We know that there are tipping points in many different complex systems. Although they may be hard to study and exactly define. For example in large systems such as the global economy or climate system. A recent study shows beautifully, in simpler ways, how social animals that lives in communities also have tipping points, before the function of the system changes fundamentally.

In this case the research focused on the communal spider which lay their eggs, spin webs and share their prey in cooperatives colonies, from Massachusetts to Argentina, in relatively cool temperatures. However, only until 31 degrees C, after which they start to attack each other. Suggesting a tipping point where some small perturbation can cause an abrupt and dramatic shift in the behavior of the system.

Reversal is difficult

Sea surface temperature anomalies from Dec 2013 to Sept 2015. Click here to view animation. Source: NASA

A new paper presented in Nature Geoscience show a realistic evolution of global mean surface temperature since 1900 with the help of advanced computer simulations. The study distinguishes a clear anthropogenic (human caused) warming by removing natural variability, regulated mainly by the Pacific Ocean.

Plotted raw temperature data show a rise of temperatures in a nonlinear fashion, with steeper increases over the past 50 years. When removing natural variability, warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean, the rise in global mean surface temperatures show a more linear increase with an acceleration in the 1960s. The Pacific Ocean thus plays a key role in regulating global climate, for example, by having a cooling effect between 1998-2014 (also known as the “hiatus”).

While raw data show a warming of 0.9 °C between 2010-2014 relative to 1900 Kosaka & Xie’s calculations yields a much higher anthropogenic warming of 1.2 °C after correcting for the natural variability. Because the Pacific had a cooling effect during this period anthropogenic warming have been underestimated. When the Pacific turns from carbon sink to source warming is likely to accelerate. This is the scary thing about natural systems, they behave in dynamic, nonlinear fashion, amplifying or dampening forcings.

We need to increase society’s general resilience to shocks and disturbances. With that I mean that we need to increase communities capacity to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks.

Extreme events have long lasting effects on society and need to be managed properly or major losses will be inevitable. Megadroughts in Syria and California, the rapid spread of wildfires in Indonesia and Canada or massive flooding in the UK and Denmark are just some examples of extreme events that we will have to get used to due to climate change and resource depletion. Other shocks may come from a fragile financial system in form of massive unemployment, from a dysfunctional political system that leads to a revolution or from mass migrations due to failed states. 

Extreme events are notoriously difficult to predict because probabilities are hard to measure and uncertainties are high. That's why it's so important to take proactive measures to strengthen a society's general resilience to such events. This requires a complex systems perspective and understanding of human-nature interactions. Strengthening general resilience includes:

The important thing with diversity is that it can offer both functional diversity and response diversity. In other words, a diverse system can offer many different functions but also a diversity of responses to disturbances so that critical functions are maintained even if some parts of the system fail. For example, in a marine ecosystem some fish may carry out similar functions (e.g. grazing on corals) so that if one species disappears there is another that can keep on carry out the critical function for the benefit of the overall ecosystem. Similarly if a bridge or air plane has many backup safety mechanisms that all perform the same function (i.e.redundancy) the risk of a collapse or crash is much lower. This is also applicable to the economy where a diversity of many small companies with similar functions contributes to stability in case some should default. That's why it’s very unhealthy to have a few but major banks that can crash the entire system. It is also a reason why societies with high income inequality do poorly, because all the wealth has been concentrated at the top which creates instability and risk of revolution. Heterogeneous landscapes with high biodiversity have higher resilience to extreme events and so monocultures is a really bad idea since it increases vulnerability to massive crop failure, loss of pollinators, and spread of pests.

Connectivity can both be a good and a bad thing depending on degree. In today’s society we most often have a high degree of connectivity, international interdependence, that makes us vulnerable to the rapid spread of extreme events or cascading effects. Modularity helps contain disturbances to specific regions/sectors and lowers the risk of contagion. The more self-sufficient communities can be the better. Especially for the provision of essential goods and services such as water, food, energy and health care. Decentralised systems of decision making are also more flexible and can respond more rapidly to a crisis than any central control system ever can.

