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City Life Vs Country Life Pages: 6 (1613 words)
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A Life Lesson in Keller’s The Story of My Life: Empowering Self-Efficacy Pages: 6 (1531 words)
Debating the Relationship Between Art and Life: Does Art Imitate Life? Pages: 5 (1426 words)
My Life Experience How It Changed My Life Pages: 6 (1611 words)
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What Will Life on Earth Be Like in 2050?

Scientists Look Ahead Five Decades In State-Of-The-Planet Report, Explore Ways To Solve Earth's Problems

Washington, D.C.

January 19, 2006

Megan Rabbitt

[email protected]

The number of extreme events, such as hurricanes and famine, affecting at least one million people will increase over the next 45 years if a certain scenario of world development plays out. Demand for water will increase enormously — between 30% and 85% — especially in Africa and Asia, by the year 2050. But human health may improve as public health measures advance vaccine development and lessen the impact of epidemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS. These are just a few of the many findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) published in a 4-volume set by Island Press and released today.

The MA is the product of a 4-year global research initiative, commissioned by the United Nations, in which 1,300 scientists from 95 nations explore the complex interactions between human well-being and the environment.

“The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment tells us that there is an inextricable link between the health of humans and the health of the planet. We can no longer ignore the enormous economic and social benefits, such as climate regulation and water purification, provided by nature’s fragile ecosystems,” said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation. “The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is an extensively researched, scientifically grounded roadmap for why and how we should slow or reverse today’s ecosystem degradation and chart a path toward sustainable human development.”

The MA looks ahead 50 years from the year 2000 to paint four alternate pictures, or scenarios, of life on earth. Current estimates of 3 billion more people and a quadrupling of the world economy by 2050 show that our consumption of biological and physical resources will skyrocket putting much more pressure on ecosystems. But the scenarios demonstrate that the condition of ecosystems in the future could be significantly worse or better than in the present – depending on policy choices. For example, wise use of environmental technology, investing in education and health, and reducing poverty can reduce pressure on ecosystems.

“Despite what looks like steady global decline, this is a story of hope. The MA gives us a powerful way to explore the possible impacts of broad policy directions for life on Earth and tells us that changes in policy can make a difference,” said Dr. Stephen Carpenter, Professor of Limnology at the University of Wisconsin and one of the chief authors of the MA.

For example, MA scientists examine how the problem of excess nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico will change under each of the scenarios in order to identify the best approach to reducing the Gulf’s dead zone, caused by decades-old land use decisions. With more sophisticated management of the delta and main stem and better coordination between upstream and downstream, the dead zone would shrink, according to one scenario. Another scenario shows that a decrease in global trade would boost agricultural production in the U.S. and, combined with other factors, would mean that more nutrients would enter the Mississippi River and flow to the Gulf, widening the dead zone.

“Many of the policies identified by the MA as positive for both the environment and mankind are used somewhere today. So if we have the political will, we have the ability to implement them on a global scale,” added Carpenter.

The four scenarios are descriptions of plausible futures – based on changes in such factors as economic and population growth, climate change, and trade – told from the point of view of someone looking back from 2050 at what has happened in the world since 2000.

If certain assumptions play out by 2050, according to the MA, water will be more plentiful in nearly all regions because of climate change, but pressure on ecosystems to provide water to meet growing demand increases. Food security is likely to remain out of reach for many people, despite increasing food supply, but child malnutrition, while not eradicated, will likely drop over the coming decades.

By the end of the century, climate change may be the predominant driver of biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystem services globally. The Earth’s surface temperature is projected to increase 2.0 – 6.4 degrees Celsius bringing more incidents of floods and droughts. Sea levels will rise (50 – 70 centimeters by 2100). Biodiversity damage will grow worldwide as the rate of change in climate escalates.

“Ecosystem services have dramatically improved human wellbeing over the past centuries. People are better nourished and live longer and healthier lives than ever before, incomes have risen, and political institutions are more open,” stated Dr. Walter Reid, Director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Professor with the Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. “But these gains have been achieved at a growing cost. It’s now time for us to measure the economic value of these services so we can make better decisions about our future.”

“Payments for ecosystem services can be an effective way to protect services that people rely on, such as clean water, while also protecting the environment,” said Dr. Prabhu Pingali of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “By placing a monetary value on these services, we will be smarter about using them while creating alternative sources of income for people, from farmers in the United States to tribes in developing countries.”

Three parts of the world may undergo faster changes in ecosystems than other regions and should be closely monitored by scientists, according to the MA. For example, Central Africa could see a rapid increase in demand for food and water which will intensify farming and raise the risk of water contamination from fertilizers and pesticides. Other hot spots are the Middle East, where rapid population growth could increase dependence on food imports, and South Asia where deforestation and industrial farming may “break” the region’s ecosystems.

The MA represents the first time scientists have looked at how the health of the environment contributes to human well-being and how policy decisions we make today shape the world of tomorrow. It is also the first time that scientists have examined changes – not just to nature – but to the benefits people receive from nature (identified as ‘ecosystem services’ in the MA), such as providing food, filtering air and water, controlling disease, building soil, pollinating crops and aesthetic and spiritual benefits.

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Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different

L et’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an underappreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the changes we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

As America’s new leaders began trying to mend fences with other nations, climate action proved to be a crucial way to rebuild diplomatic trust. China and India had their own reasons for wanting swift action—mostly, the fact that smog-choked cities and ever deadlier heat waves were undermining the stability of the ruling regimes. When Beijing announced that its Belt and Road Initiative would run on renewable energy, not coal, the energy future of much of Asia changed overnight. When India started mandating electric cars and scooters for urban areas, the future of the internal-combustion engine was largely sealed. Teslas continued to attract upscale Americans, but the real numbers came from lower-priced electric cars pouring out of Asian factories. That was enough to finally convince even Detroit that a seismic shift was under way: when the first generation of Ford E-150 pickups debuted, with ads demonstrating their unmatched torque by showing them towing a million-pound locomotive, only the most unreconstructed motorheads were still insisting on the superiority of gas-powered rides.

Other easy technological gains came in our homes. After a century of keeping a tank of oil or gas in the basement for heating, people quickly discovered the appeal of air-source heat pumps, which turned the heat of the outdoors (even on those rare days when the temperature still dropped below zero) into comfortable indoor air. Gas burners gave way to induction cooktops. The last incandescent bulbs were in museums, and even most of the compact fluorescents had been long since replaced by LEDs. Electricity demand was up—but when people plugged in their electric vehicles at night, the ever growing fleet increasingly acted like a vast battery, smoothing out the curves as the wind dropped or the sun clouded. Some people stopped eating meat, and lots and lots of people ate less of it—a cultural transformation made easier by the fact that Impossible Burgers turned out to be at least as juicy as the pucks that fast-food chains had been slinging for years. The number of cows on the world’s farms started to drop, and with them the source of perhaps a fifth of emissions. More crucially, new diets reduced the pressure to cut down the remaining tropical rain forests to make way for grazing land.

In other words, the low-hanging fruit was quickly plucked, and the pluckers were well paid. Perhaps the fastest-growing business on the planet involved third-party firms that would retrofit a factory or an office with energy-efficient technology and simply take a cut of the savings on the monthly electric bill. Small businesses, and rural communities, began to notice the economic advantages of keeping the money paid for power relatively close to home instead of shipping it off to Houston or Riyadh. The world had wasted so much energy that much of the early work was easy, like losing weight by getting your hair cut.

But the early euphoria came to an end pretty quickly. By the end of the 2020s, it became clear we would have to pay the price of delaying action for decades.

For one thing, the cuts in emissions that scientists prescribed were almost impossibly deep. “If you’d started in 1990 when we first warned you, the job was manageable: you could have cut carbon a percent or two a year,” one eminent physicist explained. “But waiting 30 years turned a bunny slope into a black diamond.” As usual, the easy “solutions” turned out to be no help at all: fracked natural-gas wells were leaking vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and “biomass burning”—cutting down forests to burn them for electricity—was putting a pulse of carbon into the air at precisely the wrong moment. (As it happened, the math showed letting trees stand was crucial for pulling carbon from the atmosphere—when secondary forests were allowed to grow, they sucked up a third or more of the excess carbon humanity was producing.) Environmentalists learned they needed to make some compromises, and so most of America’s aging nuclear reactors were left online past their decommissioning dates: that lower-carbon power supplemented the surging renewable industry in the early years, even as researchers continued work to see if fusion power, thorium reactors or some other advanced design could work.

The real problem, though, was that climate change itself kept accelerating, even as the world began trying to turn its energy and agriculture systems around. The giant slug of carbon that the world had put into the atmosphere—more since 1990 than in all of human history before—acted like a time-delayed fuse, and the temperature just kept rising. Worse, it appeared that scientists had systematically underestimated just how much damage each tenth of a degree would actually do, a point underscored in 2032 when a behemoth slice of the West Antarctic ice sheet slid majestically into the southern ocean, and all of a sudden the rise in sea level was being measured in feet, not inches. (Nothing, it turned out, could move Americans to embrace the metric system.) And the heating kept triggering feedback loops that in turn accelerated the heating: ever larger wildfires, for instance, kept pushing ever more carbon into the air, and their smoke blackened ice sheets that in turn melted even faster.

This hotter world produced an ongoing spate of emergencies: “forest-fire season” was now essentially year-round, and the warmer ocean kept hurricanes and typhoons boiling months past the old norms. And sometimes the damage was novel: ancient carcasses kept emerging from the melting permafrost of the north, and with them germs from illnesses long thought extinct. But the greatest crises were the slower, more inexorable ones: the ongoing drought and desertification was forcing huge numbers of Africans, Asians and Central Americans to move; in many places, the heat waves had literally become unbearable, with nighttime temperatures staying above 100°F and outdoor work all but impossible for weeks and months at a time. On low-lying ground like the Mekong Delta, the rising ocean salted fields essential to supplying the world with rice. The U.N. had long ago estimated the century could see a billion climate refugees, and it was beginning to appear it was unnervingly correct. What could the rich countries say? These were people who hadn’t caused the crisis now devouring their lives, and there weren’t enough walls and cages to keep them at bay, so the migrations kept roiling the politics of the planet.

There were, in fact, two possible ways forward. The most obvious path was a constant competition between nations and individuals to see who could thrive in this new climate regime, with luckier places turning themselves into fortresses above the flood. Indeed some people in some places tried to cling to old notions: plug in some solar panels and they could somehow return to a more naive world, where economic expansion was still the goal of every government.

