Climate change has toppled some civilizations but not others. Why?

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The link between environmental disasters and societal collapse, explained.

Focusing too closely on catastrophe can result in a skewed view of the past—it overlooks societies that navigated an environmental disaster and made it through intact.

Focusing too closely on catastrophe can result in a skewed view of the past—it overlooks societies that navigated an environmental disaster and made it through intact. A in 2021 found 77 percent of studies that analyzed the interplay between climate change and societies emphasized catastrophe, while only 10 percent focused on resilience. Historians, anthropologists, and have recently tried to fill in that gap.

On the flipside, however, cooperation can give societies that extra boost they need to withstand environmental threats. “This is why culture matters so much,” Hoyer said. “You need to have social cohesion, you need to have that level of cooperation, to do things that scale—to make reforms, to make adaptations, whether that’s divesting from fossil fuels or changing the way that food systems work.”

By these measures, the United States isn’t exactly on that path to success. According to a standard called the Gini coefficient—where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is complete inequality—the U.S. scores , at 0.38 on the scale, beaten out by Norway and Switzerland but better than Mexico . Inequality is “out of control,” Hoyer said. “It’s not just that we’re not handling it well. We’re handling it poorly in exactly the same way that so many societies in the past have handled things poorly.

 

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