Campaigners, researchers and commentators demanding action on climate change have a tendency to err on the side of catastrophe when discussing what the world might look like in the future.
Greta Thunberg’s famous statement, “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic,” is an obvious example. Even that three-word mantra ‘save the planet’ is positively febrile, since there is nothing in any scientific literature to suggest the planet needs saving.
So it should come as no surprise that the UK government’s weather and climate centre, the Met Office, is seriously kicking around some terrifying scenarios for the future. The Met Office, in conjunction with a group of other research bodies, has come up with five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for Climate Research and Policy (UK-SSPs).
These are a UK-specific version of the global scenarios used in assessments by the United Nations’ climate change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and described as “five different storylines of future socioeconomic circumstances, explaining how the global economy and society might evolve over the next 80 years”. The project website explains that “the global SSPs are independent of climate change and climate change policy” – in other words, “they do not consider the potential impact climate change has on societal and economic choices”.
Rather, they are “coupled with a set of future climate scenarios, the Representative Concentration Pathways” to allow researchers to see “how feasible it would be to achieve different levels of climate change mitigation, and what challenges to climate change mitigation and adaptation might exist”.
These UK-specific scenarios have actually been around since last summer, so it’s not entirely clear why the British press has picked up on them now. But some of them would make decent backstories for dystopian movies.
Take SSP3, titled ‘Regional Rivalry’. To cut a long story short, the UK falls out catastrophically with the rest of the world, nationalist leaders take over, there is a crackdown on environmentalist groups, the local environment gets screwed up, incomes fall and, eventually, functioning government in the four nations of the UK – having gone their separate ways – collapses. By the end of the 21st century, “Because of past investments in military and defence, but without an effective central government, different military groups (militias, criminal groups, etc.) rise to de facto power and compete for control and natural resources, creating their own feudal semi-independent micro-states with their own laws and means to enforce them. People accept severe restrictions on freedom in exchange for employment and protection.”
What? In short, the UK, after centuries of developing democratic political structures, a wealthy economy and extensive infrastructure descends into a condition more like present-day Afghanistan. Yet apparently intelligent people think this is a scenario worth taking into account when analysing the possibilities for climate change impacts.
Compare this to SSP1, titled ‘Sustainability’. In this one, environmental problems and natural disasters lead people to work together for a more sustainable society. “Society becomes more egalitarian, with all individuals actively contributing to the sustainability agenda. A UK-wide green alliance is established across countries and delivers the policies and technologies that maximise sustainability. Collaboration domestically and internationally plays a key role in the green alliance, ensuring technologies, ideas and projects are shared to gain mutual benefits. By 2100, the UK becomes a fully functional circular economy.”
If the ‘Regional Rivalry’ scenario is a dystopia, the ‘Sustainability’ scenario is an eco-warrior’s wet dream.
Still, it’s not all bad news. There’s another scenario, SSP5, titled ‘Fossil-fuelled Development’. In this one, public support for green taxation falls and people carry on using fossil fuels. Shale gas, extracted using fracking, takes off, leading to lower prices for energy and wider economic development, particularly in the north of England where the biggest supplies of shale gas are found. Soon, the UK’s north-south economic divide disappears. “Technological solutions are used to counter the impacts of large-scale environmental degradation. Large increases in population lead to rapidly expanding ‘city-states’ and massive urban sprawl.”
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In Germany the climate religion has occupied top courts.