By referencing degrowth for the first time, the IPCC has made imagining the end of capitalism a tiny bit easier
By Morgan Phillips (UK Co-Director)
Every seven or eight years the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conducts a comprehensive review of all the latest physical and social science relating to climate change. The review is conducted by the IPCC’s three working groups. Each group has its own specific focus area and brings together hundreds of academics from across the globe, all of whom contribute their expertise voluntarily. The reviews are released in the form of three assessment reports, and a final synthesis report, all of which are subject to a signing off process that involves Government officials from every UN member state.
The fact that the reports are produced at all is a testament to our unique ability, as a species, to collaborate and cooperate on difficult topics across multiple contexts and cultures. In the context of these turbulent times, it is worth pausing to appreciate this. The very existence of these reports is a triumph, an achievement to be cherished.
Shortly before the UN’s COP26 extravaganza in Glasgow last year, the IPCC published the first report of what is now the sixth round of assessment reports. That publication, pulled together by working group 1, focused on the physical science of climate change. The findings were sobering to say the least. The UN Secretary General António Guterres described the report as "code red for humanity".
On February 28th this year, working group 2 published its contribution to the sixth assessment. Their report examines the impacts, adaptations and vulnerabilities related to climate change. Again, it is sobering stuff. According to the report, the impacts of climate change are intensifying and now being felt by all life forms, all over the world. The authors explain how climate change is exposing and exacerbating existing vulnerabilities, and in many places causing irreversible losses and damage to communities, properties, landforms and species. Working group 2 also make it piercingly clear that funding for effective adaptation strategies is severely lacking, and that the risk of maladaptation is rising fast – especially in the Global South.
What this latest report and the report of working group 1 are telling us is that crude models of ‘development’ based on the pursuit of endless economic growth (even of the green kind) are incompatible with climate stability. They do not, of course, state this explicitly, but it is very hard to avoid this conclusion when you take stock of the size of the problem, the timescales involved, and the slow pace of the technological progress that is supposed to be coming to the rescue.
Working group 2 do however, in chapter 18 of their report, strongly allude to the gains that could be made if alternative models of development were given more serious attention, or even adopted. The concept of ‘degrowth’ is cited for the first time ever in a report of this nature, and more than once. Also referenced are the concepts of ‘buen vivir’, ‘Ubuntu’, and ‘ecological Swaraj’ that are gaining traction in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and India respectively. These ideas are reframing what is meant by development, while questioning the wisdom of goals like green growth and sustainable development. They offer glimmers of hope.
So, while it is hard to digest the climate science of the IPCC’s reports, and hard to remain hopeful that Western civilisation is secure, it is heartening to see that alternative forms of civilisation are at last being explored at UN level. Until now, as the oft-quoted saying goes, it has been “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, but as ideas like degrowth and ecological Swaraj creep into mainstream thinking, it is becoming easier to imagine the forms successor civilisations might take as ‘Western’ civilisation starts to unravel. This makes the end of capitalism altogether less daunting, and the end of the world less likely.
This article will appear in the next edition of Eco Living magazine.