The world today evolves as a complex mixture of Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transition tendencies. These three truths suggest three concurrent action prongs expanding on the current focus on gradual policy change: reform (incremental policy), remediation (emergency management), and redesign (system transformation). The reform prong resonates with dominant policy paradigms seeking to ease social-ecological stress, such as cautious efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, conventional institutions, notably the state-centric international order and corporate dominated political economy, appear profoundly ill-equipped to meet the challenge of deep reform. The most promising efforts, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are steps in the right direction, but not the leap forward now needed. Still, civil society reform efforts can help mute dangerous trends, thereby countering Barbarization while buying time for a Great Transition mobilization. However, evidence mounts that incremental action alone is insufficient, especially as key government and corporate leaders continue to deny, ignore, or respond indecisively to threats.
The second action prong—emergency management—counters head-on the real risk of system collapse (Barbarization). This strategy evokes an existential “precautionary principle” proscribing policies that allow further drift toward conditions where science cannot rule out social-ecological tipping points. It would be timely to extend the environmental precautionary principle, embodied in Principle 15 of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Rio Declaration [20] to the system level. Additionally, redoubled cultural and educational efforts are needed to counter the politics of hate and polarization. In parallel, international emergency preparation for humane intervention into hotspots of chaos and conflict are essential, lest military containment becomes the rule. Finally, critical consideration of selected geoengineering options compatible with the precautionary principle, such as massive biomass sequestration in soils, rather than perilous solar radiation management, would be prudent.
Since thus far the reform and emergency prongs have proved too little, too late, the third prong comes to the fore: actions to advance transformative cultural and institutional change. A robust strategy for deep change has many dimensions, including designing innovative economic and governance models attuned to contemporary challenges, debating alternative global visions, and nurturing a shift toward values of global solidarity, ecological sensibility, and lives of qualitative fulfilment over consumerism. Critical to this approach are new initiatives to foster connectivity across popular movements and civil society networks, thereby creating a path to an overarching movement of global citizens for a Great Transition.
The three action prongs—reform, remediation, and redesign—are best pursued synergistically, rather than as independent strategies. Non-government actors and networks are critical to all dimensions: prodding governmental reform, prompting calamity control, and galvanizing transformative movements. In parallel, research can better support and guide these efforts by giving priority to the exploration of nonconventional futures and their links to near term choices. For example, for climate, integrated assessment models used to quantify greenhouse gas emissions underlying climate projections do neither incorporate the potentially disruptive feedbacks of climate impacts on economic and demographic drivers of emissions, nor are they equipped to deal with deep societal or economic transformation. Most immediately, assessments such as those of the IPCC need to be enhanced to incorporate disruptive change, whether the feedbacks of severe climate change on economic and demographic assumptions or the impacts of a deep shift in human values and institutions.
Beyond the climate issue, the search for pathways to social-ecological sustainability requires integrated analysis across sectors, geographic scales, and time horizons. The research agenda now taking shape to address this challenge [21] would be well advised to highlight the exploration of system discontinuity and transformation as a critical dimension for deepening understanding, broadening policy, and engaging citizens. Facing a holistic challenge, we need a new transdisciplinary science that, in collaboration with artists, historians, innovators and social visionaries, can propel awareness and action by illuminating the landscape of the future, in all its dire peril and unique opportunity. This would better connect science, policy and society, and foster explorations of alternative paradigms for a civilization fit for the twenty-first century. The COVID-19 pandemic has painfully demonstrated the real risk of historical discontinuity. A varied array of other social-ecological discontinuities can plausibly emerge in the coming decades. Going forward, scenario assessments with claims to relevance and rigor must emphasize nonconventional global futures.