The Unbearable Unawareness of our Ecological Existential Crisis

Over the past two years, the full report on Climate Change Mitigation by IPCC scientists, as well as research from other centres such as the Stockholm Resilience Centre, has consistently confirmed that we are on a doomsday trajectory. Unless we move rapidly in the opposite direction, the chances that we will face planetary catastrophes that seriously threaten the existence of life on our planet in the next twenty years are realistic and probable. Unsustainable capitalism keeps us deluded and largely unaware that we are on the brink of a serious existential risk. Therefore the great challenge is to provoke the awareness and critical thinking of ordinary citizens. Only a Citixens Revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arouse Now! –– Álvaro J. de Regil

Transitioning to Geocratia — the People and Planet and Not the Market Paradigm — First Steps

Parting from the fact that saving Planet Earth, our home, changes everything, we need to build a new ethos where the majority of humankind commits to a system whose only purpose is the pursuit of the welfare of people and Planet Earth. This requires that all Earth resources necessary for the enjoyment of life of all living things be managed to achieve true long-term sustainability. — Álvaro J. de Regil

Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wages, Human Height, Mortality Since the Long 16th Century

This paper assesses claims that, prior to the 19th century, around 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty (defined as the inability to access essential goods), and that global human welfare only began to improve with the rise of capitalism. The rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. –– Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel

The irrelevance of animals

So-called "laboratory meat" is simultaneously generating great expectations and concerns. The huge investment and research efforts of economically powerful private initiatives have uncovered an important economic niche waiting to be exploited. The promoters of the market for laboratory meat or meat derived from vegetable products have seen in their ethical and ecological foundations the great lever that will mobilise consumers on a massive scale towards their products. The growth in supply and speculation around these products responds, among other factors, to two very different pressures: on the one hand, the climatic behaviour of meat production. On the other hand, the growing pressure from animal and vegan groups on the living and dying conditions of the animals that are raised for their consumption. –– Pedro M. Herrera

Controversial Demographic Projections Under Climate Collapse in 2050 - South and Mesoamerica in a Global Context

The corporate sector is building another aggressive re-engineering of global agrifood systems in South America and Mesoamerica. The region represents a pillar for global food security, warns the UN in the New Mission. Capitalist euphoria assumes 10 billion inhabitants by 2050. This is forging higher agricultural productivity, innovation, digitalisation and the expansion of standardised agriculture. Thus, they produce and market food destined for populations with some or enough consumption capacity, overconsumption and waste of food with equivalent carbon footprints. –– Nubia Barrera Silva

The pressing priority of saving the Amazonia

The world's most biodiverse region is threatened by deforestation levels close to the point of no return. Despite this, the countries involved failed to reach agreements at the last summit in Brazil in August. –– David Roca Basadre

Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries

Humanity is well into the Anthropocene, the proposed new geological epoch where human pressures have put the Earth system on a trajectory moving rapidly away from the stable Holocene state of the past 12,000 years, which is the only state of the Earth system we have evidence of being able to support the world as we know it. Seven of eight globally quantified safe and just Earth System Boundaries (ESB) and at least two regional safe and just ESBs in over half of global land area are already exceeded. We propose that our assessment provides a quantitative foundation for safeguarding the global commons for all people now and into the future. — Johan Rockström et al

Marine plastic pollution as a planetary boundary threat – The drifting piece in the sustainability puzzle

The exponential increase in the use of plastic in modern society and the inadequate management of the resulting waste have led to its accumulation in the marine environment. There is increasing evidence of numerous mechanisms by which marine plastic pollution is causing effects across successive levels of biological organisation. This will unavoidably impact ecological communities and ecosystem functions. –– Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, Sarah E. Cornell, Joan Fabres

Crisis or collapse? Overshoot and degrowth

The delicate state of the Earth system has been described as a crisis or a set of crises: “ecological crisis,” “climate crisis,” “biodiversity crisis.” Our ecosocial situation has also been described as a crisis. The answer to the dilemma between crisis and collapse could ultimately lie in the combination of the incontrovertible diagnosis of serious ecological overshoot and the urgent need to decelerate—in order to hopefully prevent the consequences of overshoot from forcing a traumatic deceleration. — Asier Arias