But there was a second response that carried the day in most countries, as growing numbers of people came to understand that the ground beneath our feet had truly shifted. If the economy was the lens through which we’d viewed the world for a century, now survival was the only sensible basis on which to make decisions. Those decisions targeted not just carbon dioxide; these societies went after the wild inequality that also marked the age. The Green New Deal turned out to be everything the Koch brothers had most feared when it was introduced: a tool to make America a fairer, healthier, better-educated place. It was emulated around the world, just as America’s Clean Air Act had long served as a template for laws across the globe. Slowly both the Keeling Curve, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, and the Gini coefficient, measuring the distribution of wealth, began to flatten.

That’s where we are today. We clearly did not “escape” climate change or “solve” global warming—the temperature keeps climbing, though the rate of increase has lessened. It’s turned into a wretched century, which is considerably better than a catastrophic one. We ended up with the most profound and most dangerous physical changes in human history. Our civilization surely teetered—and an enormous number of people paid an unfair and overwhelming price—but it did not fall.

People have learned to defend what can be practically defended: expensive seawalls and pumps mean New York is still New York, though the Antarctic may yet have something to say on the subject. Other places we’ve learned to let go: much of the East Coast has moved in a few miles, to more defensible ground. Yes, that took trillions of dollars in real estate off the board—but the roads and the bridges would have cost trillions to defend, and even then the odds were bad.

Cities look different now—much more densely populated, as NIMBY defenses against new development gave way to an increasingly vibrant urbanism. Smart municipalities banned private cars from the center of town, opening up free public-transit systems and building civic fleets of self-driving cars that got rid of the space wasted on parking spots. But rural districts have changed too: the erratic weather put a premium on hands-on agricultural skills, which in turn provided opportunities for migrants arriving from ruined farmlands elsewhere. (Farming around solar panels has become a particular specialty.) America’s rail network is not quite as good as it was in the early 20th century, but it gets closer each year, which is good news since low-carbon air travel proved hard to get off the ground.

What’s changed most of all is the mood. The defiant notion that we would forever overcome nature has given way to pride of a different kind: increasingly we celebrate our ability to bend without breaking, to adapt as gracefully as possible to a natural world whose temper we’ve come to respect. When we look back to the start of the century we are, of course, angry that people did so little to slow the great heating: if we’d acknowledged climate change in earnest a decade or two earlier, we might have shaved a degree off the temperature, and a degree is measured in great pain and peril. But we also know it was hard for people to grasp what was happening: human history stretched back 10,000 years, and those millennia were physically stable, so it made emotional sense to assume that stability would stretch forward as well as past.

We know much better now: we know that we’ve knocked the planet off its foundations, and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries, is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We’re dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far we haven’t crashed.

This is one article in a series on the state of the planet’s response to climate change. Read the rest of the stories and sign up for One.Five, TIME’s climate change newsletter.

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What will the world look like in 2050?

2050 is the target set for the world to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions. So what would the world look like if we get it all right? And what if we get it wrong?

Will the world in 2050 be an overheated smoggy mess? Or will we have global warming under control? ILlustraion by James Mackay

The agreements made – or not made – at COP26 will determine the future of the planet and all its inhabitants for decades to come. For some the target of net zero emissions by 2050 is achievable. For others impractical.

If the world can successfully curb its emissions, the planet will stay within the 1.5C of warming agreed at the 2015 Paris climate accords and we can avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Fail to do so, and we’re headed for a planet well over 2C warmer, with catastrophic consequences.

Most of us know the numbers by now, but down these two pathways, what might life actually look like in the decades to come? We spoke to climate experts with specialisms across fashion, society, architecture and diet to envision a day in the life in 2050 – in the best and worst case scenarios for the planet.

2050: Best-case scenario

The world stuck to its climate ambitions and successfully drove down greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 onwards. Most countries including the UK achieved net zero emissions on target, but historical greenhouse gases mean that the Earth is now 1.3 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures.

It’s 6am when your sleep assistant wakes you by tuning into the radio and gradually dialling up the brightness of your bedside lamp. When you bought it, the shop assistant promised the device would monitor your sleep rhythms and rouse you at the optimal moment. Judging by your grogginess, you’ve been ripped off.

It’s early December and there’s a chill in the air, so you reach up to the control panel above your bed and click the heating on. Two floors below, you hear the heat pump whirr and your well-insulated room quickly fills with warm air. The DJ plays a teaser track from Adele’s upcoming album, 60 , as you throw on a robe and marvel at her stamina.

Pulling back the curtains, you’re relieved to see that the two straight weeks of torrential rain has finally ceased, with the sun now straining through a thin grey cloud. The radio news bulletin says last week’s flooding almost breached barriers in York and parts of London. You think of Susan, who came to the co-living complex a decade ago after her home in Fairborne, Wales, was reclaimed by the sea. You feel lucky to have chosen to live here. Most of your housemates have stories like this – hurricanes, wildfires, floods and typhoons forcing them from their homes.

Your thoughts are interrupted by the smell of bacon wafting in from the kitchen. The best cook in the building is on breakfast duties. Today’s meal is a plate of toast, “fake-on”, (70 per cent lab-grown meat, 30 per cent pea protein) spinach and a couple of eggs from the coop in the buildings’ shared garden. Meat is a rare treat these days. When you do have it, it’s usually produced in a lab and mixed with alternative proteins. The bread is homemade, courtesy of the retirees living in your building whose enthusiasm for baking just about makes up for the endless nostalgia for the “good old days” of snow at Christmas and diesel cars.

You’ve been living here for five years now and, bar one odd housemate who only ever emerges at night, you get along well with everyone. Co-living complexes with shared communal facilities first sprung up in the 2030s, when the climate crisis began displacing millions and developers were forced to innovate. At first the goal was extra space, but over time complexes went a long way to easing loneliness, community tensions and, thanks to government-subsidised rent, social inequalities.

Your housemates linger in the kitchen after breakfast. As it’s Friday, most have now finished their four-day week and will head off to various volunteering projects during the day.

For most, the five-day week is a distant memory. The first time the four-day week was rolled out it was an emergency measure to reduce carbon footprints , but today, 80 per cent of the workforce enjoy a three-day weekend. Originally, mass rollout saw a big push to encourage volunteering on the free day, though you personally enjoy using your Monday off to lie horizontally on the sofa.

The constant rain has been irritating, but it does mean no faffing with spare water supply for your shower. The water for bathing comes from a rainwater tank on the roof, which trickles through the pipes to be heated and treated before coming out of the shower head.

Pushing for time now, you finish up, hurry back to your room and pull on some clothes. Your jeans are a “lifetime” pair bought in 2030, with the distressed finish produced by lasers instead of the water-intensive methods once used in the early 2000s. The shirt you pull over your head is made from recycled orange peel, and your anorak is second hand, lined with fleece made from old plastic bottles . Your boots are vintage leather, exchanged for a pair of brogues at a swap shop down the road.

You don’t own as many clothes as you used to. Vintage, second hand and independent retailers dominate the market, and huge discounts on new clothes are available for taking unwanted garments back to clothing stores, who either sell them on or upcycle them into new life. Thanks to the success of a huge public campaign some years back, the old re-use, repair and recycle mentality has returned, with schools making sustainability – and needlework – a core part of the curriculum.

Once dressed, you briefly contemplate taking your bike to work but decide the risk of getting stuck behind the school “bike bus” isn’t worth it. You open your Ryder app instead. In almost every big city now, some variation of this app allows you to hitch a ride with others going in the same direction, keeping millions of cars off the road. There’s three people going your way, so you tap the one with the most normal-looking profile picture (sorry, Mr Lycra) and head out to wait by the building’s charging points.

You’re picked up by a chatty woman from the local area who tells you all about her recent holiday on a high-speed inter-rail ticket. Since railway-building accelerated in the late 2020s, international trains are fast, cheap and appealing. Plane travel hasn’t stopped, but it has shrunk dramatically, with flights now relying mostly on hydrogen fuel and domestic journeys banned. Like almost every car on the road, the one you’re travelling in today is electric.

You whizz past the high street and watch local cafe owners roll back the covers over their outdoor seating for the first time in weeks. The area is already teeming with families, dog walkers and joggers, all with plenty of space to move since pedestrian and cycle space was vastly expanded into the road.

The “15-minute city” hasn’t emerged perfectly everywhere, but amenities, shops and entertainment are accessible without a car for most people, meaning local business has boomed. In city centres where footfall declined, empty shops were given over to arts and charity organisations to create extra space for culture, leisure and community services.

Green space is everywhere you look thanks to the urban forests planted long ago to soak up carbon and cool the intense summer temperatures that strike cities every summer. The air is cleaner. Long-gone wildlife is returning, and a complex system of fences and sensors has been devised to keep as many animals as possible away from the roads, where quiet electric car motors can often prove deadly.

After a short ride, you’re dropped off by the shuttle boat that takes you out to the offshore wind farm where you’ve worked as a turbine engineer for the last couple of decades. When wind farms started cropping up in enormous numbers off Britain’s coastlines years ago, naysayers complained that they were spoiling the view. When gas shortages started crippling those same households, they soon fell silent.

Your working day finishes around six and you grab a bus home, where a vegetable box has been delivered to your doorstep by the local farm. Thanks to droughts and crop failures around the world, supermarket shortages are not uncommon, but an increased reliance on seasonal British-grown produce provides a degree of food stability.

You take the box inside, thinking back in disbelief to the days when fruit came individually wrapped in plastic. The ocean remains full of it to this day, but single-use plastic has been almost entirely phased out of production processes, and mass cleanup operations are underway to remove as much as possible from global water supply.

Your evening plans involve a drink at a local bar with a friend. Ever since pedestrians claimed back vast swathes of cities, street lighting has been vastly improved, and footfall is high even at night. You know your neighbours and feel safe walking alone to the bar, where you sit down with your friend and order two glasses of 2040 English wine.

You feel a little guilty when the drinks arrive, remembering that where parts of England won better climes for wine-growing out of the climate crisis, parts of the Mediterranean have burned. As ever, the conversation quickly turns to these unluckier parts of the world, and those nations who have unfairly paid the price for emissions produced by wealthier countries.

Things are by no means perfect, but the world is a far better place than it would have been had leaders failed to hit the brakes on emissions in the 2020s. Bit by bit, the Earth is getting cleaner and greener, and in time, scientists say temperatures will begin climbing back down.

2050: Worst-case scenario

2050: countries around the world failed to achieve their climate ambitions , and greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise from 2020 onwards. The Earth is now 2.4 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures, wreaking havoc on the climate and environment.

You can’t remember if it was the wind rattling your window or the coughing from the next room that woke you up first, but either way you’ve been sitting up in bed for half an hour.

A friend of yours, Layla, and her son Daniel have been staying in your flat since their home in Hull flooded. She’d bought the house 20 years ago, putting faith in a developer’s promise that living on a flood plain presented “minimal risk of damage” when accounting for flood barriers .