As was common sense only two generations ago having reserves, no matter if it’s food or skills, contribute to a faster recovery after a disturbance. Just-in-time logistics make communities vulnerable to sudden shocks or major disturbances. So does a reliance on finite resources like oil. Keeping strategic reserves while improving local supply or transitioning to renewables is increasingly important. We know that plants and animals that survive a disturbance are critical to ecological recovery from e.g. extraordinary fires or volcanic eruptions. Keeping seed banks is also increasingly important as ever more species are lost. Social memory is another important aspect that can help push for a faster recovery.

Transparency and up to date information about status and trends of ecosystem and social health is essential to maintain resilience over the long-term. Complex systems are not static but ever changing and so to provide adaptive management one needs to constantly be learning and collecting information to ensure stability of the system. Citizen science and decentralised monitoring is much more effective and low cost than large-scale operations by central authorities. Traditional knowledge about changes over time is invaluable. Indicators can also help provide early warnings of potential tipping points.

Trust is the basic glue that holds society together and it’s fundamental to everyday social and economic interactions. It is easier to maintain trust when groups are small and people know each other but harder in large communities and cities. When trust is high people are more willing to cooperate and transaction costs are low. This is yet another reason why decentralisation of decision-making is important. Today we live in a society where basic trust between actors has been replaced with money, but that monetary system is inherently unstable and increasingly untrustworthy. Trust takes a long time to build up but can be erased rapidly. When trust in a society is low transaction costs increase as fewer people are willing to cooperate or trade. The erosion of social trust is very damaging to a society that in the end may lead to bank runs, social unrest or even conflict.

Every September, Arctic sea ice reaches it's yearly minimum. While some experts have estimated that we might see an ice free Arctic this year or the next, most scientists probably agree that 2020 is more the consensus view. However, the image below shows a recent drop in sea ice extent that is so dramatic (red line) that some think it could be something wrong with the measurement (it was a measurement problem!). 

But still it's a very strong reinforcing feedback in the climate system that will increase further warming. IPCC's models were so very wrong regarding the Arctic, they predicted this wouldn't happen until the end of the century. Now we know that too conservative climate science can be dangerous too.

Human pressure on the planet's ecosystems have in some cases lead to gradual changes but more often it has lead to surprising, large and persistent ecological regime shifts. Such shifts challenges environmental stewardship because it leads to substantial changes in ecosystem services at the same time as these shifts are hard to predict and reverse.

A new study in PLOS now indicates that the most common drivers to ecological regime shifts include: climate change, agriculture and fishing. Aquatic systems, such as kelp forests, have been most affected by regime shifts. The good news, however, is that 62% of identified drivers can be managed at local or national scales, while only 38% can only be managed internationally.

According to the study, food production and climate change are key drivers of regime shifts that are coupled with one another and have the potential to lead to large-scale cascading effects. Food production relates to a number of negative drivers such as resource depletion, pollution, habitat destruction, and deforestation which have the potential to be managed locally or regionally. While climate change drivers needs to be managed internationally. 

Most drivers of ecological change are increasing along with the exponential growth of the world's economy. So while reducing local drivers of ecosystem change can build resilience to continued global change over the short term, global changes will eventually overwhelm local management. Indicating that it is necessary but insufficient to act only on a local to regional scale.

Every 3-7 years variations in tropical winds and pressure shift warm ocean water east to the South American coast, causing an El Niño event. Last time we experienced a really strong El Niño was in 1997/1998 but this years event have the potential to top that record, according to many scientists. There is a 90% chance that El Niño will continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16 (NOAA, 2015).

This week average temperatures jumped to above 1.9C which is much sooner than most models predicted, that indicated it would occur by October/November. We could reach ocean warming of 2.2 or even 3C above average by the end of the year. Such temperature anomalies would exceed the maximum values seen during the record 1997/98 event.

Combining our current climate forcing with such a powerful El Niño could mean that global average atmospheric temperatures will continue to hit record highs. The heat coming from the Pacific Ocean is massive and will probably reinforce the the "hot blob" in the Northern Pacific as well as transport warmer waters into the Arctic, through the Bering Strait. This could increase the melting of Arctic sea ice with a reinforcing feedback of further warming in the region. A powerful El Niño could also increase storminess along the south and eastern US and across the North Atlantic where a cold pool south of Greenland (associated with a weakening North Atlantic current) is already intensifying storms.