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The update of the planetary boundaries framework reveals that six of the nine boundaries have been transgressed, suggesting that the Earth is now outside the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is about to be exceeded, while aerosol loading exceeds the limit regionally. Stratospheric ozone levels have recovered slightly. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries previously identified as exceeded. Given that primary production drives the biosphere functions of the Earth system, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for the functional integrity of the biosphere. This boundary has also been transgressed. Modeling the Earth system with different levels of transgression of climate change and Earth system boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on the Earth system must be considered in a systemic context. —Katherine Richardson et al

The Spectre of ‘Knowledge as Commons’

Universalising knowledge, producing ‘knowledge as a common good’ is necessary to bridge gaps, build bridges and return power to the ‘people’ in a universal sense. –– Sam Popowich

Making Sense of the World: Why Education Is Key to Change

A precondition to creating a different world is the capacity to imagine it. But many education systems continue to bear the imprint of the industrial, nation-state societies they emerged from. What would be required to empower people to first envision and then build a more sustainable and just society? A conversation with economist Maja Göpel on how education could spark the shift. –– Maja Göpel

Just population policies for an overpopulated worl

After decades of neglect, environmentalists are once again becoming aware of the need to limit the number of human beings. But, like Rip Van Winkle, we find that the world has changed while we were asleep. There are now billions more people, hundreds of millions of new members of the global middle class, and high consumption among the rich. Meanwhile, the planet has become warmer, more polluted, more domesticated, and more impoverished. This article specifies what just population policies look like for an overpopulated world: one where most national populations must decrease significantly to create sustainable societies, and where failure to do so threatens environmental disaster for humans and the rest of life on Earth. — Philip Cafaro

Advancing the Welfare of People and the Planet with a Common Agenda for Reproductive Justice, Population, and the Environment

Driven by rising consumption and population, human demands are depleting natural resources essential to human life, damaging farmland, freshwater supplies, fisheries, and forests, and driving climate change. This report offers a strategy to protect natural systems and improve well-being by expanding reproductive justice, a concept that includes family planning, reproductive health, and gender equity, and the preservation of the environment and climate. —J. Joseph Speidel and Jane N. O'Sullivan

Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections and Jeopardising Scenarios for Sustainable Futures

The size of the world population has profound implications for the demand for food, energy, and resources, changes in land use, and greenhouse gas emissions. This study examines why most population projections have underestimated global population growth and the implications for the actions needed to achieve sustainable societies. —Jane N. O'Sullivan

‘The energy transition has not yet begun’

Interview with Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (France, 1977), historian of science, technology, and the environment, and professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He has just published Without Transition: A New History of Energy (Seuil), which will be translated and published in Spanish by Arpa. He is also the co-author, with Christophe Bonneuil, of The Anthropocene Event: The Earth, History, and Us (Points Histoire) and The Joyful Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk (Seuil). —Hervé Kempf

World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot

Anthropogenic ecological overshoot has previously been identified as a root cause of the myriad symptoms we observe today across the planet, from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise of new entities and climate change. We aim to highlight the critical disconnect of the current social chasm in communication between those in the know, such as scientists working within the limits of growth, and members of the citizenry, influenced largely by social scientists and industry, who must act. –– Joseph J. Merz et al.

Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific — An Introduction

As respected international relations specialist David C. Kang has argued in American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and other works, there has been a general decline in military spending as a percentage of GDP in the largest East Asian states over the past two decades. Taking the eleven largest states, it has fallen to approximately half of what it was two and a half decades ago, declining from an average of 3.35% in 1990 to an average of 1.8% in 2015, a trend that has continued. This objectively points to a growing, rather than declining, sense of national security in the region. It is this climate of peace that the United States threatens to disrupt, not for the sake of East Asia, but with the aim of preserving its preeminence as a world power at all costs. —John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” and ‘Monthly Review’: A Historical Introduction

