Humanity already possesses much of the science, technology and economic capacity needed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet global emissions continue to rise. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions reached an estimated 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025, setting another record and intensifying a question that has become central to the climate crisis: why does climate action remain so much easier to promise than to deliver? A new Perspective in Science Bulletin argues that the problem is not simply a shortage of clean technologies, weak political will or inadequate climate models. Instead, the authors identify a deeper conceptual error: climate and society are still commonly treated as two separate systems that must somehow be connected, even though they have always evolved together as one tightly interdependent system.
The article, titled “Climate and society as one: A (de)coupling future for escalating climate challenges,” was led by Professor Ye Chao of Fudan University, with contributions from researchers in several countries, including U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Jessica Fanzo and European Academy of Sciences members Alexander Baklanov and Michael Meadows. The authors argue that economies, institutions, cultures and technologies do not merely respond to environmental change from the outside. They actively produce, amplify and sometimes reduce climate risks through decisions about energy, land, transport, food, finance and infrastructure. At the same time, changing climate conditions reshape those same social systems. This continuous feedback means that climate change is not an external disturbance imposed on society; it is part of a co-evolving climate–social system.
The distinction has important consequences for the way climate policy is designed. Integrated Assessment Models, or IAMs, are widely used to explore relationships among economic growth, energy demand, emissions and temperature change. These models have helped policymakers compare mitigation pathways, estimate carbon budgets and assess the effects of different energy technologies. However, the authors say that many IAMs still represent social norms, political conflict, public risk perception, institutional trust and governance changes as external assumptions rather than as dynamic forces within the model. This can produce technically sophisticated scenarios that underestimate how people and institutions alter the direction of climate outcomes. A policy may appear optimal on paper but fail in practice because it overlooks public resistance, unequal costs, political turnover or the ability of powerful groups to preserve high-carbon systems.
The researchers describe this gap as a form of “governance decoupling.” International climate commitments often do not translate smoothly into national policies, while national targets can remain disconnected from regional implementation and household behavior. Coordination is also weak among sectors that are physically and economically linked. Energy policy affects transport and industry; agriculture influences land use and methane emissions; finance determines which technologies receive investment; and public health shapes how communities experience heat, pollution and disasters. These interactions unfold over decades, yet political systems often operate on election cycles of only a few years. The result is a collective-action trap in which leaders recognize the long-term danger of emissions but face immediate incentives to protect jobs, prices, voters and existing infrastructure.
To make this relationship more visible, the authors revisit the Environmental Kuznets Curve, a well-known concept in environmental economics. The traditional EKC proposes that pollution may initially increase as economies grow, reach a peak at a particular income level and then decline as wealthier societies adopt cleaner technologies, stronger regulations and less carbon-intensive forms of production. The new Perspective reinterprets this curve not as an inevitable route that every country will follow, but as a map of changing coupling states between economic development and emissions. In this framework, the trajectory of a country depends on institutions, policy choices, technological systems, global trade and historical conditions—not income alone.
The first state, described as “weak coupling,” applies to economies where economic expansion remains closely tied to rising carbon dioxide emissions. Growth in these countries can generate employment and reduce poverty, but it may also increase demand for coal, oil, gas, cement, steel, electricity, private vehicles and carbon-intensive construction. China and India today are presented as examples of this developmental phase, although their trajectories are not identical. The authors compare them with the earlier industrial histories of today’s developed economies, which also experienced periods when rising production and higher living standards were powered by rapidly increasing fossil-fuel use. Weak coupling is therefore not a moral label or a permanent condition; it describes a structural relationship that can change as energy systems and governance evolve.
The second state, “strong coupling,” has a deliberately different meaning from the usual interpretation of decoupling in climate discussions. It refers to economies that continue to grow while their emissions decline, indicating that prosperity and climate action are advancing together rather than moving in opposition. The United States and Germany are cited as examples of economies that passed their emissions peaks decades ago and have since reduced territorial emissions while maintaining high levels of economic activity. Such progress can result from efficiency improvements, renewable energy, fuel switching, industrial restructuring, regulation and changes in consumption. However, the authors caution that falling domestic emissions do not automatically mean that a country has eliminated its climate impact. Imported goods, international aviation, outsourced manufacturing and financial investments can shift emissions beyond national borders, making trade and telecoupling essential parts of the analysis.
The third state, called “de-coupling,” carries a deliberately negative meaning in the proposed framework. It describes an “anti-EKC” condition in which fossil-fuel dependence, institutional weakness or structural poverty prevents economic development from aligning with climate resilience. In such settings, low emissions may not reflect clean prosperity; they may instead reflect limited industrial capacity, energy poverty or a lack of access to modern infrastructure. Conversely, fossil-rich economies can generate substantial revenues while remaining vulnerable to volatile markets, extreme weather and delayed diversification. This distinction is crucial because a simple emissions-versus-income graph can make very different social realities look similar. The authors emphasize that the three states are neither fixed nor necessarily sequential. Governance can move a country toward stronger coupling, stall its progress or reverse earlier gains.
Policy, in this view, is not merely a tool for correcting market failures after emissions have occurred. It is the steering mechanism that reshapes the entire climate–social system. Abrupt reversals of international commitments can weaken confidence, slow investment and push a country away from strong coupling, while coordinated long-term policies can accelerate technological and institutional change. China’s rapid expansion of new-energy vehicles is presented as an example of deliberate intervention bending an emissions trajectory. By 2024, the country had approximately 31.4 million new-energy vehicles on its roads, and such vehicles accounted for 41.83 percent of new registrations. The figure illustrates how industrial policy, infrastructure investment, consumer incentives, manufacturing scale and regulatory standards can interact to transform a major source of emissions.
The authors argue that making this framework operational will require more than attaching social variables to existing climate models. They call for “team science” and knowledge co-production involving geographers, climate scientists, economists, sociologists, political scientists, public-administration experts and communities affected by climate policies. One possible direction is to combine IAMs with agent-based models, which simulate how households, firms, governments and other actors make decisions under changing information, incentives and constraints. Such integrated approaches could represent feedbacks that conventional models often simplify, including public trust, social inequality, political polarization, institutional learning and behavioral change. Emerging initiatives—including the Earth Commission’s Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries, citizens’ climate assemblies, Just Transition funds and open-data platforms such as OS-Climate—illustrate how science, governance and public participation might be brought into closer alignment. In a world shaped simultaneously by geopolitical instability, trade tensions, artificial intelligence and accelerating environmental change, the researchers say that strengthening the coupling between climate and society may be the most important step toward making climate solutions not only technically possible, but socially durable.
Subject of Research: Climate–society systems, climate governance, economic development and carbon-emissions trajectories
Article Title: Climate and society as one: A (de)coupling future for escalating climate challenges
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2026.03.026
References: Science Bulletin, DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2026.03.026
Image Credits: © Science Bulletin
Keywords: climate change, carbon dioxide emissions, climate governance, Environmental Kuznets Curve, economic development, strong coupling, weak coupling, de-coupling, integrated assessment models, social–ecological systems, just transition, new-energy vehicles
