deep adaptation a map for navigating climate tragedy

'That's why I'm with him on the fundamentals. 'Jem's paper is in the main well-researched and supported by relatively mainstream climate science,' says Professor Rupert Read, chair of the Green House think-tank and a philosophy academic at the University of East Anglia. The important thing, Buitenhuis says, is to realise that the negative effects of climate change have already been with us for some time: 'Further gradual deterioration looks much more likely to me than a disaster within the next ten years that will be big enough that, after that, everybody will agree the status quo is doomed.' 'I think societal collapse is indeed inevitable,' he says, though adds that 'the process is likely to take decades to centuries'.

'It is time,' he adds, 'we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.'Įrik Buitenhuis, a senior researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, tells me that Bendell's conclusions may sound extreme, but he agrees with the report's overall assessment. 'Our norms of behaviour – that we call our 'civilisation' – may also degrade.' 'The evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war,' he writes in the paper.

Professor Jem Bendell, a sustainability academic at the University of Cumbria, wrote the paper after taking a sabbatical at the end of 2017 to review and understand the latest climate science 'properly – not sitting on the fence anymore', as he puts it down the phone to me. Chiefly, that it's too late to stop climate change from devastating our world – and that 'climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term'. But most of all, there's the stark conclusions that it draws about the future. There's the flashes of dark humour ('I was only partly joking earlier when I questioned why I was even writing this paper'). There's the language ('we are about to play Russian Roulette with the entire human race with already two bullets loaded'). 'Deep Adaptation' is quite unlike any other academic paper.

Deep adaptation a map for navigating climate tragedy