Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system. However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information gap between report cycles.

We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open-data, open-science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain. As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel.

The indicators show that, for the 2014–2023 decade average, observed warming was 1.19 [1.06 to 1.30] °C, of which 1.19 [1.0 to 1.4] °C was human-induced. For the single-year average, human-induced warming reached 1.31 [1.1 to 1.7] °C in 2023 relative to 1850–1900. The best estimate is below the 2023-observed warming record of 1.43 [1.32 to 1.53] °C, indicating a substantial contribution of internal variability in the 2023 record. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.26 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2014–2023. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of net greenhouse gas emissions being at a persistent high of 53±5.4 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade, as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track a change of direction for some of the indicators presented here.

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Forster, P. M., et al. (2024). Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: Annual Update of Key Indicators of the State of the Climate System and Human Influence. Earth Systems Science Data, 16, 2625–2658.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2625-2024

An apocalyptic imaginary appears so frequently in debates on climate change and the Anthropocene that it might be considered the dominant historical narrative of our time. However, when dealing with apocalypticism, biblical references are not always appropriate.

In this article, I argue that we are dealing with two different concepts of apocalypticism, and that the new apocalyptic history is not a negative version of the religious apocalypse. Second, I also argue that the new apocalyptic history nevertheless seems to revolve around the idea of the promise as a specific historical way of binding the past, present and future into a coherent history that, ironically, seems to open up a dialogue with the history of theology.

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Chorell, T.G. (2024). Two Concepts of Apocalypse and Apocalyptic History Today. Rethinking History, 1–19.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2024.2352315

The central question in this paper is whether a market economy can theoretically and empirically deal with sustainability. A system analysis of the current neoclassical theory shows that the system components (goal function, interaction mechanisms, actors and outcomes) are predominantly defined in terms of economic growth and facilitated by market exchange. This fosters (over)production and consumption of private goods, crowding out public goods and preservation of the commons. The one size fits all ‘economic mechanism design’ cannot deliver social outcomes regarding sustainability.

The explicit recognition that an economy has different domains (ecological, social, economic) broadens the options for incorporating sustainability within the economic system. This richer framework allows us to analyse the economic problem at hand: an efficient economic system in an inclusive society within biophysical boundaries. We show that the alternative for market economics does not only have to be government intervention but can also include private forms of collective decision-making.

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Schoenmaker, D., Stegeman, H. (2023). Can the Market Economy Deal with Sustainability? De Economist 171, 25–49.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-022-09416-6

The Resilient Cities Network, formerly known as the 100 Resilient Cities, supports the development of local resilience policies in partaking cities from around the globe. Various policies in the network are an example of an upcoming trend where experiments are increasingly conducted in the urban space to shape governance. Experiments in this context are purposeful interventions to increase resilience through learning and the temporal and spatial diffusion of results. Experimentation and resilience are highlighted in the literature on political ecology for policies presumably leading to urban transformations. Both approaches face strikingly similar critiques, namely that related rationales and narratives frequently maintain the political and economic status quo and reproduce socially unjust urban realities. However, they are rarely examined together and empirical findings are missing when it comes to comparative research; particularly between the Global South and North.

Against this background, this paper asks: Which role plays social justice in rationales and narratives of resilience experiments in Global South and Global North cities? I examine experimental policy actions in Global South and North cities of the Resilient Cities Network (N = 112) qualitatively through an analytic lens that links a social justice understanding to the setting, agency, and design of resilience experiments. Based on this analysis, I compare the results to explore emerging patterns of the role given to social justice in urban resilience experimentation across cities of the Global South and North. The findings show that narratives in Global North cities revolve stronger around recognising social justice, but Global South cities put more emphasis on marginalised groups and learning mechanisms that potentially foster social justice through output legitimacy.

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Kochskämper, E. (2024). Just Transformations Through Resilience Experiments? Comparing Policy Rationales and Narratives of the Global South and North in the Resilient Cities Network. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-024-00599-7

The necessity and consequences of the exponential growth in tourism activity experienced throughout the world over the past half-century have been increasingly questioned by an expanding body of activists and critical researchers. One of the emerging responses within this debate concerns calls for reversing the trend in pursuit of touristic ‘degrowth’.