Albert Einstein, the world's most famous theoretical physicist and its most celebrated scientist, had fled Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler, emigrating to the United States in 1933, where he became a citizen in 1940. However, for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, Einstein remained a dangerous and anti-American figure who threatened the internal security of the United States by his very presence in the country. His 1949 publication of an article entitled ‘Why Socialism?’ for the new magazine Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine was thus seen by the FBI as direct confirmation of his strong ‘Communist sympathies.’ —John Bellamy Foster

The Case for Socialist Veganism

Corporate veganism: a corporate greenwashed market expansion tactic that exacerbates animal suffering, human exploitation and ecological destruction inside and outside the food system. –– Benjamin Selwyn and Charis Davis

Overconfidence in climate overshoot

Global emission reduction efforts remain insufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goal. This makes the systematic exploration of so-called overshoot pathways, which temporarily exceed the global warming limit set before reducing temperatures to safer levels, a priority for science and policy. Only a rapid reduction in emissions in the short term is effective in reducing climate risks. — Carl-Friedrich Schleussner et al

Provoking Awareness and Action for Geocratia

Contrary to the dominant narrative, we do not live in democratic societies, but in totally unsustainable market-driven societies aimed at maximizing capital accumulation. This requires infinite production and consumption on a finite planet, causing a planetary fracture that is leading us down an unsustainable path where life is likely to be at monumental risk in the next twenty years, unless we quickly divert from it. To do this, we need to replace capitalism with Geocracy or the “government of the Earth,” where we reorganize ourselves socially to build a new ecocentric edifice centered on caring for our planet. To achieve this, we must build a revolutionary movement from the ground up to strike a blow against the system and force governments to agree to new geocratic ecosocial contracts. Here I describe how to achieve this. —Álvaro J. de Regil

‘The sea can be a subject of law'

The Mar Menor was the first natural environment in Europe to be granted legal personality. This milestone has attracted the attention of half the world, interested in new ways of preserving their home. It is too early to tell, but it would not be unreasonable to think that this civil and human achievement is incubating unprecedented repercussions on the way we have conceived our relationship with nature until now. Starting with the radical conviction that it is not just a formula for necessary respect for the planet, but ‘a path to peace’. One more step on the long road of respect that we still owe ourselves as inhabitants and children of the Earth. —Miguel Ángel Ortega Lucas

The New Cold War on China

The Trump administration's pursuit of a new Cold War against China is not an anomaly, but rather the inevitable response of the US to China's rise and the end of Washington's unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared a Cold War against the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s and 1950s as part of a grand strategy to secure its global hegemony in the immediate post-World War II era, today it is declaring a New Cold War against China in order to maintain that same imperial hegemony. —John Bellamy Foster

The Ecological Rift in the Anthropocene

—A conversation with John Bellamy Foster on ecology, ecological imperialism, and potential solutions to the ongoing planetary crisis. —John Bellamy Foster, Fabio Querido, Maria Orlanda Pinassi, and Michael Löwy

Taiwan: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective

In the Western imagination, Taiwan is little more than a stage for ideological warfare with the People's Republic of China (PRC), a crossroads between democracy and authoritarianism, Western values and Chinese backwardness, and free-market capitalism and closed-door communism. However, the island of Taiwan has played a fundamental role in Chinese history for centuries. Located just 100 miles off the south-east coast of the mainland, Taiwan was linked to it through migration, trade, language and culture long before European and Japanese colonisers took advantage of its strategic location as a launching pad for economic and military incursions against China as a whole. Today, this history continues as US imperialism positions Taiwan as the ideological and military base for its new Cold War against China. —Qiao Collective

The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry

When I come to study in detail some of the arguments of these new military writers about nuclear war, I will necessarily have to adopt many aspects of their own methods and terminology, that is, I will have to meet them on the methodological ground of their own choosing. I want therefore to apologise in advance for the nauseating inhumanity of much of what I have to say. (P. M. S. Blackett) — John Bellamy Foster