A few weeks ago, those barriers were breached overnight. Layla’s insurance company was overwhelmed with claims for damage and folded, leaving her with nowhere to go. Daniel’s asthma had flared up since the incident, and the high pollution levels on your street aren’t helping his cough.

Still, you think, it could be worse. The UK’s botched transition to an electric vehicle fleet was at least an attempt. In the US, the driving lobby dug in their heels (thanks, Trump 2024) and driving gas powered cars became the next target of the culture wars. Americans who once complained about masking up for coronavirus now cover their faces for fear of destroying their lungs.

As you’re thinking this, your phone beeps with today’s pollution alert. Medium is the best it’s been in a while, you think optimistically, as you switch on the news.

You’re not really sure why you do this anymore – perhaps a sense of obligation. Or perhaps to try and remind yourself how much worse things could be. Every day another disaster, every day people forced from their homes by fires, floods and hurricanes. Aid organisations do their best, but the relentless onslaught of crises makes it difficult to respond quickly enough. A pang of guilt strikes as you remember cancelling your direct debit to a disaster relief fund last week. After losing your job, you just couldn’t afford it anymore.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the newsreader moves onto a light news segment on the celebrities who have “come together” to sing Lean on Me in the hopes of bringing “light” to the victims of the latest hurricane in the Philippines. You think bitterly about the multi-million dollar bunkers these people have underground for when things really get truly terrible – though you question whether being locked in there with them would be worth it.

Your flat, a converted Victorian townhouse, was never properly insulated after the collapse of the government’s “build back blazing” voucher scheme in 2023. On wintry days like today, the cold air creeps up through the floorboards and numbs your toes. Your roof was fitted with solar panels years back, but the manufacturer cut corners and opted for cheap flimsy materials which failed to account for the increasingly extreme weather you’re now experiencing in the UK: winters of extreme rainfall and summers of extreme heat. You flick on the boiler – still powered by gas – and pull up the blinds.

#GreenhouseGas Bulletin has a stark, scientific message for #COP26 Current rate of CO2 increase ➡️ ⬆️temperature by end of the century far above #ParisAgreement targets of 1.5 to 2°C ➡️ More extreme weather, sea level rise, impacts on food and water security, ecosystems etc pic.twitter.com/JRTONZNSOL — World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) October 25, 2021

The street outside is strewn with placards and the shop window opposite has been shattered. You’re surprised the commotion didn’t wake you up. It’s hard to remember a time when people weren’t protesting , and even harder to remember exactly what they’re protesting about anymore – there’s so much to be angry about. For your own part, you’re just weary.

You remember your guests and pop your head into the living room, offering them breakfast with the sheepish caveat that the options might be limited .

It’s now hard to obtain certain fruits and vegetables – like bananas – once common in the UK. Fish stocks have been depleted to the brink of extinction and meat is often prohibitively expensive, though global instability means prices fluctuate too often to keep track.

Vast swathes of once habitable, arable land across Africa, South America and Australasia are agricultural deserts, with more regions edging closer to the brink every day. As a result, supermarket shelves are regularly bare , though local community gardens – founded years ago in the spirit of self-sufficiency – try to help where they can.

Scraping together the contents of your fridge and pantry, you manage coffee and beans on toast, serving it up apologetically. The other day, you heard a positive news story about new agricultural opportunities opening up in Greenland and Antarctica now the ice is gone, though you cynically wonder who’ll start the next war to claim it.

Over a million people in the south of Madagascar are being denied their human right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. New report on the human rights impact of climate change in drought-stricken southern Madagascar, out tomorrow. #ClimateActionMada pic.twitter.com/395vAqIMkj — AmnestySouthernAfrica (@AmnestySARO) October 26, 2021

Over breakfast, you chat about the ongoing employment crisis. While the UK has been protected from the worst climate-related impacts of global warming, worldwide instability has repeatedly tanked the economy. During the most recent recession, you heard stories of people opening their banking app to find the bank had collapsed overnight – taking their savings with it.

With little to do since you lost your job, you offer to take Daniel to the GP about his cough while Layla works from home, clinging by a thread to her own career. Like several medicines, the kind Daniel once relied on to treat his chronic asthma are in short supply. Regular flooding of roads slows delivery of nearly everything, and, more alarmingly, the natural resources from which many chemicals are extracted have been wholly or partway destroyed.

Your wardrobe is what it ever was – a jumble of cheaply-made, inexpensive clothes . Even when Ghana and Pakistan stopped agreeing to take shipments of Britain’s discarded garments and they began piling up in landfills at home, it didn’t stop the fashion giants from peddling £1 dresses for one-time wear. You pull on a jumper and jeans and head out to the car.

Electric cars are the norm now, though a failure to install sufficient charging points early in the transition drove thousands of frustrated drivers back to petrol. Perhaps worse than the petrol-heads, though, are the wealthy drivers of electric SUVs who drive them faster, further and more dangerously than they ever did prior to electric power. Poorly-placed charging points have further squeezed pedestrian space, making some pavements impossible to walk on. Outdated infrastructure means buses and trains are constantly late, delayed or cancelled.

85% of fast fashion ends up in landfills. It's a disaster for the planet https://t.co/G14Tv7CLxN #BlackFriday #buynothingday pic.twitter.com/hK0QvSN97D — Greenpeace International (@Greenpeace) November 25, 2016

The doctor’s trip is futile. Medical professionals are so overwhelmed with new conditions and mental health crises these days that they’re squeezing two appointments into five-minute slots. The GP writes Daniel a prescription you know the local pharmacy doesn’t have in stock.

Still, it’s not raining when you emerge, so you drive through the city centre to the nearest local forest. You pass the once-buzzing high street, all now converted into hundreds of rabbit-hutch flats . You remember once visiting a friend there who lived without natural light among hundreds of others with nowhere else to go.

The walk through the forest is pleasant enough, and you visit the tree you planted yourself there, decades prior. Back then, airlines and large companies deluded the country into thinking any amount of carbon was acceptable if a forest was planted to offset it. What they failed to account for was the wildfires that came for Britain as summers heated up and peat burning continued.

The forest is eerily quiet, you think to yourself as you wander through the trees. Once upon a time, this area was teeming with animal life. Nobody could bring themselves to care when the insects first started disappearing , but it wasn’t long afterwards that the impact cascaded through the food chain, killing birds and mammals in turn.

It was like this every time some milestone was passed, you think, trying to place your finger on the point of no return. It’s not like there weren’t warnings. Throughout the early 2000s entire species went extinct, the Amazon was logged for wood, coral reefs died and ice caps melted. The outrage was brief and fleeting and politicians shook their heads then went back to business as usual. The public didn’t want to know, or didn’t care, or some combination of both.

Perhaps sensing your thoughts, Daniel turns and asks what the forest used to be like as you head back towards the car. You answer in vague terms about birds and picnics and tree-planting. All the way home, you’re plagued by the thought that none of this was inevitable.

With thanks to UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body and COP26 sponsor ; Professor Jane Harris, the director of research and innovation at the London College of Fashion; Professor Jeremy Till, architecture expert and head of Central Saint Martins University Arts London; Professor Glen Lyons, professor of future mobility at UWE Bristol; Dr Christian Reynolds, senior lecturer at the Centre for Food Policy, City University, London; and Professor Dan Lunt, professor of climate science, at the school of geographical sciences, University of Bristol, for their contributions and insight for this article.

While you’re here…

The Big Issue has co-launched a new fund that invests ONLY in companies working to solve the climate crisis and help to create a cleaner, more sustainable world. The focus is on what can be done NOW for future generations.

In partnership with Aberdeen Standard Investments, the Multi-Asset Climate Solutions (MACS) Fund actively scours the globe for companies that get at least half of their revenue from climate change solutions and other key environmental challenges. Currently, less than five per cent of the world’s companies fit the bill.

From renewable energy and green buildings to electric vehicles and remote working technologies, the fund invests in companies that are enabling the transition to a low carbon economy.

A Climate Advisory Group that includes Nigel Kershaw, Chair of The Big Issue Group, as well as respected environmental, policy and finance experts and climate activists has been established to make sure the fund does what it is supposed to do. It is proof that the fund is not a tokenistic step.

20 per cent of the net revenue goes back into The Big Issue to support its social mission .

To find out more about the MACS Fund go to bigexchange.com or abrdn.com .

Learn more about further Big Issue work for Future Generations, through John Bird’s Future Generations Bill currently working through Westminster, see bigissue.com/today-for-tomorrow

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Fully Human

Transforming AI to Serve Humanity

AI Overview And Worldview

How will the world be like in 2050?

In this article published by Wired, bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari explores what what world will be like in 2050.

In 2011, Yuval Noah Harari restated the history of humankind through his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind . According to Harari, our species, homo sapiens is responsible for the extinction of other human species such as the Neanderthals. He believes that we owe our resilience as a species to our capacity to believe in things that exist purely in our imagination. Our institutions, our religions, even the revolutions we have engaged in, are all myths.

Four years after, in 2015, Harari published the Sapiens sequel, entitled Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow . In this book, he expounded on the new capacities that our species developed over time, as well as the possible impact such capacities can have in our future societies. Despite the wonderful innovations we have made over the years, Harari believes that we will soon lose control over our the earth. The technologies we create, will lead us to lose control over our own capacity to create meaning for our lives.

In this Wired article, Harari helps readers imagine an unknown future. But he says, “once technology enables us to engineer bodies , brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal”.

What then can we do? His advise is simple: know thyself. But to this he attaches a warning:

If…you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Why It Matters

It’s not every day we hear a materialist advise people to “To know what you are, and what you want from life”. We feel it amounts to these same words: What is a human being? What is our purpose on earth? To be able to answer this question, one must overcome the traditional definition of the human being as an animal, with purely physical needs.

What makes you human? Why shouldn’t you be replaced by a machine?

Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century

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An unsettling peek into the reality of life in 2050

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Rather than just imagine the future, what if we could walk around in it? In an installation, designer Anab Jain invites visitors to enter an apartment in the middle of the 21st century.

What will our world look like in 30 years?

Many of us fear the worst. Today, violent storms and wildfires are ripping through the world; we’re rapidly losing crop biodiversity ; and large numbers of people are already suffering from chronic food insecurity . Any of these situations, it seems, could spiral out of control over the coming decades.

But why just worry about the future when you can step into it? Anab Jain , a TED Fellow and the cofounder of London future-design studio Superflux (watch her TED Talk: “ Why we need to imagine different futures ”), builds potential tomorrows that people can experience firsthand right now — and gain insights that we could apply to take control of our destinies. “A lot of us in the West don’t think climate change is our problem; we always think about it as somebody else’s problem,” Jain says. “It’s too big and too difficult to deal with. We take in the data, but we don’t apply it to what this means for our own lives.” In an installation called Mitigation of Shock , the Superflux team aim to show us what our lives might be like if we do nothing to combat global warming, by taking us into a flat in London — in the year 2050. Let’s step in ….

