system dynamics
Human societies tend to follow cyclical patterns of growth and decline dependent on environmental variables.
" Since then the number of Fossil Fuel Age humans has
grown well past the planet’s carrying capacity by a factor of
at least 1.5 times and the current trajectory of industrializa-
tion, population growth, climate change, and environmen-
tal degradation is clearly unsustainable (Rees and Wack-
ernagel 2013; Steffen et al. 2015; Day and Hall 2016; Day
et al. 2018; Crownshaw et al. 2018; Burger et al. 2019).
The modern industrial city has taken on a new significance
on the worldwide sustainability stage after the recent urban
transition to greater than 50% of global population living
in cities and more than 500 cities with more than a mil-
lion people (e.g., Glaeser 2011, p. 338). This transition is
the industrial revolution underwritten by the massive use
of fossil fuels. The fossil resource bases for modern cities
are fundamentally non-sustainable in the face of growing
biophysical constraints on resources, ecosystem degrada-
tion, population growth, climate change impacts, and a pro-
foundly dysfunctional economic system based on contin-
ued growth (Graeber 2012; Hall and Klitgaard 2012; Day
et al. 2018; Crownshaw et al. 2018; Burger et al. 2019).
Components of this dismal picture lie ahead. They include
human impacts that have caused global-scale degradation of
natural ecosystems (Roberts 2009) and decreasing ability to
provision ecosystem goods and services to vulnerable areas
like coastal zones and arid regions. Any effort to transition
to renewable energy will compete with resources needed
to mitigate climate change and environmental degradation
and to support a growing population (Day et al. 2018). How
these needs are balanced is the primary decision-making
challenge of the immediate future. "
Human societies tend to collapse upon reaching a complexity that cannot be sustained.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1810/1810.07056.pdf
A quantitative analysis of deforestation and population growth rates suggest a high likelihood of complex society collapse in 2-4 decades.
" ...we conclude from a statistical point of view that the probability that our civilisation survives itself is less than 10% in the most optimistic scenario. Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilisation (see Fig. 5). Making the situation even worse, we stress once again that it is unrealistic to think that the decline of the population in a situation of strong environmental degradation would be a non-chaotic and well-ordered decline. This consideration leads to an even shorter remaining time. Admittedly, in our analysis, we assume parameters such as population growth and deforestation rate in our model as constant. This is a rough approximation which allows us to predict future scenarios based on current conditions. Nonetheless the resulting mean-times for a catastrophic outcome to occur, which are of the order of 2–4 decades (see Fig. 5), make this approximation acceptable, as it is hard to imagine, in absence of very strong collective efforts, big changes of these parameters to occur in such time scale. "