Planetary justice: a systematic analysis of an emerging discourse

Concern for justice has been central to contemporary social and ecological debates for decades, but only recently has it been introduced into Earth system-focused discourses on the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries. In this article, we will focus on the emerging discourse on planetary justice, which aims to address this gap. Our goal is to outline the general parameters and novel contributions of planetary justice, while acknowledging the emerging variability within this discourse. —Agni Kalfagianni, Stefan Pedersen, and Dimitris Stevi

Narrating the Amazon

As the largest tropical forest and one of the biggest carbon sinks in the world, the Amazon plays an indispensable role in keeping our planet habitable. Although the threat facing the Amazon region is well-known, it is hard to truly grasp the severity of the situation through scientific facts alone. Inter-cultural exchanges and discarding longstanding colonial perspectives can help bridge that gap. — Paolo Pecere

Earth system boundaries and Earth system justice: sharing the ecospace

The literature on planetary and Earth System boundaries urges humans to live within those boundaries. Sharing such a limited ecospace raises questions of justice. Global environmental assessments and scholars of the topic are increasingly paying attention to questions of justice, but they do not adequately define how to share the limited ecospace. In this context, we ask how the justice awareness of global environmental assessments can be improved through an Earth System justice framework that guides how the global community might share limited ecological space. Based on an analysis of how justice concerns are addressed, we propose an Earth System justice framework that analyzes how ecospace can be shared fairly. —Joyeeta Gupta et al

The evolution of the climate movement: from radicalism to complacency

In 2018, the publication of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C marked a turning point in the climate movement. This report urged the international community to take radical action. This call to action sparked an unprecedented wave of mobilisation, giving rise to a new generation of movements that not only placed the climate crisis at the centre of institutional and social debate, but also linked it to other struggles such as the labour, decolonial, feminist and anti-speciesist movements. However, over time, the initial fervour of these movements seems to have waned. What began as a radical challenge to hegemonic powers has been transformed into a series of initiatives more oriented towards self-indulgence and group therapy.— Bilbo Basaterra

Innovate or Die

Technological development is often seen as a natural product of human ingenuity that should never be stopped or directed. But innovation can also exacerbate social and environmental impacts. Can degrowth reorient technology towards an inclusive and environmentally friendly transformation? The idea that innovation is key to economic growth is deeply rooted in our society. But this exclusively positive framing of technology ignores that innovation, in addition to improving quality of life, can reinforce existing structures of power and oppression and exacerbate environmental damage. New narratives are needed to broaden the scope of the concept of innovation.—Mario Pansera

The Dream of a Thing: Refounding the Economy of a Venezuelan Commune

Probably the most famous quote from José Carlos Mariátegui, often considered the founder of Latin American Marxism, is that socialism on our continent must be ‘neither a copy nor an imitation, but a heroic creation.’ Chávez gave equal importance to the latter part, which focused on the construction of new social relations as a popular and constitutive act. He was not wrong. What would socialism be if not an innovative creation of the people? Beyond the refusal to copy and imitate, Chávez saw that what was needed was a difficult but necessary collective effort by the masses that would involve their participation in iterative experimentation—research, participation, and action—in the construction of socialism. —Chris Gilbert

Navigating desires beyond growth

As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement opposes the hegemony of economic growth. In this article, we explore the role that fantasy plays in the emergence and sustenance of the movement. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and official documents, we examine the discourse of degrowth from the perspective of Critical Fantasy Studies, arguing that fantasies structure the desires of supporters and sustain the energy that underlies their environmental policies and actions. We suggest that the fantasy of ‘mutual dependence and care’, in particular, affectively strengthens their efforts to challenge hegemonic norms of economic growth and, in doing so, reinforces the distributed modes of political action of degrowth, while allowing its members to cultivate a prefigurative ethic of commitment. —Joshua Hurtado Hurtado and Jason Glynos

An Ecological Civilisation Will Have to Be Socialist

In this interview with Sumaúma, Ian Angus talks about the ideas set out in Facing the Anthropocene and explains the origin of his thought. The interview took place in late March 2024, shortly after the Sub-commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, rejected the proposal to formally endorse the idea that we are in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The term, which derives from the Greek word anthropos, or human, is already broadly used by scientists and environmentalists to designate an era when human activities interfere directly with Earth’s structure and speed up climate change.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

