Towards a theory of coupled sociopolitical events-planetary boundaries, crises, policrisis and Earth System syndromes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coupled matrix model to analyze how sociopolitical events influence planetary boundaries and Earth system crises, providing a framework to classify and compare complex sociopolitical syndromes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel interacting matrix model linking sociopolitical events with planetary boundaries and Earth system crises, including scenarios leading to runaway effects.

Findings

Exponential sociopolitical events can cause runaway effects on planetary boundaries.

The model predicts evolution scenarios leading to crises and policrisis.

A classification method for sociopolitical syndromes is introduced.

Abstract

The impact of the human activities can be evaluated by the Planetary Boundaries (PBs), however, so far it is not clear how to assess the influence of specific sociopolitical events (SPEs) on the Earth System (ES) and at the same measure, without a suitable framework, to gauge how these affect the PBs. In this work, we propose an interacting matrix model that couples SPEs with the PBs and consider the possible evolution scenarios and, in particular, those leading to crises and policrisis. We address specifically the situation where the PBs evolve according to the continuous logistic function, and then consider an exponentially-evolving SPE, which we show to cause a runaway effect on the PBs. We also propose a way to describe, classify, and compare sociopolitical syndromes, that is, a set composed of more than a single polycrisis.