THE GREAT ACCELERATION
Carolina Yacamán Ochoa
The Great Acceleration is the name given to the surge in socioeconomic and biophysical transformations in the mid-1990s as a result of massive economic and technological development after the Second World War (Aguado, 2017). It was used for the first time in 2005, at the Dahlem Workshop on the history of the relationship between human beings and the environment.
“The trends in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and associated temperature changes also suggest a rapid acceleration of human impacts on the atmosphere over the last 50 years. These and many other changes demonstrate a distinct increase in the rates of change in many human–environment interactions as a result of amplified human impact on the environment after World War II – a period that we term the ‘Great Acceleration’” (Hibbard et al., 2007, p-342).
In 2005, echoing Karl Polanyi’s 1944 analysis ‘The Great Transformation’, Will Steffen –Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre– and other authors began to use this term in scientific circles to describe the global biophysical and climate changes caused by a multi-dimensional anthropogenic process that began in 1950 (Steffen et al., 2007).
This period of inflection in the Earth System coincides with the highest economic growth rates in the history of capitalism, with the Green Revolution and the industrialisation of agriculture, the ensuing rural exodus and demographic explosion and concentration in urban areas. It was, therefore, a peak in the history of our planet, marked by the switch from coal to oil as the main energy metabolism element, and also by outsourcing production and consumption processes associated with economic globalisation. Thus emerged an unprecedented new horizon, with significant implications not only on the Earth System’s atmospheric and climate conditions, but also for its structure and functioning (Ellis, 2018).
The term Great Acceleration is based on the observation of a series of socioeconomic and biophysical indicators. To start with, 24 indicators were selected, as part of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) from 1999 to 2003. Subsequently, researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre updated these indicators, reducing them to 12 and disaggregating the information among higher- and lower-income countries (Steffen et al., 2015). The analysis of socioeconomic indicators (from 1750 to 2010) shows that in the mid-20th century, nearly all human activities experienced an increase, such as total and urban population, economic growth, energy and water consumption, and fertiliser use. Increases in transport, telecommunications, international tourism, and foreign investment are likewise revealing indicators of high levels of global connectedness.
Trends during the mentioned period evidence a global change in the Earth System’s biophysical conditions, in line with the exponential growth signalled through certain socioeconomic indicators. Increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and stratospheric ozone; rising temperatures on the Earth’s surface; increasing ocean acidification, loss of tropical forest and of considerable areas of land dedicated to agriculture and forestry, are just some of the variables. At the same time, we are witnessing an increase in the use of synthetic materials such as plastics and concrete, the loss of biodiversity and the translocation of species resulting from changes in land use, diminishing river flows, rising sea levels, and increasing coastal hypoxia (Syvitski et al., 2020).
The most conspicuous conclusions from the Great Acceleration graphs reveal that global environmental change has been driven by a number of anthropogenic forces that are significantly altering the Earth System’s resilience. Furthermore, there is a marked upward trend in the magnitude, scale and intensity of the ecological footprint which cannot be attributed to natural variability.
The pressure generated by human activity is driving the Earth System further and further from the stability conditions of the Holocene period (Bertolami y Francisco, 2018), a geological epoch characterised by a period of climatic stability that enabled human societies and biodiversity to flourish on our planet. This trend also coincides with the activation of certain critical Earth System parameters that are coming close to their tipping points, and may unleash irreversible response in climate, ecosystems, and human societies. Among these, we may highlight accelerating loss of ice in Greenland and Western Antarctica, worsening drought in the Amazon rainforest, Atlantic circulation slowdown since the 1950s, early signs of permafrost thaw, and growing numbers of wildfires and boreal forest pest attacks (Lenton et al., 2019).
Likewise, it is important to note that interactions among the diverse socioeconomic factors feature an accumulative cascade effect, whose consequences may be unknown and escape human control. It is thus evident that human impacts, despite their long history dating back to the Late Pleistocene, had never become such a global environmental force until the mid-20th century (Head et al., 2022).
The scientific discussion on the Great Acceleration is important for two main reasons: First, it provides a narrative to explain a new interval in the recent history of the Earth while establishing a framework within which to give context to the magnitude of the Earth System’s key drivers, one of which is the growing use of fossil fuels. Second, to demand responsibility for the Earth System’s instability, caused, to a very large extent, by a fraction of the human population that lives in high-income countries, enjoying unsustainable levels of consumption, at the cost of extractive policies applied in other countries in the global South.
For many scientists, the Great Acceleration is important because it provides a quantitative base for defining the new geological epoch in the Earth’s history known as the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014; Steffen et al., 2015; Waters et al., 2018; Head et al., 2022). However, there is no scientific consensus over the precise origin of the Anthropocene. Some researchers claim it began in the late 18th century, at the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution and with the invention of the steam engine (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Nevertheless, Great Acceleration graphs show that rapid transformations in humans’ relationship with the natural environment began in the 1950s. This suggests that the acceleration of planetary changes and the exponential increase in human activity are determining factors in the transition toward the Anthropocene (Steffen, 2022).
In this context, the Great Acceleration is a key marker pinpointing the onset of a new geological epoch dominated by human influence on the Earth System. The Great Acceleration as a concept, however, has received far less attention from the media than the Anthropocene. One of the reasons for this, according to Jorge Riechmann (2019), is that the idea of the Anthropocene fits into the dominant culture’s ideology of a society/nature divide, encouraging our self-image as different and superior to nature. Other humanities and social science academics have pointed out that the Anthropocene discourse treats all humankind without distinctions, in contrast with studies on the Great Acceleration, and argue that the Anthropocene conceals significant equity issues (for instance, Malm and Hornborg, 2014).
From the de-growth vantage point, quantitative evidence and the study of Great Acceleration socioeconomic and biophysical indicators issue a clear warning of the urgent need to modify the current system. Given this context, de-growth approach proposes that, to effectively address the severe ecosocial crisis, it is necessary to bring about a drastic change in the current capitalist system.
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