The climate transition will either be cultural or it won't be

The way in which we conceive of territories and live in them, at both local and global level, will evolve as a result of ecological requirements and their societal effects. But anthropisation, the long march of human beings towards the domestication of nature, has created deeply rooted histories, behaviours and lifestyles: The climate transition will either be cultural or it won't be.

Ever since it first acquired tools, homo faber[1] has been transforming inhabited environments to the point of taming them, affecting biotopes and biodiversity, and all living matter (biomass). The consequences of anthropisation show that human beings have often forgotten that they are not alone on earth.

Although we sometimes look no further than the end of our street or field, the management of an area cannot ignore what is happening elsewhere, and the issue of climate change is now at the centre of all strategies to inform local, continental and global political decision-making. The major and minor debates that feed the official agendas and those of civil society during the COPs demonstrate this.

This disruption is affecting our metabolisms, as well as all living things (animals and plants) and geology. In 2022, the French High Climate Council [2], reports that the impact of the rise in temperature (+2.9°C compared with 1900-1930) will have a negative effect on agricultural yields, hydroelectric production, mortality and biodiversity, and will generate natural disasters.

Awareness of the effects of human activity

Based on a recent mission, the Tara Ocean Foundation reports that 40 to 60% of the world's population lives on coastal areas. It notes that since the 18th century, colonisation and the creation of major commercial ports, which facilitated triangular trade and the import of goods, have led to the artificialisation of coastlines, the erosion of dunes, the covering of ponds and the destroying of areas of biodiversity for replacing them with artificial, concrete infrastructures.

What does this observation tell us about the evolution of maritime trade? Territories are not only geographically and climatically diverse, the footprint that trade, agriculture and industry have fundamentally left on them also creates specific social contexts and historical antecedents that have become decisive, generating cultures and habits that are deeply rooted in human memory, passed on to be reproduced.

Since the 1980s, the conversation on sustainable development[3] has been taking a cross-cutting approach to culture. For the Brazilian educationalist Paolo Freire, "Culture is the way in which a human group responds to the challenges of history" [4]. This proposal enables a community of destiny to conceive of what Bertrand de Jouvenel, the French guru of foresight in the 1960s, called "futuribles [5]", possible futures.

For Quebec sociologist Guy Rocher, culture "is a set of more or less formalised ways of thinking, feeling and acting which, being learned and shared by a plurality of people, serve, in both an objective and symbolic way, to constitute these people into a particular and distinct collectivity"[6]. The fields of action of culture are therefore not restricted to heritage and the arts, but are open to ways of living, beliefs and practices.

Awareness of the harmful effects of certain human activities requires political and economic leaders, educators and all those whose actions shape people's opinions to encourage citizens who are also farmers, consumers or tourists to imagine possible futures which, from local to global level, not only make ecosystems more resilient to the effects of human activity, but also guide human activities towards mitigating their harmful effects, adapting practices and rehabilitating ecosystems.

At a hearing on 12 February before the French Senate Committee of Inquiry into TotalEnergies, Jean-Marc Jancovici, Chairman of The Shift Project think tank, called for a massive effort to reduce CO2 emissions. In his view, keeping global warming below 2°C would require an annual reduction in emissions of 5%. The creator of the carbon footprint said that nuclear power alone would not be enough to decarbonise the economy, and that radical lifestyle changes would be needed to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

A non-partisan ecology, guided by the common good

The major challenge is to establish an integral ecological vision[7], stripped of its partisan version to become a universal cause, by associating all the pillars of sustainable development, linked to the notion of the common good, which also implies the question of intergenerational transmission. It is therefore a political issue, in the highest sense.

This conception of ecology is based on an understanding of urban, rural and neo-rural ecosystems, on harmony between the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and on the definitive acceptance that the human species was not born to dominate the planet, but to share it with other creatures. Fundamentally, it's a question of education, to prepare citizens to live in communities of destiny in a conscious and accepted way.

At local level, for example, this reflection and the political action that follows from it require the application of the principle of subsidiarity, which is essential in terms of decentralisation and community ownership to ensure that the responsibility for choosing and deciding the future is as close as possible to the citizens, who are themselves the agents of change.

Cultural[8], political and educational, this systemic transition needs to be approached using the tools of foresight to understand the major trends in future developments.

It is still possible to mitigate the effects of climate change, provided that an appropriate global policy is implemented as a matter of urgency [9]. This is the challenge facing all those who are aware of the issues and decide to take action.

Richard Amalvy

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Richard Amalvy has leaded a number of national and international NGOs and worked as a consultant for various intergovernmental organisations (World Bank, OECD, IAEA) and companies in the digital industry. He is a professor at the Graduate School of International and Political Studies (HEIP, Paris), where he teaches foresight and public affairs management. He has experience of managing local authorities in France.

[1] Hanna Arendt, The human condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958

[2] Annual report of the High Council for the Climate, 2022

[3] Defined in 1987 in the Brundtland Report, sustainable development is a development model that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

[4] Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, New York Herder and Herder, 1970

[5] Bertrand de Jouvenel, Futuribles: essai sur l'art de la conjecture, Éditions du Rocher, 1964.

[6] Guy Rocher, Culture, civilisation et idéologie, éditions Seghers, 1969.

[7] Integral ecology is a concept of the Catholic Church, disseminated in particular by Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato si.

[8] See the "Climate: what culture for what future" series, Centre Pompidou, Paris, December 2022.

[9] Sylvain Huet, Le GIEC urgence climat, le rapport incontestable expliqué à tous, Taillandier, 2023.