After 15 years of charged academic debate, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) earlier this year announced its rejection of the official proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as Earth’s new geological epoch. With global average temperatures soaring and the consequences of a rapidly changing climate becoming increasingly widespread and severe, what does the decision mean for scientific and popular discourses around anthropogenic climate change? 

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It is inarguable that humans have had an age-defining impact on planet Earth. Over two decades ago, this thought led scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to first formulate the idea of the Anthropocene, a term asserting that human (or anthropogenic) influences on our planetary ecosystems have now become so dominant and so destabilising to necessitate the establishment of a new chronostratigraphic epoch in the official geological timeline of Earth.

In recent decades, the Anthropocene has gained immense scientific and popular currency within the global discourse on anthropogenic climate change, finding particular evocation in moral-political pleas for urgent action to temper the ever-increasing reality of the destructive impact of human actions. Despite the term’s global ubiquity, however, its scientific usage has remained informal: confirmation that the Anthropocene is officially Earth’s new geological reality has rested on the outcome of one and a half decades of tense academic debate over the scientific validity of the term. 

In March 2024, this debate came to an end, as the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the governing body of the geological discipline, voted to officially reject the Anthropocene proposal. In view of the seemingly undeniable reality of our destructive human impact, what does the rejection of the term mean for the discourse around anthropogenic climate change?

More about the topic: Explainer: What Is the Anthropocene?

A Long-Awaited Decision

Following the popularity surrounding the term, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formally established in 2009 by the Subcommittee on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), a sub-group within the IUGS, to develop an official proposal that outlined sufficient geological evidence to support the existence of a distinct Anthropocene epoch. In geology, the formalisation of a new chronostratigraphic unit in the official Geological Time Scale calls for a “golden spike” – material evidence in the stratigraphic (rock strata) record from one physical location on Earth, demonstrating a discrete change in Earth’s geological history. The proposed golden spike must be approved by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), under the IUGS. 

Research on the Anthropocene start date has generated dozens of theses regarding when the era began and which location is the most definitive golden spike, but the official AWG proposal ultimately landed in 1952. This date represents the start of the so-called Great Acceleration in mass-scale human production and consumption, based on an influx of recent evidence that has found radioactive residue, microplastics, pesticides, and ash from fossil fuel combustion across the global geological record. The final AWG proposal selected the specific evidence of the radioactive plutonium deposits from 20th-century hydrogen bomb tests found in the sediment of Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, as the golden spike. 

Although scientific evidence demonstrating the dominance of human influences on Earth’s geology is extensive, the SQS vote resulted in a conclusive “no” to the Anthropocene, with 12 out of the 16 members voting against the proposal. Despite a firm challenge from SQS chairman Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head regarding alleged “procedural irregularities” surrounding the vote, the IUGS officially terminated the challenge on March 20, endorsing the original vote with 15 out of 17 in favour. 

The controversy surrounding the final vote is emblematic of the broader academic debate over the Anthropocene, with the last 15 years witnessing heated academic exchanges and three resignations from the AWG due to disputes over the term. With such contention over the new geological epoch, the recent rejection clearly holds significant and varying implications for how we, as humans, understand our place in our present global reality, and for how we use the term in the discourse around climate change.

The Rejection and Its Implications 

Does the rejection actually mean that we aren’t in the Anthropocene? That anthropogenic climate change is less-real of a global reality? The foremost answer is no. 

It is impossible to deny the monumental, destructive impacts that human activities have had on the planet, and the rejection of the term is not meant to contradict this reality; scientific evidence showing the significance of anthropogenic influences on the environment from leading global scientific organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and IUGS has been met with near-unanimous approval. The IUGS has not ignored scientific evidence, as some have alleged, or intended to deny the destructive reality of global climate change. What the debate and rejection show, rather, is that the Anthropocene is fundamentally political: the term has transcended scientific semantics to become a political battleground in the all-encompassing struggle to understand our global environmental reality, our role as humans within it, and why we now need to act sustainably, to reverse the harm we have inflicted.