This discussion has been inspired by a longstanding body of research problematizing the imperative and consequences of economic growth more generally, initiated by natural and social scientists. This article offers a state-of-the-art overview of the application of degrowth perspectives to discussions of (sustainable) tourism development and outlines a future agenda for research and praxis continuing this important line of inquiry.

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The narrative of US climate impact and action often focuses on the nation’s cities and crowded coasts. However, in the vast expanse of rural and small-town America, there is a story that has been largely untold, one of significant emissions reduction potential shadowed by systematic underinvestment.

A first-ever analysis of emissions sources in our nation’s countryside found a stark reality: At least 36% of US emissions are produced in rural America, amounting to 2,263 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMT CO2e) annually. The analysis highlights that U.S. climate action requires rural strategies and investments.

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Rural Climate Partnership. (May 2024). The Overlooked Climate Impact of Rural America (Report).

https://ruralclimate.org/rural-emissions-report-2024/

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Biofuels represent a complex issue in the sustainability discourse as they require the simultaneous consideration of different dimensions and scales of analysis. This situation explains the co-existence of contrasting ‘scientific evidence’ about their performance.

This paper presents a novel conceptual framework that integrates four key aspects of the performance of biofuels: (1) the social factors determining the desirability of biofuel use on the demand side – why do we want to produce biofuels?; (2) the internal technical and economic constraints affecting the viability of their mode of production on the supply side – how can we produce biofuels?; (3) the external biophysical constraints limiting the feasibility of their production – what are the material limits imposed by the availability of natural resources?; (4) the level of openness of the biofuel system referring to the imports used to overcome local limits – the level of externalization of the requirement of natural resources and technical production factors reducing energy security.

The proposed framework generates a biophysical characterization of the supply function of a biofuel system (which inputs are needed to generate the supply) contextualized against a biophysical characterization of the societal demand (what inputs the society is ready to invest in the energy system in order to obtain the supply).

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Ripa, M., Cadillo-Benalcazar, J.J.,  Giampietro, M. (2021). Cutting through the biofuel confusion: A conceptual framework to check the feasibility, viability and desirability of biofuels. Energy Strategy Reviews, 35(5), 100642.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2021.100642.

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Forty-five surgeons, emergency room physicians and nurses who volunteered in several Gaza hospitals over recent months have written to Joe Biden claiming that the true death toll from Israel’s months-long assault is more than 92,000, demanding the US withdraw diplomatic and military support for Israel until there is a ceasefire.

The eight-page letter, delivered on Thursday and addressed to Biden, the first lady, Jill Biden, and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, said the medics saw evidence of widespread violations of laws governing the use of US weapons supplied to Israel, and of international humanitarian law.

Mainstream media is often considered corporate-friendly due to its heavy reliance on advertising revenue. When your advertisers include pharmaceutical and food companies, defence contractors and financial institutions, addressing critical issues could be seen as corporate suicide.

As Noam Chomsky put it, the media often serves as a tool for “manufacturing consent,” rather than fostering informed public discourse. He emphasized that certain topics are confined within allowable boundaries set by powerful institutions, limiting the range of acceptable discussion.

Middle Americans and the poor have been leading hard lives for decades because of the nature of the economic and political systems in which we live and work. Those systems prioritize many things, but the well-being of average citizens is not one of them. The American polity and economy are thoroughly skewed in favor of production, profit, and power at the expense of people, place, and planet.

Yes, the Democrats failed to deliver, but even when they had some power, they were quite constrained. The critique of our failed and failing political economy could take forever, but much of it is summed up by Peter Barnes in Capitalism 3.0: “The reason capitalism distorts democracy is simple. Democracy is an open system, and economic power can easily infect it. By contrast, capitalism is a gated system; its bastions aren’t easily accessed by the masses. Capital’s primacy thus isn’t an accident…. It’s what happens when capitalism inhabits democracy.”

Since 1980, the global economy has undergone a dramatic transformation, with the globalization of the labor force, the rise of automation, and—above all—the growth of Big Finance, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. The social democratic consensus of the immediate postwar years has given way to a new phase of capitalism that is leaving workers further behind and reshaping the class structure.

The precariat, a mass class defined by unstable labor arrangements, lack of identity, and erosion of rights, is emerging as today’s “dangerous class.” As its demands cannot be met within the current system, the precariat carries transformative potential. To realize that potential, however, the precariat must awaken to its status as a class and fight for a radically changed income distribution that reclaims the commons and guarantees a livable income for all. Without transformative action, a dark political era looms.

