climate change – Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene

Impacts of agrisolar co-location on the food–energy–water nexus and economic security

Nature Sustainability volume 8, pages 702–713 (2025)

Abstract

Understanding how solar PV installations affect the landscape and its critical resources is crucial to achieve sustainable net-zero energy production. To enhance this understanding, we investigate the consequences of converting agricultural fields to solar photovoltaic installations, which we refer to as ‘agrisolar’ co-location. We present a food, energy, water and economic impact analysis of agricultural output offset by agrisolar co-location for 925 arrays (2.53 GW_p covering 3,930 ha) spanning the California Central Valley. We find that agrisolar co-location displaces food production but increases economic security and water sustainability for farmers. Given the unprecedented pace of solar PV expansion globally, these results highlight the need for a deeper understanding of the multifaceted outcomes of agricultural and solar PV co-location decisions.

Main

Climate change threatens our finite food, energy and water (FEW) resources. To address these threats by transitioning towards net-zero carbon emissions energy systems, new energy installations should be designed while considering effects on the complete FEW nexus. The rapid expansion of solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation is a key part of the solution that will need to grow more than tenfold in the United States (US) by 2050 to meet net-zero goals¹. However, solar PV expansion presents threats to agricultural production due to its land-use intensity and potential in croplands². A considerable portion of ground-mounted solar PV facilities in the US are installed in agricultural settings^3,4,5. Yet regions with high solar breakthrough, such as the California Central Valley (CCV), are often among the most valuable and productive agricultural land in the US^3,5,6. It is not yet clear how the current solar PV landscape affects agricultural security, much less under 2050 net-zero expansion. Here we quantify both the agricultural offsets of solar PV land-use change and the decision-making processes behind these transitions for existing solar PV arrays in agriculture.

Competition between solar PV and agricultural land uses has led to various co-location methods where installations are sited, designed and managed to optimize landscape productivity across a wide range of ecological and anthropogenic services⁷. This approach differs from conventional solar PV deployment, which is often installed and managed primarily for electricity output and reduced maintenance⁷. Emerging concepts such as techno-ecological synergies (TES)⁸ and more recently, ecovoltaics⁷, encompass a wide range of co-location strategies enabling renewable energy installations to serve multiple productive ecosystem services. Agricultural production and solar PV can be laterally integrated (agrisolar co-location)⁹ or directly share land and photons via vertical integration (agrivoltaic co-location)^10,11.

Agrivoltaic co-location involves the direct integration of solar and agriculture (crops or grazing) or ecosystem services (pollinator habitat, native vegetation) within the boundaries of solar infrastructure¹¹. The earliest technical standardization, originating from Germany, specifies that this can occur under or between system rows, but not adjacent to, while agricultural yield losses are reduced to less than one-third of reference (without solar PV) yields¹⁰. Effective agrivoltaic management can improve agricultural yield, microclimate regulation, soil moisture retention, nutrient cycling and farmer profitability, while enhancing public acceptance^12,13,14,15. Thus, agrivoltaic co-location can address the agricultural competition concerns created by solar PV expansion.

The term agrisolar is more broadly defined (modified from SolarPower Europe⁹), as the integration and co-management of solar photovoltaics, agriculture and ecosystem services within agroenergy landscapes, explicitly considering the trade-offs and co-benefits of agricultural, environmental and socio-economic objectives. Thus defined, agrisolar practices align with TES and ecovoltaic principles and encompass both coincident (‘agrivoltaic co-location’) and adjacent co-location where agricultural land is replaced (hereafter ‘agrisolar co-location’)^11,16. However, replacing agricultural land with solar PV (‘adjacent agrisolar’) without implementing agrivoltaic management has historically been considered conventional solar and thus excluded from co-location research because agricultural production is ceased on site¹⁰. There is some evidence, however, that converting portions of agricultural fields to solar PV in water-stressed regions can also provide water and economic benefits that enhance agricultural security despite food production losses^17,18. Adjacent agrisolar replacement appears to be the dominant practice, with recent work showing that there have been relatively few documented agrivoltaic installations compared to total solar PV deployment in agriculture in the CCV^5,19. Because agrisolar practices are understudied relative to literature on other forms of co-location^14,20, there is a need to assess regional resource outcomes for most existing solar PV installations and consequences for lost food production without agrivoltaic management. Conceptual examples of solar PV co-location are shown in Fig. 1.

**Fig. 1: Conceptual diagram of trade-offs and co-benefits with agrisolar, agrivoltaic and ecovoltaic co-location.**

We argue that by enhancing water, energy and economic security, transitioning farm fields to solar PV installations can be considered adjacent agrisolar management in water-stressed regions. Here security is the capacity of a farmer to maintain or improve their financial well-being, operational resilience and access to essential resources, such as water and energy, while preserving the integrity and future of their agricultural practices. We assess the FEW security effects of these agrisolar PV installations across the CCV through 2018 and estimate the economic potential of those arrays throughout a 25-year operational-phase lifespan. We compute landowner cash flow including net energy metering (NEM) for commercial-scale PV installations and land leases for larger utility-scale arrays. All resource and economic effects are referenced to a counterfactual business-as-usual scenario with no solar PV installation, assuming continued agricultural production and operation on the same plot of land. The purpose of this analysis is to evaluate the lifespan FEW and economic impacts of existing agrisolar arrays in the CCV. Rather than projecting future installations or policies, we report on the existing agrisolar placement, design and policy practices to inform future practices on a per-hectare basis, tailored to regional needs. We also highlight the need for, and opportunities within, additional research into agrisolar practices.

Results

Commercial- and utility-scale agrisolar arrays in CCV

We assembled a comprehensive dataset of agriculturally co-located solar PV installations within the CCV through 2018. We identified 925 solar PV arrays installed between 2008 and 2018, with an estimated capacity of 2,524 MW_p on 3,930 ha of recently converted agricultural land. The estimated array capacity of each individual array ranged from 19 kW_p to 97 MW_p. A temporal synthesis of the input solar PV dataset, separated by array scale, is shown in Fig. 2b,c. The smaller commercial-scale arrays are roughly twice as common, yet account for one-tenth of the installed capacity and converted land area of utility-scale arrays. Note that commercial-scale arrays are predominantly fixed axis, whereas utility-scale arrays are more frequently single-axis tracking systems. There are also notable peaks in the number of installations for both array scales in 2016, potentially in response to the NEM 2.0 legislation timeline²¹. While there is some spatial clustering of converted crop types (Fig. 2a), converted crops were widely distributed across the CCV.

**Fig. 2: Study area and characterization of ground-mounted agrisolar PV installations.**

Offset food and nutritional production

The 925 agriculturally co-located arrays displaced 3,930 ha of cropland, which is ~0.10% of the CCV active agricultural land²². In the baseline scenario (Methods provide scenario details), nutritional loss was 0.16 trillion kcal (Tkcal) and 1.41 Tkcal foregone by commercial- and utility-scale arrays, respectively (Fig. 3). The total, 1.57 Tkcal, is equivalent to the caloric intake of ~86,000 people for 25 years (solar lifespan), assuming a 2,000 kcal d^–1 diet. The nutritional footprint of commercial-scale arrays (−21.2 million kcal (Mkcal) ha^–1 yr^–1) was greater than utility-scale arrays (−15.6 Mkcal ha^–1 yr^–1) and the total impact was primarily composed of grain (58%), orchard crops (21%) and vegetables (10%). Utility-scale arrays displaced the nutritional value of grain (60%) hay/pasture (16%) and vegetables (10%). Note that for displaced kcal production of hay/pasture, contribution was negligible despite dominating the converted area due to inefficient caloric conversion to human nutrition for feed and silage crops. Resource footprint, total lifespan impact and crop contribution is shown in Fig. 3. Cumulative resource impacts across the region through time are available in Supplementary Fig. 1.

**Fig. 3: Lifespan land use, food loss, electricity production and potential irrigation electricity offset and potential water conservation with agrisolar co-location in California’s Central Valley.**

Electricity production and consumption

We modelled the annual electricity generation for each array and offset irrigation electricity demand. Total cumulative electricity generation for these identified arrays by 2042 was projected to be 10 TWh for commercial-scale arrays and 113 TWh for utility-scale arrays. The potential electricity saved by not irrigating converted land was 11 GWh and 146 GWh for commercial- and utility-scale arrays, respectively. Note that this was three orders of magnitude less than the total electricity generation. For reference, the total lifespan impact of electricity production and potential irrigation electricity offset ( ~ 124 TWh) could power ~466,000 US households for 25 years (assuming 10.6 MWh yr^–1 per household).

Changes in water use

Most (74%) agriculturally co-located arrays in the CCV replaced irrigated croplands. On the basis of the business-as-usual change in total water-use budget (considering irrigation water-use offset and operation and maintenance—O&M water use), we estimate that agrisolar co-location in the region would reduce water use by 5.46 thousand m³ ha^–1 yr^–1 (total: 42.1 million m³) and 6.02 thousand m³ ha^–1 yr^–1 (total: 544 million m³) over the 25-year period for commercial- and utility-scale arrays, respectively. This could supply ~27 million people with drinking water (assuming 2.4 liters per person per day) or irrigate 3,000 hectares of orchards for 25 years. O&M water use on previously irrigated land was ~eight times less than irrigated crops—if offset irrigation water were conserved rather than redistributed. Irrigated crops that contributed the most to the offset irrigation water use were orchards (29%), hay/pasture (28%) and grain (27%) for commercial-scale installations and grain (37%), hay/pasture 31%), cotton (15%) for utility-scale installations.

Agricultural landowner cash flow

Adjacent agrisolar co-location is more profitable than the baseline agriculture-only scenario, regardless of how landowners are compensated (Fig. 4). For commercial-scale arrays, agrisolar landowners experience early losses from installation expenditure (−US$53,000 ha^–1 yr^–1). However, the lifespan cash flow was dominated by NEM, offset electricity costs and surplus generation sold back to the grid, resulting in a net positive economic footprint of US$124,000 ha^–1 yr^–1, 25 times greater returns than lost food revenue (−US$4,920 ha^–1 yr^–1). The resulting economic payback period was 5.2 years (best- and worst-case payback in 2.9 and 8.9 years respectively; Supplementary Fig. 2).

**Fig. 4: Lifespan economic footprint of commercial- and utility-scale agrisolar co-location.**

The net economic footprint for utility-scale agrisolar landowners (US$2,690 ha^–1 yr^–1) was 46 times less than the commercial-scale footprint (Fig. 4b). In contrast to commercial-scale arrays, utility-scale agrisolar landowners were not responsible for installation or O&M costs but still lost food revenue (−US$3,330 ha^–1 yr^–1) and were only compensated by land lease (US$1,940 ha^–1 yr^–1) and offset operational (US$3,830 ha^–1 yr^–1) and irrigation water-use costs (US$220 ha^–1 yr^–1). In the worst-case scenario, the total budget was negative (−US$432 ha^–1 yr^–1), suggesting that some landowners could lose revenue. There was no payback period for utility-scale agrisolar landowners because the net economic budget was always positive (baseline and best-case scenario) or always negative (worst-case scenario). Cumulative economic impacts across the region in Supplementary Fig. 3.

On average, estimated foregone farm operation costs exceeded forgone food revenue (Fig. 4). While this may be affected by reporting differences in agricultural revenue and farm operation cost sources, agricultural margins are known to be small, or negative, for certain croplands (for example, pastureland), with margins likely to decrease further under future climate change and water availability scenarios²³. For commercial-scale installations, cutting farm operation costs in half (highly conservative) resulted in a longer economic payback period of just a month. Cutting offset farm operation costs in half for utility-scale installations did not affect economic payback or the always-positive baseline and best-case budget.

Discussion

The effect of agrisolar co-location on food production

We found that displacing agricultural land with solar PV locally reduced crop production ( ~ 1.57 Tkcal), which may affect county- and state-level food flows. Fortunately, on national and global scales, food production occurs within a market where reduced production in one location creates price signals that can stimulate production elsewhere. For example, high demand and increased irrigation pumping costs in the CCV have resulted in higher prices received for specialty orchard crops. Thus, farmers have elected to switch from cereal and grain crops to specialty crops²⁴. Solar PV is also far more energy dense per unit of land than growing crops to produce biofuels¹⁸—a practice common across large swaths of agricultural farmland in the US and elsewhere. We show that conversion of feed, silage and biofuel croplands provides high irrigation water-use offsets while minimizing nutritional impacts due to the low or non-existent caloric conversion efficiencies of these crops (Fig. 3). Though, considering food waste and a lack of crop-specific nutritional-quality knowledge, we cannot evaluate end-point impacts of reported foregone kcal (calories) on human diets and health²⁵.

California produces 99% of many of the nation’s specialty fruit and nut orchard crops (for example, almonds, walnuts, peaches, olives)²⁶. Fields producing these crops were commonly converted to solar PV (270 ha of orchard crops), and it may be difficult to shift production of these crops to other locations due to their intensive water footprint, climate sensitivity and time to production^27,28. Altering global supply of these crops could lead to food price increases similar to biofuel land-use changes²⁹ with agricultural markets taking time to compensate³⁰. We found that these nutritionally dense, valuable and operationally costly crops are more commonly replaced by commercial-scale rather than utility-scale installations, resulting in a higher nutritional footprint at the site scale (Fig. 3). However, due to their smaller arrays size (Fig. 2), these arrays have a lower regional lifespan nutritional impact. The total solar PV area we consider (the area covered by panels and space between them) does not account for total cropland transformation by all solar energy infrastructure. Thus, total cropland area converted and associated caloric losses may be underestimated by up to 25%. We conducted a sensitivity analysis on this potential area bias for all area-based metrics and discuss the details of this underestimate in Supplementary Discussion.

Global food needs are projected to double by 2050^31,32. To meet these needs, yield per unit area must increase, agricultural land area under production must increase and/or food waste and inefficiency must be reduced. Reducing waste is feasible but requires a considerable change in dietary preferences³³ and supply chain pathways³⁴. Yield increases alone are unlikely to meet these needs³¹ and half of global habitable land is already agricultural³⁵. Cultivated lands are facing additional pressures due to soil quality deterioration, aridification, water availability, urban growth and threats to global biodiversity that will be exacerbated under a changing climate^36,37,38,39. Given these pressures on arable land, cropland selection for future agrisolar co-location, both commercial- and utility-scale, should be assessed at local, regional, national and international scales to maintain food availability and security.

Water security potential with agrisolar co-location

Here we show that solar PV installations preferentially displace irrigated land in the CCV (3,310 ha and 74% of co-located installations). Displacing this irrigated cropland enhances farmer cash flow while probably reducing overall water use by 5.46 and 6.02 thousand m³ ha^–1 yr^–1 for commercial- and utility-scale arrays, respectively. The total displaced irrigation water use was eight times the O&M use for those arrays. Thus, installing solar PV in water-scarce regions has substantial potential to reduce water use, which bolsters findings from previous studies^17,18,40,41. This analysis does not incorporate the additional hydrologic effects of modifying surface energy and water budgets, including reducing evapotranspiration and the potential for increased groundwater recharge^42,43.

Given that the cash flow benefits from utility-scale agrisolar co-location are relatively small, we evaluated how water-use limitations may be a factor in farmland conversion decisions. We hypothesize that fallowing land is largely a consequence of water shortages in the CCV^24,40, thus fallowing land proximal to an array (within 100 metres) may indicate an emergent agrisolar practice: intentional fallowing and irrigation water-use offset adjacent to arrays supported by revenue from the array. Each array was coded by the adjacent crop type before and post installation of the array. While we cannot know what landowners would have done with the array acreage absent the installation, this analysis provides evidence of broader land-use trends that might have been driving decisions. The transition of array acreage from before proximal post-installation land use for utility-scale arrays is displayed in Fig. 5.

**Fig. 5: Land-use change adjacent to utility-scale solar PV installations on previously irrigated cropland in the CCV.**

Understanding how economic incentives affect the replacement of valuable cropland with solar PV is essential to inform future energy landscape models and policies. Here we examined the transition to post-solar installation fallowing in adjacent irrigated cropland (Fig. 5). We observed fallowing of adjacent irrigated cropland at 58 utility-scale installations totalling 658 MW_p and 968 ha (27% of utility-scale area) composed of 410 ha of grain, 250 ha of hay and pasture, 225 of orchards, grapes and vegetables and 82 ha of cotton and other crops. The direct area of these arrays (968 ha) can be linked to a potential irrigation water-use offset of 195 million m³ over 25 years. If these arrays were on-farm plots of average size, 14,000 ha of fallowed land adjacent to these 58 arrays could displace an additional 120 million m³ of irrigation water use, each year, or 3,000 million m³ over 25 years (Supplementary Methods). Thus, if landowners choose to fallow farmland adjacent to leased land for utility-scale arrays, the water-use reductions are greatly amplified. We discuss several important limitations⁴⁴ of the Cropland Data Layer (CDL) regarding this analysis in Supplementary Discussion.

Intensely irrigated cropland in the CCV is vulnerable to drought, especially in southern basins that rely heavily on surface-water deliveries due to limited groundwater availability⁴⁵. The California Budget Act of 2021 provides financial support for fallowing to motivate farmers to reduce water use⁴⁶. Whereas fallowing land can help mitigate some hydrological problems, removing production can also result in large agricultural revenue losses⁴⁷. Converting land with solar electricity production, rather than simply fallowing could reduce risks to farmers while enhancing financial security¹⁷, especially during periods of extreme drought⁴⁰. Whereas this has implications for future installations, we show that farmers already appear to be practicing solar fallowing, probably resulting in long-term irrigation water-use reductions.

We acknowledge the potential issues in assuming that foregone irrigation water use due to solar PV installations was conserved rather than redistributed. However, a portion of this potential offset is probably real given three observations: (1) utility-scale installations correlate with newly fallowed land, which was not observed for commercial-scale arrays; (2) the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA)⁴⁸ requires water-use reductions by the 2040s and (3) agriculturally co-located solar PV maintains Williamston Act Status under the Solar-Use Easement⁴⁹ (which has recently been revived⁵⁰), a California tax incentive common in irrigated lands highly suitable for solar⁵¹. In our dataset, 46% of utility-scale installations and 58% of commercial-scale installations were completed after SGMA was enacted (Fig. 2b,c). We also performed a sensitivity analysis where only 50% of irrigation water-use offset was conserved rather than redistributed, which still resulted in an estimated US$9 million and 246 million m³ conserved due to the regional change in water use from just direct area converted (Supplementary Discussion).

Given this potential for water-use offset, solar fallowing for water-use reduction presents an opportunity for incentivized solutions that are already of interest to landowning farmers in the region¹⁷. With suitable solar area in the CCV exceeding projected fallowing acreage to comply with SGMA⁵¹, implementing agrisolar co-location policies and incentives such as these could promote complementary land uses and enhance public support¹⁵.

Achieving economic security across return structures

Regardless of scale and related financial benefits, farmers are switching away from cultivating crops to cultivating electricity. This study empirically demonstrates that both NEM and land-lease incentive structures have been viable frameworks for PV deployment in some of the most valuable cropland in the US⁶. Critically, we incorporate farm-specific agricultural dynamics across a region (offset farm operation costs, irrigation costs and food revenue) into economic considerations for replacing cropland with solar.

By including these revenues and costs, this study clearly demonstrates the strong economic incentives to replace cropland with commercial-scale arrays (Fig. 4a). Under the grandfathered NEM 1.0 and 2.0 agreements, commercial-scale agrisolar landowners enhanced financial security by 25 times lost food revenue over the lifetime of the array, while simultaneously reducing water use. The resulting total net revenue, US$124,000 ha^–1 yr^–1, is potentially underestimated because post-lifespan module replacement, resale or continued use is likely, and property values could increase (terminal value) compared to the reference scenario. We also have not considered several programmes, credits and incentives (for example, Rural Energy for America Program) that could enhance net revenue (Supplementary Discussion). However, these returns are not unlimited due to NEM capacity limitations (<1 MW_p) and requirements to size the installation below annual on-farm load²¹.

Renewable energy policy evolves quickly, shifting incentives for new customer generators. Whereas climate change and decreasing water availability in the coming decades²³ will probably increase financial motivation to install solar in agriculture, future adoption and the co-benefits reported here will also depend on new business models for grid pricing⁵². Pricing structures have already and will inevitably continue to change as utilities, regulators and grid customers adapt to distributed renewable generation, avoid curtailment and avoid the utility death spiral⁵². Although future installations and policy are not the focus of this study, the newest policy, NEM 3.0, substantially reduces compensation for surplus generation and limits options for multiple metered connections⁵³, probably requiring future installations to add battery storage and other measures to maintain similar profitability⁵⁴. However, this study considers solar arrays that are grandfathered into their respective NEM 1.0 and 2.0 agreements. Additionally, our estimated load contributions suggest that revenue reported here mostly originates from offset demand rather than credit for surplus generation (Supplementary Notes and Supplementary Discussion). The bottom line is that owning solar PV, offsetting annual on-farm electric load and selling surplus electricity back to the utility under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 has increased economic and energy security for farmers with existing arrays and has probably promoted water-use reductions in the region. Importantly, we also assumed that all decisions were made by and returns received by landowning or partial-owning farmers. We do not have access to land-ownership data for the CCV, but nearly 40% of agricultural land in the region is rented or leased⁵⁵.

Utility-scale land-lease rates alone do not offset lost agricultural revenue. However, including offset farm operation costs results in a substantially lower but still profitable agrisolar economic footprint with no major up-front capital investment (Fig. 4b). In water-scarce regions, particularly where water-use reduction is required, the smaller returns from utility-scale agrisolar practices and potentially related fallowing of land may be more attractive than continued cultivation under water-supply uncertainty¹⁷. Thus, without profitable compensation, agrivoltaic practices may not be feasible if offset operational costs and water-use reductions are driving utility-scale agrisolar decision making. We also omit some agricultural dynamics (such as the environmental benefits of carbon reduction), which could reinforce resource and economic security for both commercial- and utility-scale installation (Supplementary Discussion).

