Catastrophic climate change and the collapse of human societies
Anthropogenic climate change interacting with these other stressors could thus cause a global catastrophe, in a worldwide societal collapse. Kemp et al. [1] have reminded us that although we have reasons to suspect it, such potential collapsing futures are rarely studied and poorly understood.
The closest research is the search for evidence of tipping dynamics and estimating thresholds, timescales and impacts of potential tipping points [4]. We advocate for considering them while using the available knowledge acquired from historical and prehistorical examples of local and regional collapses, transformations and resilience of human societies also driven by climate and unsustainable use of resources
Climate change together with turbulent political rivalries and resource mismanagement that have hindered solving underlying problems have played key roles in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous human societies.
This needed research must also consider the differences in technologies, social complexity and cognitive levels to those cases that occurred during prehistoric and historical periods. Such analyses could help to better convince and inform managers and politicians, and society in general, to take action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, improve resilience and better prepare and diversify possible emergency responses.
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/10/6/nwad082/7085016?login=false
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