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Anthropogenic activities are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, causing extreme events like soil erosion, droughts, floods, forest fires and tornadoes. Fossil fuel consumption produces CO2, and trapping heat is the major reason for a rapid increase in global temperature, and electricity generation is responsible for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel consumption, CO2 emissions and their adverse impact have become the focus of efforts to mitigate climate change vulnerability. This study explores empirical determinants of vulnerability to climate change such as ecosystem, food, health and infrastructure. The sustainable use of energy is necessary for development, and a source of response to climate change. The present study focuses on renewable energy consumption to determine climate vulnerability in G7 countries between 1995 and 2019. The panel ARDL approach showed that the renewable to non-renewable energy mix showed a quadratic effect on vulnerability, whereby a minimum threshold of renewable energy is required to witness a reduction in food, health and infrastructure vulnerability. Other results indicate that trade openness and development expenditures reduce health vulnerability. Development expenditures also decrease ecosystem vulnerability, while trade openness increases it. However, both of these variables increase infrastructure vulnerability. Avoiding severe food and water crises requires investment to tackle climate change, conserve energy and water resources, reform global trade and food markets, and adapting and adopting climate-resilient responses to change.
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This content will become publicly available on September 1, 2026
Carbon, Climate, and Collapse: Coupling Climate Feedbacks and Resource Dynamics to Predict Societal Collapse
Anthropogenic climate change threatens production of essential natural resources, including food, fiber, and fresh water, and provisioning of ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, increasing the risk of societal collapse. The Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY) model simulates the effect of resource overexploitation on societal collapse but lacks representation of feedbacks between climate change and resource regeneration in ecological systems. We extend the HANDY model by integrating models of climate change and ecological function to examine the risk of societal collapse. We conducted a sensitivity analysis of our expanded model by systematically varying key parameters to examine the range of plausible socio-ecological conditions and evaluate model uncertainty. We find that lowered greenhouse gas emissions and resilient ecosystems can delay societal collapse by up to approximately 500 years, but that any scenario with greater than net-zero greenhouse gas emissions ultimately leads to societal collapse driven by climate-induced loss of ecosystem function. Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the most effective intervention to delay or prevent societal collapse, followed by the conservation and management of resilient ecological systems to sequester atmospheric carbon.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2436120
- PAR ID:
- 10638473
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Systems
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2079-8954
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 727
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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