Opportunities for agrisolar research

Whereas funding and incentives for co-location research have expanded rapidly in recent years, we advocate extending these to agrisolar co-location. Adjacent agrisolar replacement with barren or unused ground cover still falls short of the full potential of ecovoltaic and agrivoltaic multifunctionality^7,9,10,11. However, the regional resource and economic co-benefits of replacing irrigated land in water-stressed regions with solar PV here cannot be ignored. These findings are also immediately relevant to the Protecting Future Farmland Act of 2023⁵⁶, which set out a goal to better understand the multifaceted impacts of installed solar on US agricultural land. We discuss additional placement and management decisions that fall under the umbrella of agrisolar co-location in Supplementary Discussion.

We have shown that the goal of co-location, to enhance synergies between the co-production of agriculture and/or other ecosystem services and net-zero electricity production, is at least partially achievable with agrisolar co-location. Broader agrisolar research may also expose the consequences of not widely adopting agrivoltaics to retain agricultural production and protect food security. Given the ecosystem service benefits reported here, there may be an opportunity to broaden the scope of co-location research and incentives to include agrisolar co-location practices defined here.

Methods

Identifying agrisolar PV arrays across the CCV

We used remotely sensed imagery of existing solar PV arrays and geographic information system (GIS) datasets to develop a comprehensive and publicly available dataset of ground-mounted arrays co-located with agriculture in the CCV through 2018. We extracted all existing non-residential arrays from two geodatabases (Kruitwagen et al.^4,57 and Stid et al.^5,58) within the bounds of the CCV alluvial boundary⁵⁹. We removed duplicate arrays and applied temporal segmentation methods described in Stid et al.⁵ to assign an installation year for Kruitwagen et al.⁴ arrays. We acquired Kruitwagen et al.⁴ panel area within array bounds by National Agriculture Imagery Program imagery pixel area with solar PV spectral index ranges suggested in Stid et al.⁵ and removed commissions (reported array shapes with no panels). We then removed arrays with >70% overlap with building footprints⁶⁰ to retain only ground-mounted installations. Finally, overlaying historical CDL crop maps with new array shapes, we removed arrays in areas with majority non-agricultural land cover the year before installation (Supplementary Fig. 4 and Supplementary Discussion).

The resulting dataset (925 agrisolar co-located arrays) included 686 ground-mounted arrays from Stid et al.⁵ plus 239 from Kruitwagen et al.⁴. For these sites, we calculated array peak capacity (kW_p) by⁶¹:

(1)

where is the total direct area of PV panels in m², is the average efficiency of installed PV modules during the array installation year⁶² (Supplementary Fig. 5) and is the irradiance at standard test conditions (kW m^–2). Arrays were split into ‘Commercial-’ (<1 MW_p) and ‘Utility-’ (≥1 MW_p) scale arrays following the California Public Utility Commission NEM capacity guidelines⁶³.

Scenario summary and assumptions

We computed annual FEW resource and economic values for each ground-mounted agrisolar PV array identified across the CCV for four scenarios: (1) reference, business as usual with no solar PV installation and continued agricultural production on the same plot of land, (2) baseline, agrisolar PV installation with moderate assumptions related to each component of the analysis, (3) worst case, PV installation with high negative and low positive effects for each component, (4) best case, similar but opposite of the worst-case scenario. We compare baseline to the reference scenario to estimate the most likely FEW and economic effects and use the differences between best- and worst-case scenarios to estimate uncertainty. Supplementary Tables 2 and 3 provide an overview of scenarios for each resource and Supplementary Tables 4 and 5 for baseline agrisolar lifespan FEW resource and economic value outcomes, respectively.

Identified arrays were installed between 2008 and 2018 and were assumed to have a 25-year lifespan for arrays due to performance, warranties, module degradation and standards for electrical equipment^64,65. We assumed that land-use change effects ceased following 25 years of operation to simplify assumptions about module replacement, resale or continued use. We then summarized the FEW and economic effects of all arrays across the CCV and divided our temporal analysis into three phases: (1) addition (2008–2018) where arrays were arrays were being installed across the CCV, (2) constant (2019–2032) with no array additions but all arrays installed by 2018 are operating and maintained and (3) removal (2032–2042), where arrays are removed after 25 years of operation.

We performed several sensitivity analyses to address limitations in the available data and methods and to show how changes in future policy (NEM) could affect incentives displayed here. Sensitivity analysis included the capacity cut-off between commercial- and utility-scale (5 MW), solar PV lifespan (15 and 50 years), nominal discount rate (3%, 7% and 10%), solar PV direct area bias (proportional direct to total infrastructure area and a uniform perimeter buffer) and irrigation redistribution (assuming 50% of irrigation water-use offset is redistributed rather than conserved), all else equal (Supplementary Discussion and Supplementary Tables 6–20). We discuss additional assumptions and limitations in Supplementary Discussion.

Displaced crop and food production

Replacing fields (or portions thereof) with solar PV arrays affects crop production by (1) lost production of food, fibre and fuels and (2) reduced revenue from crop sales. We simplify the complex effects of lost production and include solely the foregone calories through both direct and indirect human consumption, which is justified because CCV crop production is largely oriented towards food crops. Future analyses could evaluate the lost fibre (primarily via cotton) or fuel (via biofuel refining) production.

We evaluated the economic and food production effects of displaced crops through a crop-specific opportunity cost assessment of land-use change, incorporating actual reported; yields, revenue, caloric density and regionally constrained caloric conversion efficiencies for feed/silage and seed oil crops. All crop type information was derived from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) CDL²² for the array area in both prior- and post-installation years (Supplementary Fig. 4 and Supplementary Methods provide the adjacent fallowed land analysis). Each array was assigned a majority previous crop from the spatially weighted means of crop types within the array area for the five years before the installation.

We converted all eligible crop types to kcal (also called calorie) for human consumption after Heller et al.²⁵. Foregone food production ( in kcal) following PV installation was then defined for each array as:

(2)

where is in kcal kg^–1, is in kg m^–2 and of each array in m². Crop-specific caloric density data (kcal kg^–1) were derived from the USDA FoodData Central April 2022 release⁶⁶. FoodData food descriptions and nutrient data were joined and CDL specific crop groupings were made through a workflow described in Supplementary Fig. 6. Crop-specific yield data (kg m^–2) were derived from the USDA NASS Agricultural Yield Surveys⁶⁷. State-level (California) yield data were processed similarly, with missing crop data filled based on national average yields. We used caloric conversion efficiencies for feed, silage or oil crop to account for crop production that humans do not directly consume.

For each array, we calculated annual revenue of forgone crop production in real (inflation adjusted) dollars, calculated by:

(3)

where is in US$ kg^–1, is in kg m^–2 and of each array in m². We used the annual ‘price received’ for all crops in the USDA NASS Monthly Agricultural Prices Report for 2008 through 2018⁶⁸. For the baseline case, we assumed that food prices will scale directly with electricity prices through 2042 given that they respond to similar inflationary forces⁶⁹. Supplementary Fig. 6 and Supplementary Methods provide a more complete workflow including best- and worst-case scenario assumptions.

Change in irrigation water use and cost savings

Irrigation water use can only be offset by agrisolar co-location if the prior land use was irrigated. The presence of irrigation was inferred from the Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LanID) map for the year before installation^70,71 (Supplementary Fig. 4). If the array area contained irrigated pixels, then we assumed the cropland area and all respective crops within the rotation were irrigated.

We calculated the total forgone irrigation water use ( in m³) by:

(4)

where in m is the crop-specific irrigation depth, in m³ is the annual county-level irrigation water-use estimate and in m³ is the county-level irrigation water-use estimate for the respective survey year irrigation depths.

We estimated annual crop-specific county-level irrigated depths from survey and climate datasets for each array. Crop-specific irrigation depths () were taken from the 2013 USDA Farm and Ranch Survey⁷² and 2018 Irrigation and Water Management Survey⁷³, and logical crop groupings were applied (for example, almonds, pistachios, pecans, oranges and peaches were considered orchard crops). Because irrigation depths depend on the total precipitation in each survey year, we used multilinear regression to build annual county-level irrigation water-use estimates () from five-year US Geological Survey (USGS) water use⁷⁴, gridMET growing season average precipitation⁷⁵, with year as a dummy variable to incorporate temporal changes in irrigation technologies and practices. For the installation phase (2008 to 2018), these depths varied based on historical climate and survey data, whereas the projection phases (constant and removal) used a scenario-dependent moderate, wet (worst-case, least water savings) or dry (best case, most water savings) year estimate from the historical record (discussed in Supplementary Methods).

Assigning an economic value to water use is difficult and varies based on the temporally changing supply and demand⁷⁶. We calculated the economic value of the change in water use (Water in real US$) to the farmer by:

(5)

where (m³) is the offset irrigation water use for the co-located crop minus O&M projected water use, (MWh m^–3) is the irrigation electricity required to irrigate the co-located crop given local depth to water and drawdown estimates from McCarthy et al.⁷⁷, (US$ MWh^–1) is the utility-specific (commercial-scale) or regional average (utility-scale) annual price of electricity based on the electricity returns and modelled electricity generation described in Supplementary Methods and is a CCV-wide average water right contract rate of ~ US$0.03 m^–3 (ref. ⁷⁸). Here we assume that water (and thus energy) otherwise used for irrigation was truly foregone and not redistributed elsewhere within or outside the farm. Change in O&M water use was based on Klise et al.⁷⁹ reported values, described in Supplementary Methods.

Electricity production, offset and revenue

Installing solar PV in fields has three benefits: (1) production of electricity by the newly installed solar PV array, (2) reduction in energy demand due to reduced water use and field activities and (3) revenue generation via net energy metering (NEM) or land lease. Here we assume that on-farm electricity demand is dominated by electricity used for irrigation and ignore offset energy (embodied) used for fuel.

We modelled electricity generation for each array using the pvlib python module developed by SANDIA National Laboratory⁸⁰. Weather file inputs for pvlib were downloaded from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) National Solar Radiation Database⁸¹. We also estimated annual on-farm load to differentiate offset electricity use and surplus generation. Not only is electricity generated by the arrays, but electricity consumption is foregone for each array due to not irrigating the array area. The annual change in electricity consumption due to water use ( in GWh) is calculated by:

(6)

where is the county-level rates for irrigation electricity demand in GWh m^–3 and is the change in water use in m³ from equation (5). County-level electricity requirements to irrigate were calculated using irrigation electricity demand methods described in McCarthy et al.⁷⁷ modified with a CCV-specific depth to water (piezometric surface) product for the spring (pre-growing season) of 2018⁸².

Revenue from electricity generation was calculated separately for each array depending on array size and the installation year. Commercial-scale arrays (<1 MW) were assumed to operate under an NEM 1.0 if installed before 2017 and NEM 2.0 if installed later, which allows for interconnection to offset on-farm load and compensation for surplus electricity generation (Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Table 21). Thus, for commercial-scale arrays, annual cash flow from solar PV (NEM in US$) is calculated as:

(7)

where is real US$ saved by offsetting annual on-farm electric load and is real US$ earned by surplus PV electricity generation sold to the utility under NEM guidelines. Both and are estimated based on pvlib modelled electricity generation and valued at the historical utility-specific energy charge retail rates. Historical energy charges are available either through utility reports^83,84,85 or the US Utility Rate Database via OpenEI⁸⁶. We made several assumptions that resulted in omission of fixed charges including transmission and interconnection costs from the analysis. Details about electricity rates and omitted charges are summarized in Supplementary Methods.

For utility-scale arrays (≥1 MW), annual revenue from agrisolar co-location (Lease in US$) was assumed to be given by:

(8)

where Lease is the economic value estimated to be paid to the farmer by the utility for leasing their land in US$ m^–2 and Area of each array in m².

We assumed commercial-scale arrays installed before 2017 were grandfathered into NEM 1.0 guidelines for the duration of their lifespan. However, arrays installed in 2017 and 2018 fall under NEM 2.0 guidelines which include a US$0.03 kWh^–1 non-bypassable charge removed from ^21,87,88. Annual on-farm operational load was estimated and distributed across the year based on reported California agricultural contingency profiles⁸⁹ and Census of Agriculture county-level average farm sizes^90,91,92 (Supplementary Figs. 7 and 8 and Supplementary Methods). With distributed hourly load estimations and modelled solar PV electricity generation, we delineated electricity and revenue contributing to annual load () from surplus electricity and revenue that would have been sold back to the grid and credited via NEM ().

Future electricity revenue was projected using 2018 conditions (contribution to annual load, to surplus) and energy charge rates, modelled electricity production described above (includes degradation, pre-inverter, inverter efficiency and soiling losses) and projected changes in the price of electricity. The Annual Energy Outlook report by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) provides real electricity price projections annually between 2018 and 2050 for ‘Commercial End-Use Price’⁹³. This annual rate of change was used to estimate projected deviations from 2018 energy charges (2018 US$ kWh^–1) during the constant and removal phases (2019–2042), with projected solar PV generation including discussed losses.

We used solar land consultant and industry reports for solar land-lease () rates that ranged from US$750 ha^–1 yr^–1 to US$4,950 ha^–1 yr^–1, with high-value land averaging IS$2,450 ha^–1 yr^–1 in the CCV^94,95. Comparable lease rates (~US$2,500 to US$5,000 ha^–1 yr^–1) were reported by developers in the CCV region¹⁷ and used in a solar PV and biomass trade-off study in Germany¹⁸ (~US$1,000 to US$2,950 ha^–1 yr^–1).

Array installation and O&M costs

Historical installation costs (Installation) were taken from the commercial-scale PV installation prices reported in the Annual Tracking the Sun report where reported prices are those paid by the PV system owner before incentives⁶². The baseline scenario is the median installation price, whereas the best- and worst-case scenarios are the 20th and 80th percentile installation costs, respectively. These reported values are calculated using NREL’s bottom-up cost model and are national averages using average values across all states. Installation cost was not discounted, as it represents the initial investment for commercial-scale installations at day zero. All future cash flows, profits and costs are compared to this initial investment. We also included the 30% Solar Investment Tax Credit in the Installation for commercial-scale arrays⁹⁶. The system bounds of this impact analysis were installation through the operational or product-use phase. We, therefore, did not assume removal expenses or altered property value (terminal value) to remove uncertainty in decision making at the end of the 25-year array lifespan.

Historically reported and modelled O&M values (pre-2020) range from US$0 kW_p^–1 yr^–1 (best case) to US$40 kW_p^–1 yr^–1 (worst case) with an average (baseline) of US$18 kW_p^–1 yr^–1 (refs. ^97,98). Projected O&M costs were based on modelled commercial-scale PV lifetime O&M cost to capital expenditure cost ratios from historical and industry data that provided scenarios varying on research and development differences (conservative, moderate, advanced). The annual reported values are provided from 2020 to 2050 for fixed O&M costs including: asset management, insurance products, site security, cleaning, vegetation removal and component failure and are detailed in the Annual Technology Baseline report by NREL⁹⁷, which are largely derived from the annual NREL Solar PV Cost Benchmark reports.

Farm operation costs

Business-as-usual farm operation costs (Operation) were derived from the ‘Total Operating Costs Per Acre to Produce’ reported in UC Davis Agricultural and Resource Economics Cost and Return Studies⁹⁹. We removed operational costs to ‘Irrigate’ from the total because we estimate that as a function of electricity requirements and water rights (described in ‘Change in irrigation water use and cost savings’) while retaining ‘Irrigation Labour’ as this was not included in our irrigation cost assessment. Best- and worst-case scenarios for farm operation costs coincided with yield scenarios described in ‘Displaced crop and food production’.

Discounted cash flow for agrisolar co-location

For each commercial-scale array in the CCV, we computed the annual real cash flow as:

(9)

and for each utility-scale array as:

(10)

where Commercial is the real return in 2018 US$ for commercial-arrays (<1 MW_p) and Utility is the real return in 2018 US$ for utility-scale arrays (≥1 MW_p). Each of the terms on the right-hand side of these equations are defined in the sections above.

We then computed real annual discounted cash flow () for each array to estimate the total lifetime value of each array. The at any given year n is calculated for each array by:

(11)

where is the real annual cash flow at year n (either Commercial or Utility as relevant for each array) and is the real discount rate without an expected rate of inflation (i) from the nominal discount rate () calculated using the Fisher equation¹⁰⁰:

(12)

Vartiainen et al.¹⁰¹ clearly communicates this method in solar PV economic studies and discusses the importance of discount rate (in their case, weighted average cost of capital) selection. For i, we use 3%, which is roughly the average producer price index (PPI) and consumer price index (CPI) (3.4% and 2.4%, respectively) between 2000 and 2022 and comparable to other solar PV economic studies^101,102. We use a 5% ¹⁰³ and perform a sensitivity analysis using 3%, 7% and 10% and discuss discount rates used in literature in Supplementary Discussion. Separately from the sensitivity analysis for , we also calculated our best-case and worst-case scenarios for each array.

All prices were adjusted to 2018 US dollars for calculation of real cash flow terms in equations (11) and (9). We adjusted consumer electricity prices and installation costs for inflation to real 2018 US$ using the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for All Urban Customers¹⁰⁴. We adjusted all production-based profits and costs (all other resources) using US Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index for All Commodities¹⁰⁵.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The datasets and outputs generated in the current study are publicly available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10023293 (ref. ¹⁰⁶) with all source data referenced in the published article and in its Supplementary Information files.

Code availability

The code used to generate and analyse the datasets reported here are hosted via GitHub at https://github.com/stidjaco/FEWLS_tool and are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10023281 (ref. ¹⁰⁷).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) INFEWS grant number 2018-67003-27406. We credit additional support from the USDA NIFA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive grant number 2021-68012-35923 and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Michigan State University. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USDA or Michigan State University. We are grateful to B. McGill for bringing the vision of agrisolar co-location to life through her artistic conceptual depiction.

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Authors and Affiliations

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USAJacob T. Stid, Anthony D. Kendall & Jeremy Rapp
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USASiddharth Shukla & Annick Anctil
Department of Sustainable Earth System Sciences, School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USADavid W. Hyndman
Biological Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USARobert P. Anex

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Humanity’s Endgame

A new history of societal collapse by an expert in existential risk argues that our globalized society is edging toward the precipice.

Nicolas Ortega for Noema Magazine

By Henry Wismayer

Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London.

LONDON — There are 8 million artifacts in the British Museum. But to commence his tale of existential jeopardy, risk expert Luke Kemp made a beeline for just two items housed in a single room. On a visit in early fall, beyond a series of first-floor galleries displaying sarcophagi from pharaonic Egypt, we stopped beside a scatter of human bones.

The exhibit comprised two of the 64 skeletons unearthed from the sands of Jebel Sahaba, in northern Sudan, in 1964. Believed to be over 13,000 years old, the bodies in this prehistoric cemetery were significant for what they revealed about how their owners died. Of those 64 skeletons, at least 38 showed signs of violent deaths: caved-in skulls, forearm bones with parry fractures from victims staving off blows, or other injuries. Whether a result of organized warfare, intercommunal conflict or even outright massacre, Jebel Sahaba is widely considered to be some of the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record.

According to Kemp, these shattered bones were a foreshadowing of another object in this room. Ten feet away, displayed at knee-height, was the Palette of Narmer. Hewn from a tapering tablet of grey-green siltstone, the item on display was an exact cast of the 5,000-year-old original — discovered by British archaeologists in 1898 — that now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

At the center of the stone stands the giant figure of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. His left hand clasps the head of an enemy, presumed to be a rival ruler of the Western Delta. In his raised right hand he holds a mace. The image is thought to depict Narmer bludgeoning his greatest opponent to death, an act that solidified his sovereignty over all Egypt. Beneath his feet lie the contorted bodies of two other victims, while overhead a falcon presents Narmer with a ribbon, believed to represent the god Horus bestowing a gift of the Western Nile. “Here we have perfect historical evidence of what the social contract is. It’s written in blood,” Kemp told me. “This is the first depiction of how states are made.”

In the British Museum’s repository of ancient treasures and colonial loot, the palette is by no means a star attraction. For the half hour we spent in the room, few visitors gave it more than a passing glance. But to Kemp, its imagery “is the most important artwork in the world” — a blueprint for every city-state, nation and empire that has ever been carved out by force of arms, reified in stone and subsequently turned to dust.

Systematizing Collapse

When Kemp set out seven years ago to write his book about how societies rise and fall — and why he fears that our own is headed for disaster — one biblical event provided him with the perfect allegory: the story of the Battle of the Valley of Elah, recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Fought between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 11th century BCE, it’s a tale more commonly known by the names of its protagonists, David and Goliath.

Goliath, we are told, was a Philistine warrior standing “six cubits and a span,” or around 9 feet, 9 inches, clad in the alloy of copper and tin armor that would give his epoch its name: the Bronze Age. As the rival armies faced off across the valley, the giant stepped onto the battlefield and laid down a challenge that the conflict should be resolved in single combat.

For 40 days, Goliath goaded his enemy to nominate a champion, until a shepherd named David came forward from the Israelite ranks, strung a stone into his slingshot and catapulted it into Goliath’s brow, killing him at a stroke, and taking his head with the giant’s own sword. For centuries thereafter, the story of David and Goliath has served as a parable challenging the superiority of physical might. Even the most impressive entity has hidden frailties. A colossus can be felled by a single blow.

According to Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” it’s a lesson we would do well to heed. Early on, he dispenses with the word “civilization,” because in his telling, there is little that might be considered civil about how states are born and sustained. Instead, he argues that “Goliath” is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.

“‘Goliath’ is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.”

Like the Philistine warrior, the Goliath state is defined by its size; in time, centralized polities would evolve to dwarf the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens. Ostensibly, it is well-armored and intimidating, exerting power through the threat and exercise of violence. And, in kind with the biblical colossus, it is vulnerable: Those characteristics that most project strength, like autocracy and social complexity, conceal hidden weaknesses. (A more modern allegory, Kemp writes, can be found in the early Star Wars movies, in which a moon-sized space station with the capacity to blow up a planet can be destroyed by a well-placed photon torpedo.)

