Planetary Phase Shift Framework
Description
Nafeez Ahmed:
"Civilisations, like all major natural systems, move through a life-cycle of four stages - growth, stabilisation, release and reorganisation. The final stage either precipitates a new life-cycle, or the death of the system.
The planetary phase shift framework indicates that human civilisation, as the largest socio-ecological system on the planet, is moving between the third (release) and fourth/final (reorganisation) stages of its life-cycle.
This conclusion is supported by empirical data across many of the defining material sub-systems of civilisation and its interactions with planetary life-support systems. We not only have extensive data that industrial civilisation is at risk of breaching significant ‘planetary boundaries’ of which the climate system is just one, we also know that the global Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of fossil fuels has been declining dramatically since the 1960s.
This has acted as a fundamental systemic driver of a steady decline in the rate of global economic growth. An increasing reliance on financialisation through debt expansion has attempted to compensate for this, but ended up compounding the systemic volatility of the financial system, resulting in periodic global and regional debt crises.
These major energy and economic shifts are intertwined with major production system crises facing legacy industries across food, transport and information. These escalating crises are, therefore, not simply multiple disparate events that happen to be deeply interconnected due to complex relationships. They are actually different sector extensions of a single, fundamental systemic crisis in humanity’s relationship with the planet (a reality which crude conceptualisations of the ‘polycrisis’ tend to obfuscate).
Simultaneously, we are moving into a new reorganisation stage in which these very sectors and systems are being reshaped and restructured. Among the major drivers of this process is the emergence of disruptive technologies across energy, transport, food, information and materials which are outcompeting incumbent industries and technologies, and on track to disrupt and displace them. These are not one-for-one substitutions but as they have completely distinctive properties operating according to novel rules, they entail entirely new systems of production.
Yet the most challenging aspect of this planetary phase shift is the role of what might be called the ‘software’ of civilisation – our cultural systems, or civilisation’s “organising system” (OS).
As we move through the third release and fourth reorganisation stages of the planetary phase shift, we are not only witnessing crisis-collapse trajectories in incumbent material structures, we are simultaneously witnessing crisis-collapse trajectories in the dominant ideologies, paradigms, and intertwined social, political and economic structures of industrial civilisation. These are being compounded by the rapid emergence of new material tools and systems of production whose operation can barely be managed or regulated by the incumbent OS.
There is thus a a huge and widening gap opening up between
1. Incumbent material systems breaking down;
2. emerging new material capabilities;
3. and incumbent cultural paradigms and OS structures."
(https://ageoftransformation.org/war-with-iran-the-planetary-phase-shift-and-global-system-paralysis/)