‘Pre-Polycrisis’ Hazard Mitigation

Mitigate Crises Now--Future Societies Might Be Less Capable

Mar. 11, 2024

Background to ‘Pre-Polycrisis’ Hazard Mitigation

The ‘polycrisis’ describes potential future situations or predicaments (which could occur at global, regional or smaller scales) in which multiple major crises may occur simultaneously and interact over time (thereby worsening humanity’s prospects), and has in recent years become an increasingly used term in general discourse at the same time as also becoming an area of active scientific investigation.  Despite these developments, understanding of this concept is likely in its infancy, and application of this burgeoning understanding to try and formulate responses even more so.

There are a vast range of mechanisms which could contribute to the manifestation of polycrisis situations (from AI-enhanced food crises to ‘Children of Men‘ style global infertility) and it is probable that we are in a ‘pre-polycrisis’ timeframe, where interactions and feedbacks may be developing but have not started to truly generate the characteristic compounding and accelerating dynamics of a polycrisis situation.  Whilst in these ‘foothills’, perhaps the only thing we can be fairly sure of is that events contributing to future polycrisis situations will be prone to entangle, worsen and multiply and could well impact upon and shape virtually every aspect of societies throughout the world in coming decades, and may in fact become something of a defining theme.

In a recent article I considered possible future mechanisms of polycrisis impacts through the prism of one particular aspect of technological modernity, namely the global nuclear waste legacy.  More specifically, I explored the origin and nature of this legacy, the long-duration and high complexity megaprojects (geological disposal facilities) being drawn up to respond to this widespread hazard, and how different facets of the polycrisis may credibly impact upon the feasibility of these projects (and how this might in turn feed into the evolving polycrisis itself).  A key takeaway was that due to the potential for future disruptions to impact on the feasibility of making geological disposal happen, there is arguably a clear driver to prioritise and expedite these projects as much as possible.  This is because future societies may have much reduced capabilities, capacities and resources to implement such expensive and complex efforts, and could suffer negative consequences as a result.

The industrial legacy highlighted in that article provides insight about the challenges future societies potentially degraded by the polycrisis might face, but is in reality just one example amongst many, given that a number of other comparable legacies exist.  There is therefore scope to widen this discussion out to other examples of other equivalent legacies and hazards, and to explore the how the polycrisis should alter how we appraise these risks now and in the future.  What is proposed here is that a planned and deliberate effort to minimise burdens on embattled future societies by strategically addressing some of the most severe hazards left by recent and contemporary societies might be both a responsibility and duty.  This might be labelled as ‘Pre-Polycrisis Hazard Mitigation’, and the basis and logic of this concept is summarised as follows:

• Globe-spanning industrial civilisation has generated legacies of persistant hazards of wide-ranging types. These are widely spatially distributed around the world and have the potential to cause ongoing and long-term harm to humans, non-human biota and natural systems.
• A proportion of these hazards have to date been subject to remedial efforts of varying types and extents, (which in some cases have successfully reduced risks) whilst other hazards have not been substantially investigated, or even recognised as presenting risks.
• Future polycrisis impacts may substantially reduce the general abilities of future societies [1] to effectively assess and address any hazards that continue to persist and cause harm.
• Remedial efforts to address the most significant persisting hazards should therefore be prioritised where possible, whilst societies still retain the capacities and capabilities to carry out such efforts.
• The benefits of this may encompass the following:
  • Amelioration of legacies which may themselves contribute to the occurrence, onset and severity of polycrisis situations.
  • Reduction in the potential future impacts on societies (and natural systems) which, due to the wide-ranging and unpredictable impacts of the polycrisis, may have a much-reduced capacity to address and cope with the effects of different legacies of the industrial era.
  • Enhancement of the prospects of future societies to recover from any period of disruption and instability i.e., reduction of the ‘drag’ from historical damages.

