Seminar Philosophical perspectives for the Anthropocene 2023

Rapid societal transformations are necessary to mitigate risky anthropogenic climate change and maintain human systems within Earth’s planetary boundaries for continued sustainable development. Recently, societal tipping processes have received increasing focus as a potential transformation mechanism. Yet, generalisable solutions towards intentionally transforming societal systems remain elusive. We argue for shifted focus away from individual social tipping points and interventions and towards uncovering the systemic conditions enabling tipping from a complex adaptive systems perspective. In this perspective, we introduce two concepts to advance the emerging field of social tipping points research: criticality, the likelihood that a system will experience tipping processes, and critical agency, human capacity to intentionally arrange conditions towards shifting systemic criticality. Criticality is a necessary condition for societal transformation, and can serve as a crucial compass for policy makers, entrepreneurs, and activists, illuminating how critical agency can be used to instigate desired ‘positive’ societal tipping.

The Living Well Within Limits project investigates the energy requirements of well-being, from quantitative, participatory and provisioning systems perspectives. In this presentation, I will communicate individual and cross-cutting findings from the project, and their implications. In particular, I will share our most recent results on the international distribution of energy footprints by country, consumption category, and income classes, as well as modelling the minimum energy demand that would provide decent living standards for everyone on earth by 2050. I will show that achieving low-carbon well-being, both from the beneficiary (“consumer”) and supply-chain (producer) sides, involves strong distributional and political elements. Political economy research is thus necessary to diagnose reasons for poor outcomes, and identify the most promising avenues for positive change. I thus argue for the active (as in activist) engagement of the research community.