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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