“The proliferation of this concept can mainly be traced back to the fact that, under the guise of scientific neutrality, it conveys a message of almost unparalleled moral-political urgency,” wrote German cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk.

For some, then, the scientific rejection of the Anthropocene has only borne negative consequences for the political discourse on anthropogenic climate change. Without an accepted, stable scientific definition, some contend that the term now lacks the discursive utility to unite global understanding of the problem and catalyse global solutions, an implication that is particularly worrying in consideration of the existing urgency for international climate action.

“The IUGS ruling means that the Anthropocene will confusingly continue to represent widely different concepts. This has been a missed opportunity to recognise and endorse a clear and simple reality, that our planet left its natural functioning state, sharply and irrevocably, in the mid-20th century,” said Zalasiewicz.

A considerable group of observers, however, have instead viewed the rejection as an opportunity. Over the course of the wider debate, many of the scientific objections to the Anthropocene have centred on the definitional narrowness of the term – stemming from the fact that the IUGS’s criteria for a golden spike required that the AWG specify one fixed start date for the Anthropocene, represented by one set location. It was this reason that spurred ecologist Erle Ellis’s resignation from the AWG last year: “[The AWG] has become so focused on promoting a single narrow definition of the Anthropocene that there is no longer room for dissent or for a broader perspective,” he wrote in his official resignation letter.

For those such as Ellis that have criticised the conceptual strictness of the AWG, the rejection has in fact supplied an opportunity for alternative narratives on the Anthropocene to emerge, with the most favoured suggesting that we define the Anthropocene as an event in geological history rather than an epoch. 

Events in geology, such as the Cambrian Explosion or Great Oxidation Event, are characterised as gradual transformations over time instead of the abrupt material shift that marks an epoch. For Ellis and many others, understanding the Anthropocene as a wider socio-historical process rather than as a discrete break in geological time imbues the term with more meaning, allowing it to serve instead as a broad multidimensional concept that better encompasses the long global history of eras and geographies across which humans have had a dominant impact on the environment – from the Columbian Exchange to the Industrial Revolution to the Great Acceleration, and from the atmosphere to the ocean to the earth. 

Utilising the Anthropocene to tie together a wide array of anthropogenic ecological transformations under the same loose umbrella is, for many, much more useful than a narrow stratigraphical definition that fixes the understanding of our human impact to one point and one place in history. This reasoning composed the core thread that ran through the IUGS’s official rejection, with the governing body rightfully recognising that the Anthropocene “will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions” when employed as “an informal non-stratigraphical term.”

“It serves humanity best as a loose concept that we can use to define something that we all widely understand, which is that we live in an era where humans are the dominant force on ecological and geological processes,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a palaeoecologist at the University of Maine.

“There is an impulse to want to put things in capital letters, in formal definitions, just to make them look like they’re nicely organised… What the working group is trying to say is everything pre-1950 is pre-Anthropocene, and that’s just absurd,” remarked Bill Ruddiman, a geologist at the University of Virginia.

Taken further, many argue that the static definition of the Anthropocene does not merely limit understanding of our historical relationship to our environment, but in fact risks actively proliferating a “misleading and regressive” narrative about who and what caused the Anthropocene. “[D]ividing Earth’s human transformation into two parts, pre- and post- 1950, does real damage by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth’s unfolding social-environmental crisis. Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet?”, asked Ellis. 

Ellis’s statement reflects a growing critical perspective that has unpicked the way in which the Anthropocene concept, under the guise of scientific objectivity, in fact promotes a universalising narrative that conceals the particular histories and societies that have engendered our present environmental reality. By reductively describing the Anthropocene as uniform phenomenon caused by a singular, undifferentiated humanity, the term serves as a convenient yet wrongful distortion for the Global North whose scholars coined the concept, concealing the disproportionate responsibility of the Anglo-American societies whose environmentally destructive activities have historically precipitated the present crisis. 