A door marked “64” takes you into a small apartment. There’s a couch that looks like it was just sat on. Shelves contain a family’s worth of books, toys and gadgets, and a coffee table holds a partial cup of coffee and a half-eaten cookie. Beyond the dining room table is a kitchen counter with recipe books; shelves overhead are full of containers of home-preserved food. The radio is tuned to the news. So far, it’s not that different from many apartments you could find in Europe today.

But as you look around, your gaze falls on a newspaper on the coffee table. The headline reads “Worldwide crop failures in 2049: How will we eat?” You hear the radio announcer talking about eco-terrorists, the hijacking of supermarket trucks, extreme weather and poor air quality. Flip through a ledger on the dining room table, and you’ll see a record of the family’s experiments in growing food, next to vials of carefully labeled seeds. The jars of preserves on the shelves turn out to be marked with the month, year and place where the food was foraged. Scan the cookbooks on the shelves, and you’ll see titles like How to Cook in Scarcity and, more alarmingly, Pets as Protein . Recipes tacked to the kitchen wall offer ways to prepare mealworms and foxes.

Turning the corner into the next room, you realize that you’ve wandered into a factory of sorts. The humming space is bathed in a fluorescent glow, and the industrial shelving units are filled with boxes of plants growing in a swirling fog circulated by tiny fans. Oyster mushrooms are being cultivated on the top shelves, along with smaller plastic containers full of live mealworms. As you peer out a window above a table brimming with a jumble of hardware, you can see storm clouds darkening the sky as people squabble over food in the streets.

“We created this living space to imagine what we might need to live in a world where some of the most drastic impacts of climate change have already occurred,” says Jain. Mitigation of Shock — which is now on view at Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) — is part of an exhibition called “After the End of the World,” which envisions the future toll of centuries of human impact and negligence. The installation takes what’s happening now and fast-forwards the action in one specific direction. In that way, it’s less a calculated prediction than an educated extrapolated guess of the future.

The scenario is fictionalized, as are the recipe books (thank goodness). However, the solutions that Superflux co-founder Jon Ardern and the studio team have built are very real. The plants on the shelves are being fed using fogponics and LED lights, all controlled using Arduinos, or microcontroller units. “The Arduinos are connected to ultrasonic sensors in a box of nutrient-rich water,” says Jain. “When the Arduino tells the sensor to go off, it converts the water into a nutrient mist that is dispersed to the plants’ roots by using computer fans.”

This is only one possible future of many, Jain hastens to add. “There could be others — worse or better,” she says. Right now, many people in developed nations can go to the supermarket and buy whatever they fancy, from Peruvian avocados to Kenyan green beans. But the way things are going, there’s a chance that this casual abundance will start to vanish. After visiting the installation, the Superflux team hopes that people walk away with a more visceral idea of what living with food insecurity might look like.

They also want people to realize we already have some of what we need to adapt. “Fogponics and hydroponics already are in use, although people currently see them as a hobby. Foraging, home preserving, growing food on allotments, and local food networks exist, too, but not as a form of survival,” says Jain. “We made the food production system using off-the-shelf stuff that we bought and hacked together and coded. The question then becomes, what if your life—your family’s life—depended on it?”

The apartment is also cluttered with discarded gadgets. There’s an unused surveillance camera, something that resembles a Nest smart thermostat, and a smart cup that will tell you when your drink is hot enough. “There’s also a fridge with a smart panel that tells you it’s run out of milk, but there’s nowhere to buy milk,” says Jain. “In our scenario, these things are now irrelevant — detritus, just lying around. We wanted to hint at the shiny future that is being predicted by tech companies and corporations. The lived reality will be somewhere in the middle.”

Jain has been intrigued by the response from visitors so far. “A lot of people have told me that they feel freaked out by it,” she says. “And some have said, ‘This feels totally normal — it’s already happening.’ It’s very different, depending on your emotional connection to what’s happening around you. How much time have you spent absorbing and internalizing the information we’ve been given and the changes that have already occurred?” Jain’s best-case scenario for the installation would be for folks leave wanting to make some behavioral shift. “We’re still buying from supermarkets; most of us are still not feeling that shortage, insecurity or vulnerability,” she says. “I think the news is like a fire outside the window. You close the window if you think the fire’s going to be bad. But what if the fire starts coming in through the window? That’s the feeling we want to give people: that it’s happening now, but we also have the tools, strategies and, most importantly, the imagination for whatever comes next.”

Mitigation of Shock was on exhibit at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona through April 29, 2018.

About the author

Karen Frances Eng is a contributing writer to TED.com, dedicated to covering the feats of the wondrous TED Fellows. Her launchpad is located in Cambridge, UK.

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What will the world be like in 2050?

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The World in 2050

The long view: how will the global economic order change by 2050?

Cumulative global GDP growth between 2016 and 2050

China’s projected share of world GDP at PPPs by 2050

India’s global GDP ranking at PPPs by 2050 (behind China but ahead of the US)

EU27’s share of global GDP at PPPs by 2050 (excluding UK)

Key findings

This report sets out our latest long-term global growth projections to 2050 for 32 of the largest economies in the world, accounting for around 85% of world GDP.

Key results of our analysis (as summarised also in the accompanying video) include:

The world economy could more than double in size by 2050, far outstripping population growth, due to continued technology-driven productivity improvements
Emerging markets (E7) could grow around twice as fast as advanced economies (G7) on average
As a result, six of the seven largest economies in the world are projected to be emerging economies in 2050 led by China (1st), India (2nd) and Indonesia (4th)
The US could be down to third place in the global GDP rankings while the EU27’s share of world GDP could fall below 10% by 2050
UK could be down to 10th place by 2050, France out of the top 10 and Italy out of the top 20 as they are overtaken by faster growing emerging economies like Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam respectively
But emerging economies need to enhance their institutions and their infrastructure significantly if they are to realise their long-term growth potential.

Explore the World in 2050

View the infographics below for highlights of our GDP projections and explore the results further using our interactive data tool.

Further details are provided in our summary report , full report and slide pack .

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World in 2050

60 second update from PwC's Chief Economist John Hawksworth on the long term outlook for global growth.

Key projections

Challenges for policymakers.

Our analysis also identifies a number of key challenges for policy-makers, including:

Avoid a slide back into protectionism, which history suggests would be bad for global growth in the long run
Ensuring that the potential benefits of globalisation are shared more equally across society
Developing new green technologies to ensure that long-term global growth is environmentally sustainable

Please download our full report for more in-depth analysis of these policy issues.

Opportunities for business – winning in emerging markets

Our report, which can be downloaded in full below , also considers the opportunities for business:

As emerging markets mature, they will become less attractive as low cost manufacturing bases but more attractive as consumer and business-to-business (B2B) markets
But international companies need strategies that are flexible enough to adapt to local customer preferences and rapidly evolving local market dynamics
Since emerging markets can be volatile, international investors also need to be patient enough to ride out the short-term economic and political cycles in these countries

Please also take a look at the research of our Growth Markets Centre for detailed examples of how companies can succeed in emerging markets.

Download The World in 2050: The Long View

How will the global economic order change by 2050?

Download the full report (PDF, 1.8mb)

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The World in 2050

Nebojsa Nakicenovic

Distinguished Emeritus Research Scholar (TISS)

The World in 2050 (TWI2050) is a global research initiative in support of a successful implementation of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, with the goal to provide the fact-based knowledge to support the policy process and implementation of the SDGs.

TWI2050 was launched by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) .

The Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs ), unanimously adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, provide an aspirational narrative for the desired future for human development with an actionable agenda . The aspiration is for a world free from hunger, injustice and absolute poverty, of universal education, health and employment with inclusive economic growth, based on transparency, dignity and equity, all achieved within the boundaries of the planet.

The urgent question now is how to act on this aspirational agenda and to have a clear understanding of the full consequences and cost of inaction and the benefits of achieving SDGs in every major region of the world.

The World in 2050 (TWI2050) is an initiative designed to help answer these questions. TWI2050 aims not only to contribute to this understanding but also develop science-based transformational and equitable pathways to sustainable development that can provide much needed information and guidance for policy makers responsible for the implementation of the SDGs.

Project objective

The goal of the new scientific initiative TWI2050 is to provide the fact-based knowledge to support the policy process and implementation of the 2030 Agenda . TWI2050 aims to address the full spectrum of transformational challenges related to achieving the 17 SDGs in an integrated manner so as to minimize potential conflicts among them and reap the benefits of potential synergies of achieving them in unison.

The SDGs set out very clear and ambitious global goals across social, economic and environmental areas with important interactions between and among these goals (e.g., between energy and climate, between food security and ecosystems, etc.). What is lacking, but urgently required, is an assessment of the viability of achieving these multiple social-economic-environmental-planetary goals simultaneously using integrative and systemic methodological approaches. This is necessary to answer questions such as:

How do we meet the hunger, poverty, energy, growth goals while meeting the environmental goals?
What are the synergies and trade-offs?
What are the costs of pursuing social goals without meeting sustainability goals and the other way around?

DOWNLOADS AND LINKS

TWI2050 Report @ HLPF 2020 : In 2020, the TWI2050 initiative has launched another report, emphasizing the need for sustainable innovations in a post-pandemic world.
TWI2050 Concept Note
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The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future

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What will the world look like in 2050? What will be our biggest challenges and the major issues shaping our world? And what countries will have the biggest economies?

Hamish McRae is one of Europe's leading speakers on global trends in economics, business and society. He's also an economic and finance journalist and editor at The Independent.

In his new book The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future , he maps out the next thirty years - and he has a well-established reputation for predicting global trends; thirty years ago he did a similar exercise in his book The World in 2020: Power, Culture and Prosperity ; and warned, among other things, of Brexit, a populist revolution in America, and a global pandemic.

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Perspectives

The Science of Sustainability

Can a unified path for development and conservation lead to a better future?

October 13, 2018

Aerial view of roads cutting through a forest of trees.

A False Choice
Two Paths to 2050
What's Possible
The Way Forward
Engage With Us

The Cerrado may not have the same name recognition as the Amazon , but this vast tropical savannah in Brazil has much in common with that perhaps better-known destination. The Cerrado is also a global biodiversity hotspot, home to thousands of species only found there, and it is also a critical area in the fight against climate change, acting as a large carbon pool.

But Brazil is one of the two largest soy producers in the world—the crop is one of the country’s most important commodities and a staple in global food supplies—and that success is placing the Cerrado in precarious decline. To date, around 46% of the Cerrado has been deforested or converted for agriculture.