Kemp is, of course, by no means the first scholar to try to chart this violence and vulnerability through the ages. The question of what causes societies to fail is arguably the ultimate mission of big-picture history, and a perennial cultural fixation. In the modern era, the historian Jared Diamond has found fame with his theories that collapse is usually a product of geographical determinism. The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, hosted by the historian Paul Cooper, has over 220 million listens. Perusing a bookshop recently, I spotted a recent release, entitled “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World,” among the bestsellers.

What distinguishes Kemp’s book from much of the canon is the consistencies he identifies in how different political entities evolved, and the circumstances that precipitated their fall. A panoramic synthesis of archaeology, psychology and evolutionary biology, “Goliath’s Curse” is, above all, an attempt to systematize collapse. Reviewers have hailed the book as a skeleton key to understanding societal precarity. Cooper has described it as “a masterpiece of data-driven collapsology.”

Moreover, it is a sobering insight into why our own globalized society feels like it is edging toward the precipice. That’s because, despite all the features that distinguish modern society from empires of the past, some rules hold true throughout the millennia.

Becoming ‘Dr. Doom’

In September, Kemp traveled down from Cambridge to meet me in London for the day. Given his subject, I half-expected a superannuated and eccentric individual, someone like Diamond with his trademark pilgrim-father beard and penchant for European chamber music. But Kemp, 35, would prove to be the antithesis of the anguished catastrophist. The man waiting for me on the concourse at King’s Cross was athletic, swarthily handsome and lantern-jawed. He’d signed off emails regarding our plans to meet with a puckish “Cheerio.”

Kemp’s background is also hardly stereotypical of the bookish scholar. He spent his early years in the dairy-farming town of Bega in New South Wales, Australia, where cattle outnumbered people three-to-one. It was “something of a broken home,” he told me. His father was an active member of the Hell’s Angels, involved in organized crime, a formative presence that would later germinate Kemp’s interest in power dynamics, the way violence is at once a lever for domination and for ruin.

Escaping to Canberra, after high school, Kemp read “interdisciplinary studies” at the Australian National University (ANU), where he found a mentor in the statistical climatologist Jeanette Lindsay. In 2009, it was Lindsay who persuaded him to join a student delegation heading to COP15 in Copenhagen, where Kemp found himself with a front row seat to what he calls “the paralysis of geopolitics.”

At one stage, during a symposium over measures to curb deforestation, he watched his own Australian delegation engage in endless circumlocutions to derail the debate. Representatives from wealthier countries, most notably America, had large teams that they could swap in and out of the floor, enabling them to filibuster vital, potentially existential questions to a deadlock. “If you’re from Tuvalu, you don’t have that privilege,” Kemp explained.

Afterward, Kemp became preoccupied by “a startling red thread” evident in so many spheres of international negotiation: the role of America as arbiter of, and all too often barrier to, multilateral cooperation. Kemp wrote his doctoral thesis on how pivotal issues — such as biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons and climate change — had grown captive to the whims of the world’s great superpower. Later, when he published a couple of academic articles on the same subject, “the ideas weren’t very popular,” he said. “Then Trump got elected, and suddenly the views skyrocketed.”

In 2018, Kemp relocated to the United Kingdom, landing a job as a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk” (CSER, often articulated, in an inadvertent nod to a historical avatar of unalloyed power, to “Caesar”). His brother’s congratulatory present, a 3-D printed, hand-engraved mask of the Marvel character “Dr. Doom,” would prove prophetic. Years later, as Kemp began to publish his theories of societal collapse, colleagues at CSER began referring to him by the very same moniker.

“Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, ‘dark triad’ personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.”

It was around this time that Kemp read “Against the Grain,” a revisionist history of nascent conurbations by James C. Scott. Kemp had always been an avid reader of history, but Scott’s thesis, which argued that the growth of centralized states “hadn’t been particularly emancipatory or even necessarily good for human wellbeing,” turned some of Kemp’s earlier assumptions about human nature on their head.

Such iconoclastic ideas — subsequently popularized in blockbuster works of non-fiction like Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind” (2019), and “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) by Graeber and Wengrove — would prompt years of research and rumination about the preconditions that enable states and empires to rise, and why they never last forever.

‘Hobbes’ Delusion’

“Goliath’s Curse” opens with a refutation of a 17th-century figure whose theories still cast a long shadow across all considerations of societal fragility. In “Leviathan” (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed that the social contract was contingent on the stewardship of a central authority — a “Leviathan” designed to keep a lid on humanity’s basest instincts. Political scientists refer to this doctrine as “veneer theory.”

“Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire,” Kemp surmises. “Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.”

For decades now, the predominant version of history has been beholden to this misanthropic worldview. Many of the most influential recent theories of collapse have echoed Hobbes’ grand theory with specific exemplars. Diamond has famously argued that the society on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, unraveled due to self-inflicted ecocide before devolving into civil war. That interpretation, in which the islanders deforested the land in the service of ancestor worship, has since been held up as a species-wide admonition — evidence, as researchers John Flenley and Paul Bahn have written, that “humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), Steven Pinker estimated that 15% of Paleolithic people died of violent causes.

But Kemp was struck by a persistent “lack of empirics” undermining these hypotheses, an academic tendency to focus on a handful of “cherry-picked” and emotive case studies — often on islands, in isolated communities or atypical environments that failed to provide useful analogs for the modern world. Diamond’s theories about the demise of Rapa Nui — so often presented as a salutary cautionary tale —have since been debunked.

To further rebut such ideas, Kemp highlights a 2013 study by the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum. In what amounted to the most comprehensive survey of violence in prehistory, the authors analyzed almost 3,000 skeletons interred during the Paleolithic Era. Of the more than 400 sites in the survey, they identified just one instance of mass conflict: the bones of Jebel Sahaba. “The presumed universality of warfare in human history and ancestry may be satisfying to popular sentiment; however, such universality lacks empirical support,” Haas and Piscitelli wrote.

If there was any truth to the Hobbesian standpoint, the Paleolithic, with its absence of stratified social structures, should have been marked by mass panic and all-out war. Yet the hunter-gatherer period appears to have been a time of relative, if fragile, peace. Instead, conflict and mass violence seemed to be by-products of the very hierarchical organization that Hobbes and his antecedents essentialized. Cave art of armies wielding bows and swords dates only to around 10,000 years ago. “As soon as you start tugging on the threat of collapse, the entire tapestry of history unravels,” Kemp told me.

But if Hobbes was wrong about the human condition — if most people are averse to violence, if mass panic and mutual animosity are not the principal vectors of societal disintegration — what then explains the successive state failures in the historical record? Where or what, to mix metaphors, is Goliath’s Achilles’ heel?

What Fuels Goliath?

In seeking to disentangle a template of collapse from this historiography, Kemp turned to historical data, searching for traits of state emergence and disintegration shared by different polities. “When I see a pattern which needs to be explained, it becomes a fascination bordering upon obsession,” he told me.

A central pillar of his research was the Seshat Global History Databank, an open-source database incorporating more than 862 polities dating back to the early Neolithic. Named after the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Seshat includes a range of metrics like the degree of centralization and the presence of different types of weaponry; it aggregates these to create nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs), including polity size, hierarchy, governmental framework and infrastructure.

“Wherever Goliath took hold, ‘arms races’ followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious.”

Using this and other sources, Kemp set out to collate his own novel dataset, this time focusing on the common features not of complexity, but of collapse. In keeping with Seshat’s old-god nomenclature, he dubbed it the “Mortality of States” index, shortened to “Moros”, after the Greek god of doom. Covering 300 states spanning the last five millennia, the resulting catalogue is, Kemp claims, “the most exhaustive list of state lifespans available today.”

To some extent, Kemp’s data told a story that has become received wisdom: As Earth thawed out from the last ice age, we entered the Holocene, a period of warmer temperatures and climatic stability. This shift laid the terrain for the first big inflection point: the advent of agriculture, which encouraged our previously itinerant species to settle in place, leading to greater population density and eventually proto-city-states. These early states rose and fell, often condemned by internal conflict, climatic shocks, disease or natural disasters. But gradually the organization of human societies trended toward higher levels of complexity, from the diffuse proto-city-states, through the birth of nations, then empires, to the globalized system of today. The violent paroxysms of the past were merely hiccups on a continuum toward increased sophistication and civility, and perhaps someday immortality. Such is the tale that is commonly framed as the arc of human progress.

But trawling through the data in more detail also revealed unexpected and recurrent patterns, leading Kemp to an early realization: states observably age. “For the first 200 years, they seem to become more vulnerable to terminating. And after 200 years, they stay at a high risk thereafter,” Kemp told me.

The other glaring commonality concerned the structure of these societies. “The common thread across all of them is not necessarily that they had writing or long-distance trade,” Kemp said. “Instead, it’s that they were organized into dominance hierarchies in which one person or one group gains hegemony through its ability to inflict violence on others.”

Kemp argues that dominance hierarchies arise due to the presence of three “Goliath fuels.” The first of these is “lootable resources,” assets that can be easily seen, stolen and stored. In this respect, the advent of agriculture was indisputably foundational. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be taxed and stockpiled, giving rise to centralized authorities and, later, bureaucracies of the state.

The second Goliath fuel is “monopolizable weapons.” As weaponry evolved from flint to bronze, the expertise and relative scarcity of the source material required for early metallurgy meant that later weapons could be hoarded by powerful individuals or groups, giving those who controlled the supply chain a martial advantage over potential rivals.

The third criterion for Goliath evolution is “caged land,” territories with few exit options. Centralized power is predicated on barriers that hinder people from fleeing oppressive hierarchies.

In Kemp’s telling, every single political entity has grown from one of these seeds, or more commonly, a combination of all three. Bronze Age fiefdoms expanded at the tip of their metal weaponry. “Rome,” Kemp writes, “was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords,” its vast armies sustained by crop imports from the Nile Valley, its endless military campaigns funded by the silver mines it controlled in Spain. In China, the Han dynasty circumscribed its territory with its Great Wall to the north, intended both to keep Xiongnu horseback raiders out and the citizenry in. Europe’s colonial empires were built, in Diamond’s famous summation, by “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

For millennia, the nature of forager societies kept these acquisitive impulses to some extent contained, Kemp argues. The evolutionary logic of hunting and gathering demanded cooperation and reciprocity, giving rise to “counter-dominance strategies”: teasing, shaming or exile. With the advent of Goliath polities, however, the “darker angels of our nature” were given free rein, yielding social arrangements “more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.”

“Rather than a stepladder of progress,” Kemp writes, “this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.” Moreover, Goliaths “contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.”

In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Consequently, history has been shaped by pathological figures in the Narmer mold, dominance-seekers predisposed to aggression. Reinforced by exceptionalist and paranoid ideologies, these strongmen have used violence and patronage to secure their dominion, whether driven by a lust for power or to avenge a humiliation. Several of the rebellions that plagued dynastic China, Kemp points out, were spearheaded by aggrieved people who failed their civil service examinations.

“Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same.”

Wherever Goliath took hold, “arms races” followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious. The growth of “one bellicose city-state” would often produce a domino effect, in which the threat of an ascendant Goliath would provoke other regional polities to turn to their own in-house authoritarian as a counterweight to the authoritarian next door.

In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Many of the great men of history, who are often said to have bent society to their will, Kemp told me, are better thought of as “a rollcall of serial killers.”

The 1% View Of History

Back downstairs, on the British Museum’s ground floor, we walked into a long gallery off the central atrium containing dozens of megalithic totems from the great ages of antiquity. The giant granite bust of Rameses II sat beatific on a pediment, and visitors peered into a glass cabinet containing the Rosetta Stone. Kemp, slaloming through the crowds, murmured: “The 1% view of history made manifest.”

Along both walls of an adjacent corridor, we came upon a series of bas-reliefs from the neo-Assyrian city of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. Depicting scenes from the life of the Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud in the 9th century BCE, the gypsum slabs were like an artistic expression of Kemp’s historical themes: Ashurnasirpal sitting on a throne before vassals bearing tribute; Ashurnasirpal surrounded by protective spirits; Ashurnasirpal’s army ramming the walls of an enemy city, rivals dragging themselves along the ground, backs perforated with arrows. The entire carving was overlaid with cuneiform script, transcribed onto signage below, with sporadic sentences translated into English: “great king, strong king, king of the universe. … Whose command disintegrates mountains and seas.”

Across the atrium, in a low-lit room containing a bequest from the Rothschild family’s antique collection, Kemp lingered over an assortment of small wooden altarpieces, with biblical scenes and iconography carved in minuscule, intricate detail. Elite status could be projected in the imposing size of a granite statue, he said. But it could just as well be archived in the countless hours spent chiseling the Last Supper into a fragment of boxwood.

It is, of course, inevitable that our sense of history is skewed by this elite bias, Kemp explained. While quotidian objects and utensils were typically made of perishable materials, the palaces and monuments of the governing class were designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring and durable. In the hours that we spent on the upper floors, we spied just one relic of ordinary life: a 3,000-year-old wooden yoke from Cambridgeshire.

Likewise, early writing often evolved to reinforce the “1% view of history” and formalize modes of control. The predominance of this elite narrative has produced a cultural blind spot, obscuring the brutality and oppression that has forever been the lot of those living at the base of a pyramid, both figurative and actual.

From all this aristocratic residue, Kemp sought to extract a “people’s history of collapse” — some means of inferring what it was like to live through collapse for the average person, rather than the elites immortalized in scripture and stone.

The Curse Of Inequality

If Kemp’s research revealed that historical state formation appears to follow a pattern, so, too, did the forces that inexorably led toward their demise. To illustrate how the process works, Kemp provides the example of Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that arose on the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey around 9,000 years ago, one of thousands of “tells,” mounded remnants of aborted settlements found throughout the Near East.

Excavations of the site’s oldest layers suggest that early Çatalhöyük was notable for its lack of social differentiation. Crammed together in a dense fractal of similarly sized mud-brick dwellings, the settlement in this period exhibits no remnants of fortification and no signs of warfare. Analysis of male and female skeletons has shown that both sexes ate the same diet and performed the same work, indicating a remarkable degree of gender equity.

This social arrangement, which the Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder has described as “aggressively egalitarian,” lasted for around 1,000 years. Then, in the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, the archaeological record starts to shift. House sizes begin to diverge; evidence of communal activity declines. Later skeletal remains show more evidence of osteoarthritis, possibly betraying higher levels of workload and bodily stress. Economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient, which measures disparities in household income, doubled in the space of three centuries — “a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil,” Kemp writes. Within a few centuries, the settlement was abandoned.

“In almost every case, [societal] decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality.”

The fate of Çatalhöyük established a template that almost every subsequent town, city-state and empire would mirror. Its trajectory resounds throughout the historical record and across continents. Similar patterns can be discerned from the remnants of the Jenne-Jeno in Mali, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Tiwanaku in Titicaca, and the Cahokia in pre-Columbian North America.

Occasionally, the archaeological record suggests a fluctuation between equality and disparity and back again. In Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City, the erection of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid by an emergent priestly class in around 200 CE ushered in a period of ritual bloodletting. A more egalitarian chapter followed, during which the temple was razed, and the city’s wealth was rechanneled into urban renewal. Then the old oligarchy reasserted itself, and the entire settlement, beset by elite conflict or popular rebellion, was engulfed in flames.

Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same. As Acemoğlu and Robinson explored in “Why Nations Fail” (2012), the correlation between inequality and state failure often rests on whether its institutions are inclusive, involving democratic decision-making and redistribution, or extractive: “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Time and again, the historical record shows the same pattern repeating — of status competition and resource extraction spiraling until a tipping-point, often in the shape of a rebellion, or an external shock, like a major climate shift or natural disaster, which the elites, their decision-making fatally undermined by the imperative to maintain their grip on power, fail to navigate.

In almost every case, decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality. A rise in the presence of large communal pots indicates an upsurge in feasting. Deviation in the size of dwellings, preserved in the excavated footprints of early conurbations, is a measure of social stratification, as wealth accumulates among the elite. Graves of that same nobility become stuffed with burial goods. Great monuments, honoring political and religious leaders or the gods who were supposed to have anointed them, proliferate. Many of the most lucrative lootable resources throughout history have been materials that connote elevated social standing, an obsession with conspicuous consumption or “wastefully using resources,” that marked a break from the hunter-gatherer principle of taking only what was needed. (Kemp wears a reminder of the human compulsion to covet beauty as much as utility, an obsidian arrowhead, on his wrist.)

All the while, these signs of burgeoning inequality have tended to be twinborn with an increasing concentration of power, and its corollary: violence. War, often instigated for no more reason than the pursuit of glory and prestige, was just “the continuation of status competition by other means,” Kemp writes. On occasion, this violence would be manifested in the ultimate waste of all: human sacrifice, a practice custom-made to demonstrate the leadership’s exceptionality — above ordinary morality.

Better Off Stateless

As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.

Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said.

In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.

Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.”

“Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.”

Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.)

Elsewhere, too, collapse was not necessarily synonymous with popular immiseration. The demise of the extravagant Mycenaean civilization in Greece was pursued by a cultural efflorescence, paving the way for the proto-democracy of Athens. Collapse could be emancipatory, freeing the populace from instruments of state control such as taxes and forced labor. Even the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, became in time an economic leveler, slashing inequality and accelerating the decline of feudalism.

It’s a pattern that can still be discerned in modern contexts. In Somalia, the decade following the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 would see almost every single indicator of quality of life improve. “Maternal mortality drops by 30%, mortality by 24%, extreme poverty by 20%,” Kemp recounted from memory. Of course, there are endless caveats. But often, “people are better off stateless.”

Invariably, however, Goliaths re-emerged, stronger and more bureaucratically sophisticated than before. Colonial empires refined systems of extraction and dominance until their tentacles covered diffuse expanses of the globe. Kemp, never shy of metaphor, calls this the “rimless wheel,” a centripetal arrangement in which the core reaps benefits at the margins’ expense.

At times, such regimes were simply continuations of existing models of extraction. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés unseated the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, it was merely a case of “translatio imperi” — the handing over of empire. The European imperial projects in the Americas were an unforgivable stain, Kemp said. But, more often than not, they assumed the mantle from pre-existing hierarchies.

Endgame

In the afternoon, we walked north from the British Museum over to Coal Drops Yard, formerly a Victorian entrepôt for the import and distribution of coal, now a shiny vignette of urban regeneration. The morning rain had cleared, and Granary Square was full of tourists and office workers enjoying the late summer sun. Kids stripped to their underwear and played among low fountains; people chatted at public tables beneath a matrix of linden trees. Kemp and I found an empty table and sat down to talk about how it could all fall apart.

As “Goliath’s Curse” approaches its conclusion, the book betrays a sense of impending doom about our current moment. The final section, in which Kemp applies his schema to the present day, is entitled “Endgame,” after the stage in chess where only a few moves remain.

Today, we live in what Kemp calls the “Global Goliath,” a single interconnected polity. Its lootable resources are data, fossil fuels and the synthetic fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Centuries of arms races have yielded an arsenal of monopolizable weapons like autonomous drones and thermonuclear warheads that are “50 trillion times more powerful than a bow and arrow.” The land — sectored into national borders, monitored by a “stalker complex” of mass surveillance systems and “digital trawl-nets” — is more caged than ever.

We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe. However, the resulting interdependencies and fetishes for unending growth have created an ever-growing catalog of “latent risks,” or accumulated hazards yet to be realized, and “tail risks,” or outcomes with a low probability but disastrous consequences. Kemp characterizes this predicament, in which the zenith of human achievement is also our moment of peak vulnerability, as a “rungless ladder.” The higher we go, the greater the fall.

“We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe.”

Under a series of apocalyptic subtitles — “Mors ex Machina,” “Evolutionary Suicide,” “A Hellish Earth” — Kemp enumerates the existential threats that have come to shape the widespread intuition, now playing out in our geopolitics, that globalized society is sprinting toward disaster. After the post-Cold War decades of non-proliferation, nuclear weapons stockpiles are now growing. The architects of artificial intelligence muse about its potential to wipe out humanity while simultaneously lobbying governments to obstruct regulation. Our densifying cities have become prospective breeding grounds for doomsday diseases. Anthropogenic climate change now threatens to shatter the stability of the Holocene, warming the planet at “an order of magnitude (tenfold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90% of life on earth 252 million years ago,” Kemp warns.

The culprits in this unfolding tragedy are not to be found among the ranks of common people. The free market has always been predicated on the concept of Homo economicus, a notional figure governed by dispassionate self-interest. But while most people don’t embody this paradigm, we are in thrall to political structures and corporations created in that image, with Dark Triad personalities at the wheel. “The best place to find a psychopath is in prison,” Kemp told me. “The second is in the boardroom.”

Now, deep into the Global Goliath’s senescence, several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red. Donning his risk analyst hat, Kemp arrives at the darkest possible prognosis: The most likely destination for our globalized society is “self-termination,” self-inflicted collapse on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Goliath is more powerful than ever, but it is on a collision course with David’s stone.

Lootable Silicon

All of this seemed hard to reconcile with the atmosphere of contented civility in Granary Square on this sunny September afternoon. I proposed that an advocate for global capitalism would doubtless view our current circumstances as evidence of the Global Goliath’s collective, trickle-down bounty.

“We should be thankful for a whole bunch of things that started, by and large, in the Industrial Revolution,” Kemp said. “Vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, low infant mortality and the fact that over 80% of the population is literate. These are genuine achievements to be celebrated.”

Kemp argued that most redistribution has been a product of “stands against domination”; for example, the formation of unions, public health movements and other campaigns for social justice. Meanwhile, underlying prosperity still depends on the rimless wheel: the hub exploiting the periphery. “If we were here 150 years ago, we’d be seeing child laborers working in these courtyards,” he said, gesturing at the former coal warehouses that are now an upmarket shopping mall and that once served as a nerve center of the fossil fuel industry that built the modern age.

