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Anthropogenic climate change as a monumental niche construction process: background and philosophical aspects

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Abstract

Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting biogeochemical cycles and the climate at a global level. We argue that anthropogenically-driven climate change must be understood in terms of a monumental niche construction process, generating long-term ecological inheritance and eco-evolutionary feedbacks that are putting our health and well-being and those of future generations at risk. We then list five major sources of climate change counter-intuitiveness, highlighting how evolved cognitive biases and heuristics may stand in the way of providing effective responses within tight deadlines. Drawing on our framing of the climate breakdown, we finally call for an evolutionary perspective in approaching the adaptive challenge posed by climate change: we argue that putting the brakes on a genuine self-endangering evolutionary trap ultimately depends on our counteractive niche constructing abilities, played at the level of our institutional and innovation capacity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Francesco Suman (University of Padua) for helpful discussion in the early phases of this work and Dr. Adrian Currie (University of Exeter) for his thoughtful feedback on a later draft of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Biology, Evolutionary Biology Research Unit, University of Padua, Via U. Bassi 58/B, Padova, Italy

    Andra Meneganzin & Telmo Pievani

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20131, Milano, Italy

    Stefano Caserini

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  1. Andra Meneganzin
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Andra Meneganzin drafted Sects. 1, 2, 3; Telmo Pievani drafted Sects. 4, 5, 6 of the initial manuscript. Stefano Caserini critically and carefully reviewed the whole work and the scientific writing, integrating passages in each section and primary scientific literature on climate change.

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Correspondence to Andra Meneganzin.

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Meneganzin, A., Pievani, T. & Caserini, S. Anthropogenic climate change as a monumental niche construction process: background and philosophical aspects. Biol Philos 35, 38 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09754-2

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