Understanding the Anthropocene as a geohistorical event helps us understand how our present global reality cannot be decoupled from the material histories of Western capitalism and European colonialism, within which lie the origins of our destructive modern practices. It is from this perspective that some have perceptively criticised the composition of the AWG, in which the dominance of Western male geoscientists within the group has been regarded as a procedural failure for an investigation of global reach.

Now Is the Anthropocene

Ultimately, the formal rejection of the Anthropocene term does not mean that anthropogenic climate change is less-real of a global reality. What the verdict does suggest, however, is that we need to adopt a deeper and more nuanced view of this reality – one that embraces the sweeping historical complexity of our human relationship to the environment, rather than one that distorts this history in the attempt to define it through neat scientific labels.

As science journalist Alexandra Witze put it, “By voting ‘no’, [the SQS] actually have made a stronger statement, that it’s more useful to consider a broader view – a deeper view of the Anthropocene.”

The post Not Yet Anthropocene: What the Official Rejection of Earth’s New Epoch Means for the Climate Discourse appeared first on Earth.Org.

The latest UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) marked a “historic” decision on the operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund. For decades, the issue of loss and damage increasingly faced by the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities has constituted a key frontier in the ongoing battle for justice in international climate action, particularly in relation to the chorus of demands for wealthy polluters to recognise and act in accordance with their historical responsibility for climate change and its related impacts. Although lauded by many as an emblematic win for climate justice, this article questions what the operationalisation of the new Fund has meant for climate justice in real terms. How has the Fund advanced action for the most vulnerable in line with historical responsibility, or has it at all?

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Climate Justice and Loss and Damage: The Story So Far

In the context of global average temperatures continuing to consistently break all-time monthly records into 2024, and the confirmation last month that the critical 1.5C global warming threshold has been consecutively breached over a twelve-month period for the first time in history, the issue of the ever-increasing economic and non-economic losses and damages faced by the world’s most vulnerable communities in the Global South could not be more crucial.

Used as shorthand to refer to the economic, social, and cultural losses and damages caused by human-induced extreme weather events and slow-onset climate changes to natural systems and human communities, “loss and damage” has for decades constituted a central frontier in the ongoing battle for climate justice. 

With present and projected losses and damages disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities in the Global South – that is, those with generally the least responsibility for historical emissions and the smallest financial capacity for tackling climate-related impacts – the issue of loss and damage has become central to global civil society demands that developed country polluters in the Global North act in line with their historical responsibility for the majority of the world’s cumulative fossil fuel emissions. Calls for wealthy polluters to ameliorate their historical climate debt have most commonly taken the form of demands for compensatory financial flows to developing countries, to support the least responsible yet most vulnerable communities in dealing with the adverse impacts of climate change.

Exemplified by the failure of developed Parties to meet their promise of US$100 billion in climate finance flows to developing countries per year by 2020, it is clear that wealthy nations are not doing enough to ensure climate finance is equitable. 

In this context, the agreement at COP27 to establish a Loss and Damage Fund was widely lauded as a “landmark” decision for climate justice. A year on, COP28 commenced with the “historic” agreement on how to operationalise the Fund, celebrated by the Convention’s proponents as “an important symbol of global solidarity… and a step forward in international climate justice.” Last year’s decision comes as an all too welcome win for the long-awaited institutionalisation of loss and damage finance under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), following decades of near-total exclusion from international climate policy. 

Celebration of the Fund has been tentatively echoed by many across civil society, with the international humanitarian organisation CARE remarking that the decision marked “a landmark day for climate justice after 30 years of rich countries blocking the way.” Many others, however, have criticised the Fund as the “bare minimum” and, notably, even a “failure… of climate justice.”

With civil society and policymakers so divided over the normative success of the Fund for climate justice, it is essential to dive into the specificities of how this “historic” decision has (or hasn’t) advanced just climate action for the most vulnerable in line with historical responsibility.

More on the topic: Explainer: What Is ‘Loss and Damage’ Compensation?

What Does the Operationalisation of the New Fund Mean for Climate Justice?