The same dynamics hold sway today, albeit at a further remove. Just south of us, across the Regent’s Canal, sat the London headquarters of Google, a billion-dollar glass edifice. At first glance, Kemp gave the building an enthusiastic middle finger.

Later, he explained: “The people sitting in that building are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”

Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization.

Another plausible eventuality, which Kemp dubs the “Silicon Goliath,” is a future in which democracy and freedom are crushed beneath the heel of advanced algorithmic systems. He is already at work on his next book about the evolution of mass surveillance, an inquiry that he told me “is in many ways even more depressing.”

Slaying Goliath

Toward the end of “Goliath’s Curse,” Kemp imagines a scenario in which the decision of whether to detonate the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 was made not by a Department of War but by a “Trinity jury,” an assembly of randomly selected members of the public.

“Now several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red.”

In such a counterfactual, with the Nazis defeated, Japan already inches from surrender and Manhattan Project physicists warning of a non-zero possibility that the test could ignite the whole atmosphere and exterminate all life on Earth, Kemp contends that a more inclusive decision-making process would have changed the course of history. “If you had a random selection by lottery of 100 U.S. citizens and asked them, ‘Should we detonate the bomb?’ What decision do they come to? Almost certainly ‘No,’ he told me.

As Kemp sees it, the widespread adoption of such open democracy is the only viable route to escape the endgame. These citizen juries wouldn’t be free-for-alls, where the loudest or most outrageous voice wins, but deliberative procedures that necessitate juror exposure to expert, nonpartisan context.

Such assemblies wouldn’t be enough to “slay Goliath” on their own, Kemp told me. “Corporations and states … [must] pay for the environmental and social damages they cause … to make the economy honest again.” Per capita wealth, Kemp added, should be limited to a maximum of $10 million.

I challenged Kemp that this wish-list was beginning to sound like a Rousseauvian fever-dream. But seven years immersed in the worst excesses of human folly had left him in no mood for half-measures. “I’m not an anarcho-primitivist,” he said. There was no point trying to revivify our hunter-gatherer past. “We’d need multiple planet Earths!” Kemp conceded. And yet the urgency of our current circumstances demanded a radical departure from the existing status quo, and no less a shift in mindset.

His final demotic prescription, “Don’t be a dick,” was an injunction to everyone that our collective future depends as much on moral ambition as political revolution. Otherwise, Goliath won’t be just a Bible story. It could also be our epitaph.

Uncategorized

Human agency in the Anthropocene

Ilona M. Otto ^a, Marc Wiedermann ^a, Roger Cremades ^b, Jonathan F. Donges ^ad, Cornelia Auer ^a, Wolfgang Lucht ^ac

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106463 Get rights and content

Abstract

The human species has been recognized as a new force that has pushed the Earth’s system into a new geological epoch referred to as the Anthropocene. This human influence was not conscious, however, but an unintended effect of the consumption of fossil-fuels over the last 150 years. Do we, humans, have the agency to deliberately influence the fate of our species and the planet we inhabit? The rational choice paradigm that dominated social sciences in the 20th Century, and has heavily influenced the conceptualization of human societies in global human-environmental system modelling in the early 21st Century, suggests a very limited view of human agency. Humans seen as rational agents, coordinated through market forces, have only a very weak influence on the system rules. In this article we explore alternative concepts of human agency that emphasize its collective and strategic dimensions as well as we ask how human agency is distributed within the society. We also explore the concept of social structure as a manifestation of, and a constraint on, human agency. We discuss the implications for conceptualization of human agency in integrated assessment modelling efforts.

1. Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement set very ambitious goals that, if taken seriously, would result in a rapid transformation of human-environmental interactions and decarbonization of the global socio-economic system (United Nations, 2015a, United Nations, 2015b). What the agreements do not specify, however, is how the transformation should be achieved and who the transformation agents would be. In most modern scientific assessment of global human-environmental interactions, including Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), alternative futures do not evolve from the behavior of the population in the simulated region or market, but are externally chosen by the research teams (e.g. Moss et al., 2010). The human agency that can be broadly understood as the capacity of individual and collective actors to change the course of events or the outcome of processes (Pattberg and Stripple, 2008) is only weakly represented in the commonly used global system models. For example, Integrated Assessment Models are not capable of modelling abrupt changes and tipping points in both natural and human systems (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012) that may imply severe and non-linear consequences for the Earth system as a whole (Lenton et al., 2008). There is, however, a relatively rich body of literature in social sciences, primarily in political science and institutional theory, that conceptualizes human agency in the governance of social-ecological systems (e.g. Ostrom, 2005; Kashwan et al., 2018) and in Earth system governance (e.g. Biermann et al., 2012, Biermann et al., 2016). The aim of this paper is to assess the representation of human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling efforts and to examine how the rich body of literature on human agency in social sciences could be used to improve the modelling efforts.

The cornerstones of social sciences are built on the tension between agency and structure in social reproduction – the force of self-determination versus the embeddedness of social institutions (Dobres and Robb, 2000). Just as bio-physical laws determine the coupling between chemical and mechanical processes, social structures, including norms and institutions, impose constraints on the shaping of human interactions (North, 1990); they specify what people may, must, or must not do under particular circumstances and impose costs for non-compliance (Ostrom, 2005). Social institutions also have a function in expressing common or social interest and in channeling human behavior into what is socially desired (Coleman, 1990). Unlike bio-physical laws, however, social institutions are man-made structures and they are constantly being transformed by human action. In general, the smaller the social entity the less durable it is. The size, scale, and time-frame of the social entity push it towards a durable structure and stability (Fuchs, 2001). Numerous authors have contributed to this long and fruitful debate on micro- and macro-level social structures and interactions within social sciences. However, very little of that knowledge has so far been applied by the global environmental change modelling community. To give an example, the IPCC Report on Mitigation of Climate Change underlines the role of institutional, legal, and cultural barriers that constrain the low-carbon technology uptake and behavioral change. However, the diffusion of alternative values, institutions, and even technologies are not incorporated in the modelling results (Edenhofer et al., 2014). Little is known about the potential for scaling-up of social innovations, let alone the possible carbon emission reductions they could drive if applied on a larger scale. How quickly would such innovations diffuse into virtual and face-to-face social networks, and what would the agency of different actors, and groups of actors, be in such a diffusion process? The purpose of this work is to analyze how social theory could be better integrated into the global environmental change assessment community, and how relevant social theory could be incorporated in modelling efforts.

The paper is structured as follows. We start by reviewing how human agency has been incorporated within Earth system science and integrated modelling efforts so far. We then move to the exploration of the concept of human agency and social structure and review the relevant social stratification theories. We propose how the concept of human agency could be incorporated in global human-environmental system models, and finally we conclude.

2. Human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling

The recognition of the human species as the driving force of modern global environmental challenges, occurring at the end of the 20th Century, brought a new perspective to environmental and Earth system sciences. Lubchenco (1998) called directly for the integration of the human dimensions of global environmental changes with the physical-chemical-biological dimensions. In this context, Crutzen (2006) proposed the distinction of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, where the human species becomes a force outcompeting natural processes. As one possible framework to assess human agency in the Anthropocene, Schellnhuber (1999) developed the notion of “Earth System” analysis for global environmental management in which the human force has been conceptualized as a “global subject”. The global subject is a real but abstract force that represents the collective action of humanity as a self-conscious force that has conquered the planet. The global subject manifests itself, for instance, by adopting international protocols for climate protection.

The conceptualization of the human species as the global subject has been applied in Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IAMs refer to tools assessing strategies to address climate change and they aim to describe the complex relations between environmental, social and economic factors that determine future climate change and the effects of climate policy (van Vuuren et al., 2011). IAMs have been valuable means to set out potential pathways to mitigate climate change and, importantly, have been used in the IPCC’s assessments of climate change mitigation (Clarke et al., 2014). However, the development of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) coincides in time with the supremacy of the rational choice paradigm. Rational choice theory emphasizes the voluntary nature of human action and the influence of such actions on decisions, assuming human beings act on the basis of rational calculations of benefits and costs (Burns, 1994). According to this paradigm, rationality is a feature of individual actors and the world can be explained in terms of interactions of atomic entities. Humans are rational beings motivated by self-interest and consciously evaluate alternative courses of action. Markets are seen as the mechanisms linking the micro and macro levels and allow the combination of the concrete actions of individuals, e.g. buyers and sellers (Jaeger et al., 2001). The rational choice paradigm is reflected in welfare maximization assumptions underpinning the development of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models that are widespread in IAMs. CGE models are computer-based simulations which use a system of equations that describe the whole world economy and their sectoral interactions. The analysis of scenarios in CGE models compares a business-as-usual equilibrium with the changes introduced by one or several policies and environmental shocks — e.g. a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme under several climate scenarios — which generate a new equilibrium (Babatunde et al., 2017). It is important to understand that the policy shock in such models is introduced externally; it does not evolve from the model and does not consider the dynamics behind the agency of different actors and groups of actors. In fact, human societies in CGE models are only reflected in aggregated population numbers by world region. The institutional settings within the human societies operate are given and cannot be endogenously changed. CGE models place a strong emphasis on the market as a solution to all kinds of problems including environmental and social issues (Scrieciu, 2007). Furthermore, state-of-the-art IAMs model aggregate datasets of sub-continental size. For instance, the IAM known as REMIND considers just 11 world regions, while the energy component of IMAGE considers only 26. The order of magnitude of the population of each of these regions is between 287 M and 680 M inhabitants (ADVANCE, 2017). Similarly, in the global land use allocation model MAgPIE, the food energy demand for ten types of food energy categories (cereals, rice, vegetable oils, pulses, roots and tubers, sugar, ruminant meat, non-ruminant meat, and milk) in ten world regions differentiated in the model is determined exogenously by population size and income growth, assuming that, for example, higher income is related to a higher demand for meat and milk (Popp et al., 2010). The impacts of changing lifestyles and the implications of demand-side solutions can be explored only manually by varying the underlying assumptions.

In context of the definition of human agency used above, IAMs reflect an agency of a rational consumer who decides on the choice of an optimal action having access to perfect information about the alternatives. By analyzing energy, land use, and their implications on global emissions (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012; Hibbard et al., 2010) IAMs can compute an economic setup to maximize welfare functions. Nevertheless, the welfare functions do not cover the diversity of human preferences. Complex distinctions of qualitative aspects, such as networks or influencers that can drive these processes, do not exist.

This drawback has been noted by the IAM community and attempts have been made to integrate human agency related behavior towards the political economy, social behavioral and interaction patterns (Riahi et al., 2017), or regimes of effort sharing (van den Berg et al., 2019) have been made. Some models also consider inequality and a diversity of consumption patterns (Hasegawa et al., 2015; McCollum et al. 2018). However, these approaches are still driven by exogenous quantifications and are unable to sufficiently inspect dynamics of human agency. Although IAMs are able to design pathways combining multiple strategies to achieve the 1.5 °C target of the Paris Agreement, which include human agency related actions such as lifestyle changes (van Vuuren et al., 2018), many questions remain. For example, how can human agency be triggered to achieve the lifestyle changes, at an individual level, necessary to achieve the 1.5 °C target? Also, how can the necessary institutional dynamics be brought into play? So far, these aspects are rarely considered in IAMs.

Novel and promising modelling approaches to incorporate human agency are being developed in complex network science (Borgatti et al., 2009) and social-ecological system modelling (Pérez et al., 2016). Complex networks usually consist of a set of nodes representing individual agents or representative aggregations thereof (such as business parties, geographical regions or countries) which are connected by different types of linkages, such as business relations, diplomatic ties, or even acquaintance and friendship (Newman, 2018). This type of framework has been developed in the past, and applied successfully to describe heterogeneous datasets from the social sciences, and to establish conceptual models for socio-economic and socio-ecological dynamics (Filatova et al., 2013). Nevertheless, most of such models are still based on theoretical assumptions with weak links to empirical data. A closer link with empirical data has so far only been achieved at case study level, focusing on particular local socio-environmental phenomena such as fishery or water management with agents representing local resource users or managers (e.g. Suwarno et al., 2018; Troost and Berger, 2015). The questions driving this work are: (i) how can similar models be conceptualized in order to represent the whole World-Earth system of human societies and their bio-physical environment (Donges et al., 2018) and (ii) how can they be linked with empirical data?

3. The concept of human agency in social sciences

Dellas et al. (2011) refer to agency in the governance of the Earth system as the capacity to act in the face of earth system transformation or to produce effects that ultimately shape natural processes. Agency in Earth system governance may be considered as contributing to problem solving, or alternatively it could include the negative consequences of the authority to act. Lister (2003) and Coulthard (2012), in their research on agency related to environmental and citizenship problems, distinguish two dimensions: (i) ‘everyday agency’ being the daily decision-making around how to make ends meet, and ‘strategic agency’ involving long-term planning and strategies; and (ii) ‘personal agency’ which reflects individual choices and ‘political and citizenship agency’ which is related to the capacity of people to affect the wider change (Lister 2003). Personal agency varies significantly across human individuals. However, there are powerful examples of social protests and movements demonstrating that even individually disempowered people can have a strong voice if they act collectively (Kashwan, 2016). In the context of natural resources and environmental management, there are empirical examples of self-organized local and regional communities and grassroots movements crafting new institutions that limit the control of national authorities (García-López, 2018; Dang, 2018). To give an example, civil society groups in Mexico managed to shape the REDD+ policies to protect the rights of agrarian communities (Kashwan, 2017a). In this context, Bandura (2006) proposes the differentiation of individual, proxy and collective agency (2006: 165). Individual agency refers to situations in which people bring their influence to bear through their own actions. This varies substantially from person to person with respect to individual freedom to act and the consequences of action. Individual agency is influenced by a whole set of socio-economic characteristics including gender, age, education, religion, social, economic and political capital. In many cultures, the individual agency of women is limited, for example, by inheritance law or by informal norms restricting their mobility or educational opportunities (Otto et al., 2017). However, individual agency also varies with an individual’s ability to change the system rules. For example, very wealthy or influential people might find it easier to set new market trends or influence public decision-making processes than those with fewer resources (Otto et al., 2019). Proxy, or socially mediated agency refers to situations in which individuals have no direct control over conditions that affect their lives, but they influence others who have the resources, knowledge, and means to act on their behalf to secure the outcome they desire. Collective agency refers to situations in which individuals pool their knowledge, skills, and resources, and act in concert to shape their future (Bandura 2006: 165). These dimensions of agency are visualized in Fig. 1.

The dominant view of human agency in Earth system science and integrated modelling approaches has so far focused on the left upper corner of Fig. 1, i.e. on the everyday agency of individual human agents. This would correspond to, for example, modelling the effects of food consumption on land use patterns (e.g. Popp et al., 2010). Interestingly, although opinion formation and election models are well advanced in game theory (e.g. Penn, 2009; Ding et al., 2010), they have not yet been applied to the formation of international environmental policy in IAMs. At the same time the recent so-called protest voting shows that a small fraction of voters can push public policy down a radically different pathway. Some studies link the protest voting and rising populism with increasing inequalities and the political and social exclusion of the poor and underprivileged (Becker et al., 2017). In some cases, radical policy changes might also be achieved by individual acts of civil disobedience and, in a destructive manner, by terrorist attacks. Civil disobedience represents the peaceful breaking of unjust or unethical laws and is a technique of resistance and protest whose purpose is to achieve social or political change by drawing attention to problems and influencing public opinion. Terrorism is defined as an act of violence for the purpose of intimidating or coercing a government or civilian population.

Furthermore, radical policy changes and social tipping points can emerge due to changes in the collective behavior and preferences. The term ‘tipping point’ “refers to a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system” (Lenton et al., 2008), hence the mere existence of tipping points implies that small perturbations created by parts of such a system can push the whole system into a different development trajectory. Examples of tipping-like phenomena in socio-economic systems include financial crises, but could also include the spread of new social values, pro-environmental behavior, social movements, and technological innovations (Steffen et al., 2018). To give an example, social movements and grassroots organizations played an important role in the German energy transition that was initiated in 2011 as a reaction to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in Japan. It was, however, preceded by about 30 years of environmental activism (Hake et al., 2015). Finally, tipping-like phenomena can also be achieved by consumer boycotts and carrotmob movements. Consumer boycotts coupled with environmental NGO campaigns led, in Europe, to changes in the animal welfare regulations and the implementation of fair trade schemes (Belk et al., 2005). Carrotmobs refer to consumers collectively swarming a specific store to purchase its goods in order to reward corporate socially responsible behavior (Hoffmann and Hutter, 2012).

At the same time, cultural values and the ethical interpretation of behavior might vary in some respects across different countries and world regions and will lead to different manifestations of agency. Cultural values provide a strong filter of the actions perceived as good or responsible, as well as the consequences of violating norms (Belk et al., 2005). In the climate change context, some authors link the public acceptance of climate policy instruments to the belief and value systems in place, and the perceptions of the environment (Otto-Banaszak et al., 2011).

4. The manifestation of human agency: the layers of social structure

Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009) propose a distinction between actors and agents in Earth system governance. Actors are the individuals, organizations, and networks that participate in the decision-making processes. Agents are those actors who have the ability to prescribe behavior. The collective prescriptions and constraints on human behavior are usually referred to as the social structure (Granovetter, 1985; Dobres and Robb, 2000). The social structure is composed of the rule system that constitutes the “grammar” for social action that is used by the actors to structure and regulate their transactions with one another in defined situations or spheres of activity. The complex and multidimensional normative network is not given, but is a product of human action; “human agents continually form and reform social rule systems” (Burns and Flam, 1986: 26). The social rule system can also be framed as social institutions that are involved in political, economic, and social interactions (North, 1991). Similarly, Elinor Ostrom defines institutions as “the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions. Individuals interacting within rule-structured situations face choices regarding the actions and strategies they take, leading to consequences for themselves and for others” (Ostrom, 2005: 3). Social norms are shared understandings of actions and define which actions are obligatory, permitted, and forbidden (Crawford and Ostrom, 1995). Social order is only possible insofar as participants have common values and they share an understanding of their common interests and goals (King, 2009). Williamson (1998) proposes differentiating different informal institutions such as norms, beliefs and traditions, and formal institutions that comprise formal and written codes of conduct.

The process of shaping of the social rule system formation is not always fully conscious and intended. Lloyd (1988: 10) points out that a social structure is emerging from intended and unintended consequences of individual action and patterned mass behavior over time “Once such structures emerge, they feedback on the actions” (Sztompka, 1991: 49). For Giddens (1984) human action occurs as a continuous flow of conduct and he proposed turning the static notion of structure into the dynamic category of structuration to describe the human collective conduct. Human history is created by intentional activities but it is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction (Giddens, 1984: 27). As pointed out by Sztompka (1994), Giddens, embodies human agency in the everyday conduct of common people who are often distant from reformist intentions but are still involved in shaping and reshaping human societies. This process of the formation of social structure takes place over time; the system which individuals follow today have been produced and developed over a long period. “Through their transactions social groups and communities maintain and extend rule systems into the future” (Burns and Flam 1987: 29).

Another element of the social structure that is identified by several authors corresponds to the network of human relationships that, just like the shapes in geometry, can take different forms and configurations (Simmel, 1971). The network of relationships among the social agents is also referred to as governance structures, or sometimes as organizations. North (1990: 73) defines organizations as “purposive entities designed by their creators to maximize wealth, income, or other objectives defined by the opportunities afforded by the institutional structure of the society.” Williamson (1998), focusing on the types of contracts, distinguishes three basic types of governance structures: markets, firms, and hybrids. In markets, transaction partners are autonomous; in firms, partners are inter-dependent and integrated into an internal organization. Hybrids are intermediate forms in which contract partners are bilaterally dependent but to a large degree maintain autonomy (Williamson 1996: 95–98). Studying communication networks and social group structures allows us to distinguish more social network relationship patterns (Sztompka, 2002: 138).

Finally, the social structure is also shaped and influenced by large material objects such as infrastructure and other technological and industrial structures, that some authors call the technosphere (Spaargaren, 1997: 78). Herrmann-Pillath (2018) defines the technosphere as the encompassing aggregate of all artificial objects in opposition to the natural world, and more specifically, establishes the systemic separateness of the technosphere relative to the biosphere. Just as social norms impose on one hand certain constrains on human behavior, however, on the other hand, structure the human interactions and also provide certain opportunities, the technosphere can be viewed as a humanly designed constructs that provide certain opportunities as well as they limit certain choices of individuals operating at different geographical and time scales (Donges et al., 2017a).

The system is fully interconnected, and the social structure layers are interrelated. The slow changing layers of social structure impose constraints on the layers that change more quickly. The faster changing layers of social structure, however, are also able to change the slow slayers through feedback mechanisms (c.f. Williamson, 2000). Human agency is manifested through the maintenance, reproduction and modifications in the social structure layers (Burns, 1994). Interestingly, infrastructure objects in the technosphere layer show a similar order of change as the informal and formal institutions, and thus might constrain the social change in the faster changing levels. Thus artefacts become co-carriers of agency (Herrmann-Pillath, 2018). Nevertheless, sharp brakes from the established procedures rarely happen. Such defining moments are an exception to the rule and usually emerge from massive discontents such as civil wars, revolutions, or financial crises (Williamson, 1998). Institutions can also lock the society into a path-dependence (Beddoe et al., 2009). The capacity to undergo a radical restructuring, however, is a unique feature distinguishing social systems from organic or mechanical ones. Restructuring the social structure is a product of human agency and is grounded in the interaction between structures and human actions that produces change in a system’s given form, structure or state (Archer, 1988: xxii). However, the transition of institutions is frequently driven by crises (Beddoe et al., 2009).

