Low end emission scenario (where we would need to peak global CO2 emissions in the next decade) is 1,280Pg Carbon. In all scenarios, sea level change will dramatically increase in the next few thousand years to rates we have never encountered, nor are capable of mitigating on a local or global scale.
Image taken from Clark et al (2016). This map shows areas of submergence for countries with at least 50 million people living on land affected by long-term sea level projection based on the low-end emission scenario (1,280Pg carbon).Why is this not causing widespread panic in the UK? In the next few thousand years, London, Cardiff, Liverpool, most of East Anglia and Lincolnshire will not exist. In all possible scenarios. Why is everyone not talking about it? Very few people have even heard of the paper – I only read it because it was assigned in a university tutorial. The reasons are complex, but one that stands out is timescale. Its projections are too long-term for an individual to comprehend, or care about. Our brains are not programmed to care about generations so far in the future, for that would not aid our own survival in the present.
Map taken from http://flood.firetree.net. It shows sea level rise of 20 metres in the UK and North Sea coasts of Northern European countries. This is less than the rise predicted in the next 3,000 years in all scenarios – it will be worse than this.Unfortunately, the individual’s wants and needs is exactly what our neoliberal society holds most dear. Neoliberalism’s fundamental transfer of power from the collective to the individual through free markets ensures no demand for innovation in an area with no short-term benefits for the individual. This is embedded within the larger argument that compatibility between successful adaptation to climate change through the pursuit of immediate environmental sustainability, and a neoliberal pathway to growth and development is non-existent. A global sustainable society can only be achieved, and the benefits felt, collectively. To address environmental sustainability, long-term planning on a scale beyond the individual is needed. It is therefore unsurprising that governments are required to intervene in market forces where climate change is concerned.
Longer term policies are required for rational action on climate change, for the good of the future generations of our species, at the expense of today’s individual. This is what is being attempted in the international climate change COP conferences, but even long-term government policies that direct economic investments do not reach the timescale required to address the climate crisis. The IPCC, the scientific body that accumulates and presents the most recent global climate science for international policy makers to review, almost entirely projects climate change and its impacts within the 21st Century. This is a limited future horizon that prevents full understanding and appropriate political action to successfully mitigate the climate crisis.
Why is the science presented like this? Speaking the truth to those in power is not a one-way process; although science informs policy, policy frameworks also mould how climate science is undertaken, combined, and presented. Timescales of thousands to tens of thousands of years don’t matter to people evaluating climate risks, because of the way our political and economic system works:
Socioeconomic models, such as population and GDP projections, generally stop by 2,100.
The further into the future benefits of a policy (or ‘investment’) are felt, the more the investment is discounted. *
Our governments represent only the current individuals who have elected them, not future generations of the country.
As democratic electoral cycles are so short, the policies selected are those that will show benefits before the next election.
* When predicting future events there is a certain amount of uncertainty attached. If we predict that a sea level rise now will be 30mm higher in 10 years’ time, we can’t be sure of that because in the intervening years global CO2 emissions trends are only guessed. So instead we give it a range - say between 28mm and 32mm. The longer we try to predict, the greater the range we have to give – hence Clark et al.’s range from 25 to 52 metres (Figure 1). The lower end of the range has been ‘future discounted’ more than the upper end of the range. In terms of sea level rise over 3,000 years, the potential to ‘discount the future’ is so great, that investment returns on policies whose impacts would only be seen that far into the future are valued at zero.
So, science must be presented in appropriate forms in order for policy makers to interpret and translate them into realistic policies that are compatible with neoliberal economics. There is no point including long term climate projections in the IPCC reports (though it makes a much stronger case for mitigation efforts today), as it would cost countries huge amounts of money, with little short-term benefit.
