Climate crisis is but a symptom: a call for shift to life-amplifying policies
As COP 27 gathering runs its course in Sharm El Sheikh, I feel the need to reflect on current state of climate policies — which, to my mind, are currently often based on simplifications and flawed assumptions.
- First, an obvious yet an underestimated fact: what we face is not the climate crisis but a multidimensional crisis of planetary boundaries. The 8-billion large humanity has tilted many planetary systems out of balance, including the water cycle, the nitrogen and phosphorous cycle, and others. The unidimensional prioritization of “average temperature increase since the pre-industrial age” not only misrepresents the complexity of the challenge we are dealing with, but also leads to inefficient and sometimes counter-productive policies.
- Since the climate crisis has moved to the center of public attention in the early 2000s, the majority of policies addresses the issues of CO2 emissions. Consequently, industries started to prioritize solutions that only focus on CO2 reduction — such as hydroplants and biofuel produced from monocrops — ignoring the impact these solutions create on other planetary boundaries.
- There is a growing body of evidence that the climate crisis is but a symptom of what James Lovelock would call “Gaia crisis”, the disturbance of the complex self-regulated “organism” of Earth that (re)produces favorable conditions for the diverse life on our planet through the evolution of biosphere.
In other words, all dimensions of planetary boundaries are interrelated, and the most important one of them is the biodiversity. According to the Biotic Regulation theory, all living natural ecosystems serve as stabilizers of local and global climate. The interconnection between living organisms serves as a network of feedback loops that allow ecosystems to self-regulate their internal and external stability. This theory finds multiple confirmations, including the tracking of the water cycle in rainforests, where rains are actually produced by forests themselves.
(and yes, as the last several decades of research show, forests are tightly woven “wood wide webs” of trees, fungi and other organisms, processing amounts of information that greatly surpass those processed by an average human brain).
4. The crisis of biosphere loss — both in terms of volume and diversity — is well documented in the last two centuries. The rate of species die-out exceeds the “normal” rate (of stable biosphere) by the magnitude of 1,000s. In the last 50 years alone, the size of wildlife populations has been reduced to one-third of what it was half a century ago. Due to the interrelation between biotas and climate, this die-out could possibly be one of the main drivers in the unfolding climate crisis, as the “tipping points” model shows. While we cannot fully appreciate the risks produced by the die-out of certain amphibians or fishes, the loss of key species may become an unremediated catastrophe, such as the loss of bees (pollinators of 9/10 of flowering plants) or phytoplankton (that produces 70% oxygen on Earth).
5. Accordingly, the climate crisis cannot be resolved by addressing climate-related indicators such as the average temperature, the concentration of greenhouse gases, or the level of emissions. These are important indicators, but they are greatly insufficient. The only way to bring the collective human existence within the planetary boundaries — and therefore to avoid the collapse of our civilization — is by restoring (or recreating) the biosphere itself “back” to pre-industrial-age shape in terms of volume and the biodiversity.
6. The energy sector is blamed as the key disruptor of the climate. However, if judged by the impact on the biosphere, three other sectors stand out: agriculture & fishery, land & sea transportation, and urban infrastructure. The change of practices in these sectors holds the key to resolution of the climate crisis.
To summarize: in words of Janine Benyus, “life creates conditions conducive to life”. The destruction of life creates conditions destructive to life, including humans. If we want to “solve” the climate crisis, we need to realign our civilization to become life-supportive and life-amplifying.
It is not an easy task to accomplish. The destruction of biosphere began long before the industrial age — for more than 10,000 years, agricultural practices and expansion of human settlements relied on destroying complex and diverse natural ecosystems and replacing them with simple human-controlled environments of domesticated crops, building, and infrastructure. What we need is no less than a cultural turn, a new “revolution” comparable with (or maybe exceeding) the agricultural and the industrial transition. We need to unlearn expansionist practices that have been the “best practice” of our ancestors for millennia, and relearn regenerative practices of care for all species in the ecosystem, not just those “useful” to us.
If this complex challenge to be untangled, here is a bucket list of possible (and greatly incomplete) “life-amplifying” policies should be brought into reality in the next decade (or else):
a. Priority #1: the rapid change of industrial agriculture practices. Intense industrialized monocrop production needs to be phased out and replaced with agroecology practices such as food forests. Agroecology is currently expensive and therefore reserved only to (small share of) organic farming. However, with the advent of Industry 4.0 solutions — fields controlled by AI, drones monitoring crops, precision farming and more — its cost can be brought on par with monocrops. This transition can be led primarily by global food companies that can prioritize supplying from agroecological producers (and increasing the variety of their offering).
In addition to changing our relationship with the land, we should also recognize the predatory and exploitative nature of our relationship with oceans. The overfishing continues to push populations of the wild fish beyond the point of regeneration, and urgent conversion to regenerative practices in fishery — such as polycultural regenerative ocean farming — is necessary to stabilize and restore ocean flora & fauna.
Additionally — and, perhaps, even more critically long-term- the transition to local production & consumption systems is needed, where local farmer & consumer cooperatives create symbiotic relationship for guaranteed community food supply, the land and biodiversity protection. Many organizations today experiment with this new production& consumption model — such as Bioregional Weaving Labs — and their work can become a seed for a new movement of “regenerative cooperatives” around the globe.
b. All new infrastructure, transportation, and energy projects should be designed to minimize their biodiversity footprint, and not just carbon footprint. Existing infrastructure needs to be audited for its footprint and redesigned to reduce its harm.
An important fix: all major highways across the world should install “green corridors” for wildlife migration. To encourage national compliance around the world, leading economies (EU, US, China) can institutionalize a policy similar to carbon tax: operators using roads without green corridors will have to pay a fee for wildlife restoration projects.
Whenever possible, industries (especially construction, transportation, and energy) need to switch to nature-based solutions. But even with nature-based solutions, it is important to track whether their effect can be detrimental for the biodiversity.
c. Finally, enough has been said that the current financial system is one of the root causes of the climate and biodiversity crisis — and therefore, the transition to regenerative financing can become a solution. The pledge from Regen Foundation beautifully summarizes the key actions needed: fostering new finance models, creating multidimensional systems of impact measurement, and producing data transparency through Web3 solutions.
Last but not least, all of these measures will be futile if we do not start to change the mindset of leaders and the population. Our education systems today, from basic education to elite leadership education, are built to maintain industrial practices and values. Without the transformation of our learning models, without the transition to (evolutionary) learning ecosystems for human and planetary thriving, technologies and policies alone will not be able to resolve the crisis we are facing.
