Signs of impending social collapse and what we can do

A version of this is to be published by the Frank Fenner Foundation.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) has published, in late September 2016, a paper called Anticipating societal collapse; Hints from the Stone Age. This repeats speculation that the Syrian conflict has in part been triggered by the worst drought in the Fertile Crescent in its instrumental record, and it lists several mechanisms for why societies can sometime be so slow to take evasive action that collapse becomes inevitable. 

One of these is called the “sunk-cost effect” – essentially, people have invested so much effort and time in something that once worked, that they keep on with the same approach, even though it is like sending more money after bad. A second is the “bystander effect.” We are herd creatures and behave like those around us. A third is that elites have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, thus blocking change – this mechanism surely is easy to see today, in modern Australia and elsewhere.

The paper reviews evidence that science can increasingly detect incipient collapse (by finding evidence of falling “resilience”) and concludes by suggesting that science and big data be used to scan the globe for empirical indicators of such declines, in the hope that this will finally shift society’s behaviour. That seems reasonable, but evidence alone will not be enough to overcome either the sunk-cost effect or to convert predatory human elites into benevolent change agents. Furthermore, does one really needs big science to sense that resilience is in decline – is not the massive increase in global refugee numbers sufficient evidence of a major problem?

Much of my own academic work (since 1991) has been relevant to social collapse. In particular, I have been making the case that if societies collapse then this will do immense harm to public health. Therefore, public health and medicine more broadly would be well served – indeed they have a duty of care – to  recognise these issues and to try to prevent collapse. The bystander effect could switch from a liability to an asset – humans can change their collective behaviour, not only to do harm (e.g. by going to war) but to transform society in ways that mean civilisation can survive, e.g. by switching to clean energy, eating less meat, and establishing a fairer, more bio-sensitive world.

In the last three months I have published two more articles about these topics, called Sounding the Alarm: Health in the Anthropocene and Planetary overload, limits to growth and health. They are both open access. I welcome any comments.

Limits to growth, planetary boundaries, and planetary health

Draft paper here: comments welcome*

This paper presents an overview of the “Limits to Growth” debate, from Malthus to Planetary Boundaries and the Planetary Health Commission. It argues that a combination of vested interests, inequalities, and cognitive impediments disguise the critical proximity to limits. Cognitive factors include an increasingly urbanized population with declining exposure to nature, incompletely substituted by the rise of simulated and filmed reality.

Following prominence in the 1960s and early 1970s, fears of Limits to Growth diminished as the oil price declined and as the Green Revolution greatly expanded agricultural productivity. While public health catastrophes have occurred which can be conceptualised as arising from the exceeding of local boundaries, including that of tolerance (e.g. the 1994 Rwandan genocide), these have mostly been considered temporary aberrations, of limited significance.

Another example is the devastating Syrian civil war. However, rather than an outlier, this conflict can be analysed as an example of interacting eco-social causes, related to aspects of limits to growth, including from climate change and aquifer depletion. To view the “root causes” of the Syrian tragedy as overwhelmingly or even exclusively social leaves civilization vulnerable to many additional disasters, including in the Sahel, elsewhere in the Middle East, and perhaps, within decades, globally.

An aspect of the Limits to Growth debate that was briefly prominent was “peak oil”. Fear of this has fallen with the oil price. But this does not mean that Limits to Growth are fanciful or will apply only in the far future, even if (which seems unlikely) the oil price remains low. The proximity of dangerous climate change is the starkest example of an imminent environmental limit; other examples include declining reserves of phosphorus and rare elements. Crucially, human responses have the capacity to accelerate or delay the consequences of these limits. 

Greater understanding of these issues is vital for enduring global population health.

Keywords: Anthropocene, civilization collapse, climate change, conflict, environmental determinism, human carrying capacity

* This was published as "Planetary overload, limits to growth and health" in Current Environmental Health Reports

Sounding the Alarm: Health in the Anthropocene

Published June 30, 2016 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
See: http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/7/665

Butler CD: Sounding the alarm: Health in the anthropocene. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2016) 13 665; doi:610.3390/ijerph13070665.

Abstract: There is growing scientific and public recognition that human actions, directly and indirectly, have profoundly changed the Earth system, in a still accelerating process, increasingly called the “Anthropocene”. Planetary transformation, including of the atmosphere, climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, has enormous implications for human health, many of which are deeply disturbing, especially in low-income settings. A few health consequences of the Anthropocene have been partially recognized, including within environmental epidemiology, but their long-term consequences remain poorly understood and greatly under-rated. For example Syria could be a “sentinel” population, giving a glimpse to a much wider dystopian future. Health-Earth is a research network, co-founded in 2014, which seeks, with other groups, to catalyse a powerful curative response by the wider health community. This paper builds on a symposium presented by Health-Earth members at the 2015 conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. It reviews and synthesizes parts of the large literature relevant to the interaction between the changing Earth system and human health. It concludes that this topic should be prominent within future environmental epidemiology and public health. Created by our species, these challenges may be soluble, but solutions require far more understanding and resources than are currently being made available.

EXTRACT (links added)


"One of the most authoritative warnings of potential global collapse is by Martin Rees, for five years President of the Royal Society. His book about this is starkly entitled Our Final Century (or in the U.S. edition “Our Final Hour”). There are many other cautions from significant figures, including Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and Pope Francis. Admonitions have also come from a few with a health background, including Tony McMichael, a former president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology.

More broadly among the health community, such counsel has had little effect, with exceptions such as some conferences, editorials, and the Wellcome Trust’s “Our Planet Our Health” grant round, announced in 2015. Although most health curriculi includes environmental health very little such training concerns systemic environmental (and “eco-social”) risks, including the relationship of these adverse global environmental changes and factors with conflict. Even within political science, few analysts accept that the civil war that started in Syria in 2011 has significant environmental as well as social roots, such as the intensifying drought and groundwater shortage. High human population growth also arguably had a role in Syria, by accelerating local resource depletion including of groundwater and by reducing the “demographic dividend” which, some analysts have long argued, helps to promote economic and human development, including through improved education.
Kelley et al. (and others, including in the military) have argued that climate change intensified the Syrian drought. Climate change can be conceptualized as a “risk multiplier” for conflict, not only in Syria, but in Darfur and Somalia, and in many unsettling future scenarios. Via this web of eco-social factors, Syria can be conceptualized as a “sentinel” population, a case study which is likely to be replicated in broad principle, though not in precise detail, if, as seems likely, sufficient future stresses occur.

Two recent papers and a commentary warn that life in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, especially near the Persian Gulf, will become increasingly difficult under some plausible climate change scenarios by 2100, due to the combination of rising temperatures and humidity. Although air conditioned life inside may be possible, how can the infrastructure be maintained? Will robots be sufficiently advanced? Will workers tending infrastructure do so only at night?

One of these papers warns of the impact on Haj pilgrims, which (due to its timing being determined by a lunar calendar) periodically occurs during the hottest months of the year. Abstaining from water during hot days, a requirement of Ramadan (also determined by a lunar calendar), could also become extremely problematic to health in hot and humid conditions. One of these articles, led by the director of the Max Planck Institute for chemistry also anticipates: “that climate change and increasing hot weather extremes in the Middle East and North Africa, a region subject to economic recession, political turbulence, and upheaval, may exacerbate humanitarian hardship and contribute to migration”.