The world of our children will be different from ours. The crucial question: to what extent will that world be livable?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report last month — a synthesis of all the work it’s done over the past few years to summarize the latest climate science. It noted that if urgent action is taken to tackle the climate crisis, a livable future can still be possible.
It’s good news, but describing Earth’s future as merely “livable” hardly paints an inspiring picture of what future generations have to look forward to. That feels like the bare minimum.
“A livable future is actually not such a difficult thing to define,” said Lisa Schipper, an IPCC author and a professor in development geography at the University of Bonn. “It refers to meeting basic human needs.”
Schipper’s definition is useful but, digging deeper, the concept of a “liveable future” is more subjective than it initially appears. Our future relations could experience different livable futures depending on who and where they are, when they’re alive, and, most crucially of all, the decisions our generation makes right now. The extent to which we can secure this future depends upon decisions made right now by governments and corporations. That in turn will be influenced by the collective power of citizens demanding they prioritize a habitable, sustainable future.
That could mean a small, wealthy elite hoarding exclusive access to an increasingly scarce set of resources over the next hundred years, while everyone else suffers. Equally, it could mean that people globally live in better harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems and have the clean air, affordable housing and food security they need to get by, hundreds of years into the future. That livable future is up to us to imagine and fight for right now.
“As a baseline, the future that I’m fighting for is one in which every single person is able to live in dignity, to experience joy often and not be worrying about the things you need to survive,” said climate activist Mikaela Loach, speaking at the launch of her book It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World in Edinburgh, Scotland, last month.
Something Loach says she wanted to make clear in her book was that this type of livable future is “very possible.” The IPCC agrees. Its report shows us how to maximize our chances of making that livable future as good as it can be for as many people as possible.
Livable, but for whom?
The question of what a livable future looks like raises another question: livable for whom? Right now, the effects are felt unequally. Those who are least responsible for climate change — the most vulnerable populations — experience the most adverse impacts.
Even now, at 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, we’re seeing firsthand the impacts of human-caused climate change. Significant, unpredictable weather events are causing death, destruction and displacement of people around the world. Arguably, some of the worst-hit areas could already be defined as unlivable by Schipper’s definition.
One graphic in the IPCC report, showing how climate change will affect people born in different decades between 1950 and 2020, uses colored bands on human figures to indicate the amounts of warming they’ll have to endure at various life stages. It demonstrates there is potential for those alive at the end of this century to live in a world not markedly warmer than the one we live in now. But they could also face one catastrophically warmer.