Excerpted from Jem Bendell:

“What if it’s too late to avert catastrophic climate change? Should I continue to prepare my next environmental report, pleased with my organisation’s own reduction in emissions, and pray for a technological breakthrough to save us? Or might I admit I’m disillusioned with my efforts and instead try to be that yoga teacher I always wanted to be? Or go to join Occupy? Surely they could use some of my professional support. Perhaps I should redouble my efforts to live a low-carbon lifestyle. Yes, that would make me feel better. I’d feel authentic – and could blame everyone else. Or perhaps it is time I stared the climate science squarely in the face, and reconsidered my professional strategies accordingly with the aim of affecting society at large.

There are many ways we could respond to a sense that it is too late for sustainability. So, rather than let unsurfaced fears shape our decisions in work and life, could it be time to explore openly the various ways we might respond to the disruption ahead?

A report entitled State of the World, published this week by the Worldwatch Institute, explores whether sustainability is still possible and how people’s choices would be affected if they realised that it’s to late to stop climate disruption.

“The basic trends themselves remain clearly, measurably unsustainable… the relentless march of warmer temperatures, higher oceans, and ever-more-intense downpours and droughts,” explains the report.

The Worldwatch Institute says it is addressing “a topic that most discussions of sustainability leave unsaid: whether and how to prepare for the possibility of a catastrophic global environmental disruption.” They are not alone. Late last year PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report that concluded it was too late to hold the future increase in global average temperatures to just two degrees. The same month the World Bank noted that, unless there is a major change in current trajectories of development, then a four-degree average rise is likely by 2100. Not known as a doomsayer, the World Bank noted: “There is… no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” Let that statement sink in. It means that currently we are on course for the end of civilisation as we know it.”