Professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School Jorgen Randers, who co-authored of the trailblazing 1972 book The Limits to Growth and last year authored 2052 – A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, has warned that investments related to climate adaptation will rise strongly over the coming four decades as countries respond to more extreme weather-related disasters.

He is pessimistic, however, that these investments will be made ahead of the likely calamities, owing to an absence of national and international decision-making institutions that are able to respond to long-term imperatives, rather than react to short-term political pressures.

In a recent report entitled ‘Turn down the heat: Why a 4 °C warmer world must be avoided’, the World Bank spelt out the possible weather impacts should the planet’s temperatures warm by the 4 °C above preindustrial levels – a level many scientists believe is likely by 2100, unless policy action is taken.

Coastal Cities

The scenarios outlined included the inunda-tion of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production and possible higher attendant malnutrition rates; dry regions becoming drier and wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves, especially in the tropics; exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; an increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible losses of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.

Speaking in Johannesburg at an event jointly organised by engineering group Arup and the South African unit of the University of Cambridge, and ahead of a meeting with the National Planning Commission, Randers lamented that the world was currently less sustainable than was the case in 1972 – the year he, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and William Behrens modelled 12 pos- sible scenarios for the world between 1972 and 2100.

Sustainability

Evidence of this lack of sustainability could been seen, he said, in the fact that the world was still emitting twice as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere yearly than could be absorbed by forests and oceans, which was leading to a build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and a rise in temperatures.

In the absence of “extraordinary” techno-logical and governance breakthroughs, Randers’ latest modelling showed that the world economy would grow more slowly over the coming 40 years than had been the case over the preceding four decades.

This was not the result of resource con-straints, but rather declining population growth rates and falling levels of consumption spend-ing, partly as a result of the need to make higher climate adaptation-related investments.

The 2052 book’s forecast assumed a world population peak of only eight-billion in 2040, which was below most other global estimates, and that the rate of economic expansion would moderate as a result to well below the 3.5% yearly average between 1970 and 2012.

As a result, the world economy could be only double its current size by 2050, rather than the fourfold increase being predicted by other economic forecasters.

As a consequence, world consumption would peak in the coming 20 years, while energy consumption would peak during the 2030s, when fossil fuel sources were still likely to account for 60% of production.

Hotter World
Given that energy-use assumption, total CO2 emissions were forecast to continue to rise for 20 years, before peaking and eventually declining to a point where they would be no higher in 2050 than they were in 2012.

Temperatures would, however, still exceed the 2 °C above the preindustrial “danger threshold” by 2050 and level off at “plus 3 °C” in 2080, before gradually declining.

Therefore, Randers argued, the combination of stagnating population and gross domestic product growth would provide an unplanned remedy to the problem of “endless growth on a finite planet”.

“Basically, we will just peter out.”

But this slowdown would occur too late to avoid “triggering a climate crisis and, in the process, we will have much unnecessary suffering”.

One direct cost would be the diversion of national investment capital and labour resources to repair and upgrade infrastructure damaged by increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

“Typically, this investment will only flow after the hurricane strikes and there is a deci-sion to build a dyke. “But, in my view, we are unlikely to see societies deciding to build a dyke ahead of time,” Randers bemoaned.