Researchers part of the international Past Global Changes project, have analysed sea levels during several warm periods in Earth's geological past when global average temperatures were similar to or slightly warmer than today (~1C above pre-industrial levels) (Dutton et al. 2015). The team concluded that during the last interglacial, a warm period between ice ages 125, 000 years ago, the global average temperature was similar to the present and this was linked to a sea-level rise of 6-9 meters, caused by melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. And 400,000 years ago sea-levels rose 6-13 meters. 

What is scary about these two periods is that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained around 280 parts per million (ppm). The research group also looked at sea levels during the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, when carbon dioxide levels reached around 400 ppm, similar to today's levels. According to the scientists, sea levels were at least 6 meters higher than today. This could happen to us, but surely it would take a long time, right?

Risk of rapid sea-level rise

Well, in another recent study a group of 17 scientists describes a scenario where the world oceans rise much faster than models have predicted (Hansen et al. 2015). The study basically points out that a 2C global average rise in temperature, a political limit to induced warming, would result in a rise of the world's oceans to dangerous levels. The team looked at what happened during the Eemian period when atmospheric temperatures were approximately 1C warmer than they are now and found that ocean levels were much higher than they should have been based on modern climate models. The explanation for this could be that even a small climate forcing could set in motion reinforcing feedback loops in the climate system. In this case, warming led to a small amount of ice sheet melt, which changed ocean currents, which melted more ice. Such complex dynamics are not well incorporated into modern climate models.

Sea-level rise is speeding up. Source: Hansen et al. 2015

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing to melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system also known as “Earth’s Air Conditioner”. The Arctic regulates ocean and atmospheric circulation and keeps the the planet cool. Climate change is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world. The Arctic, however, is central to these impacts as it is warming more rapidly relative to lower latitudes, about twice as fast as the rest of the globe, making it “the canary in the coal mine”. What happens in the Arctic is of utmost importance to us humans if we want to know how climate change will impact our only home, planet Earth.

The Arctic is very sensitive to global heat forcing, and any small warming there could rapidly trigger a number of feedbacks that generate more warming for the Arctic and the globe. These feedbacks include but are not limited to: A) snow and ice melting; B) changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation; C) thawing permafrost and methane release. The concept of a “tipping point” - a threshold beyond which a system shifts to an alternate state - has become familiar to most people concerned with the climate debate. If tipping point means crossing a critical threshold in which a system enters substantial, potentially irreversible, change that causes it to move into an entirely new state, there may be precursors or early warning signals of such change. Such warnings are exactly what climate researchers and ecologists are looking for and trying to map out. The graphic below shows potential tipping elements in the Arctic region.

Map show potential tipping points in the Arctic region: ice melting (white); ocean and atmospheric circulation (aqua green); and biome changes (dark green). Source: Lenton (2012)

Snow & Ice melt

Source: meltfactor.org

As snow and sea ice retreat, exposing land and sea with lower albedo (i.e. less reflectiveness), more solar energy is absorbed, thus leading to further melting and retreat in a vicious cycle. The present thinning and retreat of Arctic sea ice is one of the most serious geophysical consequences of global warming and the rate of ice melting have greatly exceeded the predictions of most models (Wadhams, 2012). Experts suggest that we may have, in 2007, passed a tipping point towards having sea-ice free summers in the Arctic (Livina and Lenton, 2013). Some studies suggest that the Arctic could have sea-ice free summers in only a couple of years, 2016-2020 (Maslowski et al. 2012; Wadhams 2014) while others predict it to occur later, around 2041-2050 (Cawley 2014; Liu et al. 2012) given continued warming. Eighty-one percent of Greenland, which is located mostly inside the Arctic Circle and is the world’s largest island, is covered by ice. The Greenland ice sheet is currently losing mass at a rate that has been accelerating (Lenton, 2012). And in July of 2012 Greenland ice sheet reflectivity at 2000m-2500m collapsed during the summer (figure 1). In a study published in Nature Reyes et al. (2014) argued that between 4.5 and 6.0 meters of sea level rise 400,000 years ago could be attributed to a collapse of Greenland's southern ice sheet. Data from marine records in the North Atlantic show that the average temperatures in Greenland during that period were only about 1°C warmer than today’s temperatures. The similarity in climate between then and now “suggests the threshold for ice sheet collapse is pretty low”, according to one of the co-authors, “We could be nearing the tipping point” (Oregon Live, 25th June 2014).

Changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation

Permafrost—the ground that stays frozen for two or more consecutive years—is a ticking time bomb of climate change. Some 24 percent of Northern Hemisphere land is permafrost. That's 23 million square kilometers found mostly in Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and other higher mountain regions. When the Arctic warms, permafrost can start thawing and releasing carbon and methane into the atmosphere (figure 2). In a controversial paper in Nature, Comment, Whiteman et a. (2013) posited a scenario whereby a 50 Gigatonne (Gt) methane pulse would occur over a decade time period and calculated its potential economic costs. To put this in context, the total amount of methane in the world’s air now is about 5 Gt, and the annual input is about 0.5 Gt, so this would double the methane in the air within the first year. Newspapers such as the Guardian and popular blogs were quick to pick up the story and claimed that there was a possibility of an Arctic “methane bomb”. Following articles have, however, shown little evidence pointing to the likelihood of such a scenario. A group of international scientists wrote in Nature Geoscience in 2014 that “significant quantities of methane are escaping the East Siberian Shelf as a result of the degradation of submarine permafrost over thousands of years” (Shakova et al. 2014). The authors claim that a sudden release of methane, in a “pulse”, seems unlikely and that methane will probably continue to bubble up slowly, contributing to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But they do caution that its possible that global warming could cause more storms in the Arctic Ocean, releasing methane on a bigger scale. There is no established tipping point for methane release, but some studies suggest that a tipping point for continuous Siberian permafrost thaw could be as low as 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial period (Oxford University). 

Sea levels are rising due to thermal expansion from warmer oceans and melting of land-based ice. Satellite measures since 1993 show global sea level rise of around 3.2 mm/year (CSIRO). The potential for increases in sea level rise is enormous because the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctic contain over 99% of all the freshwater on Earth (NSIDC). Estimates suggest that if Greenland ice sheets would melt completely it could raise sea level 6 meters. In other words, a one per cent loss of the Greenland ice cap would result in a sea level rise of 6cm (NSIDC). In a process that is accelerating, ice caps are losing mass. In past periods of Earth’s history, levels of atmospheric greenhouse gasses and sea levels have followed one another closely, allowing an inference about where sea level is headed. Sea levels may rise by more than 2 meters for each degree Celsius of warming the planet experiences over the next 2000 years (see figure), according to one study (Levermann et al. 2013). But even a one meter sea level rise could cause major problems for low-lying countries such as the Maldives and Bangladesh, forcing inhabitants to migrate. Around 150 million people live within 1 metre of high tide level (CSIRO). Coastal cities, ports and airports could be flooded, as could cities sited near tidal estuaries, like London. And many nuclear installations are built by the sea which is of great concern knowing what happened in Fukushima.

Shifts in atmospheric circulation could influence weather patterns. Rising temperatures seems to slow down and increase the waviness of the jet stream, increasing long duration extreme weather patterns such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves (YaleEnvironment, 2012). This has significant impacts on temperature and precipitation patterns in Europe and North America. That weather patterns can "get stuck" might explain why the intensity of extreme weather events has increased. We have seen many examples of “stuck” weather patterns during the past few years. Deep southward dips in the jet stream hung over the U.S. east coast and Western Europe during the winters of 2009/2010, 2010/2011, and 2012/2013 bringing a seemingly endless string of snow storms and cold. In the early winter of 2011/2012, in contrast, these same areas were under northern peaks in the jet stream which brought unusually warm and snowless conditions (Francis, 2013). And in summer times persistent weather have been responsible for droughts and heat. The record heat waves in Europe and Russia have been linked to early snowmelt in Siberia (Jaeger and Seneviratne, 2011). These changes affects agriculture, forestry and water supplies. For example, farming becomes more precarious as weather patterns and prognosis are no longer reliable. Changes in weather patterns also impact storm surges and hurricanes. Some scientists suggest that changes to the jet stream drove hurricane Sandy west, towards the coast of northeastern United States (LiveScience, 2013). Ranking as the second costliest hurricane in United States history (Huffington Post, 2013) one can see how changes to storm patterns can have enormous costs to society and the economy.

