World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability - WBGU

Summary for Policy-Makers
A new Social Contract
It’s not because things are difficult that we
dare not venture. It’s because we dare not
venture that they are difficult.
Seneca (1 BC–AD 65)
In recent history, the ongoing pro-democracy movements
in a number of Arab states and the fall of the
Berlin Wall have served as proof of the power and
dynamics of transformative processes. There are several
lessons to be learned from these upheavals for the transition
to sustainability: firstly, unsustainable situations
can lead to dramatic collapse. Moreover, transformative
forces often remain hidden below the surface for quite
some time. This is evident today not least in the quantifiable
global change in values to embrace sustainability.
After all, the downfall of dictatorships whose mainstay
has been the extraction of crude oil and natural gas
(Soviet Union, Libya) also reveals the formerly hidden
costs of a ‘fossil’ industrial metabolism.
Normatively, the carbon-based economic model is
also an unsustainable situation, as it endangers the climate
system‘s stability, and therefore the natural lifesupport
system for future generations. The transformation
towards a low-carbon society is therefore as much
an ethical imperative as the abolition of slavery and the
condemnation of child labour.
For quite some time now, the fossil economic system
has been changing all over the world. The WBGU views
this structural transition as the start of a ‘Great Transformation’
into a sustainable society, which must inevitably
proceed within the planetary guard rails of sustainability.
Long-term studies show clearly that worldwide,
an ever-increasing number of people desire this
move towards sustainability and a long-term approach.
Moreover, the nuclear disaster in Japan makes it clear
that we must choose the fast lane towards a low-carbon
future without nuclear energy.
Now, it is first and foremost a political task to overcome
the barriers of such a transformation, and to
accelerate the change. In the WBGU‘s view, a long-term
oriented regulatory framework must be developed for
this to ensure that prosperity, democracy and security
are achieved with the natural boundaries of the Earth
system in mind. Above all, development paths must be
pursued which are compatible with the 2 °C climate
protection guard rail agreed upon by the global community
at Cancún in 2010. This drastic change in direction
must be accomplished before the end of the current
decade in order to reduce global greenhouse gas
emissions to a minimum by 2050, and thereby to maintain
the possibility of avoiding dangerous climate
change. Hence, time is of the essence here.
In its flagship report, the WBGU elaborates explicitly
on the fact that the technological potential for comprehensive
decarbonisation is available, outlines business
and financing models for the transition, and points out
that the political instruments needed for a climatefriendly
transformation are widely known. The council
also describes how the requisite transformation encompasses
profound changes to infrastructures, production
processes, regulation systems and lifestyles, and
extends to a new kind of interaction between politics,
society, science and the economy. Various multi-level
path dependencies and obstacles must be overcome.
Furthermore, the transformation can only succeed if
nation states put global cooperation mechanisms before
their own short-term oriented interests, in order to
make a trend reversal, particularly as far as the global
economy is concerned, towards climate-friendliness
and sustainability possible. And not least, from a global
perspective, this is also about issues of fairness – issues
that need resolving.
This ‘Great Transformation’, then, is by no means an
automatism. It very much depends on ‘organising the
unplannable’ if it is to succeed within the available tight
timeframe. This is unique in history, as the ‘world‘s
great transformations’ (Jürgen Osterhammel) of the
past were the result of gradual evolutionary change.
Adding together all of these challenges involved in
the transformation to come, it becomes clear that the
upcoming changes go far beyond technological and
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