Burns (1994: 215-216) introduces the notion of ‘windows of opportunity’ that are very relevant for analyzing social transformations. Interactive situations lacking social equilibria, which typically occur after catastrophes and other shocks, usually give rise to uncertainty, unpredictability, and confusion, and motivate actors to try, individually or collectively, to restructure the situation. In such restructuring activities, actors typically engage in reflective processes and make “choices about choice” and participate in meta-games (Burns 1994: 208). The actors may structure and restructure their preferences, outcomes, and outcome structures, and occasionally also the entire decision and game systems in which they participate. Through such structuring activity, human agents also create, maintain and change institutions and collective or organized agents such as movements, the state, market and bureaucratic organizations (Burns and Dietz, 1992; Burns, 1994: 215–216).

Transformations are the moments in history when the meta choices – “choices about choices” are made. The outcomes of such choices and the new type of system depend largely on the agents that get involved in the collective process of designing the new system. This process could be exclusive and incorporate only a narrow group of decision-makers as frequently happens in “quiet” transitions to authoritarian regimes. Alternatively, they can be more open and include representatives of various social groups, as happened in the political and economic transformation in Eastern Europe. Taking this example, Burns (1994) proposes that transformations are a co-evolutionary process sometimes driven by contradicting actors’ interests. Transformations might entail shifts in core societal organizing principles and systems of rules. As a result, agents with vested interests may struggle to maintain established systems or to limit the changes within them. Other agents act openly or covertly to modify or transform the system. Table 1 summarizes the above discussion and tries to link the social structure layers to the dominant type of human agency that can to be used to transform them.

Table 1. The layers of social structure, the dominant type of agency and the order of change.

Structure layer	Sub-components	The dominant type of human agency	The order of change
Institutional	Informal rules: norms, religion, tradition, customs	Collective and strategic	30 to over 100 years
Institutional	Formal rules: constitutions, written codes of conduct, judiciary, property rights	Collective and citizenship	10 to 50 years
Organizational	Governance structures	Proxy and strategic	5 to 10 years
	Organizations	Proxy, strategic	5 to 10 years
	Networks	Proxy, individual, everyday	Continuous
Technosphere	Infrastructure	Proxy, strategic	10–50 years
Technosphere	Technology	Proxy, individual and everyday	Continuous

(Following Williamson, 1998).

Even in periods of radical change, however, the actors never start from scratch. They cannot choose a completely new system and they always depart from the ongoing social order in which they are embedded. The future evolves from practical activities, experiments, learning, conflict and struggle (Burns, 1994: 216). A similar point of view is presented by evolutionary institutional economists, in which transformations are seen not as a simple replacement of old institutions by new ones, but as a recombination and reworking of old and new elements and groups of actors (e.g. Stark, 1996; Bromley, 2000).

5. Distribution of human agency: differentiating socio-metabolic agent classes

Following the rational choice paradigm could lead us to a conclusion that the society is a sum of individuals (Burns, 1994) and that any forms of agency should be equally distributed among the individuals in the society. Such an approach is typical for integrated assessment models in which human systems are usually separated into population and economic sectors. The parameters that describe population are usually mainly population number, and economic production determines the use of resources and pollution emissions in the model (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012).

It is, however, enough to observe the world to know that such assumptions are very simplistic. People’s resource use and pollution emissions differ according to income, place of abode, type of occupation, and possessions. Moreover, their goals and interests, and the likelihood of them being fulfilled also differ. There are powerful individuals and groups in society who successfully strive for their interests, and there are individuals and groups who, despite struggling, never achieve their objectives. There are also masses of individuals who just strive to make ends meet. The questions are what types of agents or organizations can be incorporated in the models and what sort of agency do they have? Is there a need for a new social class theory taking access to energy and related carbon emissions as the base of social stratification?

Most social differentiation theories follow either the Marxist distinction between physical and capital endowments or the Weberian approach which differentiates classes through inequalities in ownership and income (Kozyr-Kowalski, 1992: 53). Some class theorists also highlight the development stages and inequalities across different countries and world-regions (Offe, 1992: 122). One more dimension that has not been discussed so far by social differentiation theories is the socio-metabolic profile of social classes, which constitutes the common ground for social and natural sciences. Social metabolism refers to the material flows in human societies and the way societies organize their exchanges of energy and materials with the environment (Fischer-Kowalski, 1997; Martinez-Alier, 2009). Social classes can be differentiated based on their metabolic profiles (Martinez-Alier, 2009). The use of energy by human beings can be divided into two main categories. The first one refers to the endosomatic use of energy as food, and the second one refers to the exosomatic use of energy as fuel for cooking and heating, and as power for the artefacts and machines produced by human society. Thus one person a day must eat the equivalent of 1500 to 2500 kcal to sustain their life functions, which is equivalent to about 10 MJ (megajoules) of energy per day or 3.65 GJ per year (Martinez-Alier, 2009). This amount varies only slightly among human beings. A rich person physically cannot eat much more, and even poorer individuals need the equivalent energy in the form of food to survive. Dietary composition and the amount of waste produced, however, will differ across the social strata. Nevertheless, there are still people suffering from hunger, unable to meet their basic needs.

The exosomatic energy use varies to a greater degree. The poorest social groups, who have no permanent access to electricity in their homes, who obtain energy for cooking and heating from the combustion of biomass products, who use overcrowded buses and trains to travel, use in total about 10 GJ of energy per person per year (Martinez-Alier, 2009) and constitute the lowest, socio-metabolic underclass. A more detailed picture can be derived by comparing the carbon footprint of different socio-economic groups. Personal CO₂ emissions are released directly in fuel combustion processes in vehicles, airplanes, heating and cooking appliances, and indirectly through electricity use and consumption of products that generated emissions in the upstream production processes. The authors include CO₂ emissions from energy used directly in homes (for space heating, lighting, etc.), for personal transportation (including personal vehicles and passenger aviation), and from the energy embedded in the production of goods consumed. Kümmel (2011) proposes the term “energy slaves” to describe the exosomatic energy use from fossil fuels by modern human society. On average, the daily energy consumption of a human being is equivalent to the men power of 15 people. Inhabitants of the most energy intensive Western Societies (i.e. the U.S.) consume, per person, the equivalent of the work of 92 people every day.

The results from UK households show that CO₂ emissions are strongly income, but also location, dependent. The highest emissions can be generated by people living in suburbs, mostly in detached houses, and having two or more cars. Emissions of such households equated to about 26 CO₂ tonnes in 2004. This amount was 64% higher than the emissions of the group with lowest emissions of 16 CO₂, which comprised mostly of older and single person urban households as well as the unemployed living mostly in urban areas (Druckman and Jackson, 2009). UK household emissions can be compared with emissions from households located in less developed countries. For example, household emissions in Malaysia, as in the UK, are strongly dependent on income and location. However, Malaysian households with the lowest emissions were found in villages as well as in low-income urban squatter settlements. The urban squatter settlement households emitted on average 10.18 CO₂ tonnes. The village households emitted on average 9.58 CO₂ tonnes per year. Households with the highest CO₂ emissions were located in high cost housing areas and they were responsible on average for 20.14 CO₂ tonnes per year (Majid et al., 2014).

On the other end of the social ladder, there are super-rich hyper-mobile individuals with multiple spacious residences, and whose live-styles are characterized by conspicuous consumption patterns. They are less than 1% of global population and their consumption related greenhouse gas emissions could be over 170 times higher than the world’s poorest 10% (Oxfam, 2015). They can be characterized by extremely high levels of all types of agency. The influence and roles of many super-rich in the world of politics, media, culture, business and industry are often inter-related. In contrast to the super-rich in pre-industrial societies they have almost unlimited mobility, owning properties in different counties, with their homes being guarded and fortified. They have the ability to switch countries of residence, taking the advantage of ‘nondomiciled’ tax status, i.e. being the national of a certain country while not actually living there (Paris, 2013). Table 2 presents a first attempt to stratify the global population according to their socio-metabolic profiles that is based on disaggregated data on consumption related carbon emissions (Oxfam, 2015; Otto et al., 2019).

Table 2. Socio-metabolic class differentiation.

Empty Cell	Percent of global population	Percent of life-style CO₂ emissions	The level of human agency
Socio-metabolic underclass	20%	2.5%	Extremely low
Socio-metabolic energy poor class	30%	7.5%	Low
Socio-metabolic lower class	30%	22%	Moderate level of collective agency
Socio-metabolic middle class	10%	19%	Moderate to high
Socio-metabolic upper class	9.5%	35.4%	Very high
Super-rich	0.54%	13.6%	Extremely high

(Based on: Oxfam, 2015; Otto et al., 2019).

The proportions in Table 2 are striking. The top 10% of the global population is responsible for almost 50% of global consumption related greenhouse gas emissions. The wealthiest 0.54% of the human population is responsible for more lifestyle carbon emissions than the poorest 50% (Otto et al., 2019).

Energy use, as well as carbon dioxide emission, can also be used to analyze the socio-metabolic profile of economic sectors, companies and other organizations. From 1854 to 2010 12.5% of all industrial carbon pollution was produced by just five companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Shell and Conoco Philipps (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2018). To give an example from a different sector – in 2015 Saint-Gobain, a French multinational building materials manufacturer emitted 9.5 million metric tonnes CO₂e (Carbon Disclosure Project, 2016: 22). For a comparison, emissions from industrial processes in France in 2013 equated to 17.6 million tonnes CO₂e (General Directorate for Sustainable Development, 2016: 25) (GTM, 2018).

The socio-metabolic profile of social classes, nations, and organizations can be directly linked with their agency in the Earth system. The global socio-metabolic underclass is obviously characterized by a very low degree of agency. There are rare exceptions of mass protests initiated by the poorest social groups that can collectively influence formal institutions and change their governance (Kashwan, 2017b). However, these people are mostly occupied with making ends meet and have low organizational capabilities. In contrast, the global socio-metabolic upper classes are those who are characterized by a high level of individual agency as well as having the organizational capabilities to actively exercise their agency. Due to their resource incentive life-style they also have the moral obligation to be the agents of a transformation in global sustainability.

6. Improving the representation of human agency in integrated assessment modelling

In this section we ask how the above conceptual discussion could be summarized into guidelines improving the operationalization of human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling. In order to incorporate the different aspects of human agency as discussed in the previous sections, there is a need to introduce agents with heterogeneous goals, opinions and preferences into the models. The agents should be able to form networks that represent their mutual interrelationships and interactions between them. These system interaction rules should ideally refer to the social structure layers differentiated in Table 1, forming a nested hierarchical embeddedness of each agent.

Conceptual models, that incorporate the above requirements have been successfully developed and studied in the recent past. Their core properties might thus form a proper basis for extending IAMs to include heterogeneous agency on the level of (representative) individuals. Such models have been utilized to study opinion, and the associated consensus-formation specifically under the assumption of heterogeneous agents. Most of these works are based on the voter model in which agents exchange discrete (sets of) opinions in order to reach some consensus on a given (possibly abstract) topic or problem (Clifford and Sudbury, 1973; Holley and Liggett, 1975). Acknowledging that in its standard version the voter model considers all agents to have identical agency, extensions have been based on social impact theory (Latane, 1981) that specifically include heterogeneous relationships between single actors or groups (Nowak et al., 1990). Such extended models generally account for proximities between agents in some abstract space of personal relationships which is commonly modeled by assigning agents unique values of persuasiveness and supportiveness, describing their agency with respect to influencing as well as supporting others. While being of generic nature such classes of models can be easily modified to account for various kinds of processes related to social behavior, such as social learning (Kohring, 1996) or leadership (Holyst et al., 2001), which are again directly related to the notions of (heterogeneous distributions of) human agency. Certain models include additional layers of complexity by also accounting for the heterogeneous distribution of different group sizes (Sznajd-Weron, 2005) and certain majorities within those groups (Galam, 2002) when determining criteria for consensus in opinion dynamics.

One particular model of general cultural dynamics that has attracted great interest in the social science community, and that should be highlighted here, is the so-called Axelrod model (Axelrod, 1997). In its core, it accounts for two commonly observed tendencies in large groups of individuals or aggregations thereof: social influence (i.e. agency) and homophily (a process that dynamically influences each individual’s agency over time). The Axelrod-model not only specifically accounts for heterogeneity in the different agents but also (and to some degree unintuitively) allows emerging cultural diversity to be modeled in its convergent state. In general, such flexible approaches allow incorporating individual human agency in terms of the different ties an agent might have with others (Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994; Granovetter, 1977). Additionally, each tie can be associated with different strengths, thus also incorporating heterogeneity in the human agency (Castellano et al., 2009). Network modelling approaches further allow us to explicitly resolve the associated social structure (as well as the temporal evolution thereof) through an evaluation of the overall topology of the network on the meso- or macroscale (Costa et al., 2007).

A necessary step in operationalizing human agency in IAMs includes differentiating global socio-metabolic agent classes with heterogeneous metabolic profiles linking them with the material and energy flows in the bio-physical environment as well as heterogeneous social profiles that specify their preferences, opinions, and positions in social networks. Such efforts could be linked to the emerging research on downscaling planetary boundaries (Häyhä et al., 2016) as well as the established research on differentiating social milieus (e.g. Bauer and Gaskell, 1999). Some authors also propose model co-development, together with citizens and citizen groups (Figueres et al., 2017). Some authors also recommend abandoning the search for one gold-standard model, and instead explore future pathways based on a multitude of different concepts and representations of people and human agency (Donges et al., 2017b). For example, Donges et al. (2018) propose a modelling framework allowing incorporation of large sets of different models and concepts, in a standardized form, in order to assess and compare different future trajectories.

7. Conclusions

The Anthropocene has emerged unintentionally as a side effect of the industrialization of human societies (Crutzen, 2006). There are only a few examples of the human ability to internally interact with planetary geological forces, with the Montreal Protocol being the most often referred to example (Velders et al., 2007). At the same time historical examples show that there are instances of rapid transitions in societies (Bunker and Alban, 1997). Achieving policy challenges as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals require a certain degree of societal transformation. The concept of agency is central to implementing transformations needed to limit global warming and achieve the SDGs. Most of the IAMs that dominate the scientific assessments of global environmental changes do not include a representation of human societies that would have a capacity to undertake system transformations. At the same time, there is a relatively rich social science theory that can be used to improve the operationalization of human agency in integrated assessment modelling efforts.

In this paper we show that human agency can actively shape the World-Earth system (c.f. Donges et al., 2018) through interventions at different layers of social structure. Human agency, however, is not evenly distributed across all human individuals and social groups. We postulate a differentiation of socio-metabolic agent classes that could be integrated into integrated assessment modelling efforts. More socio-economic sub-national and sub-population group data is needed for this purpose (c.f. Otto et al., 2015). Social institutions for sustainable management of global, regional, and local ecosystems, however, do not generally evolve spontaneously, but have to be consciously designed and implemented by the resource users (Gatzweiler and Hagedorn, 2002; Kluvankova-Oravska et al., 2009). Each social transformation contains a disruptive component that implies a destruction of existing patterns of social interaction and institutional structures, and creation and emergence of new patterns and structures. Introducing more dimensions of human agency into IAMs, and co-creating scenarios and pathways for modelling exercises together with citizens and institutions, would help break the barriers that disconnect peoples’ actuality and agency with models, a discourse which has been gaining weight among policy makers (Figures, 2016). This disconnection can be broken by co-developing with citizens and various resource users the elements of global human-environmental system models, and by considering the people behind the numbers and the possible ways of funneling their agency. We encourage the integrated modelling community to work more closely with social scientists as well as we encourage social scientists to explore the methods and concepts applied in natural sciences.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their feedback that helped them to improve the paper. I.M.O., J.F.D., and R.C. are grateful for financial support by the Earth League’s EarthDoc programme. I.M.O. is supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 821010. J.F.D. is grateful for financial support by the Stordalen Foundation via the Planetary Boundary Research Network (PB.net). M.W. is financially supported by the Leibniz Association (project DominoES). This research has been carried out within the COPAN – Co-evolutionary Pathways Research Group at PIK.

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Should we connect children to nature in the Anthropocene?

Brendon M. H. Larson, Bob Fischer, Susan Clayton

Abstract

To most conservationists and many parents, it seems obvious that it is a good thing to teach children to value the natural world. Not only does connection with nature support their development and well-being, but it also supports ongoing efforts by humans to sustain the natural world.
However, there are incontrovertible trends towards a diminution of the state of nature as a consequence of human activities.
In this context, as a thought experiment, we address a rather grim question: Should we still encourage children to be connected to nature, to care for it and be concerned about it?
We first consider the meaning of connection to nature in the Anthropocene, and then turn to a consideration of several ethical dimensions of this problem, including the potential trade-off between well-known health benefits of time in nature and the long-term psychological impacts of loss of nature (e.g., ecological grief and solastalgia).
While there is no simple answer to our question, our analysis does highlight underappreciated ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene as well as the value of the local, urban forms of nature to which children around the world are increasingly exposed and engaging with in unprecedented ways.

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

The end of nature probably also makes us reluctant to attach ourselves to its remnants, for the same reason that we usually don’t choose friends from among the terminally ill. I love the mountain outside my back door … But I know that some part of me resists getting to know it better—for fear, weak-kneed as it sounds, of getting hurt. … There is no future in loving nature (McKibben, 1989).

1 INTRODUCTION

On an evening in early spring, one of us (BL) brought his 5-year-old son to see two species of mole salamanders crossing a small road to travel from a woodland, where they overwinter underground, to a breeding pond. It was cool and rainy, so the conditions were salutary for salamanders, and father and son observed about 30 of them make their way. From our perspective as environmentalists and parents, this scene is a positive one because a member of the next generation was learning to value living beings and the natural world. At one point in the evening, however, upon finding a dead salamander that had been crushed by a car, the child broke down in tears. We cannot help but wonder whether his sorrow was outweighed by the benefits of this excursion, by the pleasures and wonder of a first-hand connection with these beautiful creatures (see Carson, 1998).

Our aim here is to pose a related question, although at a much larger scale: whether, in this era of mass extinctions and environmental degradation, children should still be encouraged to be emotionally invested in the natural world (and if so, why).

The prevailing view is not only that parents should encourage connection with nature, but that it is critical that they succeed. In his classic book, Richard Louv (2008) documented the growing disconnection of children from nature, with increasingly urban children spending less time outside and more time looking at screens (or capturing virtual Pokémon creatures outside; Dorward et al., 2017), and argued that it is essential to overcome ‘nature-deficit disorder’.¹ More recently, Soga and Gaston (2016) reviewed the causes (i.e. loss of opportunity and orientation) and consequences (i.e. changes in health/well-being, emotion, attitude and behaviour) of the resulting ‘extinction of experience’, and proposed ways to reverse it. Accordingly, Abson et al. (2019) consider reconnection with nature to be one of three ‘transformational “sustainability interventions”’. This growing body of research has contributed to a veritable parenting movement to get children outdoors.

There is a curious disconnect, however, between this invocation to connect children with nature and the state of said nature.² Nature has changed dramatically over the past several decades, and it continues to change, with many indicators revealing seemingly inexorable declines wrought by human activity (e.g. IPBES, 2019). It is the sum total of these human impacts, evidenced by certain geological markers, which has given rise to the proposal that humans now inhabit the Anthropocene epoch (Corlett, 2015).³ Although diverse commentators, poets and scholars are asking hard questions about how to face up to the Anthropocene (e.g. Bringhurst & Zwicky, 2018; Ghosh, 2016; Major, 2018; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2019; Wapner, 2010), most people generally proceed as though humans will figure things out and reverse the trends, despite the evidence of the growing challenge to doing so (e.g. IPCC, 2021; Jewell & Cherp, 2019; UNEP, 2019). People behave as if it were not the case that ‘around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history’ and the ‘average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900’ (IPBES, 2019). These changes are already creating sadness and anxiety among children (Chawla, 2020). Despite recognition that nature’s ‘baseline’ is changing (Soga & Gaston, 2018), parents go on parenting as though their children will inherit a world that looks much like the one they have known.⁴

Assume, for the purpose of this thought experiment,⁵ that dramatic climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental harms are largely irremediable, so the state of nature will continue to precipitously decline. We strongly hope this assumption is false, yet we are interested in exploring its implications. In particular, we ask an important—albeit unsettling—question for anyone invested in raising and educating children⁶: Should we continue the common practice of trying to connect children to nature? If so, why? The environmental crisis is likely to impose all sorts of costs on children already. Should we at least minimize the emotional burdens associated with the decline of nature?⁷

We approach these questions as nature-loving parents ourselves, parents who feel that the lives of our children would be much, much diminished with fewer connections to the natural world. We cannot help but recoil in raising this question. Nonetheless, insofar as views about raising children have been shaped by prior, pre-Anthropocene ways of thinking, conventional wisdom may need to be overturned in the Anthropocene (e.g. Hamilton, 2017; Head, 2015; Latour, 2018; Lövbrand et al., 2015). For example, although some readers might consider our argument to be anthropocentric given its focus on human well-being rather than the well-being of other species, our thought experiment begins with the assumption that it is too late for many of those other beings—and the very concept of anthropocentrism is being challenged giving the prevalence of human impacts in the Anthropocene (see Hamilton, 2017). We approach these questions in the spirit of promoting better dialogue among conservationists and naturalists, parents and educators, all of whom are wrestling with questions about how to raise children and teach them about nature and its value in this new epoch.

Ultimately, we argue that several of the reasons people might offer for connecting children with nature are weaker than many might be inclined to suppose, at least given the assumptions we make here. Still, some notable reasons remain: first, as a way for people to connect with their children; second, as an attempt to slow the inevitable; and third, as a way to live out our own love for nature.

2 CONNECTION TO NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

We begin by clarifying the meaning of ‘connecting to nature’ in the Anthropocene.⁸ Connection to nature is generally considered to include an emotional and a cognitive component. The emotional component is something like loving nature, which comprises both deep appreciation and affection for the object of love. The cognitive component involves developing a self-concept that incorporates an interdependence with the natural world—by locating oneself in relationship to nature. A visual analogue can be seen in the ‘inclusion of nature in the self scale’ developed by Schultz (2001). It asks people to rate their connection to nature by identifying the appropriate distance between two circles, one of which represents the self and one of which represents nature.