The complete loss of Arctic summer sea ice has major knock-on effects, such as boosting phytoplankton and absorbing more heat in the oceans. Ocean warming effects marine life in temperate latitudes making species such as cod, haddock and flounder shift their geographic ranges, leaving fewer cold water species (NASA, 2013). Disease also spread faster in warmer water so parasites are having larger effects on species, especially sensitive coral reefs. Because the planet’s oceans currently absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide, which lowers the pH level of the water, the oceans are becoming acidic. Acidification makes shell-formation among marine organisms such as plankton and mollusks more difficult, which could have major cascading effects on marine life as these organisms make up the base of the ocean’s food chain. Coral reefs, which are marine biodiversity hotspots, are particularly sensitive to changes in temperatures and pH. Coral reef ecosystems are in global decline and this means loss of storm buffers and loss of estuaries for fish species that generate 200 million jobs and food for a billion people (NOAA).

According to most scientists, a CO2 amount of order 450 ppm or larger, if long maintained, would probably push Earth toward an ice-free state (Hansen et al. 2008, 2013). 450 ppm is considered a climate tipping point, beyond which we would have no control. We are at 400 ppm today, which constitutes high risk of transgressing the tipping point. According to science we need to get back down to 350 ppm to be considered in the safe zone. 

Some studies suggest that we may have passed a tipping point in relation to having sea-ice free summers in the Arctic already in 2007 (Livina and Lenton, 2013). The loss of reflective surfaces in the summer reinforces further warming, as dark water absorbs more heat from the sun, causing further melting. The loss of summer sea-ice cover is reversible, given that warming slows down (i.e. drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions). 

By looking at sediment records a team of scientists found that 1°C warmer than today's temperatures in Greenland contributed to a 4-6 meter sea level rise from the collapse of the southern part of the ice sheet (Reyes et al., 2014). 

At 1.5°C warming, from pre-industrial levels, Siberian permafrost starts thawing on a large scale (Vaks et al., 2013). Crossing this tipping point could potentially lead to runaway climate change because of the scale of carbon stores and because methane is 20 times more effective in increasing global temperatures than equal amount carbon dioxide.

What is happening in the Arctic impacts us all. Rapid climate changes are now taking place in the Arctic with impacts on a planetary scale. We do not know how to fix it except from lowering our emissions. Many experts say we need a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emission, starting now. Global leaders have to come to an agreement that substantially reduces emissions, the rich world taking the lead. Our only home, the Earth, is changing rapidly and we are now running into dangerous risks of substantial warming and triggering climate tipping points that reinforces further warming beyond our control. The last call is coming up in November of 2015 Paris Climate Meeting. “The Arctic acts as an early warning system for the entire planet” (Dr. Chip Miller, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory). We should all follow what happens there closely and warn the world of the potential dangers of going on with "business as usual".

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Geological point of view

Economic point of view

Conclusion

More and more organisations are waking up to the fact that growth in GDP in itself is not a sufficient condition to make a country more prosperous. Something that many ecological economists have been saying for decades. Because many western countries economies are now contracting or struggling to simply stay put, while inequalities are growing, conventional economists are having to admit to capitalism's dark sides. In a recent article, on McKinsey's website, Beinhocker and Hauer (2014) confirms the faulty equilibrium model that neo-classicists have based their theory on. The economy is, as many non-conventional economists have argued, a complex, dynamic, open, and nonlinear system. Similar to that of an ecosystem. And moreover the economy is only a part of larger system. These insights have fundamental implications for how people think about the nature of capitalism and prosperity.

We live in a highly globalized world, where people and places are becoming increasingly interconnected. Our social, economic, technical and environmental systems are therefore becoming more complex. With it follows new opportunities but also major challenges. For example, complex systems give rise to new types of problems which often are systemic in nature, including: Financial, economic and debt crisis, Social and political instabilities, Environmental degradation and climate change, Organized crime, cyber-crime and Quick spreading of emerging diseases. A major challenge is thus how to organize ourselves in the best possible way to achieve both individually and socially beneficial outcomes. Both free market radicalism and dictatorial state control have failed us utterly. We need another way of studying and managing social, financial and environmental systems in an increasingly complex world. “Business as usual” is no longer an option.