Applicable Hazardous Legacies

The industrial and anthropogenic hazards and legacies to which these proposed plans might apply are potentially far-ranging, but for even pre-polycrisis societies there are constraints to what is within reach.  There are unlikely to be feasible, effective and affordable solutions for pollutants dispersed over global scales in relatively diffuse, high-entropy forms (e.g., CO2 in the atmosphere, macro- and microplastics in the oceans), so the phenomena in question here would have in common that they would be discrete and relatively well-bounded i.e., localised or already-contained concentrations of pollutants, or sources of pollutants, or otherwise damaged environments.

The capabilities which contemporary societies have, but potentially not future societies degraded, disrupted and constrained by polycrisis situations, include complex, specialised and resource/energy-intensive manufacturing, equipment and logistics, along with co-ordinating organisation, supporting financing, and political, institutional and public (i.e., government, regulatory or private industry) will and support.  Specialised inputs such as technical expertise (e.g., consulting, academic research) and specialised facilities (e.g., seed banks) would likely also be required, and all of these capabilities would need to be available in globally distributed locations.

The following bullet points encompass some examples of applicable legacies, noting that this is an initial rather than exhaustive list:

• Nuclear Wastes

As described previously, the global radioactive waste inventory [2] comprises a complex, distributed set of radioactive and toxic materials that could pose significant hazards to humans and ecosystems if the radionuclides they contain were to migrate into the environment.  Geological disposal facilities are the large, complex and long-duration final disposal solutions proposed for these legacies in many locations globally, which will isolate and contain the concentrations of radionuclides sufficiently long for radioactive decay to substantially reduce the hazards, minimising risk to humans and the biosphere.

• Methane-Leaking Hydrocarbon Infrastructure

Methane is a greenhouse gas with a heat-trapping potency of between 30 and 80 times greater than CO2 (depending on the timeframe on which its effects are measured) and the rise in the atmospheric concentration of this gas (and its climate change contribution) has recently accelerated.  There are likely to be multiple mechanisms underlying this, but the global oil and gas extraction industry may account for up to a quarter of all of these methane emissions [3].   Mitigation of this hazard will require attenuation and elimination of the ongoing chronic releases from redundant and abandoned extraction infrastructure (e.g., improperly sealed wells and ruptured pipelines) and emission ‘bursts’ from active infrastructure (e.g., fugitive leaks and venting).

• Contaminated Sites

Spills, leaks and dumping of various toxic compounds and elements from various types of anthropogenic activity (mostly since industrialisation, but from much earlier activity too) has resulted in the concentrated/localised accumulation of pollutants in environmental media, particularly land/soil and surface/groundwater.  Certain types of contamination are globally common (not including more diffuse soil contaminants such as pesticides and microplastics) and certain widespread industrial activities create and readily spread contaminants.  In Europe alone there are an estimated 2.8 million contaminated sites (including up to 40,000 impacted by ‘forever chemicals’).  These sources of contamination can adversely impact humans and ecosystems at different scales via pathways such as drinking water, food chains, and direct exposure.  Mitigations for this hazard generally involves removal of the contamination source and/or the pathways to receptors, and has been implemented through a globally mature (i.e., with accrued experience and an extensive remediation ‘toolkit’) and regulated industry which is currently funded (depending on the context) via dedicated resources, landmark projects, or through more piecemeal and ad-hoc approaches.

• Landfills

Landfilling as a waste management approach has a long history, but since the rise of industrialisation and consumerism the quantities and varieties of wastes disposed of by civilisation has risen hugely, with the majority of this material having been disposed via various types of surface and subsurface landfill (which have reached impressive scales in many locations globally).  Legacy and non-engineered landfills present multiple environmental hazards, but emission of airborne pollutants and methane (adding significantly to the fugitive global emissions described above), leaking of leachate into the water environment, and release of solid wastes back into the environment are the main aspects.  Approaches for the mitigation of harms from legacy landfills are currently immature but under-development plans could involve large-scale ‘mining’ and reuse of landfilled materials, though the costs of this would mean it would likely be targeted at those landfill sites presenting the greatest risks.