Under the privately-owned means of production, workers function as a mechanistic instrument of capital and not as social beings with individual agency. Workers cede control of their lives – and, by extension, their very selves – by not having control over their labour. Labor under capitalism does not allow workers to engage in journeys of self-discovery; it is not a means to attain autonomy. Workers can exist only in the manner that has use to the bosses; they are subservient to wider capitalist system goals and prescribed activities.

Yes, after the Donald Trump shooting, now is a good time to talk about the need for better gun laws. If we’re serious about diminishing the incidence of lone-wolf political violence in the United States, lecturing people to tone down the way they talk about figures like Donald Trump is unlikely to be an effective strategy.

A more fruitful area to focus on is America’s gun laws, which are bizarrely permissive by the standards of other advanced democracies. Nearly 342 million people live in this country, and we have about 393 million guns. If you want fewer political shootings, and fewer shootings in general, it’s long past time to do something about that.

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that capitalists ruminate over moral issues and struggle to find some sort of ethical compromise in which the preservation of the environment and the feeding of humanity can both be accomplished. Capitalism, by nature, kicks ethical constraints aside, just as water runs down hill.

Many activists have argued that the climate movement must broaden its base, form alliances and coalitions, and – this is critical – develop the sort of rhetorical gravitas commensurate with the task of redirecting human fate. If poverty has deep systemic ties to climate catastrophe, does that compel us to expand our collective vision, and to protest all of the hostile societal forces that punish poor people?

In so many places experiencing extreme heat, air conditioning will become nothing short of a protective survival tool, but (all too sadly) it’s also a prodigious generator of — yes, of course! — greenhouse gases. The climate impact of air conditioning and refrigeration, which together already account for more than 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions from all sources, is expected to double in the next 25 years. If that happens, the world’s nations will be thrown even further off track when it comes to fulfilling their pledges to meet UN climate goals.

The question is: Can we somehow work ourselves free of such a dependence on industrial cooling, or have we already passed the point of no return?

In recent years, auto manufacturers have phased out many smaller vehicles, citing weak demand, in favour of an ever-growing array of SUVs and light trucks. Not only do they cost more to purchase and fill up, but they are having an outsize effect on global warming. As the International Energy Agency points out, if SUVs were a country, they would be the fifth-biggest emitter of CO2.

David Zipper, a Washington, D.C.-based senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative who has studied the automotive industry for decades, calls it a “prisoner's dilemma” — a situation where consumers who may prefer smaller cars are being pushed toward larger ones. “It plays to this reptilian brain that I think automakers did with SUVs and pickups, to basically say, ʻWouldn’t you rather be … the biggest person on the road?’” Zipper said.

A fundamental problem is that capitalism is dependent on consumerism. Household consumption (all the things that people buy for personal use from toothbrushes to automobiles) constitutes 60 to 70 percent of a typical advanced capitalist economy’s gross domestic product; it is because of this dependency that so much money and effort is put into advertising and marketing, creating “needs” we didn’t know we had, and the pervasiveness of “planned obsolescence.”

Consumerism and over-consumption are not “cultural” or the result of personal characteristics — they are a natural consequence of capitalism and built into the system. Problems like global warming and other aspects of the world environmental crisis can only be solved on a global level through democratic control of the economy, not by individual consumer choices or by national governments.

A savvy reporter I once met referred to carbon capture and storage as a “delay and fail” strategy by the fossil fuel industry. The industry has generated a lot of hoopla and elicited substantial public funds to supposedly help make the technology “commercially viable.” The funds are spent on so-called pilot projects which take many, many years to reach their conclusion.

There is no reason to believe that absent huge subsidies, carbon capture and storage will ever be broadly viable. By the time the politicians and public have figured this out, the industry will have been able to burn through another couple decades of fossil fuels with few repercussions. Of course, one of the advantages of spending limited public research funds on boondoggles like this one is that such spending will starve the alternatives to fossil fuels (including conservation and efficiency) these alternatives might otherwise have had access to.

More than 140 organizations gathered under the slogan: “Enough, let’s put limits on tourism.” Neighborhood associations, social movements, ecologists, and housing activists were among the groups that organized the march.

