The Six Critical Determinants That May Act as Human Sustainability Boundaries on Climate Change Action

Abstract

Significant advances have been achieved in multilateral negotiations regarding human development and environmental safeguarding since the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. There is much greater global awareness and action towards sustainability. However, sustainability has persistently been sidelined, leading to the identification and definition of a transgressed “safe and just space for humanity”. Here we develop a new evolutionary approach and methodology to explain the reasons why sustainability continues to be a difficult challenge for contemporary societies to adopt. We argue that these originate in six major biological, social, psychological, political, and cultural critical determinants that resulted from human biologic and cultural evolution. Although they are essential for human prosperity and wellbeing, these characteristics may also act as human sustainability boundaries. It is possible to reduce the inhibiting power of each critical determinant in the pathways to sustainability, a vital process that we term softening. Identifying, knowing, and softening these impediments is a necessary first step to achieving sustainability through greater self-knowledge and transformational processes. The application of the present methodology is restricted here to the climate change challenge. We examine the ways in which each human sustainability boundary is capable of obstructing climate action and offer possible ways to soften its hardness.