• Deforested Land

Since the start of the Agricultural Revolution humans have cleared up to one third of the world’s forest cover (with half of this occurring in just the last century), and continued destruction of remaining forest biomes has been modelled to present high risks of future catastrophic outcomes for human civilisation.  This is largely because forests of different types in different locations globally form the basis of many wider ecosystems, are essential to the functioning of Earth Systems such as the hydrosphere, and perform multiple ecosystem services such as drawing down CO2, maintaining healthy soils (thereby supporting global agriculture) and regulating the hydrological conditions which impact human habitation.  Deforestation presents a hazard by perturbing these functions, and reforestation/arboreal ecosystem restoration at scales commensurate to recent deforestation (whether industrially or locally implemented) would likely be the most effective mitigation of these hazards.

Wider Discussion

Modern complex societies currently still have the resources and capabilities to address many aspects of the globe-spanning legacies of pollution/environmental damage that they themselves created, but this may not remain true of societies increasingly disrupted in future by polycrisis situations.  The Pre-Polycrisis Hazard Mitigation concept proposed here therefore suggests that current/near-future societies have a duty to address these legacies as expediently as possible (whilst the capabilities are still available) to alleviate harms to future societies subject to polycrisis disruption.

Calls for forward-looking preparations of this sort are not without precedent; the 2005 Hirsch Report (in relation to the peaking of global oil production) recommended that a ‘crash programme’ of mitigating measures be implemented as early as possible to ‘soften the blow’ of inevitable future harms from peak oil.  The ‘Deep Adaptation’ framework defined by Jem Bendell in his groundbreaking and widely-read 2018 paper makes the case that severe societal disruptions in future are now all but inevitable, and that people should make themselves ‘collapse-ready’ in current timeframes by embracing a number of measures to increase personal and community resilience and ruggedness.

What is undeniable is that the historical opportunity for undertaking a smooth transition to a global society with lower levels of pollution and fewer externalities via minimised, spread-out costs and disruption was largely squandered despite superb early foresight.  We have therefore collectively painted ourselves into a contemporary corner in which the required responses to ameliorate risks to future societies are more urgent, and by necessity will have to be more ‘rough and ready’, and with an aim to reduce the most severe risks as much as practicable rather than achieving optimised outcomes.

These efforts would be a large scale application of the precautionary principle in that they recognise that for future societies struggling under the cosh of crises they themselves did not create, environmental hazards may not be manageable and may exacerbate their challenges; it is not known how this may manifest, but it is a reasonable assumption that efforts to address these problems now will be better than just leaving them.  As noted previously, the phrase ‘repairing the roof whilst the sun shines’ (or perhaps at least …before the rains come) is applicable to any effort to make good problems and hazards whilst conditions permit, and is appropriate as an organising principle or call to action.

Investing in ameliorating these hazards may seem at face value to offer limited scope to substantially reduce the overall risk picture for the polycrisis, but in actuality it may be the case that every marginal reduction in risk might be the difference between a single community or ecosystem failing or surviving in future.  Just like every tenth of a degree of climate change avoided might make a difference somewhere, every legacy of pollutants and damaged environments addressed now could provide an unforeseeable improvement to future prospects somewhere. The benefits of addressing hazards such as those identified could also potentially stretch well beyond near-ish timeframes and alleviate long-term harms to living and non-living natural systems. These prospects alone should compel us to at least attempt to achieve some form of ‘deep preparation’ for the choppy waters ahead.

[1] This encompasses all political and other organised bodies of people at different scales, from local communities through to cities and counties, to regions, states and provinces, up to nation-states and the international community.

[2] In addition to the to the packaged/stored wastes described, nuclear facilities themselves (e.g., decommissioned, partly dismantled, and accident-damaged reactors including naval and research units and graphite cores in quiescent ‘care and maintenance’ states, along with other miscellaneous structures such as tanks and pipework) would also form part of the nuclear legacy.

[3] Landfills are significant anthropogenic sources too, and are discussed separately.