Influential Paper Defending Climate Change’s Great Acceleration Wins 10-year Impact Award

“The Great Acceleration” is a concept in the scholarship over climate change that highlights the correlation between extreme human economic activity and higher average temperatures around the globe. In short, it’s a defining start point for the Anthropocene, a sometime contentious term for the geologic period in which human activity has been the primary agent affecting the climate and environment. An article defending the dating of the “Great Acceleration,” — and appearing in an academic journal, The Anthropocene Review, that was only in its second year — is one of the most impactful articles published in Sage journal in the year 2015.

For that achievement, the authors of “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” will receive a 10-Year Impact Award from Sage. Acclaimed climate scientist Will Steffen, the paper’s lead author, passed away in 2023. The other authors are Wendy Broadgate, currently Global Hub Director, Sweden Hub for FutureEarth; Lisa Deutsch, senior lecturer at Stockholm Resilience Centre Owen Gaffney, chief impact officer at Nobel Prize Outreach; and Cornelia Ludwig, education and environmental coordinator at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The team’s paper was conceived as an update to a landmark book they had published a decade earlier.

“The 10-Year Impact Awards attest to the enduring quality and lasting relevance of scholarship in fields often undervalued by short-term measures of success,” Ziyad Marar, president of global publishing at Sage., has explained. “Being an independent publisher allows us to look beyond traditional metrics to broaden perspectives on how impact is recognized in those disciplines across the globe.”

“The trajectory of the Anthropocene” had received 3,074 scholarly citations by the time of judging, placing it second among all papers Sage published in 2015. Using data drawn from Overton, the paper has also received 263 policy citations.

The Anthropocene Review is a trans-disciplinary journal issued 3 times per year, bringing together peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of research pertaining to the Anthropocene, from earth and environmental sciences, social sciences, material sciences, and humanities.

Below, Gaffney answers some questions we had about the paper

In your estimation, what in your research—and obviously the published paper—is it that has inspired others or that they have glommed onto? I ask this in particular since the field of climate research and the ‘Anthropocene’ itself (hence the then-new journal!) is both crowded and contentious.

Since it was first proposed in 2000 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the Anthropocene has generated significant academic interest across many disciplines, from geology and Earth system science, obviously, to law, economics, international governance, feminist studies, philosophy and more. The Great Acceleration has often been central to this discussion. It has become part of the discussion on the Anthropocene onset. The Great Acceleration supports the case that the Anthropocene began around the 1950s rather than at the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s or much earlier, at the dawn of agriculture, as some have argued. There is also a broader academic interest in understanding the dynamics of of the last 80 years, which are so unique in human history and earth history, for example the population explosion, growth in GDP, and how these complex phenomena interact with the Earth system. The Great Acceleration, it seems, provides a useful summary. 

I should point out that our paper with Sage was the second update of the Great Acceleration. The series was first published in “Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure,” in 2004. We are currently working on a third with an expanded author group. 

What, if anything, would you have done differently in the paper (or underlying research and analysis) if you were to go back in time and do it again?

Data availability remains a challenge. It would certainly have been useful to develop a system for regular updates of the datasets, for example on an annual or bi-annual basis.  data availability, especially long-term time series of Earth system processes, was difficult then and remains so. 

 What direct feedback—as opposed to citations—have you received in the decade since your paper appeared?

Even today, ten years on, we are regularly contacted by publishers, artists, writers, producers and others to reproduce the graphs. It is always satisfying to feel the work is inspiring, or at least useful, to others. 

How have others built on what you published? (And how have you yourself built on it?)

The Anthropocene Working Group, which has been exploring the case to formalise the Anthropocene in the stratigraphic record, has expanded the suite of 24 Great Acceleration indicators to hundreds and indicated there are likely thousands. 

You dared suggest there were “glimmers of hope”. Do they remain or have they dimmed? Is humanity’s foot still pressing the accelerator?

The Great Acceleration work really began with Will Steffen (1947-2023). He led the work on the first assessment published in 2004 and this second 2015 assessment. In 2023, Will passed away, suddenly. This was a deep shock to all the authors. We miss him terribly. He was a brilliant scientist with immense knowledge of the state of the Earth system, the social system and the risks humanity is now taking with the stability of both, but he resolutely rejected defeatism. As he knew, our superpower as a species is cooperation at scale. Yes, it is alarming that key curves like carbon dioxide emissions and temperature, are not decisively bending yet. But population growth rates peaked a long time ago. And the ozone hole looks set to recover fully this century. And renewable energy is growing exponentially – some positive accelerations are on their way. The question that Will was working on most intently before he passed away was whether the transformation will happen fast enough to avoid crossing dangerous tipping points. Perhaps humanity will do the right thing – once every other alternative has been exhausted. 

Could you name a paper (or other scholarly work) that has had the most, or at least a large, impact on you and your work?

The most recent academic discussions on the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and tipping points continue to influence our work.