They warned it could happen: a world of surging nationalism, stalling economic development and the unraveling of decades of international cooperation on climate change and other global challenges.
Long before Donald Trump lurched away from diplomatic norms and the international rules-based order, scientists mapped out different potential futures to understand the possible implications for greenhouse gas emissions. Developed a decade ago, five of these “pathways” became crucial to the work of the UN’s IPCC climate expert panel. These are not predictions for the 21st century.
Rather, they envision what could happen with various societal changes including for trade, economic development, technological innovation and global population. The most optimistic narrative foresees sustainable growth and improved equality.
Photo: AFP
A second “middle-of-the-road” scenario is an extension of current trends.
The third is a world riven by rivalries, a fourth is blighted by increasing inequality, and the fifth assumes supercharged economic growth grounded in expanding fossil fuel use. Keywan Riahi, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, who coordinated the development of the so-called Shared Socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), said the world has largely developed in line with the third scenario in recent years.
While it is certainly not a perfect fit, what we see now “is a much more fragmented world,” Riahi said. “Collaboration is more difficult, economic development is actually also not so optimistic.”
Photo: AFP
‘ROCKY ROAD’
Scientists’ original description of the SSP3 scenario was: “A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues.”
This “rocky road” is arguably the worst of all the hypothetical futures. Planet-heating emissions are second only to economic expansion driven by oil, gas and coal. But the fractured SSP3 world ranks first when it comes to damages from climate change, showing the largest population boom, and the weakest economic growth.
This scenario “reflects a current strain of populist isolationist politics that is ascendant today,” climate scientist Zeke Hausfather noted in a recent newsletter post. In 2021, Hausfather got blowback for calling SSP3 “Trump World.” But “the actions in his second term around energy and trade seem to be playing out much more closely to SSP3 than other pathways,” he said.
The US has ditched the Paris climate treaty, turned its back on global cooperation on science, trade and health and eviscerated its international development budget.
Washington has lambasted UN sustainable development goals, especially related to climate change and women’s rights. Domestically, the world’s second biggest carbon polluter has undermined progress on low-carbon technology, canceled climate research and even stymied weather data collection. World leaders have expressed their disquiet.
“The global economy thrived on a foundation of openness and multilateralism underpinned by US leadership... but today it is fracturing,” said European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde in late May. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney declared the global trade system in place for 80 years “over,” and China’s Xi Jinping (習近平) urged the preservation of “the international order based on international law, and global fairness and justice.”
NOT DESTINY
There are important ways in which today’s reality differs from the hypothetical SSP3 world. World population projections are significantly lower, for instance. And the development of climate tech has been “much more successful,” Riahi said. A dramatic drop in the cost of solar and wind power, as well as electric vehicles and batteries, has boosted the growth of low-carbon technologies.
Carbon dioxide emissions have also slowed, while predicted warming for the end of the century is lower than a decade ago — albeit still reaching catastrophic levels. Scientists are currently updating SSP projections and crafting a new set of climate narratives.
They have much to unpack. Riahi said that even if there was a “complete collapse of climate policies globally,” the previous worst-case emissions projections will likely not materialist because clean energy has become so cheap.
At the same time, he said, the world will almost certainly overshoot the Paris deal’s aspirational goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the coming years. This has forced scientists to consider a new set of questions. What is the new best-case scenario for bending emissions down to zero? If current policies persist, will emissions stay high for a longer period, causing temperatures to keep rising in the coming decades?
“What are the implications climatically of this high overshoot, which is unfortunately a more and more likely scenario if you extrapolate what we see at the moment?” said Riahi.
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
It was just before 6am on a sunny November morning and I could hardly contain my excitement as I arrived at the wharf where I would catch the boat to one of Penghu’s most difficult-to-access islands, a trip that had been on my list for nearly a decade. Little did I know, my dream would soon be crushed. Unsure about which boat was heading to Huayu (花嶼), I found someone who appeared to be a local and asked if this was the right place to wait. “Oh, the boat to Huayu’s been canceled today,” she told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Surely,
Imagine being able to visit a museum and examine up close thousand-year-old pottery, revel alone in jewelry from centuries past, or peer inside a Versace bag. Now London’s V&A has launched a revolutionary new exhibition space, where visitors can choose from some 250,000 objects, order something they want to spend time looking at and have it delivered to a room for a private viewing. Most museums have thousands of precious and historic items hidden away in their stores, which the public never gets to see or enjoy. But the V&A Storehouse, which opened on May 31 in a converted warehouse, has come up
RSS