There are a number of reasons why the UNFCCC short-term approach to tackling climate change one policy at a time is flawed. Firstly, the viewpoint that the short- term is the most relevant timeframe with regards to adaptation and mitigation policies assumes the reversal of negative impacts of climate change in the next few hundred years. Therefore, accelerated investment in technologies required to achieve deeper reductions over the long term will be evaded. It biases investment towards new technologies within the same unsustainable neoliberal system, and away from a need for permanent, long term changes in political and economic systems. In terms of sea level rise, it selects for small adaptation policies such as flood defence infrastructure in threatened cities, rather than the relocation of them to safer/higher ground. These short-term adaptation policies often do not acknowledge the risk of inevitable forced relocation in the future due to extreme weather events, where poorer areas and demographics will suffer most (Keeler et al. 2018).
Secondly, this short-term approach with regard to socioeconomic impacts completely overlooks the fundamental human rights of future generations. There has already been unequal application of capitalist technologies to mitigate climate change, creating a world rife with climate injustice. This inequality is apparent on many levels today – with regard to race, gender, and wealth. But an often-overlooked level is generational inequality, what economists call ‘the tyranny of the present’. While discount rates may describe the economic view of how much we are willing to pay for future generations at the expense of our own, the ethical viewpoint must take precedent.
This is explored in the notion of climate intergenerational justice, covered extensively in Henry Shue’s book ‘Climate Justice’. The later the date we reach zero carbon emissions and global environmental sustainability, the more threatening to forms of life the conditions on our planet become – there is a fundamental moral responsibility regarding climate change to make that date as soon as possible to avoid crossing extinction thresholds for many species, and survival thresholds for some human communities. It is a challenging concept to argue; future generations do not exist yet, but their wellbeing depends on decisions which they have no say. So how would we constitute ‘fairness’ over time? We must separate acceptable and unacceptable risks (life-threatening, morally impermissible risks) to impart onto future generations. This is incredibly difficult to do, and would involve the use of trade-offs between the well-being of future generations and present economic gains being established.
The political inability to tackle sea-level rise scares me. Sea level rise is already a complex and multifaceted problem, without bringing a temporal scale into it too. But I argue that there is an urgent need to change the way climate science and policy for crisis mitigation is understood in terms of timeframe. Science must be presented not just for the next 80 years, but on a timescale that provides the citizens of this planet and individuals tasked with policy making on behalf of us all, with all essential information in order to make the best policies impacting for millennia. With this, change must be made in the way our current economic system operates – neoliberal values of individualism and short-term gain must be shifted towards a collective and longer-term perspective. This is imperative to ensure future generations do not have quality of life drastically reduced, simply because of our systems’ failure to monetise ethical values. Careful construction of official intergenerational justice systems is needed to overrule economics with ethics in certain aspects of climate policy making. While we will most certainly feel the negative effects of more stringent climate policies now, without them we are knowingly sealing the fates of future generations of this planet to a world not worth living on.
“How should this generation’s failure to act be evaluated? ‘They could have helped but they didn’t’? ‘They unfairly left their share of the effort to be done by some succeeding generation’? Unfortunately, it seems incomparably worse than those assessments: They made the choice that determined how bad climate change became at its worst, and their choice resulted in its becoming worse than it would have if they had chosen differently. They were not for the most part evil people (although they complacently tolerated corrupt political leaders), but they were simply preoccupied with their own comfort and convenience, not very imaginative about human history over the long run, and not particularly sensitive to the plight of strangers distant in time. They did not mean to do any harm, but in fact they inflicted severe damage on their own descendants. A sad chapter in human history – so much opportunity lost while a tiny clique with financial interests in fossil fuels amassed short-term profit. Will this be our legacy?”
- Henry Shue, Climate Justice, Chapter 12: Responsibility to future generations and the technological transition.
Author: Beth Davenport
References:
Long-term climate modelling that stress the case for much stronger mitigation efforts today:
https://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/teaching_materials/coastlines/student_materials/907 – overview
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2923.pdf - Clark et al. 2016
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0466-0.pdf - Sonja van Renssen 2019
Discounting for the future:
Arrow, K. et al. Determining benefits and costs for future generations. Science 341, 349–350 (2013).
Intergenerational justice and climate change:
Flood defence increase in threatened cities vs relocation:
-> ‘ adaptation policy is not paying enough attention to the (almost) inevitable transition from living with risk to spontaneously relocating away from coastal areas’
Interactive map showing land inundated at different sea level rise scenarios:
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