Complex systems is a field of science studying how parts/actors of a system give rise to the collective behaviors of the system, and how the system interacts with its environment. Complex systems behave qualitatively different from old world simple systems. Complex systems are dynamic and behave in non-linear ways, giving rise to abrupt changes which can in worst case scenario lead to collapse, sometimes irreversible e.g. fish stock collapse. Complex systems often give the illusion of control because of this feature. For example, many economists believed that they had eradicated depression type crises with their neo-liberal free market policies from the 1980s onward. When in reality, all they had done was to build up a major instability in the system (built on debt) which took a long time to mature, then when a shock hit the system it suddenly collapsed. In complex systems it is the interactions between different parts/actors of the system which are important, giving rise to emergent behavior of the overall system. Studying parts of the system separately will therefore not tell you anything about the system as a whole e.g. studying banks but not in relation to the rest of the economy. Attempts to “control complexity”, i.e. to force a complex system to behave in a certain way, are often counter-productive, ineffective and costly. This is why central planning always fails. Design principles such as rules, norms and incentives which influence actors collective behavior are key to understanding and influencing many complex systems.

Source: New England Complex Systems Institute

Building more resilient systems

Because there is a poor understanding of complex systems, attempts to only optimize for efficiency often leads to a loss of resilience i.e. increase in systemic risk. Other common drivers of systemic risk include: loss of redundancy, loss of diversity, more networking, and faster dynamics. Building more resilient systems will be key to avoiding major crises and ensuring future development and well-being. Ways of enhancing resilience includes:
- Increase redundancy: have reserves, alternatives, plan B
- Simplify: limit system size
- Lower connectivity: decoupling strategies
- Increase diversity: having a multitude of species or assets
- Real-time monitoring: adaptive feedbacks, self-regulation
- More transparency and awareness: more data and analysis
- Suitable incentives: norms and rules governs actors behavoir from the bottom up

Governance

Emerging infectious diseases (EID) may have a lot to do with changing environmental conditions and human-wildlife interaction. EID are either new types of pathogens or old ones that have mutated to become novel, as the flue does every year. Most known human EID are shared with animals meaning they are zoonotic. There is an excellent map over hot spots for EIDs in the world that was published in the New York Times back in 2012 that can be found here. While the research field, ecology-infectious diseases, is relatively new and crosses disciplinary boundaries I believe it should get more attention. Especially since it may tell us more about why EIDs have become so prevalent over the last couple of decades.

Ebola

While Ebola is a really scary disease because of its high fatality rate (50-90 %) its just one of nearly 1,000 known human diseases that have originated from animals. The specific source of the Ebola outbreak is not known, however, Ebola is thought to be naturally harboured in some species of bats. Initial transmission to humans may thus have come about via butchering or consuming bats or other infected species. VICE News made a great short documentary about bushmeat in the time of Ebola. While Ebola has had a devastating impact in west African countries it is unlikely that Ebola becomes a global pandemic since the infection pathway requires direct contact with bodily fluids. That said, the illegal bushmeat trade could potentially act as a transfer of the disease in to other countries around the world. Anyway, the Ebola outbreak serves as a reminder of the linkages between disrupted ecosystems and human illness.

Ecology

The more we humans expand our footprint and population, altering habitats and moving animals (and the pathogens they carry), the greater potential for infection and spread of pathogens novel to humans. For example, overfishing in an area could lead to an increase in bushmeat consumption due to subsistence standards which in turn could increase the prevalence of EIDs. Similarly deforestation forces animals to move into closer proximity to humans leading to closer contact, conflicts and loss of biological diversity. Moreover warming temperatures due to climate change may also change habitats and create new ones suitable for species and their pathogens. Examples range from mosquitoes to fruit bats.

Source: Future Earth

Coordination?

Some international groups such as WHO, Future Earth, Diversitas have come together and created the ecoHEALTH project, bringing together researchers from different fields to investigate connections between health and environmental change to generate policy outputs. Hopefully this crisis may shed some new light on prevention methods that include a better care for the worlds ecosystems and biodiversity. For example; combating illegal wildlife trade, improving sanitation, halting deforestation and securing more eco-friendly food production. At the moment many international help organizations are are instead struggling to keep up with all the emerging health crises. Doctors without borders (MSF) have their work cut out for them, combating both disease outbreaks and humanitarian crises, from outbreaks of MERS, Ebola and the Avian Flue to conflicts in South Sudan, Central African Republic and Syria. The organisations spokesperson begged the UN for more resources to combat the Ebola Outbreak, as many countries have not responded quickly enough to the crisis. One should understand that these are costly ways of trying to handling public health issues, much more can be done and to a lower cost on the side of prevention. We have the tools, now we only need foresight.