Producing more soy doesn’t have to mean converting more native habitat, however. A new spatial data tool is helping identify the best places to expand soy without further encroachment on the native landscapes of the Cerrado. And with traders and bankers working together to offer preferable financing to farmers who expand onto already-converted land, Brazil can continue to produce this important crop, while protecting native habitat and providing more financial stability for farmers.

The Cerrado is just one region of a vast planet, of course, but these recent efforts to protect it are representative of a new way of thinking about the relationship between conservation and our growing human demands. It is part of an emerging model for cross-sector collaboration that aims to create a world prepared for the sustainability challenges ahead.

Is this world possible? Here, we present a new science-based view that says “Yes”—but it will require new forms of collaboration across traditionally disconnected sectors, and on a near unprecedented scale.

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Download a PDF version of this feature. Click to see translated versions of this page.

I. A False Choice

Many assume that economic interests and environmental interests are in conflict. But new research makes the case that this perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive to both ends. Achieving a sustainable future will be dependent on our ability to secure both thriving human communities and abundant and healthy natural ecosystems.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with the University of Minnesota and 11 other organizations to ask whether it is possible to achieve a future where the needs of both people and nature are advanced. Can we actually meet people’s needs for food, water and energy while doing more to protect nature?

The perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary, but actively counterproductive to both ends.

To answer this question, we compared what the world will look like in 2050 if economic and human development progress in a “business-as-usual” fashion and what it would look like if instead we join forces to implement a “sustainable” path with a series of fair-minded and technologically viable solutions to the challenges that lie ahead.

In both options, we used leading projections of population growth and gross domestic product to estimate how demand for food, energy and water will evolve between 2010 and 2050. Under business-as-usual, we played out existing expectations and trends in how those changes will impact land use, water use, air quality, climate, protected habitat areas and ocean fisheries. In the more sustainable scenario, we proposed changes to how and where food and energy are produced, asking if these adjustments could result in better outcomes for the same elements of human well-being and nature. Our full findings are described in a peer-reviewed paper— “An Attainable Global Vision for Conservation and Human Well-Being” —published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment .

These scenarios let us ask, can we do better? Can we design a future that meets people’s needs without further degrading nature in the process?

Our answer is “yes,” but it comes with several big “ifs.” There is a path to get there, but matters are urgent—if we want to accomplish these goals by mid-century, we’ll have to dramatically ramp up our efforts now. The next decade is critical.

Furthermore, changing course in the next ten years will require global collaboration on a scale not seen perhaps since World War II. The widely held impression that economic and environmental goals are mutually exclusive has contributed to a lack of connection among key societal constituencies best equipped to solve interconnected problems—namely, the public health, development, financial and conservation communities. This has to change.

The good news is that protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to a growing world do not have to be either-or propositions. Our view, instead, calls for smart energy, water, air, health and ecosystem initiatives that balance the needs of economic growth and resource conservation equally. Rather than a zero-sum game, these elements are balanced sides of an equation, revealing the path to a future where people and nature thrive together.

View of the English Bay in Vancouver, Canada at sunset.

II. Two Paths to 2050

This vision is not a wholesale departure from what others have offered. A number of prominent scientists and organizations have put forward important and thoughtful views for a sustainable future; but often such plans consider the needs of people and nature in isolation from one another, use analyses confined to limited sectors or geographies, or assume that some hard tradeoffs must be made, such as slowing global population growth, taking a reduction in GDP growth or shifting diets off of meat. Our new research considers global economic development and conservation needs together, more holistically, in order to find a sustainable path forward.

What could a different future look like? We’ve used as our standard the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 measures for “a world where all people are fed, healthy, employed, educated, empowered and thriving, but not at the expense of other life on Earth.” Our analysis directly aligns with ten of those goals. Using the SDGs as our guideposts, we imagine a world in 2050 that looks very different than the one today—and drastically different from the one we will face if we continue in business-as-usual fashion.

A sustainable future is possible.

To create our assessment of business-as-usual versus a more sustainable path, we looked at 14 measurements including temperature change, carbon dioxide levels, air pollution, water consumption, food and energy footprints, and protected areas.

Business as usual compared to conservation pathway showing changes in temperature, air quality, fisheries, and protected land.

Over the next 30 years, we know we’ll face rapid population growth and greater pressures on our natural resources. The statistics are sobering—with 9.7 billion people on the planet by 2050, we can expect a 54 percent increase in global food demand and 56 percent increase in energy demand. While meetings these growing demands and achieving sustainability is possible, it is helpful to scrutinize where the status quo will get us.

The World Health Organization, World Economic Forum and other leading global development organizations now say that air pollution and water scarcity—environmental challenges—are among the biggest dangers to human health and prosperity. And our business-as-usual analysis makes clear what many already fear: that human development based on the same practices we use today will not prepare us for a world with nearly 10 billion people.

To put it simply, if we stay on today’s current path, we risk being trapped in an intensifying cycle of scarcity—our growth opportunities severely capped and our natural landscapes severely degraded. Under this business-as-usual scenario, we can expect global temperature to increase 3.2°C; worsened air pollution affecting 4.9 billion more people; overfishing of 84 percent of fish stocks; and greater water stress affecting 2.75 billion people. Habitat loss continues, leaving less than 50 percent of native grasslands and several types of forests intact.

However, if we make changes in where and how we meet food, water and energy demands for the same growing global population and wealth, the picture can look markedly different by mid-century. This “sustainability” path includes global temperature increase limited to 1.6°C—meeting Paris Climate Accord goals—zero overfishing with greater fisheries yields, a 90 percent drop in exposure to dangerous air pollution, and fewer water-stressed people, rivers and agricultural fields. These goals can be met while natural habitats extend both inside and outside protected areas. All signatory countries to the Aichi Targets meet habitat protection goals, and more than 50 percent of all ecoregions’ extents remain unconverted, except temperate grasslands (of which over 50 percent are already converted today).

Behind the Science

Discover how TNC and its partners developed the models for 2050.

Aerial view of wind turbines on agricultural land.

III. What's Possible

Achieving this sustainable future for people and nature is possible with existing and expected technology and consumption, but only with major shifts in production patterns. Making these shifts will require overcoming substantial economic, social and political challenges. In short, it is not likely that the biophysical limits of the planet will determine our future, but rather our willingness to think and act differently by putting economic development and the environment on equal footing as central parts of the same equation.

Climate, Energy and Air Quality

Perhaps the most pressing need for change is in energy use. In order to both meet increased energy demand and keep the climate within safe boundaries, we’ll need to alter the way we produce energy, curtailing emissions of carbon and other harmful chemicals.

Under a business-as-usual scenario, fossil fuels will still claim a 76 percent share of total energy in 2050. A more sustainable approach would reduce that share to 13 percent by 2050. While this is a sharp change, it is necessary to stanch the flow of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The reduction in carbon-based energy could be offset by increasing the share of energy from renewable sources to 54 percent and increasing nuclear energy to one third of total energy output—delivering a total of almost 85 percent of the world’s energy demand from non-fossil-fuel sources.

Additionally, we will only achieve the full extent of reduced climate impacts if we draw down existing carbon from the atmosphere. This can be done through greater investment in carbon capture and storage efforts, including natural climate solutions—land management strategies such as avoiding forest loss, reforestation, investments in soil health and coastal ecosystem restoration.

The net benefit of these energy redistribution efforts is twofold. First, they lower the rate at which greenhouse gases are flowing into the air—taking atmospheric carbon projections down to 442 parts per million, compared to business-as-usual estimates that put the level closer to 520 ppm.

Second, these energy source shifts would create a marked decline in particulate air pollution. Our models show that the higher fossil fuel use in the business-as-usual scenario is likely to expose half the people on the planet to poorer air quality by 2050. Under the sustainable scenario, that figure drops to just 7 percent of the world’s inhabitants, thanks to lower particulate emissions from renewable and nuclear energy sources.

Case Studies:

Forests That Fight Climate Change: Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira region demonstrates how reforestation can tackle climate change, improve water supplies, and increase incomes in rural communities. Learn More
Can Trees Be a Prescription for Urban Health?: Conservationists, community organizations and public health researchers joined forces to plant trees in Louisville, Kentucky and monitor their impact on air quality and residents’ health. Learn More

Food, Habitat and City Growth

Meeting the sustainable targets we propose requires a second front on land to shift how we use available real estate and where we choose to conduct necessary activities. Overall, the changes we include in our more sustainable view allow the world to meet global food, water and energy demands with no additional conversion of natural habitat for those needs—an outcome that is not possible under business as usual.

While transitioning away from fossil fuels is essential to meet climate goals, new renewable energy infrastructure siting will present land-use challenges. Renewable energy production takes up space, and if not sited well it can cause its own negative impacts on nature and its services to people. In our more sustainable path, we address this challenge by preferencing the use of already converted land for renewables development, lessening the impact of new wind and solar on natural habitat. We also exclude expansion of biofuels, as they are known to require extensive land area to produce, causing conflicts with natural habitat and food security.

Perhaps most encouraging, we show that it is possible to meet future food demands on less agricultural land than is used today. Notably, our scenario keeps the mix of crops in each growing region the same, so as not to disrupt farmers’ cultures, technologies, capacity or existing crop knowledge. Instead, we propose moving which crops are grown where within growing regions, putting more “thirsty” crops in areas with more water, and matching the nutrient needs of various crops to the soils available.

Unlike some projections used by others, for this scenario we left diet expectations alone, matching meat consumption with business-as-usual expectations. If we were able to reduce meat consumption, especially by middle- and high-income countries where nutritional needs are met, reducing future agricultural land, water and pollution footprints would be even easier.

Meanwhile, on the land protection front, our analysis is guided by the Convention on Biological Diversity, the leading global platform most countries have signed. Each signatory country has agreed to protect up to 17 percent of each habitat type within its borders. While many countries will fall short of this goal under business as usual, it can be achieved in our more sustainable option.

Use already degraded land for energy development.

By making changes in food, water and energy use, we can better protect nearly all habitat types.

We acknowledge 17 percent is an imperfect number, and many believe more natural habitat is needed to allow the world’s biodiversity to thrive. Looking beyond protected areas, we see additional differences in the possible futures we face. Our more sustainable option retains 577 million hectares more natural habitat than business as usual, much of it outside of protected areas. Conservation has long focused on representation—it is not only important to conserve large areas, but to represent different kinds of habitat. Under business as usual, we will lose more than half of several major habitat types by mid-century, including temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, Mediterranean forest, and temperate grassland. Flooded and tropical grasslands approach this level of loss as well.

