Climate and Energy Crises from the Perspective of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Trade-Offs between Systemic Transition and Societal Collapse?

Abstract

AR6 IPCC reports give divergent messages about the different socio-economic transition approaches to deal with the current climate emergency. The dangers of not giving a clear message to policymakers and to society on the need of changing the current socio-economic paradigm are considerable: to fall in the SSP3-7.0 scenario, which is conducive to the collapse of our current civilization. In this work, key variables to assess the main functionalities of global socio-economy are analyzed under a system dynamics approach. This allows for understanding what the evolution is of our current socio-economy in a framework of climate change and resource depletion. The aim of this work is to provide a different perspective on socio-economic evolution by identifying similar characteristics in the worst-case IPCC scenarios with historical behavior in complex societies. From such a historical perspective and the current system evolution, a conceptual model is proposed to explain our globalized complex system near to a phase transition. Then, phase transition correspondences from the model to the current socio-economic system are proposed and a series of corresponding preventive measures (in terms of social actions, economic measures, and their linked policies) are suggested to avoid collapse scenarios.