The decisions adopted regarding the operationalisation of the new Fund on the opening day of COP28 represented the culmination of a year’s fraught negotiations by the 24 member Transitional Committee, established in Sharm el-Sheikh to prepare a comprehensive proposal on the Fund’s practical implementation. Agreement to accept the recommendations of the Committee was momentously reached on the first day of the Conference and followed over the next two weeks by a flurry of financial pledges from the Convention’s most economically developed (and most historically responsible) parties. Although the swift decision and influx of pledges on day one certainly reflected an ostensible “step forward in international climate justice,” the reality underlying the hopeful promises is not so straightforward.

1. Contributors to the Fund

Undoubtedly the most significant detail regarding the Fund’s advancement of climate justice has been the stipulation for “developed country Parties [to continue] to take the lead to provide financial resources for commencing the operationalisation of the Fund.”

Although not made explicit, for many, the Fund’s tacit recognition of the distinction between present vulnerability to and historical responsibility for climate change still amounted to a significant win. 

“This Fund is recognition that those experiencing the worst impacts of the climate crisis are the least responsible for causing it, which is a huge accomplishment”, said Zahra Hdidou, the Senior Resilience and Climate Advisor for ActionAid UK.

For many others, however, the omission of any officially mandated contributions structured on the basis of historical responsibility represents a glaring failure for climate justice. 

“The continued denial by wealthy historic polluters of their responsibility to pay for climate harms, hiding behind paragraphs and footnotes, is out of touch with reality,” remarked Lien Vandamme, Senior Campaigner at the Centre for International Environmental Law.

Although the call for developed Party leadership has been outwardly interpreted as an affirmation of their historical obligations to developing countries, the broader legal coaching of the decision within the Paris Agreement serves to fundamentally reject the idea that financial leadership on the Fund is denotative of historical responsibility. A controversial footnote to Article 8 of the Paris Agreement confirmed that loss and damage policy “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.”

Adherence to the footnote, then, has for many rendered void the potential for the Fund to advance recognition of historical responsibility, with developed Party financial leadership instead notionally rooted in the supremacy of their economic capacities only. Indeed, the US-driven provision incorporated into the Committee’s recommendations to ensure contributions remained discretionary served to solidify the rejection of developed country responsibility from the final decision. The voluntary nature of the contributions effectively guarantees that a long-term mobilisation scale structured by a certain notion of responsibility is not relevant. In this context, pledges reflect merely the (limited) goodwill of an affluent neighbour, rather than a systemic recognition of historical liability. 

2. Contributions to the Fund 

The influx of financial pledges made across the two weeks of the Conference appeared to many observers as demonstrative of an equitable commitment to supporting the most vulnerable. Total pledges from developed Parties by the end of week two exceeded US$700 million. Of this total, US$300-400 million was promised by the EU collectively, $100 million from the UAE, $50 million from the UK, $17.5 million from the US, and $10 million from Japan.

Although ostensibly a triumph for the most vulnerable, the $700 million has in fact been found to constitute less than 0.2% of the economic and non-economic losses developing countries face each year from climate-related impacts. UN estimates on the annual costs of climate-related losses range from US$160-340 billion per year by 2030. The current pledges, “while welcome, … [are] a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of funding needed,” said Tasneem Essop, the Executive Director of Climate Action Network (CAN) International.

With funding commitments falling so overwhelmingly short, the equity of a discretionary financial mechanism for loss and damage must once again be called into question. 

“It is immoral… that rich nations cannot find adequate funds for addressing climate impacts, yet could instantly find billions of dollars, not millions, but billions of dollars to support a war on the people of Gaza,” remarked Essop in her address to the world leaders at COP28.

The insufficiency of current pledges is couched within the broader structural inadequacy of climate finance flows to developing countries overall. The larger failure of developed country Parties to meet the $100 billion per year by 2020 target points to injustice of a voluntary system of climate finance in which contributions have no benchmark, such as historical responsibility, against which they are able to be mandated and monitored.