But what, exactly, is it that environmentalists want their children to connect to? The idea of connecting to nature is contentious (Fletcher, 2017; Zylstra et al., 2019), mainly because a number of scholars have argued that it is untenable to define nature as a realm distinct from human influence (e.g. Clayton et al., 2017; Fletcher, 2017; Hamilton, 2017; Lorimer, 2012). Consequently, we are not focused here on nature in terms of a wilderness ideal, but on nature in its diverse manifestations, from more or less urban regions through to more ‘wild’ landscapes (e.g. Caro et al., 2011). It is important to recognize that—although connection to nature can be both activated or suppressed among adults—the foundations for connection are laid in childhood, and children who have early experiences with wild nature are more likely to experience that connection (Chawla, 2020; Hosaka et al., 2017).

As this last point suggests, connection to nature occurs along a continuum. At one extreme, imagine a child who rarely leaves the center of a metropolis, whether Mexico City or New York or Tokyo, a child whose connection to nature is largely limited to interactions with a few trees, the occasional bird and glimpses of sky. Soberingly, on a global scale, such a child would often inhabit a slum, whether Khayelitsha in South Africa or Neza in Mexico City, and the visible parts of nature would be filtered through smog. Moving towards the other extreme, a child may be commonly immersed within a natural space (whether a lakeshore, a savannah, or a forest), although these landscapes will vary in the degree to which they have been impacted by humans. Obviously, not all families live in places that have been damaged equally in the Anthropocene—nor are their abilities to connect to nature equitable. For simplicity’s sake, we focus on children raised in relatively urban locations, as this will be the normal experience for children given global trends (UN, 2018).

Connection to nature is also both particular and selective. It is particular in the sense that, at least when children are young, they do not connect with something as abstract as the entire natural world, but instead with particular flowers, trees and charismatic megafauna—or even bees, snakes and worms. They may also have little concern for abstractions that matter to adults. Genovart et al. (2013), for example, found that Spanish adolescents are better able to recognize exotic species of mammals and fish than native ones, probably because they encounter them more frequently.

Connection to nature is selective in the sense that positive emotions are not typically linked to all parts of nature equally. Nature, of course, is not all beautiful vistas and majestic megafauna.⁹ It is, in addition, hurricanes and cancer and animals dying of thirst during droughts. Additionally, it is extinction events and climate change—both of which can have natural causes, although the recent examples of concern are obviously anthropogenic. The point is just that when people talk about wanting their children to connect to nature, they generally have in mind the parts of nature that somehow serve their interests, whatever those interests may be—aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and material. They are less keen on the parts that are actively harmful; children who became overly concerned that coronaviruses were going to be eradicated might be a cause for concern. Most people have no objection to their children being attached to nature selectively; indeed, it seems like a good thing. Appreciating the selectivity matters, though; in order to inculcate connection to nature, we must be more precise about what, exactly, children are being connected to.

Returning to the main thread: Parents may have several motivations for wanting to connect their children to nature. On the face of it, this seems reasonable, both relative to the values of individual parents and from a more general environmental perspective. If parents do not connect their children to nature, those children will likely care less about it and be less aware of its continued deterioration, and thus be less likely to pass along these values to their own children, etc. This could undermine the basis for conservation efforts. As Kahn et al. (2009) observed, ‘It is hard enough to address environmental problems, such as global climate change, when people are aware of them; it is all the harder when they are not. Thus, the problem of environmental generational amnesia may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime’. Psychologists have indeed found that parents’ environmental values have a strong influence on those of their children (e.g. Casaló & Escario, 2016) and that time in nature as a child (rather than knowledge per se) is one of the strongest predictors of ‘environmental citizenship’ as an adult (e.g. Asah et al., 2018).

Nonetheless, adults have to consider the extent to which our reasons for connecting children to nature, including the desire to share our values with them, hold up in the Anthropocene. Our argument here turns on recognizing that nature is no longer stable in the way we have come to assume in the Holocene, and that it will continue to change—perhaps more and more rapidly—even under the most optimistic scenarios. Strikingly, for example, children are currently receiving education about a world that is arguably fading away: a world with polar bears and orangutans and rhinos. The pioneering work of Glenn Albrecht et al. (2007) was the first to describe a new form of psychological distress people may suffer: ‘As opposed to nostalgia—the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home—solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’. This is a particular form of distress for those who are connected to nature—one echoed in the quotation from Bill McKibben that opens this paper and in the commonplace observation that environmentalists inhabit ‘a world of wounds’. And it merely compounds more widespread versions of environmentally inflected psychological burdens, such as climate change depression, climate change anxiety and ecological grief (see Burke et al., 2018; Clayton, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).

Perhaps, then, promoting a love for nature is a bit like promoting a yearning for the Roman Empire. There is no real possibility of recovering that world, and a child who values it may be both dissatisfied with, and unfit for, modern society. Likewise, if there is no real possibility of recovering the natural world that people have so long valued, a child who acquires those values may simply inherit a nostalgia for a world that is no longer available.

With all that in mind, perhaps it is better to prepare children for a future that is increasingly likely rather than for a past for which adults feel nostalgia. Again, we say this not as technophiles who wish to escape to the stars, but as nature-loving parents who are considering how best to navigate our unfortunate present.

3 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Does it make sense to raise children differently given the severity of the environmental crisis? How might this question be addressed? The most obvious way to approach it is to ask whether it is good for children to have certain values. This leads us to examine the nature of human well-being. There are several theories that philosophers have developed about what makes human lives go well—that is, about what is good for individual human beings, rather than what is good for society, the environment or anything else. Two of the most prominent theories are hedonism and the objective list theory. We consider their implications in turn.

3.1 Hedonism

Hedonism is not the view that people crave sensual pleasures. Rather, it is the view that positive and negative affective states—pleasures and pains, happiness and unhappiness—are the only things that contribute to someone’s well-being. All else equal, hedonism says that your life goes better insofar as it has more positive affective states; it goes worse insofar as it has more negative affective states. Given this theory of well-being, the question of whether it is good for children to have certain values boils down to this: does having those values produce more positive versus negative affective states?

Insofar as a child who is connected to nature values experiences in nature and thus is more likely to pursue those experiences, it is possible that the experiences do indeed produce more positive versus negative affective states. After all, there appear to be many important benefits to such experiences (see Children & Nature Network, 2021). Consider this summary from Kuo (2015):

Contact with nature has been tied to health in a plenitude of studies. Time spent in and around tree-lined streets, gardens, parks, and forested and agricultural lands is consistently linked to objective, long-term health outcomes. The less green a person’s surroundings, the higher their risk of morbidity and mortality – even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other possible confounding variables. The range of specific health outcomes tied to nature is startling, including depression and anxiety disorder, diabetes mellitus, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), various infectious diseases, cancer, healing from surgery, obesity, birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal complaints, migraines, respiratory disease, and others … Finally, neighborhood greenness has been consistently tied to life expectancy and all-cause mortality.

However, we caution against drawing unduly optimistic conclusions from these studies. Insofar as children have limited access to nature, valuing and enjoying it may be a source of frustration rather than various benefits. This is, of course, the main concern that drives our paper. Promoting love for nature makes sense if children will have access to what they love. But if the object of love is lost, promoting love of nature seems like a way of making children vulnerable rather than happy (Chawla, 2020).

There is also a risk of overstating the significance of the research on connection to nature and various health outcomes. What many of these studies show is that there are appreciable benefits associated with being around trees and running water; they do not necessarily show that human beings benefit from extensive wild nature per se, and certainly not the kind required to, say, conserve many of the species that are currently being lost. Although some research has demonstrated the importance of greater biodiversity for human mental health and a great deal of research shows the importance of healthy ecosystems for physical health, much of the research on nature’s psychological benefits uses fairly minimal standards for nature—a view out a window, a plant in an office, or even a painting on a wall (Aerts et al., 2018). It seems plausible that some of these health benefits could be explained by factors not inherently tied to nature, much less to the kind of nature that is at issue in the environmental crisis. One can imagine, for instance, creating artificial environments that are less stressful and have superior air quality, which may well have the same effects as the natural environment. It is also the case that greenspaces can be preserved without our managing to preserve polar bears or coral reefs; even if there are benefits from being around trees per se, that does not necessarily mean being around native trees, or extensive biodiversity, or what have you (although see Lev et al., 2020).

So, while there may be a sense in which experiences of nature benefit children, it would be cold comfort to environmentalist parents if the ‘nature’ they experience is simply a manicured park. This strongly suggests that while environmentalist parents probably do want to benefit their children by teaching them to love nature, it is a particular sort of nature they want their children to value. The target is not ‘whatever provides certain psychological and health benefits’, but rather the rich biological and ecological diversity that, of course, is now so severely threatened.

3.2 The objective list theory

Consider a second theory of well-being. Objective list theorists say that some things are good for you even if they do not produce more happiness. For instance, it may be good to know certain truths about the world, even if they are not comfortable or encouraging. In the current context, for instance, there are the truths about the ways in which people are damaging the natural world: on balance, any particular individual might not get any pleasure (and indeed, might experience some significant psychological discomfort) when staring down the fact that they may soon live in a world with no Great Barrier Reef. Still, you might think that it would be bad for that person to put their head in the sand—not just because they thereby ensure that they will not be some small part of broader solutions, but because they are less in touch with reality as a result of not knowing. It is bad for them, not just bad for the world.

This view is sometimes developed by appealing to the idea of eudaimonia or flourishing. According to ancient Greek thought, beings achieve eudaimonia when they are operating as they ought to operate, when they are living out their natures and being the best versions of the kinds of things they are. On such views, things can be good for you without affecting your affective state. It is often thought that when humans achieve eudaimonia, they will have a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as personal autonomy and feelings of connection (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a sense of connection to nature is associated with this particular approach to well-being (Cervinka et al., 2012).

Even if we grant the objective list theory of well-being, though, we do not yet have an argument for the importance of loving, or connecting to, nature, but only for knowing things about nature. To get that stronger claim, someone might insist that it is good for us to love things that are valuable; and, since nature is valuable, it is good for us to love nature—even if it is sometimes costly, in hedonic terms, for us to do so.¹⁰ This is sometimes how people think about appreciating art. The view is something like: it is good to be the sort of person who experiences awe in front of masterpieces, as that means you have developed the ability to be sensitive to—and richly appreciate—certain forms of value.

Note, however, that there are at least three problems with this argument. First, even if it is good for us to love things that are valuable and nature is indeed valuable, the objective list theory does not imply that it is good for us to love nature all things considered. After all, the objective list theory agrees with hedonism that happiness and unhappiness are relevant to well-being; it simply disagrees with hedonism that they are the only things relevant to well-being. If the hedonic costs of loving nature are high enough—as, we worry, they will be for many children—then it is not good for them to love nature all things considered, even if it is good for them in one respect.

Second, while it may be good to love things that are valuable, it does not follow that it is good to love everything that is valuable. It may be that there is only so much room in a life to devote attention and effort to the things that are loved. This suggests the need to be selective in terms of the values that adults promote in our children. Additionally, there is a significant difference between loving nature and appropriately appreciating its value. We are raising the possibility that adults should not teach children to be enamoured with nature, not that they should not teach them to see its worth. This is akin to discouraging children from being enamoured with Jackson Pollock’s paintings, although it may still be important for them to see why they are valuable as works of art. You can appreciate the value of a thing without being depressed by its loss, as demonstrated by most people’s ability to watch the news without descending into despair. Again, promoting love for nature may be a bit like promoting love for the Roman Empire, rather than an appreciation for the way it advanced some people’s interests at the time.

Third, this argument for loving nature depends on nature having intrinsic value. For those already enamoured with the environment, this may be an attractive view. But it is worth wondering how it could be defended. After all, it is notable that many environmentalists retreat to instrumental defences of nature in public fora: they appeal to ecosystem services (but see Dempsey & Robertson, 2012). This may be some indication that the arguments for the intrinsic value of natural systems are less persuasive than they may at first appear (see Newman et al., 2017). Moreover, even in private, conservationists would likely acknowledge that the view that nature has intrinsic value has some unpalatable implications if not carefully qualified: recalling the earlier points about coronavirus extinction, very few of us want to say that all dimensions of nature are valuable.

3.3 What is good for parents?

Perhaps we have taken too atomistic of an approach. We are writing as environmentalists, so our reasons for wanting our children to love nature are not simply about promoting the good for our children. Compare: if we love classical music, we might want our children to love it as well simply because we think that classical music is worth valuing. But we also might want our children to love classical music because having shared values makes them people to whom we can relate. Shared values can enhance our relationship in a way that divergent values may not. It is like passing along a culture, and thus extending our legacy. Many Indigenous peoples, for example, describe relationships with the natural world and experience this as a component of health and well-being. If children were to reject this worldview (as they were sometimes forced to do by colonizing forces), it might be seen as a disturbing rejection of those cultural values.

Granted, people often fail to pass on their values. When these values are not central to our identity, the differences between us and our children can be occasion for celebration—we learn their unique contours as individuals. But when these values are more central to who we are—when our children reject our religious tradition (or our lack of one), when they are not concerned about the causes we hold dear—such differences can create distance. In many cases, that is not the end of the world. But the gulf is no less real for that.

In any case, some people may find themselves emotionally constituted such that, if their children were not to have certain values with respect to the environment, they would find it hard to relate to their children. So, even if it is not good for our children to have certain values with respect to the environment, we may well find ourselves determined to pass these parts of ourselves along. In so doing, are we acting selfishly? Very possibly. And yet it is hard to criticize selfishness in this context, as it is in service of sustaining the relationships that are most central to our lives. Many people would find it difficult to shrug off their values with respect to the environment as simply one of the many differences between generations. To the contrary, these values feature prominently in their identities as environmentalists and nature lovers. So this may be one of many cases where who we are has an enormous influence on what it makes sense to do.

Obviously, this is a far cry from the defence of environmental parenting we might have wanted. If the best we can say is that we are trying to connect our children to nature so that we can connect to our children, then while we will have a perfectly understandable rationale, it is no longer a rationale that is really about nature. Nature is, on this view, just one more means to an end—an attitude that, of course, is part of what led to the environmental crisis in the first place. Obviously enough, this charge could be levelled just as fiercely against the previous attempted justification, the one that tried to explain the aim of connecting children to nature in terms of their own well-being. Still, we have indeed found a reason to encourage our children to love nature, and that is notable. Can we, perhaps, strengthen that reason with some additional considerations?

3.4 What is good for nature?

At this juncture, the obvious move is to revert to more traditional arguments about creating the next generation of environmentalists for nature’s sake—not ours or our children’s (even if they also benefit). The thought might be that teaching children to love nature is the best protection against the myriad cultural and economic forces that promote a purely instrumental view of nature’s worth.

There are two problems with this. The first is that if this really is an era defined by foregone environmental conclusions—if humans are past the point of being able to prevent numerous species losses, climate change and the loss of various ecosystems—then it will be harder to defend teaching children to love nature for nature’s sake. Many of the valuable things people would hope to preserve simply cannot be preserved. Likewise, it will be difficult to defend teaching children to love nature for society’s sake. After all, the ultimate reason why conservationists want certain values to be common in society is because those values can, in the aggregate, make a difference to the environmental crisis. If humans can indeed avert that crisis, then it makes sense for parents to do their part and raise their children accordingly. But under the assumption that this crisis cannot be averted, then parents’ reason to do their part evaporates.

Second, and rather bleakly, it is not clear that children would be making a mistake in having a more instrumental view of nature’s worth—or, at least, an instrumental view of the worth of the nature that they will inherit. To appreciate this point, imagine a beautifully maintained classic car, perfectly detailed and lovely in all the ways such a vehicle can be. Now suppose that this car is used and abused to the point where all its aesthetic virtues have been lost; it is only good for short trips to and from the grocery store. In such circumstances, there is no mistake in having an instrumental view of the car, even if it would have been a mistake not to have appreciated it differently in its former glory. Likewise, if much of nature’s value is bound up with its beauty, diversity and complexity, then it may not be a mistake—or much of one—to devalue an uglier, more homogenous and flattened natural world.

3.5 What is good—Revisited

There may, however, be some better arguments for encouraging children to love nature. First, from a nature-centric perspective, it is generally accepted that people who feel connected to nature are more likely to act on its behalf. While it is certainly true that humans cannot completely prevent species loss and ecological degradation at this point, we recognize that it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Even given the assumption that radical change is inevitable, people may still be able to slow it, thereby increasing the longevity of what evolution has wrought—both for its own sake and for those who will be able to enjoy it. Teaching children to feel a connection to the natural world will, we hope, make it more likely that larger steps are taken to protect it. This pushes the problem back, of course: our children may not be able to run this argument for their children, or at least not for their grandchildren. But we are not looking for reasons that will last until the end of time; we are looking for reasons that can guide parents making choices in the present.

Second, from an anthropocentric point of view, connecting to nature does seem to have benefits for people. The biophilia hypothesis proposed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (1984) suggested that people have an instinctive tendency to connect to the natural environment. Ecopsychologists and others have interpreted this to mean that such a connection is necessary for mental health (Kahn & Hasbach, 2012). As stated above, there is evidence that a connection to nature is associated with indicators of psychological well-being; and exposure to natural scenery appears to enhance people’s social relationships and not just their individual well-being (Castelo et al., 2021; Cervinka et al., 2012; Olivos & Clayton, 2017). It is unclear how much nature, and what kind of nature, is necessary to establish a connection, but establishing a connection to nature appears to have benefits beyond merely a positive mood.

Finally, promoting love for nature can be important as an expression of our own love for nature, where the odds of success are largely irrelevant to whether we act on its behalf. For those of us who are already environmentalists, the destruction of the natural world is a vision of hell. Accordingly, we continue to raise our children to love the natural world in the hope that our actions will make a difference, even if the odds are very long (e.g. Bain & Bongiorno, 2019; Ojala, 2017; Pihkala, 2017). This is the view that is expressed powerfully in an arresting exchange in Barbara Kingsolver’s (2012) novel, Flight Behaviour, between Ovid, a scientist studying monarchs and Dellarobia, the protagonist:

Ovid: ‘Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction’.

Dellarobia: ‘So you’re one of the people that can? … Watch an extinction’.

Ovid: ‘If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?’

Dellarobia: ‘You do everything you can … And then, I guess, everything you can’t. You keep doing, so your heart won’t stop’.

4 CONCLUSION

These arguments are tentative, and leave out a great many important issues. For instance, even if adults should try to promote connection to nature, there remain difficult questions about methods. Our children may connect to nature quite differently than past generations, not only because of the shifting-baseline syndrome (Soga & Gaston, 2018), but also because their lives are caught up in swirling socio-cultural and technological changes that remain (and will remain) foreign to most parents (Clayton et al., 2017). It is possible, for example, that digital games and screen time may help connect children to nature, although that is hardly clear (e.g. Edwards & Larson, 2020; Fletcher, 2017). There are also hard problems about how children’s connection to nature should be informed by the need to engage with issues of justice. How can children engage in conservation that ‘takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics’ (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019)? As children engage with nature in the ways of the future, it may be even more important for parents, and other involved adults, to facilitate other ways of knowing and to actively encounter ‘the paradoxical tension between endings and possibilities’ (Moser, 2019) and the mourning (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017) demanded by the times. As parents and also as teachers and as a society, we need to investigate ways to provide children with the tools that will give them emotional resilience in a time of existential crisis (Baker et al., 2021; Ojala, 2017; Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019).

Our aim here has not been to provide definitive answers to fraught questions about whether and how to promote connection to nature among children. Obviously, individual parents will have to apply their own wisdom to the unique experience of raising each particular child. We have instead tried to prompt a more systematic conversation about these questions — a conversation that, as parents and environmentalists, we hope our children will eventually join.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We appreciate comments on the draft manuscript from Rachael Edwards and Clare Palmer and from the editors and reviewers, including Thomas Beery and Dave Kendal.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS

B.M.H.L. conceived the project; B.M.H.L. and B.F. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All three authors contributed to revisions and have approved the manuscript for publication.

ENDNOTES

¹Our edition of Louv’s book concludes with a ‘field guide’ containing ‘100 actions we can take’.
²Although it is perhaps not such a curious disconnect if one recalls the proportion of humanity that has little regard for nature and its value; for a brilliant satire on this point, see Chapron et al. (2018).
³We adopt this term with awareness that it is controversial; for discussion, see Bilgrami (2020), Hamilton (2017), Haraway (2016) and Tsing et al. (2017), among many other commentators. We are also wary of our question being interpreted as an apologia for the destruction of nature, which we wish to unequivocally declare that it is not.
⁴Other scholars have considered the reasons for our denial and inaction as well as the inertial and psychological reasons we assume for the best (e.g. Hulme 2009; Hamilton 2010; Norgaard 2011).
⁵For a related, entertaining and thoughtful engagement with ‘despair’, see McMurry (2018).
⁶One might think that this would be all of us, although many commentators take a decidedly less optimistic view of the human race–not to mention the decision many couples have made to not have children.
⁷Someone might object to the very question. They might say that if we are going to change the way we encourage our children to relate to nature for the sake of their well-being, then why would not we change the way we encourage them to relate to other things for the sake of their well-being? For instance, it is awful to lose pets and romantic partners. Should we discourage our children from loving pets and people, in the interest of preventing them from suffering loss? By way of reply, we should note that parents sometimes do discourage children from loving too much; they recommend maintaining perspective on the objects of their affection. For example, some parents may have had pertinent conversations with their teenagers about high school relationships. Accordingly, something similar may be good advice when it comes to nature. The obvious difference is that, at some point, we hope our children will form lasting bonds with people (and perhaps other organisms, too). If that is the aim, then there comes a time when reserve is inappropriate. At some point, most romantic relationships require you to be ‘all in’. Our partners expect us to invest in our relationships in ways that assume their longevity. But your relationship with nature is not like that: nature itself has no expectations.
⁸Although we focus on the concept of ‘connection to nature’, our argument could alternatively be couched in terms of the ‘extinction of experience’. Using the classification of Gaston & Soga, 2020, we are considering whether, to some extent, reduced childhood interactions with nature may be adaptive at this point in human history. Note that we are not promoting the absolute extinction of these interactions, although perhaps shift emphasis to interactions with living organisms as opposed to wild nature [which Gaston and Soga (2020) refer to as a ‘broader’ view].
⁹E. O. Wilson’s (1984) biophilia hypothesis, notably, implies that a negative emotional response to some aspects of nature can also indicate a connection, albeit not the kind most relevant here.
¹⁰We can get a similar result via an indirect route. People might think that it is good for our children to develop a sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity. And they might think that one important way to do that involves promoting love for nature. In that case, it might be good for them to love nature even if loving it involves some hedonic costs: the price of a sense of wonder is being saddened by the way that nature is being damaged, but wonder is worth the price.