But with the proposed shifts in food, water and energy use, we can do better for nearly all habitats in our more sustainable scenario. The one exception is temperate grasslands, a biome that has already lost more than 50 percent of its global extent today. In all, the more sustainable scenario shows a future that would be largely compatible with emerging views that suggest protecting half of the world’s land system.

Case Study:

Managing Sprawling Soy: A partnership between businesses and nonprofit groups in Brazil will help farmers plant soy in the areas where it is has the smallest impact on natural habitats. Learn More

The gravel bottoms and braided channels of rivers leading into Iliamna Lake in southwest Alaska are ideal for the many king salmon that spawn in the lake's waters.

Drinking Water, River Basins and Fisheries

Water presents a complex set of challenges. Like land, it is both a resource and a habitat. Fresh water resources are dwindling while ocean ecosystems are overburdened by unregulated fishing and pollution. Business-as-usual projections estimate that 2.75 billion people will experience water scarcity by 2050 and 770 water basins will experience water stress. Africa and Central Asia in particular would see fewer water stressed basins in the sustainable scenario.

Changes in energy sources and food production (see above sections) would lead to significant water savings by reducing use of water as a coolant in energy production and by moving crops to areas where they need less irrigation. Thanks to these changes, our more sustainable option for the future would relieve 104 million people and biodiversity in 25 major river basins from likely water stress.

Meanwhile, in the seas, we find an inspiring possibility for fisheries. Continuing business-as-usual fisheries management adds further stress to the oceans and the global food system as more stocks decline, further diminishing the food we rely on from the seas. But more sustainable fisheries management is possible, and our projections using a leading fisheries model shows that adopting sustainable management in all fisheries by mid-century would actually increase yield by over a quarter more than we saw in 2010.

And, while we know that aquaculture is a certain element of the future of fish and food, many questions remain about precisely how this industry will grow, and how it can be shaped to be a low-impact part of the global food system. Given these unknowns, we kept aquaculture growth the same in both our views of the future.

Case Studies:

Cities and Farmers Find Common Ground on Water: Smarter agricultural practices in the Kenya’s Upper Tana River Watershed are resulting in better yields for farmers and more reliable water supplies for the city of Nairobi. Learn More
Technology Offers a Lifeline for Fish: A new mobile application being piloted in Indonesia is helping fill a crucial gap in fisheries management—providing accurate data about what species are being caught where. Learn More

The land meets the sea in Uruma City, Japan

IV. The Way Forward

This analysis does not represent a panacea for the growing need for economic development across the planet or for the environmental challenges that are ahead. But it does provide an optimistic viewpoint and an integrated picture that can serve as a starting point for discussion.

Our goal is to apply new questions—and ultimately new solutions—to our known problems. We present one of many possible paths to a different future, and we welcome like-minded partners and productive critics to share their perspectives with us. We encourage people from across society to join the conversation, to fill gaps where they exist, and to bring other important considerations to our attention. Most of all, we call on the development (e.g. energy, agriculture, infrastructure), health, and financial communities—among others—to work with us to find new ways of taking action together.

Ultimately, by illustrating a viable pathway to sustainability that serves both the needs of economic and environmental interests—goals that many have long assumed were mutually exclusive—we hope to inspire the global community to engage in the difficult but necessary social, economic and political dialogue that can make a sustainable future a reality.

Protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to the world can no longer be either-or propositions. Nature and human development are both central factors in the same equation. We have at our disposal the cross-sector expertise necessary to make informed decisions for the good of life on our planet, so let’s use it wisely. Our science affirms there is a way.

Join us as we chart a new path to 2050 by helping people and nature thrive—together.

Testimonials

Opportunities to Engage

Designing strategies to address global challenges for people and nature requires integration of diverse bodies of evidence that are now largely segregated. As actors across the health, development and environment sectors pivot to act collectively, they face challenges in finding and interpreting evidence on sector interrelationships, and thus in developing effective evidence-based responses.

Learn more about these emerging coalitions that offer opportunities to engage and connect with shared resources.

Bridge Collaborative

The Bridge Collaborative unites people and organizations in health, development and the environment with the evidence and tools to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Learn More

Science for Nature and People Partnership

SNAPP envisions a world where protecting and promoting nature works in concert with sustainable development and improving human well-being. Learn More

Wicked Econ Fest

Wicked Econ Fests are workshops between leading economics, finance, conservation and policy experts to tackle specific, decision-driven challenges. Learn More

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Check out our latest thinking and real-world solutions to some of the most complex challenges facing people and the planet today. Explore our Insights

Making an idea come to life: The World in 2050

Imperial Tech Foresight worked with Imperial’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment to develop vignettes of the future, and it has been a hugely successful and important piece of collaborative work. These stories showcase how technology innovation can help tackle climate change from waste to wealth technologies to decreasing over-fertilisation in agriculture.

Check out The World In 2050 article in full here.

Right now, inventors and entrepreneurs at Imperial College London are developing world-changing ideas that could transform our relationship with the planet. The stories show the potential for a cleaner, greener, fairer future for us all, hoping that everyone can see the new future potential.

This blog post to share our process for making this future come to life together with Grantham Institute, and how our thinking can be adopted by your organisation too.

How did we bring the concept to life?

It was an iterative process, but also kept true to much used foresight methodology . We wanted to release this blogpost to share how we came to these vignettes through iterative discussions and research. As everything, the future changes and some of the predictions may or may not come true. But it aims to inspire and drive change.

The process started like most foresight-based projects by broadly exploring signals, trends and drivers. We decided not to limit the process, but explore these interventions across both urban and rural spaces. However, we kept the vignettes to a United Kingdom perspective (as you may see in the image that has landmarks from the British Isles).

Methodology and practice

In the exploration, we used horizon scanning to explore changes across the STEEPV (Social, Technology, Environmental, Economical, Political and Values) . In the process, we identified key challenges, such as:

What does self-sufficiency look like?
How might urban areas be rejuvenated?
What might be different driving forces across impermanence over permanence?
What role might government vs. citizen-led interventions have?

These questions, alongside the research helped us identify critical uncertainties (drivers of change that both express high importance vs. high uncertainty for the topic area).

We developed five vectors that we thought expressed high importance for these ideas, such as: short-term vs. long-term thinking.

We ended up with three overview themes that expressed different potential worlds and realities. These helped us shape how the different futures might look like, such as one expressing importance of short-term fixes often led by technologies.

Each of their worlds had specific challenges to them. After identifying the overview worlds, we explored emerging concepts, ideas and startups that offer sustainable interventions to the challenges. We understood the technology, but how would they impact human experiences. Each of these ended up in unique stories for how different individuals would live in the worlds.

However, as some of the worlds expressed a negative outlook, we took the decision to make them more positive (expressing solar punk futures ). With the ongoing pandemic and often dystopic perspectives on humanities addressing climate change, we wanted to share a positive vision of what could happen if we took responsibility and explored these sustainable interventions. We believe that by painting these positive future visions, we can hopefully help to create positive change. Hopefully, allowing us to think of a better version of today especially as most of the startups already exist.

The final result is intended to inspire us all to think positively about the future we can create together.

The work explores seven different vignettes about the future in 2050, it shares perspectives for transport, food and bio-economy. There are many global startups that are doing disruptive work in the space, but the most important is that we are all striving towards the same positive futures.

The process took about four months of iterative work, and we hope that it helps you and others around you to imagine the future potential. Contact us at Imperial Tech Foresight if you want to hear more about the process or find out about working with our team – we would love to hear from you.

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A person carrying a red sun brolly walks through a solar panel farm in France.

The race to zero emissions, and why the world depends on it

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A host of countries have recently announced major commitments to significantly cut their carbon emissions, promising to reach "net zero" in the coming years. The term is becoming a global rallying cry, frequently cited as a necessary step to successfully beat back climate change, and the devastation it is causing.

What is net zero and why is it important?

Put simply, net zero means we are not adding new emissions to the atmosphere. Emissions will continue, but will be balanced by absorbing an equivalent amount from the atmosphere.

Practically every country has joined the Paris Agreement on climate change, which calls for keeping the global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial era levels. If we continue to pump out the emissions that cause climate change, however, temperatures will continue to rise well beyond 1.5, to levels that threaten the lives and livelihoods of people everywhere.

This is why a growing number of countries are making commitments to achieve carbon neutrality, or "net zero" emissions within the next few decades. It’s a big task, requiring ambitious actions starting right now.

Net zero by 2050 is the goal. But countries also need to demonstrate how they will get there. Efforts to reach net-zero must be complemented with adaptation and resilience measures, and the mobilization of climate financing for developing countries.

Clean energy, like wind power, is a key element in reaching net zero emissions. is wind farm in Montenegro.

So how can the world move toward net zero?

The good news is that the technology exists to reach net zero – and it is affordable.

A key element is powering economies with clean energy, replacing polluting coal - and gas and oil-fired power stations - with renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar farms. This would dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Plus, renewable energy is now not only cleaner, but often cheaper than fossil fuels.

A wholesale switch to electric transport, powered by renewable energy, would also play a huge role in lowering emissions, with the added bonus of slashing air pollution in the world’s major cities. Electric vehicles are rapidly becoming cheaper and more efficient, and many countries, including those committed to net zero, have proposed plans to phase out the sale of fossil-fuel powered cars.

Other harmful emissions come from agriculture (livestock produce significant levels of methane, a greenhouse gas). These could be reduced drastically if we eat less meat and more plant-based foods. Here again, the signs are promising, such as the rising popularity of "plant-based meats" now being sold in major international fast-food chains.

An electric hybrid vehicle at a charging station in Germany.

What will happen to remaining emissions?

Reducing emissions is extremely important. To get to net zero, we also need to find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Here again, solutions are at hand. The most important have existed in nature for thousands of years.

These "nature-based solutions" include forests, peatbogs, mangroves, soil and even underground seaweed forests , which are all highly efficient at absorbing carbon. This is why huge efforts are being made around the world to save forests, plant trees, and rehabilitate peat and mangrove areas, as well as to improve farming techniques.

Who is responsible for getting to net zero?

We are all responsible as individuals, in terms of changing our habits and living in a way which is more sustainable, and which does less harm to the planet, making the kind of lifestyle changes which are highlighted in the UN’s Act Now campaign.

The private sector also needs to get in on the act and it is doing so through the UN Global Compact , which helps businesses to align with the UN’s environmental and societal goals.

It’s clear, however, that the main driving force for change will be made at a national government level, such as through legislation and regulations to reduce emissions.

Many governments are now moving in the right direction. By early 2021, countries representing more than 65 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions and more than 70 per cent of the world economy, will have made ambitious commitments to carbon neutrality.　

The European Union, Japan and the Republic of Korea, together with more than 110 other countries, have pledged carbon neutrality by 2050; China says it will do so before 2060.