Conclusion

The complex dynamics of EID has become a hot topic. Hopefully more countries will start taking into account the overlapping drivers of disease and environmental change. Thinking of human health as separate from animal health and their determinants should be a thing of the past. Understanding the underlying parameters, such as human-wildlife proximity and habitat change, of disease outbreak could help organizations set up global monitoring services and look for early warnings of new outbreaks.

This will be my first post on this blog and while it is a bit long I really hope people have the energy to read at least some of it. I think this is an appropriate first post since the blog is called peak resources and deals with a broad topic (or interdisciplinary field) that was really only first acknowledged with the arrival of the book Limits to Growth. The post will go through some old facts and new discussions recently posted in a Guardian op-ed. 

In the book The Limits to Growth from 1972 a group of MIT scientists studied different scenarios and modeled likely outcomes in terms of population, food production and pollution etc. to gain insight to modern civilizations limiting factors for continued prosperity on planet Earth. The central argument of the book was simple: since the Earth is finite the quest for unlimited growth in population and material goods would eventually lead to a collapse (or breakdown) of society. In the "business as usual" (BAU) scenario the researchers assumed a growing population and demand for material wealth which in turn would lead to more industrial output, pollution and require ever increasing extraction of natural resources. Human civilization would then reach a first limiting factor at the point in time when resources started to become ever more expensive as they become harder to obtain (i.e. when it takes more energy/capital to extract the same amount of resources). Then, when more and more capital goes to resource extraction, industrial output per capita would start to fall. According to the book, following a business as usual scenario this could start occurring around 2015-2020. 

Well, this is what The Guardian op-ed by Turner and Alexander discusses. First of one should acknowledge that the authors of Limits to Growth updated their book in 1994 and 2004, comparing the scenarios with then up to date data for every parameter. Furthermore, G. Turner at CSIRO published a paper called "A comparison of 'The Limits to Growth' with Thirty Years of Reality" (2008), Hall and Day wrote "Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil" (2009), and U. Bardi (2011) and R. Heinberg (2011) have written books about Limits to Growth and its public reception. Updates or comparisons to the original study are nothing new to the academic world, but perhaps to the public. This could be the case since the original study was fiercely attacked by many economists who claimed that there could be no limit to human ingenuity and foresight and thus not to growth. Today there is still a general disliking of talking about limits to growth so many environmental scientists have rephrased the issue as "ensuring prosperity within a safe operating space" (Rockström et al. 2009).

In any case, the study discussed in The Guardian is the one released by G. Turner (2014) called ‘Is Global Collapse Imminent?’, MSSI Research Paper No. 4. The study builds on Turners previous updates, but this time takes a step further by discussing the importance of peak oil and whether the Global Financial Crisis could be viewed as a first sign of hitting the limits to growth. Indeed as Turner writes in the op-ed "Limits to Growth checks out with reality" (fig.1) meaning that we are following the business-as-usual trajectory (just as previous studies mentioned above also have concluded). Okey, nothing really new so far. But then Turner goes on to write "the first stages of decline may already have started". Here the issue of peak oil is critical. Why? Because the global economy is intimately tied to cheap and abundant oil. Another important indicator is debt levels. Unsustainable levels of debt means that if there is a sudden increase in oil prices then gas and food prices becomes more expensive and people cannot afford to e.g. pay their mortgage which could result in massive defaults. Many independent researchers conclude that "easy" conventional oil production (e.g. not inlcuding shale and tar sands) has already peaked (2005-2008). Even the conservative IEA has warned about peak oil. Turner therefore argues that peak oil could be the catalyst for global economic downturn.

However, no one really knows what will actually happen when resources starts to constrain economic growth. Wars and civil unrest could break out, economic inequality could rise, or there could simply be a slowing down of western countries economic growth. Many other possible scenarios could come about as a consequence of limited resources but there is a risk that these crises mask the real underlying issue of ecosystem degradation and so many conventional solutions will not work. To prevent a severe downturn and dampen potential serious ecological consequences we need to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle, relying less on fossil fuels and preserving critical ecosystem services and biodiversity for a resilient society in a future of abrupt change. This blog will deal with how to do this and the challenges we face. For more see topics.