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Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

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Overpopulation and sustainability
Overpopulation and sustainability
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The end of the modern economy — Filoponía: diffused capital and the shifting of the boundary

I conclude with these stentorian words: If the modern economy was born two and a half centuries ago with the moral philosophy of The Wealth of Nations, I can say that Filoponía, also partly a work of moral philosophy, closes its era. Diffused capital and the shift from the economy to the environment remove the economy from its central position in society, and if, on the one hand, they return it to its etymology, on the other, they free it from the yoke of the GDP rectangle to develop it fully. This is the intrinsic singularity of Filoponía: society free of the economy and the economy free of debt.

Disponibile anche in italiano qui.

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The Early Socio-ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971): A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World

This article delves into the socio-ecological dimensions of OSPAAAL, the Cuban Third World solidarity institution, focusing particularly on the early years of its official organ: the magazine Tricontinental (1967–1971). Tricontinental’s articles and graphic works, even if not always in an explicit manner, addressed environmental concerns in a revolutionary way, anticipating debates that would later unfold on international institutional platforms. These concerns were primarily discussed in the context of the Third World’s quest for autonomous production, closely intertwined with the agrarian question and sovereign industrialisation. Key aspects such as land access, distribution, and resource management were pivotal. The publication’s central emphasis on struggles for national liberation, especially within the guerrilla arena, played a crucial role in disseminating the anti-imperialist pursuit of a sovereign social metabolism across the Third World. Combining Cuban, Latin Americanist, and internationalist accents,

Tricontinental also condemned the ecological impact of transnational corporations’ predatory resource extraction in the Third World, while exploring alternative andcooperative models. This article unveils the latent socio-environmental dimensionsof its critique, illustrating how ecological concerns subtly underpinned its anti-imperialist and internationalist discourse.

 

 

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What do I feel in the face of the climate, economic and social crisis: terror, panic, loneliness…

Terror and panic

I watch the videos - the ones that arrive because the worst tragedies are not even covered by the press - of droughts, hurricanes, storms, floods, and famines. I consider it an obligation to see them. If I am not the victim, I must at least know and empathise with the suffering of others, as I have asked men to do and to try to understand patriarchy: 'even if you don't change it, try to feel what we feel, understand our rage'. Now it is my turn, from the privilege of the security I still have, to feel what the victims of the climate and economic impacts detonated by the capitalist system feel. I can't help but panic about what will probably happen to me and to my loved ones. Turning on the water tap, flushing the toilet, and knowing that I am on the side of privilege and that privilege is going to end if the trajectory continues on the course we are on now, accelerating towards the abyss. To be so certain of the catastrophic trajectory we are on, to have the solutions, and to fail to change course. I never had panic attacks until I understood the trajectory we are on...

 

 

 

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The role of climate change in the catastrophic 2025 Los Angeles fires

Summer dry seasons are extending into winter, intensifying the impacts of Santa Ana winds

The New Year has rung in with one of the most horrific wildfire events in world history: an urban firestorm in the Los Angeles metro area that has killed at least five people and reduced thousands of homes to smoking rubble. Tw o major fires in excess of 10,000 acres – the Palisades fire in the western suburbs of Los Angeles, and the Eaton fire in the northern suburbs – were intensified by severe drought and driven by winds gusting up to 100 mph (161 km/hr) from a severe Santa Ana wind event. Climate scientist Daniel Swain said on CNN that the Pacific Palisades fire alone may end up as the most expensive wildfire in history, and that he expected that collectively, the fires ravaging the region will be the costliest wildfire event in history.

 

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Transitioning to Geocratia — the
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Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries

There are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable. In this Review, we explore the rapidly advancing field of post-growth research, which has evolved in response to these concerns. The central idea of post-growth is to replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Key advances discussed in this Review include: the development of ecological macroeconomic models that test policies for managing without growth; understanding and reducing the growth dependencies that tie social welfare to increasing GDP in the current economy; and characterising the policies and provisioning systems that would allow resource use to be reduced while improving human wellbeing. Despite recent advances in post-growth research, important questions remain, such as the politics of transition, and transformations in the relationship between the GlobalNorth and the Global South.

