Defining trends of our world DOWN TO EARTH

It was the time of change. It was the moment of innocence. It was the age of hope. It was 1992, the year when fortnightly magazine Down To Earth started its journey. The Earth Charter had been signed, signalling the importance of environmental issues on the global stage; the World Trade Organisation (created in 1994) had been set up, signalling that the now inter-connected world would bring prosperity to all. The issues of poverty, injustice, and African debt were all on the world’s agenda. It seemed, bumps, blips included, it would be all right.

Now, 25 years later, it seems the agenda has unravelled. The world has come unstuck. We know that today. So, now, 25 years later, let’s discuss what the next 25 years will bring us.

In my view, there are three big trends that will make or break our life on Earth as we know it.

The most dominant determinant will be our ability to mitigate and to cope with changing climate. There is no doubt already today that weather is more variable, extreme, and horrendously devastating for the poorest, who live on the margins of subsistence. It is they who today face the intense heat waves, the floods, and the droughts, and lose their crops and livelihoods to freak weather events. This is now. There are no full-stops. Humankind continues to pump vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What will happen tomorrow and the day after? Scientific models are most unprepared when temperatures will increase by more than 2º C over the pre-industrial era.

So, quite simply we are moving towards an age of extreme uncertainty. The planetary limits are being breached. In this scenario, nobody knows what the future will bring. This is why coping with and combating climate change will be our overwhelming task. How we do this is literally in our hands.

This second trend that will drive the future’s developments is insecurity and fear. Today we are seeing a virtual breakdown in the world. There is also no doubt that our world in the past 25 years has only increased inequity — the very rich have got richer and everybody else is waiting for deliverance. This economic insecurity is increasingly getting mixed up with cultural and religious identity politics. All in all, anger is growing and getting dangerously out of hand.

Again, we do not know how this insecurity will play out. Today, it is leading to calls for protectionism, on the one hand, and war, on the other hand. Who and how will bring us back from the brink we are standing on? Will protectionism mean that countries will invest in local economies; build down to grow upwards? Will localisation bring inclusive growth or just more of the same? All this again is what the future will tell.

The third trend is really more real. It is about us — not just democracy as we know it. But democracy as it should have matured in this age of market-only growth. Today, it seems people — you and me — are all waiting in the wings, interacting through social media type activism. This is the circle of our influence. But this is where we are going wrong.

Our question today, to secure the future’s future, has to be about the use of technological advances so that they meet the needs of all and of sustainability. Right now, we are not getting this right. We, like bystanders, are witnessing technology overtake our lives and livelihoods. Automation and artificial intelligence are driving changes in our ways of doing things. But not with any big purpose. There is no discussion what this technology change will mean for employment. There is no discussion what and how these advances can be used to meet the needs of all and not just some.

Then, we are letting corporate agendas drive democracies without any push back on how we can reclaim the space. So, while this powerful under-current is pulling the world in one direction, people in the world try and halt it through anger, frustration and desperate cries of the ballot. The ultra-left and the ultra-right are winning in our increasingly polarised, insecure and thoughtless world.

So, in the next 25 years of development, it is important to rethink the question of states, market, and society. We have dismembered the state, grown the market and believed that we have empowered society. We believed that people would be modulating voices over the market. They were the check.

But we forgot to ask — which society is being empowered and for what? And so slowly, the circles closed — state-market and aspiring consuming society merged. Became one. Anyone outside this circle stopped getting counted. They are being slowly erased. This cannot work. This is our future’s most important future agenda.

All in all, the next 25 years is in our hands. To make or break. But what is certain is that if we learn from our past mistakes and move with thoughtfulness and conversations then we have the ability to turn the tide. Together. This has to be our common agenda.