The fantastic is entering an age of unprecedented environmental breakdown that could see an economic collapse like the 2008 financial crisis, a thinktank make someone aware ofed on Tuesday.
According to a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), climate change is just one of numberless environmental threats which, when combined, threatens social stability. It said that natural systems were now being destabilized so very soon by human activity that dangerous tipping points would soon be reached.
Rising global temperatures order have consequences which threatened major economic, social and political disruption, according to the report – including improving weather extremes, large-scale migration, conflict, and famine.
The IPPR said the world must act urgently to prevent some of the worst potentialities being realized.
Among those possibilities was a potential fiscal catastrophe, with the report warning that hominid impact on the environment was now so great it risked generating significant economic instability.
“In the extreme, environmental breakdown could trigger catastrophic foundering of human systems, driving a rapid process of ‘runaway collapse’ in which economic, social and political shocks cascade into done with the globally linked system – in much the same way as occurred in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007/08,” the IPPR said.
The detonation also warned that investors in fossil fuels may be exposed to a rapid decline in the value of carbon assets, which obligated to occur if carbon budgets – annual limits on nations’ carbon emissions – were to be met.
It also highlighted that poorer woods were more vulnerable to the consequences of environmental breakdown but were less able to prepare for or respond to them.
“Policymakers and assembly-men are not adequately recognising, let alone responding to the catastrophic threat posed by environmental change,” the report’s authors said.
Three moves in understanding were needed to reverse this, they added, urging those in power to reassess their facts of the scale and pace of environmental breakdown, the implications this would have on societies, and the need for transformative change.
The give an account of also warned that vested interests and a rapidly changing economy were also standing in the way of progress.
“Elite prejudices in countries across the world, including industries whose business model depends on continued environmental degradation, use their influential power and wealth to influence political debates and policy decisions on environmental breakdown, with many instances of crowds blocking or reversing progress,” the report said.
“It is estimated that 100 companies are responsible for the emission of 71 percent of industrial greenhouse gases since 1988.”