Organizers say the massive influx of tourists exacerbates social inequality, problems around access to housing, and the environmental crisis. The July 6th demonstration follows similar protests in the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands.

There is an audacity in focusing on the possible in an age of major personal and societal impossibilities. At the time of writing (March 2022), the world is still struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, a horrific war is being waged by Russia in Ukraine, and the climate emergency is only intensifying.

From the interdictions of quarantine to the forced migration of millions, from post-truth politics to the consequences of extreme weather phenomena, our reality reminds us that the positive futures imagined for the 21st century are in question. Or, at least, that we paradoxically live, at once, in the best and the worst of times (Wijnberg, 2019). And yet, as we go against such formidable constraints, we can still rely on the quintessentially human capacity to hope, to imagine and to envision new possibilities for environmental action, justice and peace. The possible re-emerges as an organising category in our lives and our thinking not despite but because of living through the seemingly impossible and unimaginable.

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The failure to effectively confront major challenges facing humanity, most importantly, the global ecological crisis, it is argued, is due to the failure of those analysing the root causes of these challenges to engage with and invoke political philosophy to find a way out, and concomitantly, the failure of ethical and political philosophers to effectively engage with the deep assumptions, power structures and dynamics actually operative in the current world-order. It is claimed that this is due to a tacit acceptance of a cultural dualism manifest in the opposition between the sciences and the humanities, with the humanities having been marginalized by the sciences.

To overcome this dualism and marginalization of the humanities, and to defend communitarian ethical and political philosophy in a way that both challenges mainstream thinking and engages with the world as it is, with the potential to inspire and orient people for effective action, it is shown how communitarian ethical and political philosophy can be defended and developed through ecology incorporating the notion of ecopoiesis. It is shown how this can serve to create an effective counter-hegemonic culture, integrated as a dialogic grand narrative, uniting and orienting people to create a multi-polar world-order as an ecological civilization.

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Gare, A. (2024). Rethinking Political Philosophy through Ecology and Ecopoiesis. Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 5(1), 8–24.

https://doi.org/10.24412/2713-184x-2024-1-8-24

It has been suggested that philosophers should adopt a methodology largely inspired by mathematics and that the “mathematical” virtues of rigor, clarity, and precision are also fundamental philosophical virtues. In reply, this paper argues that some excellent philosophy lacks these virtues and that too much emphasis on the mathematical virtues excludes potentially valuable forms of philosophical discourse and makes the profession less diverse than it should be. Unduly restrictive conceptions of philosophical argumentation should be avoided.

On a contributory conception, philosophy should try to make a positive contribution to human emancipation where possible. The paper argues that it is possible and desirable for epistemology to contribute in this way and that the mathematical virtues are less significant in this context than the emancipatory virtues of what one might call “liberation philosophy.” These include irony, reflectiveness, imagination, contrarianism, and worldliness.

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Cassam, Q. (2023). Some Vices of Vice Epistemology.

Metaphilosophy, 54(2–3), 195–207.

https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12624

We set out a case for practice theory as a way to better understand and advance commoning, responding to calls for more communologies, that is, methodologies for the commons. Within the framing offered by practice theory, we argue for two potentially complementary ways of knowing: comparison and interpretation. These approaches and combinations of them are under-used in the field but are growing as additional ways of knowing that could inform both theory-building and practice.

The aim is to add to the knowledge base for commons movements, as part of the mycelium for the commonsverse. Such a claim is not just a methodological or epistemological argument, but an argument about how to advance the commoning movement by rethinking how we try to understand and study it. Particularly, we focus on trying to bridge the gap between the utopian aspirations of commons movements and the realities of making such changes to existing ways of organising social, political and economic life. Worked examples by the authors are offered to illustrate the value of comparison and interpretation. One is from a ‘comparative configurational analysis’ of participatory budgeting, suggesting that some of the widely argued combinations of success factors for those initiatives are not borne out by the evidence. A second worked example showcases an innovative ‘autoactionography’ method, which helps to reveal the lived experiences of developing new practices of commoning, and how commoners in one place are creating strategies towards an ontological shift against dominant modes of social organisation.

It concludes with a call for methodologies that foreground an understanding of the world as a recursive process of dynamic interplays between material resources, various forms of human agency and know-how, and ascribed meanings and aspirations.

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Richardson, L., et al.(2024). Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now? International Journal of the Commons, 18(1), 218–230.

https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1250