After World War II, human activity also accelerated in many sectors other than agriculture. The world’s population grew at an unprecedented rate and doubled in 50 years to 6 billion. In the field of environmental history, this development, which began in the 1950s, is called the “Great Acceleration”.

This post-war acceleration was made possible in large part by the removal of obstacles to economic and population growth as well as technological development. In addition to the World wars, the world economy was burdened by the economic recession that began in 1929 and lasted throughout the 1930s and is known as the Great Depression. Among other things, this recession withered investment in technological development.

In contrast, the practices generated during World War II in coordinating scientific activities (for example, developing the atomic bomb) paid off after the war in many other sectors, including energy and chemical industries. The economy was organized in a new way as the liberal market economy pursued by the winning states spread wider and economic organizing models that emphasized self-sufficiency became rare. Similarly, the Cold War setup between the great powers contributed to accelerating progress in science and technology.

The origin of the concept

The concept of Great Acceleration is strongly related to the concept of Anthropocene presented earlier in the course. The basic idea here is that humans have caused so much change on Earth that we should argue that the current geological epoch, the Holocene, has changed to Anthropocene. Scientists who launched the concept of the Great Acceleration believe that the first period of Anthropocene began with industrialization in the 19th century and ended after World War II. After that, according to this mindset, we would have moved on to the second stage of Anthropocene, called the Great Acceleration.

Environmental historians knew the phenomenon of accelerating human activity that began in the 1950s long before it was named the Great Acceleration. The term was first used in a scientific article in 2007 in a paper by Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of Nature?”. The well-known High Acceleration graphs had also been published earlier, in 2004, in a book Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure by Steffen et al. (Executive Summary downloadable here. Figures are on pages 15 and 17)

The acceleration of human activity is straining the systems of nature

The Great Acceleration figures illustrate the effects of human activity on the Earth’s natural system. Researchers have selected 12 socio-economic and 12 earth systems indicators with data describing developments either from the mid-18th century or as far as data are available – or as long as these activities have been carried out. Socio-economic indicators show that since the 1950s, human productive activity has accelerated further in almost all activities. The other 12 parameters describe the effects of this accelerating human activity on the natural environment.

From the socio-economic indicators, it can be seen that the situation has stabilized only with regard to the construction of large dams. The authors of the figures offered as an explanation that the Earth simply no longer has large rivers without dams left. This indicates that the increasing use of water will increasingly be based on groundwater. Other socio-economic indicators have continued their growth trajectories that began in the 1950s, although some bumps can be seen in the curves: for example, foreign direct investment fell sharply in the economic downturn that began in 2008.

Also, the indicators that describe the adverse impact of humans on the Earth’s ecosystems are for the most part still in a continuous growth trajectory. However, halting ozone depletion is seen as one major victory in tackling the global environmental problem. We will return to this later in the course.

The reduction in catches of marine fish, on the other hand, is not due to a reduction in fishing pressure but to a reduction in fish stocks as a result of overfishing. This, in turn, has led to an increase in aquaculture to compensate for declining fish catches, resulting in large areas of tropical mangrove forests being converted into aquaculture basins.

Great acceleration is a very illustrative way of describing the intensification of human activity and its environmental impact over the past 70 years or so. The patterns illustrate well the fact that, while over tens of thousands of years, humans have always changed their habitat (at times irreversibly at the level of entire continents), the magnitude of changes in the last few decades is unprecedented, in both speed and scale.

Towards a regional perspective

However, the Great Acceleration perspective is not very analytical and therefore has also received criticism. From the beginning, the Great Acceleration focused specifically on global developments without disaggregating the historical developments in different regions. This obscured the issues of social inequality and justice in the global development process. For example, the above-mentioned study of fossil capitalism shows that the transition to a fossil economy in the 19th century was not the work of the entire humankind, but of a small number of British capitalists.

Similarly, the link between population growth and CO₂ emissions is a more complex issue than would appear from these figures. Population growth is widely, and with good reason, considered to be the root cause of environmental problems. However, population growth does not directly correlate with greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time as the world’s population increased about 6.6 times from the early 19th century to the 2010s, CO2 emissions increased about 660 times. In other words, in addition to the number of people, emissions per person have also grown at an unsustainable rate. However, it must be remembered that emissions from all people on earth have not increased in the same way. Comparing population growth and emissions growth between 1980 and 2005, it has been found that the number of people grew the fastest in the regions with the slowest growth in emissions.

Indeed, the researchers who developed the idea of Great Acceleration have subsequently sought to increase the distinctiveness of their analysis by sharing socioeconomic trends between OECD countries, BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and other countries. The OECD is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which focuses on promoting economic growth and free trade and has 38 (2021) member countries. Roughly speaking, OECD countries are the richest countries in the world.

Even such a rough division into groups of countries reveals what kind of issues of human justice are obscured under the global perspective. Most notably, although the majority of the population lives outside OECD countries, and population growth also takes place in non-OECD-countries, economic growth, measured in terms of GDP, has largely taken place in OECD countries. In 2010, OECD countries accounted for 74% of global GDP, although only 18% of people lived in these countries. In practice, this means that one-fifth of the world's population enjoys most of the material well-being generated by economic growth and thus, through their way of life, causes and is also responsible for most of the global environmental problems.

However, this trend is changing as the middle class of the BRICS countries grows. The figures show that already in many sectors, such as paper production and telecommunications, most of the growth comes from outside the OECD countries. (see figures here). This will put more and more pressure on natural systems. For example, China’s greenhouse gas emissions have grown rapidly in the 21st century.  China’s greenhouse gas emissions surpassed U.S. emissions in 2006, and in 2015, the country’s CO2 emissions were nearly double those of the United States. At that time, China's emissions per capita were already higher than the average European.

From an environmental point of view, it would be desirable for growth outside the OECD countries not to follow a similar path of development as in the post-war OECD countries. In non-OECD Africa and Asia (also outside China and India), energy consumption is projected to increase significantly (by more than 50%) by 2040. Economic growth should be based on renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, and in some places, this would mean that energy production would have to jump over a centralized fossil energy-based system directly to renewable energy – in the same way, that telecommunications jumped directly to mobile phones. However, there is no guarantee of such a development. Africa, for example, has abundant natural resources – including oil reserves – that can act as an engine for economic growth, and comparisons to mobile phones are probably only wishful thinking. Unlike renewable energy, mobile phones did not have to compete with an infrastructure (oil fields, pipes, tankers, coal mines, power plants, etc.) that cost at least $25 trillion (in 1990 international dollars) to create during the 20th century, perhaps more than the construction of any other infrastructure in human history.

For reflection: the Great acceleration has now continued for about 70 years. How much longer do you think it will continue?  You can share your reflections and discuss with other participants on the page linked below.

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