Some climate facts:

The earth is now 1.1°C warmer than it was at the start of the industrial revolution. We are not on track to meet agreed targets in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change , which stipulated keeping global temperature increase well below 2 °C or at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

2010-2019 is the warmest decade on record. On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, the global temperature is expected to increase by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of century.

To avoid the worst of warming (maximum 1.5°C rise), the world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6 per cent per year between 2020 and 2030. Countries are instead planning and projecting an average annual increase of 2 per cent.

Climate action is not a budget buster or economy-wrecker: In fact, shifting to a green economy will add jobs. It could yield a direct economic gain of US$26 trillion through to 2030 compared with business-as-usual. And this is likely to be a conservative estimate.

Restoring natural habitats as pictured here in Cuba will help to slow down climate change

Are these commitments any more than just political statements?

These commitments are important signals of good intentions to reach the goal, but must be backed by rapid and ambitious action. One important step is to provide detailed plans for action in nationally determined contributions or NDCs. These define targets and actions to reduce emissions within the next 5 to 10 years. They are critical to guide the right investments and attract enough finance.

So far, 186 parties to the Paris Agreement have developed NDCs. This year, they are expected to submit new or updated plans demonstrating higher ambition and action. Click here to see the NDC registry .

Is net zero realistic?

Yes! Especially if every country, city, financial institution and company adopts realistic plans for transitioning to net zero emissions by 2050.

The COVID-19 pandemic recovery could be an important and positive turning point. When economic stimulus packages kick in, there will be a genuine opportunity to promote renewable energy investments, smart buildings, green and public transport, and a whole range of other interventions that will help to slow climate change.

But not all countries are in the same position to affect change, are they?

That’s absolutely true. Major emitters, such as the G20 countries, which generate 80 per cent of carbon emissions, in particular, need to significantly increase their present levels of ambition and action.

Also, keep in mind that far greater efforts are needed to build resilience in vulnerable countries and for the most vulnerable people; they do the least to cause

climate change but bear the worst impacts. Resilience and adaptation action do not get the funding they need, however.

Even as they pursue net zero, developed countries must deliver on their commitment to provide $100 billion dollars a year for mitigation, adaptation and resilience in developing countries.

National governments are the main drivers of change to reduce harmful emissions.

What is the UN doing promote climate action?

It supports a broader process of global consensus on climate goals through the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development .

It is a leading source of scientific findings and research on climate change.

Within developing countries, it assists governments with the practicalities of establishing and monitoring NDCs, and taking measures to adapt to climate change, such as by reducing disaster risks and establishing climate-smart agriculture.

climate change

Life in 2050: A Glimpse at Education in the Future

Thanks to growing internet access and emerging technologies, the way we think of education will dramatically change..

Matthew S. Williams

Life in 2050: A Glimpse at Education in the Future

Welcome back to our “Life in 2050” series, where we examine how changes that are anticipated for the coming decades will alter the way people live their lives. In previous installments, we looked at how warfare , the economy , housing , and space exploration (which took two installments to cover!) will change by mid-century.

Today, we take a look at education and how social, economic, and technological changes will revolutionize the way children, youth, and adults go to school. Whereas modern education has generally followed the same model for over three hundred years, a transition is currently taking place that will continue throughout this century.

This transition is similar to what is also taking place in terms of governance, the economy, and recreation. In much the same way, the field of education will evolve in this century to adapt to four major factors. They include:

Growing access to the internet
Improvements in technology
Distributed living and learning
A new emphasis on problem-solving and gamification

The resulting seismic shift expected to occur by 2050 and after will be tantamount to a revolution in how we think about education and learning. Rather than a centralized structure where information is transmitted, and retention is tested, the classroom of the future is likely to be distributed in nature and far more hands-on.

To the next generations, education in the future will look a lot more like playtime than schooling!

A Time-Honored Model

Since the 19th century, public education has become far more widespread. In 1820, only 12% of people worldwide could read and write. As of 2016, that figure was reversed, where only 14% of the world’s population remained illiterate. Beyond basic literacy, the overall level of education has also increased steadily over time.

Since the latter half of the 20th century, secondary and post-secondary studies (university and college) have expanded considerably across the world. Between 1970 and 2020 , the percentage of adults with no formal education went from 23% to less than 10%; those with a partial (or complete) secondary education went from 16% to 36%; and those with a post-secondary education from about 3.3% to 10%.

Of course, there remains a disparity between the developing and developed world when it comes to education outcomes. According to data released in 2018 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the percentage of people to graduate secondary school (among their 38 member nations) was 76.86% for men and 84.82% for women.

The same data indicated that among OECD nations, an average of 36.55% of the population (29.41% men and 44.10% women) received a post-secondary degree. This ranges from a Bachelor’s degree (24.07% men, 36.91% women) and a Master’s degree (10.5% men, 16.17% women) to a Ph.D. (less than 1% of men and women).

Despite this expansion in learning, the traditional model of education has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. This model consists of people divided by age (grades), learning a standardized curriculum that is broken down by subject (maths, sciences, arts, social sciences, and athletics), and being subject to evaluation (quizzes, tests, final exam).

This model has been subject to revision and expansion over time, mainly in response to new technologies, socio-political developments, and economic changes. However, the structure has remained largely intact, with the institutions, curricula, and accreditation standards subject to centralized oversight and control.

Global Internet

According to a 2019 report compiled by the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs — titled “ World Population Prospects 2019 ” — the global population is expected to reach 9.74 billion by mid-century. With a population of around 5.29 billion, Asia will still be the most populous continent on the planet.

However, it will be Africa that experiences the most growth between now and mid-century. Currently, Africa has a population of 1.36 billion, which is projected to almost double by 2050 — reaching up to 2.5 billion (an increase of about 83%). This population growth will be mirrored by economic growth, which will then drive another sort of growth.

According to a 2018 report by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 90% of the global population will have access to broadband internet services by 2050, thanks to the growth of mobile devices and satellite internet services . That’s 8.76 billion people, a 220% increase over the 4 billion people (about half of the global population) that have access right now.

The majority of these new users will come from the “developing nations,” meaning countries in Africa, South America, and Oceania. Therefore, the internet of the future will be far more representative of the global population as more stories, events, and trends that drive online behavior come from outside of Europe and North America.

Similarly, the internet will grow immensely as trillions of devices, cameras, sensors, homes, and cities are connected to the internet — creating a massive expansion in the “ Internet of Things .” Given the astronomical amount of data that this will generate on a regular basis, machine learning and AI will be incorporated to keep track of it all, find patterns in the chaos, and even predict future trends.

AI will also advance thanks to research into the human brain and biotechnology, which will lead to neural net computing that is much closer to the real thing. Similarly, this research will lead to more advanced versions of Neuralink , neural implants that will help remedy neurological disorders and brain injuries, and also allow for brain-to-machine interfacing.

This means that later in this century, people will be able to perform all the tasks they rely on their computers for, but in a way that doesn’t require a device. For those who find the idea of neural implants unsettling or repugnant, computing will still be possible using smart glasses, smart contact lenses , and wearable computers .

From Distance Ed to MOOCs

In the past year, the coronavirus and resulting school closures have been a major driving force for the growth of online learning. However, the trend towards decentralization was underway long before that, with virtual classrooms and online education experiencing considerable growth over the past decade.

In fact, a report compiled in February of 2020 by Research and Markets indicated that by 2025, the online education market would be valued at about $320 billion USD . This represents a growth of 170% — and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.23% since 2019 when the e-learning industry was valued at $187.87 billion USD .

What’s more, much of this growth will be powered by economic progress and rising populations in the developing nations (particularly in Africa, Asia, and South America). Already, online education is considered a cost-effective means to address the rising demand for education in developing nations.

As Stefan Trines, a research editor with the World Education News & Reviews, explained in an op-ed he penned in August of 2018 :

“While still embryonic, digital forms of education will likely eventually be pursued in the same vein as traditional distance learning models and the privatization of education, both of which have helped increase access to education despite concerns over educational quality and social equality.

“Distance education already plays a crucial role in providing access to education for millions of people in the developing world. Open distance education universities in Bangladesh, India, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, and Turkey alone currently enroll more than 7 million students combined.”

While barriers remain in the form of technological infrastructure (aka. the “digital divide”), the growth of internet access in the next few decades will be accompanied by an explosion in online learning. Another consequence will be the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of e-learning, which will replace traditional distance education.

Here too, the growth in the past few years has been very impressive (and indicative of future trends). Between 2012 and 2018 , the number of MOOCs available increased by more than 683%, while the total number of students enrolled went from 10 million (in 2013) to 81 million, and the number of universities offering them increased by 400% (from 200 to 800).

Between 2020 and 2050 , the number of people without any formal education will decline from 10% to 5% of the global population. While the number of people with a primary and lower secondary education is expected to remain largely the same, the number of people with secondary education is projected to go from 21% to 29% and post-secondary education from 11% to 18.5%.

For developing nations, distributed learning systems will offer a degree of access and flexibility that traditional education cannot. This is similar to the situation in many remote areas of the world, where the necessary infrastructure doesn’t always exist (i.e., roads, school buses, schoolhouses, etc.).

New Technologies & New Realities

Along with near-universal internet access, there are a handful of technologies that will make education much more virtual, immersive, and hands-on. These include augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), haptics , cloud computing, and machine learning (AI). Together, advances in these fields will be utilized to enhance education.

By definition, AR refers to interactions with physical environments that are enhanced with the help of computer-mediated images and sounds, while VR consists of interacting with computer-generated simulated environments. However, by 2050, the line between simulated and physical will be blurred to the point where they are barely distinguishable.

This will be possible thanks to advances in “haptics,” which refers to technology that stimulates the senses. Currently, this technology is limited to stimulating the sensation of touch and the perception of motion. By 2050, however, haptics, AR, and VR are expected to combine in a way that will be capable of creating totally realistic immersive environments.

These environments will stimulate the five major senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) as well as somatosensory perception — pressure, pain, temperature, etc. For students, this could mean simulations that allow the student to step into a moment in history and to see and feel what it was like to live in another time and place — with proper safety measures (let’s not forget that history is full of violence!).

This technology could extend beyond virtual environments and allow students the opportunity to visit places all around the globe and experience what it feels like to actually be there. It’s even possible that this technology will be paired with remote-access robotic hosts so students can physically interact with the local environment and people.

Cloud computing will grow in tandem with increased internet access, leading to an explosion in the amount of data that a classroom generates and has access to. The task of managing this data will be assisted by machine learning algorithms and classroom AIs that will keep track of student tasks, learning, retention, and assess their progress.