Supporting Information

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What is the role of creative industries in the Anthropocene? An argument for planetary cultural policy

Miikka Pyykkönen ^a, Christiaan De Beukelaer ^bc

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2025.101971

Under a Creative Commons license

Open access

Highlights

•International policy discourses on culture and sustainability are anthropocentric, economic growth-oriented and methodologically nationalist, and international cultural policy organisations and documents, such as United Nations resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021, have been impotent in intertwining culture with ecological sustainability.

•Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 is analyzed as an examplar of this anthropocentric and economist discourse.

•The ideological underpinnings of cultural policy are the primary reason why culture has not been seriously recognized in international sustainability policies. A profound shift away from anthropocentric worldviews, growth-oriented ideologies, and methodologically nationalist frameworks is needed.

•This ‘new’ understanding of culture in international cultural policies have to cover nature and ecology and see humans and their culture as part of larger ecosystemic framework. Incorporating such a view in public policy requires a new kind of “planetary cultural policy”.

Abstract

Many artistic expressions call for cultural, social and political change. Though the policy environments in which they emerge remain predominantly wedded to a consumption-driven creative economy. In doing so, they tacitly endorse a methodologically nationalist perspective on artistic expression, trade in creative goods and services, and cultural identity. By using the United Nations resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 as a case in point, we argue that the language of this document, which reflects the current hegemonic discourse of creative economy, misses its target when claiming to promote sustainability because it is (1) anthropocentric, (2) growth-focused and (3) methodologically nationalist. Through a discourse analysis of this particular UN resolution, we demonstrate the multiple and conflicting connections between culture and sustainability through the perspective of planetary well-being. The main target of our criticism is the anthropocentric nature of sustainability discourses, but also their unreserved promotion of perpetual economic growth. In response, we articulate the need for a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric worldviews, growth-oriented ideologies, and methodologically nationalist frameworks to enable environmentally engaged cultural policies and citizens.

Keywords

Creative economy; Climate crisis; Anthropocentrism; Methodological nationalism; Cosmopolitanism; Planetary well-being

1. Introduction: the tension between planet, people and culture

In November 2019, the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared that 2021 would be the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. The idea of the theme year was formulated in discussions between United Nations (UN) agencies, including UN-Habitat, UNESCO and UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; recently rebranded as UN Trade & Development), which also consulted representatives of pro-creative economy organisations such as the OECD and the Asia-Europe Foundation. Indonesia drafted the resolution text, which was then presented to a group of representatives of 27 countries from all inhabited continents. The final and published version of the resolution is a consensus of these multi-layered discussions. Rather than being a final result that every involved state can fully rally behind, in practice a “consensus” text is precisely one containing conflicts. It is through the subtleties of phrasing that consenting parties ensure that all other parties can recognise their red lines, pet peeves, and concerns in the text, without (seemingly) ceding too much ground. A consensus is therefore not a strong joint position, but merely a position that no one strongly objects to.

Much like other United Nations documents, the resolution commits loyalty to the background organisations and their policies and programmes, as well as the international organisations and their branches that work on the topics of the resolution:

Recalling the Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which states that the organization, as part of its purposes and functions, will maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge by encouraging cooperation among the nations in all branches of intellectual activity, and noting the report of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on culture and sustainable development, in which it is stated that cultural and creative industries should be part of economic growth strategies […] Welcoming the efforts of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other entities of the United Nations system to promote the creative economy for sustainable development. (United Nations, 2019, 2, emphasis added)

The resolution is, therefore, not so much a visionary document but largely a reflection of past initiatives and interventions. The document is thus a palimpsest through which decades of ideas and initiatives filter through.

The key argument of the resolution is that the creative industries can, should and do promote sustainable and innovation-based economic growth. The resolution mainstreams culture in and for sustainability by defining culture above all through its economic significance and national scope: “[The resolution] encourages all to observe the year in accordance with national priorities to raise awareness, promote cooperation and networking, encourage sharing best practices and experiences, enhance human resource capacity, promote an enabling environment at all levels as well as tackle the challenges of the creative economy” (UNCTAD, 2021). UNCTAD led the implementation of the theme year policies and activities in consultation with UNESCO and other relevant UN agencies.

Despite the triumphant tone of the resolution, culture plays a minor role in policies for sustainable development (Duxbury et al., 2017). If anything, it plays a contradictory role: art and culture can certainly play a positive part, but the creative industries have an enormous environmental impact that needs to be addressed (Miller, 2018). This is partly because of how the sector operates, but also because of the sponsorship connections many arts institutions maintain with fossil fuel producers, airlines and car manufacturers (Evans, 2015).

Our article builds on the following streams and debates in cultural policy: the dominant discourses and trends in international cultural policies, the economisation of cultural policies, the position of creative economies and industries in national economies, and, most of all, the meaning and position of culture in policies and politics for an ecologically sustainable world, that is, the rethinking of the human/culture and nature relationship. Brkldly, and eventually, the focus of our article is on the relation between cultural policy and cosmopolitan citizenship and identity, we posit that a new kind of human actorship in the era of climate crisis, one that includes the idea of human beings as members of the planetary community/entity. This is because we think we need more critical use of comprehensive research and policy concepts cultural policies. Such concepts still remain disconnected from the commonplace understandings of sustainability in cultural policy, as we explain in this paper. We use concepts such as the planetary well-being approach (Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Brundtland Commission, 1987) down-to-earth approach, which combine ecological, social, cultural and economic perspectives, allowing us to transcend the afore-mentioned tensions and dualisms. (A) They allow us to move towards a more robust and permanent approach when it comes to human and cultural actions – be they economic, anthropocentric or related to identity/citizenship – within natural ecosystems. (B) They enable us to rethink what culture should mean to become a key concept in the manifold efforts for sustainable futures. (C) We can use them to break the local/national-global dualism and reconstruct cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical (Beck, 2016) approaches.

This article thus explores how international policy documents frame culture, creative economy and culture’s role in sustainability. We look, in particular, at the documents and narratives proposed by United Nations Agencies, because they and their sub-actors pursue trendsetting in terms of what national, regional and local cultural policies focus on, and how culture should or could be approached (Pirnes, 2008). We are aware that there are local cultural policies and practices, which include critical and eco-sensitive features (see e.g. Bell et al., 2011; Gross & Wilson, 2020; Perry & Symons, 2019) and which potentially could be scaled at least to national level policies and practices, but to study them and their potential impacts is a topic for another article. Nevertheless, one of the key issues in international cultural policies on sustainability in the near-future is to change the orientation radically from one-sided economism towards discursive formulation and facilitation of ecological and non-anthropocentric ‘sustainable culture’. Part of this should be the rebuilding these policies more bottom-up than before in the sense that local ecological, planetary and non-capitalist forms of cultural production would get more attention in them.

The overall question this article sets out to answer is thus: Do the hegemonic creative economy and climate change discourses of international cultural and sustainability policies recognise the urgent need to rethink the human/nature and culture/nature relations? This is particularly relevant as climate change itself is a tricky concept that can be characterised as a “hyperobject” (Morton, 2013) or as an “event” (Tavory & Wagner-Pacifici, 2022). The main target of our criticism is the anthropocentric nature of the resolution and its unreserved promotion of perpetual economic growth, which are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability (Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Jackson, 2021; Raworth, 2017) and “organismal needs”, as we explain below (Kortetmäki et al., 2021). By using the above concepts, we try to articulate the need for a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric, growth-oriented ideologies and methodologically nationalist frameworks to enable environmentally engaged cultural policies.

2. Data, methods and theory

Through a discourse analysis of the resolution, we demonstrate the multiple and conflicting connections between culture and sustainability through the perspective of planetary well-being and other relevant current social scientific theories.

Our primary data consists of a single document: the resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2019), which declared 2021 to be that year, to be led and implemented by UNCTAD and Indonesia. This decision – together with the more general policy discursive and organisational history – has influenced the way the relation of creativity and sustainability is understood in the Resolution as UNCTAD unexceptionally defines it with the strong economy association (see e.g. UNCTAD, 2022) and Indonesian creative policies have also a long tradition of linking it to economic growth (De Beukelaer, 2021).

The resolution is exemplary of how a cultural policy commonly connects culture and creativity to sustainable development. As we explore in section “The context of the resolution” the document under scrutiny is a political culmination of two decades of UN inter-agency work on the issue. It is an apt summary of the issues addressed, and given its limited length it exposes the discursive shortcuts inherent to the discourse – which often remain buried in verbose reports. The document is exemplary in its message and useful in its brevity, even if it offers a simplified conceptualisation of the creative economy. However, the resolution is not norm-setting. It rather reflects existing norms and concerns. Like many such United Nations documents, it offers (almost by definition) a consensus text of how states see a certain issue.

Due to the importance of this history and context, we have also looked beyond this single document by engaging with other recent documents of international organisations to describe more comprehensively the current hegemonic discourse on cultural sustainability and its construction over time in the field of international cultural policies (see below).

We use rhetorical discourse analysis as our method for analysing the resolution. It means that we concentrate on “textual practices” (Fairclough, 1995, 185): how certain kinds of words and expressions are used to construct certain kinds of definitions of culture and sustainability and to convince the reader of their validity (cf. Johnstone & Eisenhart, 2008). We also pay attention to other levels of discursive formation by shedding light on the organisational roles and practices that influence the messages of the resolution and their value in international and national cultural policies (cf. Pyykkönen, 2012). Before the actual discourse analysis, we provide a theoretically-driven content analysis of the resolution to initially clarify its key ways of speaking about culture and sustainability in the light of our theoretical framework.

We use multiple theories and theoretical perspectives to interpret the results and further discuss our findings. The first theoretical perspective focuses on the cultural economy (e.g., Throsby, 2010) and the idea of a so-called value-based economy (Klamer, 2017), which aim to emphasise the role of culture in orthodox economic thinking. The second theoretical perspective concentrates on recent social scientific and anthropological theories that attempt to rethink and reformulate the human/culture/nature relations. Here our aim is to show how the definitions of culture and sustainability – under the umbrella of the creative economy discourse – tend to be growth-centred, anthropocentric and methodologically nationalistic (Beck, 2006; 2016; Latour, 2018; Malm, 2018). The third theoretical perspective focuses on planetary well-being, which to our understanding further directs the criticism at the conventional culture and sustainability nexus by suggesting orientations and practices that intertwine culture – and policies concerning it – with our planetary existence and identity in a novel way (Kortetmäki et al., 2021). Besides planetary well-being, we rely on Tim Jackson’s (2009, 2021) ideas on prosperity and post-growth to put practical flesh on the theoretical bones of the necessary change.

Building on these theoretical and conceptual foundations, we strive for a new conceptualisation of “planetary cultural policy”, which consists of such policy discourses and practices on heritage, arts, creative work and identity in which nature and culture are seen as part of the same systemic totality, and the intrinsic and other values of cultural activities are determined based on how they promote ecological sustainability.

3. The hegemonic discourses of culture and sustainability

Sustainability and culture have been discussed in the national and international cultural policy contexts for over 20 years from various perspectives: What does “culture” stand for in culture and sustainability? What is the role of culture among the pillars of social, economic, and ecological sustainability? What is cultural sustainability? And, above all, how should cultural policies tackle sustainability issues? Due to the diversity of interests, intentions, expectations, discourses and related practices, sustainability does not have any single form in cultural policies. Similarly, researchers argue that culture has remained too vague to be a pragmatic policy issue, confined to the margins of national and international policies for sustainability (e.g., Sabatini, 2019; Soini & Dessein, 2016). Others claim that proponents of cultural sustainability have not managed to intertwine culture with the other pillars of sustainability, especially ecological sustainability, which has diluted the significance of culture in sustainability policies (e.g., Kagan, 2011). For instance, culture is not explicitly mentioned in any of the titles of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2018; Vlassis, 2015).

As a reaction – less openly expressed – to this vagueness and marginalisation of culture in global sustainability policies, key international cultural policy agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD have embraced the economisation of culture (De Beukelaer & Spence, 2019; Garner & O’Connor, 2019; Pyykkönen, 2012).Despite some voices that have tried to expand the hegemonic economic reductionism of value (‘economism’) in more or less liberal societies by emphasising the social and educational values of cultural expressions (e.g., Klamer, 2017; Throsby, 2010), the research on this move has been ontologically uncritical the “economy”. The issue of how culture should contribute to sustainability – especially to its ecological dimension, which we consider the most critical and significant one – in this intertwinement has also remained almost unstudied in realpolitik.

This economism in the culture and sustainability discourse – and the general understanding of culture’s value – is underpinned by widely shared and ideologised significations of the capitalist market economy. In particular, the neoclassical theories of economic growth (Solow, 1999), Schumpeterian ideas on innovation, creativity and entrepreneurialism (Schumpeter, 1942; see also Potts, 2009) and related political ideas and trends (e.g., Hautamäki, 2010) have had a tremendous but thus far under-researched impact on cultural policies. These ideologies have created and strengthened a global discourse according to which the wealth and well-being of the world, nations and people are dependent on increasing productivity and economic growth. Through education, consumerism and national financial and economic policies, for instance, and through being entwined with the globalising knowledges and practices of capitalist production, these principles and their logics have become naturalised presumptions in our societies and cultures (Jackson, 2009; 2021). According to some current researchers of philosophy, environmental sociology and politics, capitalist market economism has intertwined with two cornerstones of our Western culture: anthropocentrism and methodological nationalism (Beck, 2006; Malm, 2018). Latour (2018) argues that the cultural mindset stemming from this hinders us from thinking of ourselves and our actions – practical, discursive, political etc. – as “terrestrial”, as being part of the earth and its ecosystems when acting both locally and globally.

Over time, the principles of capitalist production and market economy have also become normalised in cultural policies that guide the creative and cultural industries (McGuigan, 2015), particularly after key international players such as UNESCO and UNCTAD have adopted them as norms (De Beukelaer & Spence, 2019; Pyykkönen, 2012). In the case of UNESCO, it has meant the culmination of its long “struggle” to justify the significance of culture and cultural diversity by creating such a numerical and measurable framework discourse for them. This framework resonates positively with both the dominant rationalities of global politics and the interests of nation states and their “methodological nationalism”. UNCTAD has helped popularise the “creative economy” discourse since 2004. UNCTAD’s ostensible goal is to enhance the prosperity and wealth of the poorest countries by facilitating access to global markets for their products. Both UNCESCO and UNCTAD implicitly ground their work on anthropocentrism: the ideas and the actions they support are from humans, for humans. Nature is an instrument of their creative expressions and economic efforts.

One might argue that this particular resolution – and the work of the United Nations in general – is already “planetary” or “universal”. We disagree, because United Nations agencies are intergovernmental forums that serve to find a common ground among nations through multilateral processes (De Beukelaer & Vlassis, 2019), not to foster an overarching set of principles that serve humanity or the planet – let alone the “universe” – as a whole. Hence, the discourse we criticise is inter-national at best, whereas what we call for is a fundamental shift in the normative foundations of global governance, by prioritising the planetary above the (inter)national. In our approach and in the context of this analysis, planetarism means that in global cultural policy, in addition to human values and well-being – and against the dominant emphasis on economic value – the values and well-being of the environment has to be seriously and thoroughly considered, and to reconsider the concept of culture and to rescale it so that it intertwines with the nature and not detaches from it, as has been mostly typical for the hegemonic narrative of modernism (Koistinen et al., 2024; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; see also Latour, 2017). Alasuutari (2016) argues that policy discourses across most domains have become “synchronised”, not through coercion, but through the voluntary creation of epistemic communities. In this discourse making and identicalisation the supranational organisations, such as UN and EU, are significant players due to their legal and legitimate grounds to determine the dissemination of ideas and discourses to international and intranational policymaking. These kinds of organisations take a clear step forward on putting the ecological sustainability as the first and main goal of the cultural policies. They thus actually, though not inherently, act as an ‘obligatory passage point’ for planetarisation of cultural policies. Signs of this can be already found from the documents such as New European Bauhaus (European Commission, 2021) and Pact for the Future (United Nations, 2024), and some related policy initiatives. How these changes take place in practice, is always an empirical question and a topic of deep discussion and observation beyond the scope of this article, where our focus is on global cultural policymaking discourses.

Research debates have been more diverse than the policy discussions, especially the dominant policy discourses. Among the best-known research publications on culture and sustainability are those originating in the research network “Investigating Cultural Sustainability” (which was active 2011–2015), which brought together more than 50 European researchers. One of the key findings of this collaborative research is that culture can function for, in and as sustainable development (Dessein et al., 2015; Soini & Birkeland, 2014). Consequently, if cultural policy wants to broaden its scope of influence, it should opt to focus on the “for” sustainable development perspective because it allows the development of the sustainability of cultural expressions as well as the use of the cultural sphere and policies to enhance other aspects of sustainability, especially the ecological one (Duxbury et al., 2017). One of the key perspectives in policy reports and research papers on culture and sustainability is that they strive for “mainstreaming culture” by explaining it and its meanings next to the other pillars of sustainability. In our view, this, however, involves the “risk” that analyses merely concentrate on explaining the value of different kinds of cultural expressions and thus usually justify the economic determination of culture (e.g., Sabatini, 2019).

While some of the above-mentioned studies briefly suggest that the interrelatedness of biological and cultural forms of diversity should be enhanced in the culture and sustainability discourse/praxis (see, e.g., Dessein et al., 2015), we try to critically renew and complement them. We argue that the “mainstreaming of culture” should not be realised on an “anything goes” or economic basis, but rather by binding culture strongly and explicitly to the planetary and ecological aspects of sustainability. This does not only concern economism, but applies to anthropocentrism and methodological nationalism as well: the “planetary mainstreaming of culture” should consider principles, solutions and identities/citizen-subjectivities broader than national and human ones – ones that are both cosmopolitical and ecosystemic (see also Beck, 2006; Malm, 2018).

4. The context of the resolution

The concept of sustainable development was introduced in 1987 by the “Brundtland Commission”, formally known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission, 1987). It first defined “sustainable development” in its report Our Common Future. This document aimed to respond to the environmental threat of global warming and the need to raise the living standards of those in so-called developing countries as well as to ensure a focus on economic growth, which was seen as one of the key indicators of economically sustainable development. Culture was not an explicit topic in the report, although many of its themes were related to it. When culture was first explicated as an issue of sustainability in international cultural policy during the UNESCO Decade of Culture and Development (1988–1997), it was connected to socioeconomic dimensions. Culture was seen as a root and a driving force of economic development and social improvement in so-called developing countries (WCCD, 1995). As we already referred, this stance has been predominant in UNCTAD’s and UNESCO’s recent approaches on culture and sustainability.

UNCTAD has been instrumental in framing culture in and for sustainability, especially in so-called developing countries. UNCTAD has been greatly involved in the international creative economy policy discourses since 2004, which also marked their beginning globally. Its programmes and documents have framed culture and sustainability to describe the broader discursive practice that is indelibly linked to the resolution and its overwhelmingly economic tone. UNCTAD uses programmes and reports to turn its rich datasets on trade in creative goods and services into analyses and trends. The best known is the Creative Economy Programme, dating back to 2004 (see, e.g., UNCTAD, 2022). The programme’s main purpose is to generate “economic information through a trade lens, to understand past trends and project into the future and to promote data-led understanding of trade in creative goods and services, intellectual property, ideas and imagination” (ibid.). At its core are the so-called Creative Economy Mandates (see ibid.), one of which is the resolution we are studying here. The mandates are based on the research and policy analyses that UNCTAD produces with its partners. The central ones for UNCTAD’s meaning making are creative industry reports such as Creative Industry 4.0: Towards a New Globalized Creative Economy (UNCTAD, 2022), which aims to argue not only that the creative economy is crucial for national and global economies, but also that the creative industries can actually be key drivers of the technological change and, thus, the large-scale economic and livelihood changes of the near future.

UNESCO, whose mandate explicitly covers culture, is another key actor in defining culture in, for and as sustainability. Since the afore-mentioned Brundtland Commission (1987) report, it has explicitly discussed sustainability as a key issue to enhance through its policies. UNESCO’s declarations and conventions – such as Our Creative Diversity (WCCD, 1995), Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage (UNESCO, 2001) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005) – have outlined UNESCO’s arguments on the need to secure a sustainable future and apply culture in it. One might even say that UNESCO has been the prima driver of novel significations and contexts for culture within the framework of sustainability (cf. Dessein et al., 2015, 45, 51). The 2005 UNESCO Convention is a useful starting point for analysing the organisation’s rationale on culture and sustainability as it stresses the economic significance of cultural expressions and the construction of strong cultural industries (De Beukelaer et al., 2015; Garner & O’Connor, 2019; Pyykkönen, 2012).

UNESCO’s work is not only about making meanings, but also consists of collecting and analysing worldwide data on culture and sustainability. On the basis of this knowledge, it launches and participates in projects that promote culture in and for sustainability, such as the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. UNESCO worked hard to get culture included in the Sustainable Development Goals (Soini & Birkeland, 2014) but was not successful as none of the original 17 SDGs focus exclusively on culture (United Nations, 2018). However, there are official post-SDG explanations about how culture nonetheless is “at the heart of SDGs” (Hosagrahar, 2017), and what nations and local advocates should do to pay attention to culture when trying to follow the SDGs (UCLG, 2021). After a few years of active campaigning, culture was finally explicitly noted in four of what are called SDG targets in the revised version of the goals (United Nations, 2019).

