Superabundance is within reach. But ironically, the precondition to getting it is by giving it up. It sounds paradoxical, but this is actually the key to the next great leap in human evolution.

You’ve heard of planetary boundaries? Those measures which tell us how we are disrupting the safe operating space that permits life on earth. The more we breach those boundaries, the more the safe operating space shrinks. We’ve now breached six out of nine of them. Vital signs of planetary health are flashing red, meaning we’re at risk of abrupt and irreversible changes to the Earth System that could erode and undermine the planet’s capacity to support life.

The planetary boundaries framework has provided us with one of the most powerful scientific lenses to understand the scale of the crisis facing humanity at a species-level today.

But a crucial feature of this moment is not captured by this picture. This feature is simple: the looming obsolescence of the industrial order is part and parcel of a civilisational-scale metamorphosis in which a whole new Human System is emerging.

Humans are not outside the earth system

This intersection between human and earth systems has preoccupied much of my work in systems theory over the last two decades. I attempted to synthesise and advance much of this work in my new peer-reviewed paper, ‘“Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilisation’, published in Foresight: The Journal of Futures Studies.

The concept of a ‘planetary phase shift’ captures something much broader because it speaks to the idea that the entire human-earth system is in a state of fundamental transformation – that a new human-earth system is emerging.

Wake up: the system is changing

Much of the ‘system change’ discourse and practice that prevails today fails to recognise the absolutely fundamental reality that human civilisation is undergoing a comprehensive systemic transformation. To be sure, the shape of the emerging system is unclear. And that’s because it’s not shaped yet and could become a range of different things, positive or negative, evolutionary or regressive.

My paper develops a new transdisciplinary theoretical model to scientifically understand and track this planetary-scale systemic transformation, so that we can make better choices about how to respond. One of the frameworks that centres the entire paper is the ‘adaptive cycle’, identified in particular by CS Holling.

The adaptive cycle is a four-stage life-cycle of growth, stabilisation, breakdown and renewal which can be seen operating across all natural systems – including social systems, economic systems and civilisational systems. This paper is an attempt to explore how the adaptive cycle operates at a civilisational scale, and what this means.

To do this, I also draw on ‘phase transition’ theory, which looks at how systems change abruptly at chemical and biological levels; disruptive technologies to track the key material phase transitions at play right now; and organisational change to explore the interplay between technology and society.

The result is a big picture vision of how industrial civilisation appears to be moving through the last two stages of its current life-cycle: breakdown and renewal, or, to use Holling’s terms, release and reorganisation.

Giant leap?

Planetary phase shift theory sees the material and cultural dimensions of civilisation as mutually constituted and therefore inherently entwined. This means that the foundational technologies of industrial civilisation are bound up with the prevailing industrial organising system or OS.

To survive and thrive, a civilisation’s OS has to manage and regulate our technological infrastructure within planetary boundaries. But the technological infrastructure of our civilisation is, right now, in the throes of multiple phase transitions driving a whole system phase transformation.

Every fundamental technological system that defines civilisation – energy, transport, food, materials and information – is experiencing a phase transition in which incumbent industrial age technologies are being disrupted, outcompeted and replaced by a new set of technologies across all these sectors.

The empirical data across these sectors shows that the entire material and technological infrastructure of human civilisation is experiencing fundamental transformation.

Central to this transformation is energy. Declining energy return on investment (EROI) from fossil fuels will inevitably drive incumbent industries to decline and obsolescence within decades. Meanwhile, solar, wind and batteries are the three pillar technologies on track to transform the global electricity system. Unlike oil, gas and coal, these renewable technologies experience improving EROI the more they are deployed.

A key insight of planetary phase shift theory is that such technology disruptions, driven forward by fundamental economic factors, are really biophysical in nature because their improving economic competitiveness is a proxy for improving energy efficiency. They are getting better at fulfilling a specific social purpose, but they are also doing so with less energy per unit than before. Economically, this manifests as exponentially improving costs and capabilities.

Analysing these material trends together reveals that the entire biophysical infrastructure of our civilisation is in a period of metamorphosis as the incumbent centralised fossil fuel-centric system declines. Over the next few decades, it will be increasingly replaced by a new system based on the distributed production of energy from renewable resources via networked electrification.

If designed optimally, my paper shows, we will be able to dramatically reduce the material footprint of this system while generating far more energy than is even possible within the current system. This is why I call this possibility space a form of postmaterialist, networked superabundance.

Or widening gap?

