Climate and Energy Crises from the Perspective of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Trade‐Offs between Systemic Transition and Societal Collapse?

Abstract

AR6 IPCC reports give divergent messages about the different socio‐economic transition approaches to deal with the current climate emergency. The dangers of not giving a clear message to policymakers and to society on the need of changing the current socio‐economic paradigm are considerable: to fall in the SSP3‐7.0 scenario, which is conducive to the collapse of our current civi‐ lization. In this work, key variables to assess the main functionalities of global socio‐economy are analyzed under a system dynamics approach. This allows for understanding what the evolution is of our current socio‐economy in a framework of climate change and resource depletion. The aim of this work is to provide a different perspective on socio‐economic evolution by identifying similar characteristics in the worst‐case IPCC scenarios with historical behavior in complex societies. From such a historical perspective and the current system evolution, a conceptual model is proposed to explain our globalized complex system near to a phase transition. Then, phase transition corre‐ spondences from the model to the current socio‐economic system are proposed and a series of cor‐ responding preventive measures (in terms of social actions, economic measures, and their linked policies) are suggested to avoid collapse scenarios.