Cause and Effect | Understanding the real threats of a civilisation collapse

At the UN climate summit in Poland in 2018, biologist David Attenborough made a foreboding speech. With that in mind, some scientists in their paper "Climate change and the threat to civilisation" defined civilisation collapse as "the loss of societal capacity to maintain essential governance functions, especially maintaining security, the rule of law, and the provision of basic necessities”. They identified three possible civilisation collapse scenarios: The localised collapse of specific, vulnerable locations The collapse of several urban and national regions, with the remaining ones experiencing negative climate-related impacts such as food and water scarcity Global collapse in which cities around the world are abandoned, nations vanish, and world population falls rapidly. The scientists also identified collapse mechanisms, and grouped them into three: Direct impact mechanisms: Severe and compounding climate impacts like rising sea levels, drought, flooding, extreme heat and so forth would affect agriculture, water availability and other basic necessities for a civilisation. Exogenous shock vulnerability mechanisms: Climate change would weaken adaptive capacities through processes described in the first two mechanism types, thereby leaving global society vulnerable to collapse triggered by other types of shocks, such as wars or pandemics.