What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation would have to fund the necessary maintenance of our natural assets and why we would have to save to invest. The message is a tough one: we are way off course in terms of meeting these conditions and we cannot escape the consequences. This book explains what we would have to do to mend our ways. In doing so, it highlights the feebleness of current approaches to net zero and biodiversity loss as well as our great neglect of the core infrastructures, and why we are not meeting our duties to the next generation. This title is Open Access.

How certain can we be about projections of future climate change from computer models? In 1979, President Jimmy Carter asked the US National Academy of Science to address this question, and the quest for an answer laid the foundation for a new way of comparing and assessing computational models of climate change. My own work on climate models began with a similar question, and led me to investigate how climate scientists build and test their models. My research took me to climate modelling labs in five different countries, where I interviewed dozens of scientists. In this chapter, we will examine the motivating questions for that work, and explore the original benchmark experiment for climate models – known as Charney sensitivity – developed in response to President Carter’s question.

Scientists have been building computational models of the climate and studying the consequences of our use of fossil fuels for more than a century. In the twenty-first century, these consequences are all around us, and the need for urgent action has become clear. In this chapter, we show how experiments with climate models give us a clear picture of the choices we face, and how the climate system will respond to those choices. We’ll show how advice from climate models shapes policy targets, such as the 2°C limit and goal of reaching net-zero emissions. In the political arena, scientific advice has to compete with many other sources of information and misinformation, which has slowed meaningful action, so we’ll also examine the political processes by which we collectively make decisions, and the role each of us plays in those processes. Ultimately, climate models can guide us on how to tackle climate change, but only if we find the wisdom to understand and act on that guidance.

To provide context for the later chapters and analysis, the chapter outlines the key characteristics of Europe’s environment and nature, and the effects of human actions on it. It firstly describes the biophysical geography and natural history of Europe, including the legacy of the last Ice Age, and the current characteristics of the biogeographical regions and marine regions. It then summarises the main impacts of human activities on biodiversity in Europe, starting with early agriculture and forest clearances that created seminatural ecosystems and cultural landscapes, followed by the profound impacts of the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and more recent changes in land- and sea-use and resulting pressures over the last forty years. Other key pressures are also identified, including in relation to forestry, water and air pollution, fisheries, invasive alien species and climate change. The chapter concludes with an outline of Europe’s remaining biodiversity, identifying hotspots, and the implications for nature conservation approaches and priorities.

Over the millennia, and across all cultures, people have developed an intimate bond with birds and, for many, birds are their principal connection to the natural world. With so many eyes trained on the planet’s avifauna, birds provide us with a unique insight into the unfolding extinction crisis; the sixth such episode in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history and the first to be driven by the actions of a single species – our own. Avian extinction risk is comprehensively assessed by BirdLife International using the criteria of the IUCN Red List. The situation is alarming – around the world, birds are in steady decline, with approximately one in eight species now at risk of extinction. Each year, more species slip closer to extinction, whilst even once common birds are now disappearing fast. Yet the universal appeal of birds provides cause for hope. Their plight has been a rallying point around which a large and growing conservation movement has coalesced. A century of global bird conservation has demonstrated that when sufficient effort, resources and political will are brought to bear, bird populations can rebound and their habitats can be restored. Although imminent, mass avian extinction is not (yet) inevitable, and may still be averted if we so choose.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

Neither scientists, nor economists, nor insurers, nor military planners have assessed the risks of climate change in full. Heads of government are left to guess. A clear understanding of the scale of the risks will not on its own guarantee a proportionate response. But unless we have such an understanding, we can hardly be surprised if our response is inadequate.

Chapter 6 discusses ways in which scientists, activists, journalists, policy makers, and others concerned about global heating can most persuasively communicate climate science findings to the general public.

Chapter 10 turns to the sociology of social movements, the psychology of collective action, and the histories and tactics of prominent grassroots group to examine how to grow and empower a movement and increase broader advocacy.

Increasing numbers of people have become aware of the problem of global warming (referred to in this book as global heating) as extreme weather events and sea levels have continued to increase, private investment in renewable sources of power and in electric vehicles (EVs) and appliances has grown, and institutions and governments around the world have pledged to take action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists and intergovernmental bodies about the danger that global heating poses to the environment and to organized life as we know it, more than thirty years of talk about the urgent need for action has led to very few tangible results. Global emissions continue to rise, and few people familiar with the situation feel confident that the world will manage to meet the internationally agreed goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C, or even to 2°C. Why this is the case – how it is that, despite all that we know about the causes and harms of global heating, so little effective action has yet been taken, and how that can be changed – is the central question of this book.

The climate crisis is due to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, but we are often told it is “really” about something else: economic growth, population growth, nature deprivation, deforestation or lack of investment in new energy systems. The first is based on multiple misunderstandings, makes little quantitative sense and reverses cause and effect; nor is “growth ideology” a significant impediment to climate action. The second is even more quantitatively implausible than the first. The third is contradicted by actual rural-urban political patterns. Faith in forest carbon sequestration has given rise to a large offset industry, but forests can readily become a net source rather than a sink in a warming world. Finally, while investments in energy efficiency and renewable sources are essential, they are not the same as equivalent reductions in fossil fuels in a world of expanding energy use. This is made clear by the experience of Germany, a world leader in green development and also a regional laggard in reducing emissions. There are many other goals to be pursued, but directly suppressing fossil fuel use is the sine qua non of avoiding a climate catastrophe.

Climate justice is a term used for framing global warming and its manifold consequences as not only an environmental issue but also as involving ethical and political questions. In this chapter, I examine the usefulness of imaginative literatures from the Global South that focus on climate catastrophes and analyse them to probe the ways in which they add value. My central argument is undergirded by the idea that to achieve climate justice, it is necessary to involve disenfranchised groups in the policy-making process, for which imaginative literatures emerging from situated locations that give voice to their troubles become most pertinent.

“Climate and Race” begins with a scene from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), considered in the context of scholarship on urban heat islands, to make evident one crucial mode in which anthropogenic climate and racial grouping intersect now and will do so going forward. That established, the chapter then jumps backward in time, to the early modern period, and works gradually forward, to witness the long history of how people in Europe and America theorized the intersection of climatic and human variety. In distinction from what geneticists now contend about the ways that racial categories fail to correlate with miniscule genetic variations between human groups, and in distinction from ancient and early modern theorists who believed that bodies were so porous as to be composed differently by different environments and changed as they relocated, the most consequential modern race theorists gained traction by attending to bodily surfaces, and defining them as indexes of invisible and immutable features underneath. The chapter traces the ways in which this modern concept developed and how climate featured as an aspect of, and at times as a counterpoint to, this history of thinking.