You might also like: Wealthy Nations May Have Met $100 Billion Climate Finance Pledge in 2022, OECD Says 

Under the present funding arrangements, many contributions have been derived from the reshuffling of pre-existing official development assistance and climate finance sources. To begin to be equitable, it is essential that the Fund be able to mandate new and long-term sources of funding that ensure the most responsible polluters pay. The failure of the new Fund to do so is becoming increasingly inadmissible, in view of various recent studies that have highlighted how appropriate funds could be raised from taxations on fossil fuel industry profits and levies on high-emissions activities. 

Oxfam reported last year that taxes on the UK’s biggest polluters could have raised up to £23 billion (US$29.1 billion) via an excess profits tax on fossil fuel companies, redirected fossil fuel subsidies, frequent flyer levies, taxes on private jets and superyachts, and ring fencing 20% of wealth tax proceeds.

3. Hosting of the Fund

The second big outcome witnessed in Dubai was the decision for the Fund’s secretariat to be hosted by the World Bank on a four-year interim basis. The decision constituted a distinct point of contention during negotiations, in which a developing country-backed proposal to establish a stand-alone Fund was summarily rejected in favour of the US-led recommendation that the Bank as host would streamline the operational establishment of the Fund, enabling financial support to be promptly disbursed to the most vulnerable.

The justice implications of the Bank-hosted Fund are complex. In light of concerns over the procedural equity of the Bank’s core stakeholders consisting of some of the world’s largest historical polluters, worries may to an extent be quelled, considering that the Fund will ultimately operate under its own governance structure, rather than under the Bank’s Boards of Directors. The Fund’s Board shall consist of 26 total members, 14 of whom are mandated to come from various groups of developing countries.

The broader issue for many observers across global civil society and developing countries, then, lies with the Bank’s institutional history of climate inaction. A stark report by The Bretton Woods Project, a civil society watchdog for the World Bank and IMF, outlines the billions of dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry by the Bank, including over US$12 billion for new fossil fuel projects between 2014 and 2018. 

“[The Fund] cannot be under the control of an institution with a history of inequitable and environmentally detrimental practices,” said Climate Action Network (CAN) International’s Harjeet Singh.

4. The Beneficiaries of the Fund

In view of what for many are the flagrant shortcomings of the Fund, it may be easy to understate the institutional win that the establishment of a loss and damage funding mechanism has signalled for climate justice. The agreement made at COP28 has promised to “target people and communities in climate-vulnerable situations (including women, children, youth, Indigenous Peoples, and climate-induced migrants and refugees in developing countries…)” and consider “a minimum percentage allocation floor for the least developed countries and small island developing states.”

At the most basic level, the operationalisation of the Fund represents a significant victory for climate justice – for countries and communities on the frontline of the climate crisis, and for the global networks of actors and organisations that have for decades fought for equitable financial support on their behalf. 

“For me, the real victory of COP28 was the power of people and civil society to finally deliver outcomes put off for 30 years, something unimaginable just two or three years ago,” said Catherine Pettengell, Executive Director of CAN-UK.

You might also like: Did COP28 Succeed or Fail?

Just Climate Finance Without Historical Responsibility?

Although the purportedly “historic” decision on how to operationalise the new Loss and Damage Fund did not advance climate action for the most vulnerable in line with historical responsibility, it is plain that the increasing recognition of the financial and humanitarian responsibility of developed country parties for ameliorating the vulnerability of the developing represents a promising future direction for climate justice.

For now, the tension over whether just and effective climate action is achievable without recognition of historical responsibility remains at the centre of global debates over the efficacy of international climate finance. As this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP29, set to be explicitly dedicated to the issue of climate finance, approaches, we shall soon see whether equitable advancements are to be made in the issue-area of loss and damage. As noted by Chiara Martinelli, Executive Director of CAN-Europe, “[this] year’s negotiations on the future level of climate finance will, therefore, be a critical litmus test for a truly global course correction.”

Featured image: Oliver Kornblihtt/Mídia NINJA

The post Climate Justice and Loss and Damage: A Look At What COP28 Meant for Historical Responsibility in Climate Action appeared first on Earth.Org.