He stirred in a dash of ruddy optimism: the slowing to a stroll will bring benefit to the planet, the economy and our lives.
With much greater emphasis, the end of the acceleration was announced in 2020 by the geographer Danny Dorling. “There are not enough big rivers left to dam” - or oil to burn, groundwater to pump, forests to fell, fish to catch. “The great acceleration will not last long,” it concluded. Then in 2016 the book entitled The Great Acceleration reported that although some trends are speeding up, others, including stratospheric ozone loss and marine fish capture, had begun to decelerate. The expansion of domesticated land slowed somewhat, as did fertiliser use in rich countries.įalling fertility rates foreshadowed the end of population growth: the number of humans will peak this century, perhaps twenty years from now, before heading south. The original research group did, however, note some modulations. The initial formulation was based on data from 1950-2000, and most indices, including GDP growth, transport, and primary energy use, continued upward into the 2000s and beyond. The trends in the graphs, it has always been evident, will not accelerate in tandem for ever.
It registers that human activities are generating large-scale changes in Earth-system processes, and at a quicker pace. However, Polanyi’s book provides a causal explanation of socioeconomic change, while theirs is descriptive. Their term for this surge of people and money and concrete consciously echoed Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The great acceleration, a concept spotlighting humanity’s impact on its natural environment, was coined twenty years ago.Ī research group studying socioeconomic trends and their environmental impacts noticed explosive upticks, from around 1950, across multiple datasets: the growth of foreign investment, GDP, greenhouse gas emissions, population, cities, roads, dams, travel and tourism, the consumption of energy, water, paper, cars, and fish, deforestation rates, and many more. What does this mean for a just transition? The great acceleration - in GDP, population, cities, travel, deforestation, pollution - is on some metrics stuttering. In a 'long read', and reproduced here with permission, Dr Gareth Dale, Reader in Political Economy at Brunel University London, writes about the stalling and reversing of some of the socioeconomic trends and their environmental impacts, and explores what this means for the future of humanity.
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