The biophysical transformation that is occurring is only one part of the equation, concerning the material-technological infrastructure of civilisation. For civilisation to successfully transform, it must also transform its cultural-organisational structures at all scales – otherwise the biophysical transformation too may fail. Yet right now, we remain trapped in the industrial age OS, whose centralised hierarchies were developed to manage the old declining system.

Due to plummeting costs and improving performance, credible empirically-grounded forecasts show that renewables will inevitably outcompete fossil fuels by around mid-century. The problem is that this is not happening fast enough to avoid dangerous climate change. The other problem is that if the transition is mismanaged it could create chaos. And yet another problem is that if deployed within the conventional industrial OS, the emerging system could create other negative consequences.

In other words, we are on the cusp of a ‘giant leap’ in our material capabilities as a species; but we are in danger of aborting that leap, falling into a new dark age – if not into total collapse – if we attempt to take the leap from within the outmoded framework of the old industrial OS. The industrial OS is incapable of regulating and governing the emerging system of postmaterialist networked abundance.

Premised on narrow, reductionist and extreme materialist values, a worldview that elevates the maximisation of human material consumption as the overriding goal, this OS is simply incapable of managing a new system that is inherently networked, distributed and participatory – and that must respect planetary boundaries. Only with an OS that recognises the importance of regenerating the earth, rather than simply extracting from it without limits, can we be empowered to design the emerging system so that it circulates wealth and materials for the benefit of all, and for the health of the planet.

Uncertain future

By highlighting these dynamics, planetary phase shift theory draws attention to the critical choices we need to make at all scales about the systemic risks and opportunities emerging right now and over the foreseeable future.

For instance, there are some technologies that are far better than others; but equally, there are also transformative and regressive ways of designing and deploying those technologies.

So if we do not harness the defining advantages of these technologies by optimising them appropriately, we could also create systems which are dysfunctional.

If the emerging clean energy system is owned and controlled by billionaire oligarchs, for instance, this would lead to myriad problems. If we failed to invest in deployment in developing countries, where sunlight is often an order of magnitude more abundant, we would not just slow the deployment for poorer countries, but fail to capitalise on the most abundant sources of clean energy that could contribute to our collective prosperity.

On the upside, if we ensured that the emerging system was owned closer to the point of production by individuals, households and businesses, accompanied by freedom to share and exchange it, this would create a new type of energy commons that could distribute prosperity in ways that were unthinkable in the old system.

So how we choose to design these material systems is not just about ‘materials’, but, simultaneously, about what we value. About what we are really committed to. About our worldview and how we choose to show up in the world. About how we govern, and how we manage our social and cultural institutions.

System change

Often, we are so focused on the admittedly horrifying symptoms of the ongoing collapse of the prevailing industrial paradigm, that we are inattentive to the significance of the real shoots of material and cultural reorganisation emerging today. Those shoots of reorganisation can be both negative and positive, but the reality is they are happening, and we need to make choices about them at a species-level.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about planetary phase shift theory is that it highlights what’s truly possible. The empirical data shows unequivocally that, if we took the ‘pure’ forecasts of material trends and imagined that we deployed them rationally, without weird hang-ups, incumbent barriers, self-flagellating narcissism or regressive self-defeating culture wars, we can rapidly transition to a new ecological civilisation that could provide abundant energy, materials, food, transportation, and knowledge to all without hurting the earth.

Yet planetary phase shift theory is not sanguine about the risks ahead, and goes to pains to make clear that the window of opportunity to achieve this possibility space is rapidly closing on our current path. Indeed, we are at risk of slamming the window shut if we do not begin to make far more planetary-oriented decisions at all levels.

Which is why I wrote this paper in the first place: to distil a rigorous, scientifically-grounded framework to guide decision-making so that we can mitigate the regressive impacts of the ‘release’ stage and empower the forces of ‘reorganisation’ – to maximise chances of moving into a whole new life-cycle for humanity.

This requires an approach that grapples with the mutually constituted nature of technology and society – and that, in turn, requires coming to grips with what technologies are scaling, which are worth accelerating, and how they should be designed, structured, owned and guided in the context of a new socio-political, economic and cultural paradigm of planetary stewardship. 

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a full member of The Club of Rome, member of the Earth4All Transformational Economics Commission and Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems. He is the creator of the Age of Transformation newsletter on systems thinking.

Ahmed, N. (2024), ““Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilisation”, Foresight, Vol. ahead-of-print https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-02-2024-0025 The full text is available to read at academia.edu