New & Personalized Curriculums

In fact, AI-driven diagnostic assessments are likely to replace traditional grading, tests, and exams as the primary means of measuring student achievement. Rather than being given letter grades or pass/fail evaluations, students will need to fulfill certain requirements in order to unlock new levels in their education.

The ease with which students can connect to classrooms will also mean that teachers will no longer need to be physically present in a classroom. By 2050, “ virtual teacher ” is likely to become an actual job description! Ongoing progress in the field of AI and social robotics is also likely to result in classrooms that are led by virtual or robotic teachers and education assistants.

Speaking of robotics, emerging technologies and the shifting nature of work in the future will be reflected in the kinds of tasks students perform. For this reason, students are sure to spend a significant portion of their lessons learning how to code and build robots , take apart and reassemble complex machines, and other tasks that will enhance their STEM skills.

Other professions that emerge between now and 2050 are also likely to have an impact on student education. Given their importance to future generations, students are sure to learn about additive manufacturing (3D printing), space travel, renewable energy, and how to create virtual environments, blockchains , and digital applications .

In addition to adapting to new demands, school curriculums are likely to become a lot more decentralized as a result of technological changes. On the one hand, schools are likely to abandon compartmentalized study — math, science, language, literature, social studies, etc. — in favor of more blended learning activities that cut across these boundaries.

Gaming, Problem Solving, & Incentives

Another major change is the way education is expected to become “gamified.” This is the philosophy behind Ad Astra , a private school created by Elon Musk and educator Joshua Dahn for Musk’s children and those of SpaceX’s employees. Since then, this school has given way to Astra Nova , which follows the same philosophy, but is open to the general public.

With their emphasis on destructured learning and focus on problem-solving, these schools provide something of a preview for what education will look like down the road. As Musk remarked in a 2013 interview with Sal Khan, founder of the online education platform Khan Academy :

“What is education? You’re basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain. And it’s actually amazingly bad in conventional education because it shouldn’t be like this huge chore… The more you can gamify the process of learning, the better. For my kids, I don’t have to encourage them to play video games. I have to pry them out of their hands.”

This approach is similar to the Montessori method of education , where students engage in self-directed learning activities in a supportive and well-equipped environment. While many practices have come to be included under the heading of “Montessori school,” the general idea is to avoid using highly structured and transmission-based methods.

Combined with cutting-edge technology, this same philosophy is projected to become far more widespread and will be possible without the need for physical classrooms, schools, textbooks, etc. In this respect, it is the Synthesis School , another spin-off of Ad Astra, that provides the closest approximation of what the future of education will be like.

The Synthesis School is an open-access educational platform that takes the problem-solving and gamified approach of Ad Astra and Astra Nova and makes it available as an enrichment activity to the entire world (for a fee). In the future, children and youths from all over the world could be following the same process: Logging in from just about anywhere, forming groups, and playing games that develop our faculties.

The growing use of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will also have an effect on schooling. In terms of the future economy, these technologies could replace traditional fiat money and banking. But in education, they could facilitate an entirely new system of reward and punishment.

Here too, Ad Astra and Astra Nova offer a preview of what this might look like. In these schools, students are encouraged to earn and trade a unit of currency called the “ Astra .” This system is designed to reward students for good behavior while also teaching them about money management and entrepreneurship.

By 2050, the majority of students around the world may no longer have to physically go to school in order to get an education. Instead, they will be able to log in from their home, a common room in their building, or a dedicated space in their community. From there, they will join students from all around the world and engage in problem-solving tasks, virtual tours, and hands-on activities.

For hundreds of millions of students, this will represent a chance to at a brighter future for themselves and others. For many children, it will be an opportunity to learn about the world beyond their front door and how to facilitate the kind of changes that will benefit us all.

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Matthew S. Williams Matthew S Williams is an author, a writer for Universe Today, and the curator of their Guide to Space section. His works include sci-fi/mystery The Cronian Incident and his articles have been featured in Phys.org, HeroX, Popular Mechanics, Business Insider, Gizmodo, and IO9, ScienceAlert, Knowridge Science Report, and Real Clear Science, with topics ranging from astronomy and Earth sciences to technological innovation and environmental issues. He is also a former educator and a 5th degree Black Belt Tae Kwon Do instructor. He lives on Vancouver Island with his wife and family.

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11 december 2020, carbon neutrality by 2050: the world’s most urgent mission, by antónio guterres.

As the world marks the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, a promising movement for carbon neutrality is taking shape.

By next month, countries representing more than 65 per cent of harmful greenhouse gasses and more than 70 per cent of the world economy will have committed to achieve net zero emissions by the middle of the century.

At the same time, the main climate indicators are worsening. While the Covid-19 pandemic has temporarily reduced emissions, carbon dioxide levels are still at record highs – and rising. The past decade was the hottest on record; Arctic sea ice in October was the lowest ever, and apocalyptic fires, floods, droughts and storms are increasingly the new normal. Biodiversity is collapsing, deserts are spreading, oceans are warming and choking with plastic waste. Science tells us that unless we cut fossil fuel production by 6 per cent every year between now and 2030, things will get worse. Instead, the word is on track for a 2 per cent annual rise.

Pandemic recovery gives us an unexpected yet vital opportunity to attack climate change, fix our global environment, re-engineer economies and re-imagine our future. Here is what we must do:

First, we need build a truly global coalition for carbon neutrality by 2050.

The European Union has committed to do so. The United Kingdom, Japan, the Republic of Korea and more than 110 countries have done the same. So, too, has the incoming United States administration. China has pledged to get there before 2060.

Every country, city, financial institution and company should adopt plans for net zero -- and act now to get on the right path to that goal, which means cutting global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. In advance of next November’s UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, Governments are obligated by the Paris Agreement to be ever more ambitious every five years and submit strengthened commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, and these NDCs must show true ambition for carbon neutrality.

Technology is on our side. It costs more to simply run most of today’s coal plants than it does to build new renewable plants from scratch. Economic analysis confirms the wisdom of this path. According to the International Labour Organization, despite inevitable job losses, the clean energy transition will create 18 million net new jobs by 2030. But we must recognize the human costs of decarbonization, and support workers with social protection, re-skilling and up-skilling so that the transition is just.

Second, we need to align global finance with the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, the world’s blueprint for a better future.

It is time to put a price on carbon; end fossil fuel subsidies and finance; stop building new coal power plants; shift the tax burden from income to carbon, from taxpayers to polluters; make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory; and integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal decision-making. Banks must align their lending with the net zero objective, and asset owners and managers must decarbonize their portfolios.

Third, we must secure a breakthrough on adaptation and resilience to help those already facing dire impacts of climate change.

That’s not happening enough today: adaptation represents only 20 per cent of climate finance. This hinders our efforts to reduce disaster risk. It also isn’t smart; every $1 invested in adaptation measures could yield almost $4 in benefits. Adaptation and resilience are especially urgent for small island developing states, for which climate change is an existential threat.

Next year gives us a wealth of opportunities to address our planetary emergencies, through major United Nations conferences and other efforts on biodiversity, oceans, transport, energy, cities and food systems. One of our best allies is nature itself: nature-based solutions could provide one-third of the net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Indigenous knowledge can help to point the way. And as humankind devises strategies for preserving the environment and building a green economy, we need more women decision-makers at the table.

COVID and climate have brought us to a threshold. We cannot go back to the old normal of inequality and fragility; instead we must step towards a safer, more sustainable path. This is a complex policy test and an urgent moral test. With decisions today setting our course for decades to come, we must make pandemic recovery and climate action two sides of the same coin.

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What life will be in 2050? Free Essay Example
Example 2. E ssay about life in 2050. The world in which I live in the year 2050 is only marginally different than the one we lived in fifty years ago. Communication technology at this point is really the only thing that has advanced in great leaps. In 2050, there are no more wires used in communication.
What will the world look like in 2050?
The difference in this path to 2050 was striking. The number of additional people who will be exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution declines to just 7% of the planet's population, or 656 million, compared with half the global population, or 4.85 billion people, in our business-as-usual scenario.
What Will Life on Earth Be Like in 2050?
Megan Rabbitt. [email protected]. The number of extreme events, such as hurricanes and famine, affecting at least one million people will increase over the next 45 years if a certain scenario of world development plays out. Demand for water will increase enormously — between 30% and 85% — especially in Africa and Asia, by the year 2050.
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Homes and buildings all over the world are becoming self- sustaining far beyond their electrical needs. For example, all buildings now collect rainwater and manage their own water use. Renewable sources of electricity made possible localized desalination, which means clean drinking water can now be produced on-demand anywhere in the world.
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By admin / August 14, 2018. In this article published by Wired, bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari explores what what world will be like in 2050. In 2011, Yuval Noah Harari restated the history of humankind through his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. According to Harari, our species, homo sapiens is responsible for the extinction ...
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In this intriguing talk, Justin Friedman challenges the TEDxJohannesburg audience to imagine what world they want to live in, in 2050. Will the planet be enough for us all? Will we embrace the interconnectedness of life? Will democracy survive? Will it thrive? How will we power the planet? In what ways will technology disrupt life? Where will designers draw inspiration from?
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The World in 2050, How to Think About the Future. Author: Hamish McRae. ISBN-13: 978-1526600073. Publisher: Bloomsbury. Guideline Price: £25. Imagining the future is essential to the craft of ...
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As a result, six of the seven largest economies in the world are projected to be emerging economies in 2050 led by China (1st), India (2nd) and Indonesia (4th) The US could be down to third place in the global GDP rankings while the EU27's share of world GDP could fall below 10% by 2050. UK could be down to 10th place by 2050, France out of ...
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By 2050, 68% of the world population will live in cities, up from 55% today, so the actions of municipal and regional governments are critical. "If cities become the unit at which we do climate ...
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The World in 2050. The World in 2050 (TWI2050) is a global research initiative in support of a successful implementation of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda, with the goal to provide the fact-based knowledge to support the policy process and implementation of the SDGs. TWI2050 was launched by the International Institute for Applied Systems ...
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McRae's discussion of these multiple "forces for change" is wide-ranging and fascinating. He then moves on to a wide-ranging deliberation about "how the world will look in 2050". Throughout, however, he emphasises the critical role of choice. Everything could go well, thereby vindicating faith in sustained human progress.
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Drawing on decades of research, and combining economic judgement with historical perspective, Hamish weighs up the opportunities and dangers we face, analysing the economic tectonic plates of the past and present in order to help us chart a map of the future.A bold and vital vision of our planet, The World in 2050 is an essential projection for ...
The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future
He's also an economic and finance journalist and editor at The Independent. In his new book The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future, he maps out the next thirty years - and he has a well-established reputation for predicting global trends; thirty years ago he did a similar exercise in his book The World in 2020: Power, Culture and ...
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