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Engels for Our Times: Gender, Social Reproduction, and Revolution?

It is surprising how often in Marxist accounts of women’s oppression Frederick Engels is overlooked. He is dismissed for being deterministic, overly economistic, even un-Marxist. Heather Brown’s key work on Karl Marx and gender sees Engels as crudely mechanical compared to Marx. A more recent assessment claims that Engels’s writings on women represented “a momentous revision of Marx. Lise Vogel, a landmark writer on Marx and gender, holds Engels responsible for later, mistaken capitalism-and-patriarchy dualistic explanations of women’s oppression. For other Marxist social reproduction theorists, Engels simply does not figure into the conversation. In a 2017 collection on Social Reproduction Theory and based on Marxist political economy, Engels is not mentioned once in his own right, only as a joint author with Marx.

Yet Engels, unlike Marx, devoted a whole book to the origins of women’soppression: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which challenged the accepted view of the nuclear family as natural and universal. It remained the go-to text for many earlier socialist women, such as Eleanor Marx, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Alexandra Kollontai, as well as those of the generations who came later, such as Claudia Jones and Angela Davis. On the centenary of the publication of The Origin of the Family, feminists of different persuasions thought Engels important enough to devote a volume to reassessing his legacy. If one includes also Engels’s book on nineteenth-century working-class life in Manchester, described by Eric Hobsbawm as pathbreaking and which contained prescient insights into changing gender roles, the case that Engels has little to offer regarding gender oppression simply does not stand up. As I will argue here, Engels’s tools of analysis are vital to us understanding—and finding ways out of—gender oppression today.

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,Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Implications for Nature-Based Solutions
 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications, and potential future risks based on estimated energy matrixes and policy pathways. The aim of this publication is to assess the risks climate change poses to biodiversity using projected IPCC climate scenarios for the period 2081–2100, combined with key species-sensitivity indicators and variables as a response to climate change projections. In doing so, we address how climate-change-driven pressures may affect biodiversity. Additionally, a novel causal relationship between extreme ambient temperature exposure levels and the corresponding effects on individual species, noted in this paper as the Upper Thermal-Tolerance Limit and Species Sensitivity Distribution (UTTL-SSD), provides a compelling explanation of how global warming affects biodiversity. Our study indicates that NorthAmerican and Oceanian sites with humid continental and subtropical climates, respectively, are poised to realise temperature shifts that have been identified as potential key tipping-point triggers. Heat stress may significantly affect approximately 60–90% of mammals, 50% of birds, and 50% of amphibians in North American and Oceanian sites for durations ranging from 5 to 84 days per year from 2080. In the humid temperate oceanic climate of European sites, the climate conditions remain relatively stable; however, moderate cumulative effects on biodiversity have been identified, and additional biodiversity-assemblage threat profiles exist to represent these. Both the integration of IPCC-IUCN profiles and the UTTL-SSD response relationship for the species communities considered have resulted in the identification of the projected threats that climate pressures may impose under the considered IPCC scenarios, which would result in biodiversity degradation. The UTTL-SSD responses developed can be used to highlight potential breakdowns among trophic levels in food web structures, highlighting an additional critical element when addressing biodiversity and ecosystem concerns.

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Some Preliminary Theses on the Concept of Eco-Civilisation

In the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution in England, Newcastle was at the center of the coal industry. The idiom “taking coal to Newcastle” thus arose to indicate uselessly taking something to a place where it was already present in abundance. For a Western thinker to speak to an audience in China on ecological civilisation (or eco-civilisation) is like taking coal to Newcastle, since it is in China where the concept is most highly developed. Nevertheless, I will argue that the notion of eco-civilisation is intrinsically related to Marxism. This talk will therefore be directed at examining the concept of eco-civilisation from a broad ecological Marxist perspective. In this regard, I have ten preliminary theses on eco-civilisation.

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