It is not only the UN or its agencies that have intertwined culture and sustainability with the economy in recent international policies. Both the OECD and the G20 have recently published reports that are very much in line with the principles and objectives of UNCTAD and the resolution we analyse here. Although the OECD pays attention to the creative economy’s potential in enhancing environmental sustainability in its note for Italy’s 2021 G20 presidency (OECD, 2021), the paper includes parts that openly favour culture’s role for economic growth (e.g., ibid., 12). The text-level discursive similarity between the G20’s (2021) Creative Economy 2030 policy brief and UNCTAD’s recent statements is striking: “Before COVID-19 hit, the global creative economy was growing rapidly in many regions. This momentum should not be lost in the wake of the pandemic; rather, greater investment needs to flow to the creative industries that have the potential to make localised and high impact, and help us shift to a new sustainable economy” (ibid., 9–10). This is not surprising as representatives of UNCTAD and other pro-creative economy organisations (e.g., the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and the Global Project Culture and Creative Industries) have participated in writing the G20’s policy brief. The World Bank & UNESCO (2021), too, greatly participates in the economist discourse making through its publication Cities, Culture, Creativity: Leveraging Culture and Creativity for Sustainable Urban Development and Inclusive Growth, jointly produced with UNESCO: “Cultural and creative industries are key drivers of the creative economy and represent important sources of employment, economic growth, and innovation, thus contributing to city competitiveness and sustainability” (ibid., 2).

5. The resolution

The resolution is an exemplary and nearly caricatural account of the discourse surrounding the “creative economy”. Ecological sustainability is almost completely absent from the resolution, and when it is mentioned, it is subordinated to capitalist economic objectives. In our analysis of the resolution, we found three interlinked categories through/in which the significations of culture are constituted: (i) Anthropocentrism; (ii) Economic Determinism; and (iii) Methodological Nationalism. Through our analysis, we argue that these discourses are problematic in terms of ecological sustainability, post-Anthropocene subjectivities, and notions of planetary well-being and prosperity (cf. Jackson, 2009; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Latour, 2018).

5.1. Anthropocentrism

In general, anthropocentrism refers to a human-centred worldview and morality: humans are the only rational and truly meaning-making species and hence the key agents of the world; they are the ones who can, through work and reuse, dominate objects that originally belonged to nature; they can own and assume control over nature due to their supreme capabilities; and the value of nature is determined by its value for humans so that nature does not have an intrinsic value (Barry & Frankland, 2002). Though this raises questions of what the Anthropocene means. Commonly, it’s a shorthand for the idea “that modern human activity is large relative to the basic processes of planetary functioning, and therefore that human social, economic, and political decisions have become entangled in a web of planetary feedbacks (Malhi, 2016). Though it risks masking the deeply unequal and inequitable distribution of human influences and consequences on this way of looking at “our” era (Malm & Hornborg, 2014).

What is emblematic of anthropocentrism is that humans are either consciously or unconsciously defined and valued against nature and its actors such as animals. This is a typical text-level ‘regularity’ (see Foucault, 1972) and order in the whole centrism discourse. On the other hand, in ecocentrism and biocentrism, for instance, nature and its well-being are observed against humans. This discursive order derives from the nature/culture division, one of the major narratives in Western thought. This binarism is indeed one of the most problematic aspects of the “centrisms” in terms of ecological sustainability because it separates humans and nature from each other per se (Boddice, 2011).

As we have already claimed, conventional cultural policy understands culture as a merely human issue and makes the human the subject of and subject to cultural policy and its share of rights, actorships, beneficiaries and, in the end, the bios itself. Most studies and documents on cultural sustainability do not really pay attention to the position and role of nature or natural agents. We can take a key UN text as an example: although the UN Sustainable Development Goals address the sustainability of the environment in multiple ways and dimensions, they mostly focus on the human perspective, and the non-human aspects of sustainability are considered only if they instrumentally contribute to the human aspects (see also Dryzek, 2005, 157). The resolution also highlights the centrality of humans within its proposed approach to linking culture and sustainability:

Recognizing the role of the creative economy in creating full and productive employment and decent work, supporting entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, encouraging the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, stimulating innovation, empowering people, promoting social inclusion, and reducing poverty […]

Highlighting that the creative economy encourages creativity and innovation in attaining inclusive, equitable and sustainable growth and development, while facilitating life transitions and supporting women, youth, migrants and older persons, as well as empowering people in vulnerable situations […]

Stressing that the creative economy can contribute to the three dimensions of sustainable development and the achievement of the 2030 Agenda, including by fostering economic growth and innovation, eradicating poverty, creating full and productive employment and decent work for all, improving the quality of life and empowerment of women and young people. (United Nations, 2019, 3)

As illustrated by these excerpts, anthropocentrism stands in a logical relation to economic goals. Creative economic practices serve humans and human development without reflecting the ecological limits of these actions. Superficially, it seems that everything is in order: if the functioning of the creative economy is secured and supported, it will improve the well-being and actorship of all humans. However, we argue that this thinly veiled anthropocentrism undermines the ultimate aims of the resolution itself as well as all the other major cultural policy documents that deal with sustainability. If we want to strive for true sustainability – at the pace necessary to prevent the massive environmental crisis we are facing at the moment – we should “focus on the systems and processes that support life, well-being, and biodiversity at different spatial scales” (Kortetmäki et al., 2021, 2).

Most commonly, anthropocentrism is not an explicit point of departure or a goal. However, policy documents and research have been criticised for their “human-centred sustainability” (e.g., Lepeley, 2019): despite their good intentions, they are too much oriented to human agents and undermine the role of humans as part of broader systems and networks that also include non-human actors; all cultural and human actions have ecological and ecosystemic impacts on the planetary future (Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Latour, 2018; Malm, 2018).

The resolution is a model example of this human-centred sustainability. Although it does not explicitly mention anthropocentrism, its discussion of sustainability is limited to human needs and well-being, especially from the perspective of prosperity and economic growth. The more moral and principled sections are also human-centred: when important values and goals (human rights, human creativity and ideas, gender equality, peace) are listed, no reference is made to environmental issues, except for a loose mentioning of sustainable lifestyle. However, what overemphasises the resolution’s anthropocentrism above all is that there is no explicit recognition of planetary wellbeing, not even the term “ecological sustainability”.

5.2. Economic determinism

As the title of the resolution already indicates, the economy is its main theme. The resolution lists ways in which the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) can enhance economic growth – without, however, specifying whether it means the growth of national economies or that of private businesses – and in which the economic growth brought by the CCIs fosters social values and goals such as “empowerment for all”, “eradicating poverty”, “decent work for all” and “empowerment of women and young people”, as the following excerpts illustrate:

Recognizing the need to promote sustained and inclusive economic growth, foster innovation and provide opportunities, benefits and empowerment for all and respect for all human rights […]

[N]oting the report of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on culture and sustainable development, in which it is stated that cultural and creative industries should be part of economic growth strategies […]

Recognizing the ongoing need to support developing countries and countries with economies in transition in diversifying production and exports, including in new sustainable growth areas, including creative industries. Emphasizing the resilient growth in international trade in creative industries, including the trade of creative goods and services, and its contribution to the global economy, and recognizing the economic and cultural values of the creative economy. (United Nations, 2019, 1–2)

Economic significance is a relatively new perspective in international cultural policy discourses: while the focus on the economic value of culture was mainly criticised until the 1980s due to the instrumentality, recuperation and alienation of arts, culture, creativity and passion (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 94–136; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007; McGuigan, 2015). Bilton (2007), among others, argues that in the 1990s, experts, consultants and researchers started to speak positively about the economic value and meanings of arts and culture. Gradually, this perspective was taken up in cultural policies and by their key spokespersons such as administrators, educators and consultants, and finally by cultural actors and professionals as well. The current discourse on the economic side of culture is neutral or even downright positive about and in favour of the commodification of cultural products. This view on the cultural industries has spread in recent years together with the increasingly prevalent talk about the “creative industries”. Bilton describes the conceptual evolution from cultural industries to creative industries as follows:

The term “cultural industries” indicates that creativity grows out of a specific cultural context and emphasizes the cultural content of ideas, values and traditions. The term “creative industries” emphasizes the novelty of ideas and products and places creativity in a context of individual talent, innovation and productivity. (Bilton, 2007, 164)

This shift resonates with larger structural developments: the discursive transition from cultural industries to creative industries started in the 1990s along with the shifts in the capitalist market economy and its business structures and economic, labour and social policies. Whereas the traditional material industries weakened in so-called Western countries, the developing immaterial and digital information economy needed concepts like creativity, innovation and information and related practices to an extensive extent. Cultural policies and cultural policy researchers seized the moment and boldly defined arts and culture as the core of the emerging creative economy and designated it as a key economic growth sector. Creative industry/economy is a vaguer concept than cultural industry/economy, but its benefit is its broader scope and association with other – economically more important – industries and sectors. Through “creative industry” or “cultural and creative industries”, it is possible to raise the broad economic importance of arts and culture – at least rhetorically (Garnham, 2005).

The “economy” in creative economy refers to the organisation and the work of structures, institutions, groups and individuals concerning the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of goods and services that are defined creative and cultural. In this context, a product is therefore one that results from creativity – whether individually, collectively or industrially contributed – and is meant to be sold in the market, and its market value is at least partially based on the creativity used in its production (Throsby, 2010).

This economism is criticised because of its instrumental character, and because it endangers the intrinsic value of culture (e.g., Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 94–136; McGuigan, 2015). Recently, critical attention has focused more on the factors of precarious working conditions and the exploitation of the passion and creativity of creative workers (e.g., Gielen, 2015; McRobbie, 2016). Less thought has been given to the fact that whether material or immaterial, the production of creative goods for economic growth is indelibly against the fundamentals of ecological sustainability (De Beukelaer, 2019a). However, there is a growing body of research literature theorising alternative forms of cultural economy (e.g. Clammer, 2016, 65–90; Conill et al., 2012; Maurer, 2008; Vanolo, 2012; see more about his later in this section). These studies share a justification of non-capitalist values for the cultural production and work and the exploration of post-capitalist practices of cultural sector and production (e.g. commoning). While many of them take a critical stance towards the capitalist economic growth, very few of them observe the issue from the point of view of ecological values or practices, the radically different relation of culture and nature (i.e. ecologically sustainable culture and non-antropocentric cultural subjectivity), and how these alternative paradigms are – or should be – considered in cultural policies. Increasingly, research includes perspectives on how culture and nature can be merged on the conceptual level of the cultural policies, and how culture can be approached foundational in the de- and post-growth economies and their national and local practical applications (Banks & Oakley, 2024; McCartney et al., 2023; Pyykkönen, 2024).

In this context, we neither buy into the doxa of economic growth, nor do we dogmatically defend degrowth: we remain growth-agnostic. Our key objective is to stop using economic turnover as a proxy for other goals, such as those concerning creativity, culture and environment, because they cannot be captured by this proxy (cf. van den Bergh, 2010). The obvious alternative would be to set policy objectives that do not explicitly build on growth. The macro-economic outcome could be growth or degrowth, but this ought to be secondary to stated objectives, which in our case relate to both formulating non-econocentric and non-anthropocentric international cultural policies (especially when speaking about culture and sustainability) and – through national and local policies – paving way for the ecologically sustainable cultural productions instead of capitalist cultural industries. These are important goals both for changing the mentalities and practices (i.e. immaterial and material “consumer cultures”) of our societies and recognizing the crucial place of labour-intensive jobs in post-growth economies (cf. Jackson, 2021).

The growth and intensification of creative production – and even the maintenance of the current level – will require unsustainable amounts of resources such as raw materials, energy, transportation and devices (Jackson, 2009; see also De Beukelaer, 2019). Meanwhile, research shows that it is possible for all humans to live within planetary boundaries and above social thresholds – that is, within the “doughnut” or the “safe operating space for humanity” – though not without radically rebalancing consumption patterns between rich and poor people (Hickel, 2019; O’Neill et al., 2018; see also Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Gupta et al., 2024) while also addressing the colonial root causes of planetary plunder (Agyeman et al., 2003; Jackson, 2009; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Malm, 2018; Rockström et al., 2009). The change requires the broad and effective adoption of post-growth thinking, attitudes and their implementation in economic and social practices, which in addition to greener production and massively less consumption of material goods has to include practices of equal and inclusive social work and health-care, and democratisation of decision-making processes and citizen-involvement in governance (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Gupta et al., 2024; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Raworth, 2017).

If we approach cultural production mainly from the perspective of profit making and economic growth, it is most certainly connected – at least indirectly – to such forms of capitalist production that are anti-ecological per se. As the citations at the beginning of this section suggest, two main discursive lines can be distinguished here: the resolution tries to prove again and again (a) how the creative and cultural industries serve the economic growth of nations, and (b) how cultural and economic values (incl. technological and industrial innovations) are intertwined without any challenges. As mentioned, economic determinism and anthropocentrism converge in the resolution: a greater and well-functioning creative economy – and economic growth in general – is assumed to serve the interests of all humans. The ecological and environmental consequences of the creative economy are secondary concerns at best. In addition to being linked to the other aspects, the economy also determines them in the resolution; humans and their relations and subjectivities are valued, signified, and represented within the economic frame.

5.3. Methodological nationalism

While the climate crisis is a quintessentially global issue, cultural policy still relies on and strengthens the idea of nation states at the centre of politics. This is to be expected as the United Nations framework generally doesn’t address the tensions between global challenges and national interests head-on. The resolution reaffirms this state of affairs and, as mentioned above, blends it seamlessly with the capitalist market economisation of culture:

Recommitting to sustaining and supporting developing countries’ economies to transition progressively to higher productivity through high-value-added sectors, by promoting diversification, technological upgrading, research and innovation, including the creation of quality, decent and productive jobs, including through the promotion of cultural and creative industries, sustainable tourism, performing arts and heritage conservation activities, among others […]

Acknowledging that innovation is essential for harnessing the economic potential of each nation and the importance of supporting mass entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, which create new momentum for economic growth and job creation and expand opportunities for all, including women and youth […]

Stressing the importance of appropriate national policies aimed at promoting the diversity of cultural expression and advancing creativity for sustainable development. (United Nations, 2019, 2–3)

This kind of approach can be called “methodological nationalism”. It means the tendency of actors to assume that “the nation-state is the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, emphasis in original). In other words, it is a historically constructed post-Westphalian notion according to which nations and nation states are sovereign actors in solving political challenges and problems. Beck (2016) has criticised the concept in the context of current international politics concerning global problems. He claims that acute “cosmopoliticised” risks such as the climate crisis could give rise to “emancipatory catastrophism” – new normative horizons of common goods and a cosmopolitan outlook – if only we would be politically able to move beyond methodological nationalism. In the 21st century, not only the major challenges but also the “spaces of action” have become cosmopolitised. Beck’s view is that we can tackle these risks only with global political structures and policies, and by rethinking political agency from the level of the state to that of citizen-subjects. Emancipatory catastrophism could at best lead us to a new political approach of “methodological cosmopolitanism”. Latour (2018) makes a similar claim: we need to create political approaches and policies that are not grounded in national or global interests, but instead the earth. We globally need to learn new ways to live on and with the earth, and this is what cosmopolitan politics and agencies must be about.

How, then, does methodological nationalism appear in the resolution? As we can see from the citations at the beginning of this section, nation states are the ones that primarily benefit from the economic growth produced by the CCIs. They not only profit their economies, but also their nations in terms of prosperity, welfare and equality. Moreover, nation states and their national policies are the key actors of the resolution. It depends on them how all the economic and societal improvements generated by the creative economy will take place. The above contextualisation is not problematic only from the perspective of cultural sustainability and its basic values such as cultural diversity, but especially in terms of ecological sustainability, which is not national in its character.

6. Conclusions: towards a new planetary cultural policy

The United Nations promote the idea that the creative economy, through its constituent creative industries, will contribute to the transition towards sustainable development. However, the resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 we have examined as a key exemplar of these efforts fails to convince that the claims it makes will indeed materialise. Though it would not be useful to argue that if only United Nations agencies would change their tune, we’d be able to shift away from the kinds of ideas embedded in this Resolution. Indeed, if the document were more radical and progressive, it would not be representative of dominant international organisations’ and states’ views and interests, and it would likely not gain much traction because it would not align with dominant discourses in these organisations or responsible state ministries – and most importantly, among consultants (De Beukelaer & Vlassis, 2019). However, the “non-progressiveness” and lack of radical views might well exist also because of the politics behind the documents and the power imbalances between the contributing actors, which impact the outcomes of the political negotiations and disputes. As known, some parties – e.g. strong and powerful nation states or international organisations – do have more say than others in the resolution making processes..

While it is necessary to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the climate crisis, it can be counterproductive to make assertions without a shred of evidence. To make matters worse, the resolution makes gratuitous claims that fly in the face of empirical evidence, as we have illustrated above. The resolution stumbles over several pitfalls.

First, we have shown that the resolution fails to define a clear and realistic target (i.e., what should be “sustainable”). This may seem self-evident, but the term has become such a catch-all for anything from the grossest forms of corporate greenwashing to the most genuinely committed actions. For the term to have any meaning, it needs to be defined unambiguously. This should include an articulation of whether it means environmental, social and cultural sustainability – or merely one of them – and a clear dissociation from the hegemonic growth-oriented economist view. The definition also needs to be pragmatic in the sense that it recognizes existing and outlines new broader political projects and their tools to challenge the current capitalist and anthropocentric political order of culture. One solution would be to start seriously thinking about culture and sustainability in relation to the post-growth “safe operating space” and “doughnut economy” (Raworth, 2017; cf. Jackson, 2009), in that they offer more practical narratives and are clearer on what is needed and what can’t be exceeded.

Second, the resolution’s objectives and methods remain entirely captured within the doxa of “green growth”. This is not the, but merely a blueprint for climate action – and perhaps not the most credible one at that (Hickel & Kallis, 2019). As “green growth” remains the dominant framework for policies, explicitly recognising it as one among many competing visions of the future is all-important when working at the intersection between art, culture and creativity in relation to climate futures.

Third, both UNCTAD and UNESCO remain fixed on their respective raisons d’être, without addressing the systemic challenge we face. This results in an impoverished articulation of what the future should be, which remains tone-deaf to the real challenge that underpins the climate crisis: how to ensure life in dignity and prosperity without wrecking the planet. In sum, the resolution we have studied is fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability and the “organismal needs” (i.e. basic need that must be satisfied for an organism [human, animal, plant etc.] to realise its typical and special way and characteristics of life) of planetary well-being (Kortetmäki et al., 2021).

Notwithstanding our above criticisms of the resolution, the potential of art, culture and creativity to help confront the climate crisis is real. Its strength lies in a commitment to global environmental citizenship, which puts the planet before economic and anthropocentric or narrowly defined national, ethnic or religious group interests (Duxbury et al., 2017).¹ It should help to address global issues with a cosmopolitan sensibility (De Beukelaer, 2019b). What we propose thus inherently challenges the normative foundations and horizons of public policy. Beyond shifting the normative ground on which policymaking builds, we would argue that it also requires a new political economy of creative work, which focuses on degrowth, revaluing craft and setting up a universal basic income. This should help lay the groundwork for a post-consumer society, in which the dignity and well-being of people and the planet take precedence over shareholder value.

Our suggestions might sound like wishful thinking. Which they are. Though so are the expected outcomes of the approaches suggested in the Resolution text. Policy texts inherently are wishful thinking. Contrary to this consensus-document, we believe that our suggested approach, “our” wishful thinking if you will, is more constructive. Which kind of “wishful thinking” one entertains is not just a mirage; it is helpful in offering both a semblance of a way out of this mess and a positive story that can garner public and political support. We are now at a point where the creative economy, as characterised in the Resolution, does neither.

In sum, our key argument is that the relation of culture and environment should be radically re-evaluated and re-defined when speaking and acting about sustainability and culture. Simply repackaging the creative industry policies of the past two decades as “sustainable” does little but further delay the much-needed rethinking of the future we want. To do that, we need a new kind of “planetary cultural policy” in which decision-making on culture always takes into account the environment, ecological sustainability and planetary boundaries per se. In addition, it must ideologically and conceptually understand culture as part of nature and vice versa. Finally, cultural policies should acknowledge that everything that human beings as cultural actors do has serious and true ecological implications, which also makes it a question of citizenship, identity and subjectivity. This would definitely confuse the already blurred boundaries of cultural policy as an administrative sector even more, but we think that it is an “obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986) – i.e., the point of access to the irreversibly new understanding of relation between culture and sustainability that all key actors have to recognize and “go through”, if they want to participate in the process – if we really want to see culture as an important factor in sustainability policies and practices.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Miikka Pyykkönen: Writing – original draft. Christiaan De Beukelaer: Writing – original draft.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Dr. Miikka Pyykkönen is a Professor on Cultural Policy in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He teaches bachelor and master students in the study programme Cultures, Communities and Change, and doctoral students in Cultural Policy doctoral studies. He is also a docent in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. His current research areas are cultural policy, international cultural policy, culture and sustainability, economization of culture, entrepreneurship and history of ethnopolitics.

Dr. Christiaan De Beukelaer is a Senior Lecturer in Culture & Climate at the University of Melbourne and a Global Horizons Senior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. He was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie – FIAS-FP COFUND Fellow in Necessary Utopias at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille Université. His primary research project is Shipping in the Oceanic Commons: Regulation and Prefiguration (ClimateWorks Foundation). His most recent book Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping, published by Manchester University Press, is also available in French translation as Cargo à Voile: Une Aventure Militante pour un Transport Maritime Durable, published by Éditions Apogée. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.¹

We do recognise that citizenship is always grounded in the lives of people, which are spatially and temporally bound. This offers up a further challenge of finding a space that connects the “planetary” and the individual, through multiple levels of social entanglement and political engagement.