The UN Environment Programme just published an important report called Navigating New Horizons, which is “a global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing” — precisely my main area of work.
Moreover, it links up with another of my main areas of interest — my work as a health futurist, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, good futures thinking isn’t about predicting the future, particularly when you are dealing with very changeable social and political systems, especially when you understand that such systems are subject to sudden, non-linear change. They can reach tipping points and change very rapidly and in sometimes unpredictable ways.
My work as a health futurist mainly involved helping people think about a range of plausible alternative futures. From there, people can think about which of the plausible alternatives they would prefer, which they would want to avoid, and what they might need to do to reach their preferable future.
One of the plausible futures we face — usually thought of as the probable future — is “business as usual,” basically, just more of the same, but bigger and better.
So for years, decades in fact, “business as usual” has meant a continuation of the system of economic growth and material consumption that took off after the Second World War, a process that the Stockholm Resilience Centre dubbed “the Great Acceleration.”
But more than 50 years ago, we were warned by the Club of Rome, in the landmark report The Limits to Growth, that “business as usual” would lead to decline and collapse in the mid-21st century — still a generation away. Now we are almost there.
So right now, what appears to be an increasingly plausible future is some sort of ecological, social and economic decline, or even collapse in some places. This is because, to return to my recent columns on values, “ecosystems support societies that create economies,” as the Worldwide Fund for Nature has noted.
When we try to operate in contradiction to that dictum, we drive ecosystems into decline, or even into collapse, and with them the societies and communities that depend upon them.
Increasingly, then, “decline and collapse” is the “business as usual” future, the probable future, which is in itself an interesting shift in perception.
One of the key messages of the UN Environment Programme report is that acceleration is itself accelerating: “The speed of change is staggering,” the report states, adding that “it has become clear that the world is facing a different context than it faced even 10 years ago.”
This is due to “the rapid rate of change combined with technological developments, more frequent and devastating disasters and an increasingly turbulent geopolitical landscape.”
Indeed, the report notes, “The world is already on the verge of what may be termed ‘polycrisis’—where global crises are not just amplifying and accelerating but also appear to be synchronizing.”
The report identifies eight critical global shifts or phenomena that we need to understand and learn to manage. I will explore them next week.
Clearly, decline and collapse is not a preferable future, at least not from humanity’s perspective, although Mother Nature may welcome it as a way of ridding herself of a pest!
But nor is “business as usual” preferable, since as already noted, it leads to decline and collapse.
But the message of the report is not one of despair. On the contrary, there is hope: “The good news,” says the report, “is that just as the impact of multiple crises is compounded when they are linked, so are the solutions.”
Thus we can “shift the momentum from the brink of polycrisis to polystability.”
The report suggests there are two key changes we need to make: “a focus on intergenerational equity and a new social contract reinforcing shared values that unite us rather than divides us.”
A third important change that will help bring about the needed transformation, the report notes, is “placing a new global emphasis on wellbeing metrics rather than pure economic growth.”
If you understand intergenerational equity as referring in particular to the state of the planet we pass on to future generations, then it is noteworthy that once again we are talking about transformations in values relating to the Earth, each other and the economy.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
