Global Challenges at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

Global Challenges at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

The greatest difficulty we have in describing our

global condition as we enter the twenty-first century is that the picture that presents itself is so mixed. Measured in terms of personal prosperity, about

one-sixth of the population of the world is enjoying uncommonly high standards of living, while a much smaller percentage of those families have achieved startling levels of wealth; another one-third of humanity, in the so-called emerging economies, have seen rapid increases in per capita income over the past quarter-century; yet about one-half of the human inhabitants of the globe are still battling poverty, often to the most extreme degree. The same discrepancies exist in the realms of justice, human rights, democracy, and war and peace. States in, say, Scandanavia enjoy a happy combination of high prosperity, environmental care, social services, political and all other freedoms, whereas many countries in, say, Africa lag far behind on so many counts.

Such an extraordinarily mixed picture frequently defies our human comprehension and all too often leads observers to describe only partial accounts of the untidy, larger whole. Thus, the "cornucopian" school paints an exciting scene of a high-tech nirvana for mankind to enjoy whilst doomsters warn that we are crossing environmental and demographic thresholds that can bring disaster.

The challenge in producing such as work as Global Trends 2000 is to capture the varieties of this mixed landscape yet at the same time avoiding blandness and lack of commitment.

Perhaps the best way to think about where our planet is going is to pull right out from it and to imagine that we are members of, say, an extraterrestrial spaceship that has been circling the globe for many months, using sophisticated sensors to track ALL of the activities on this planet. The scientists in this spaceship have really advanced technologies, and big data banks, and are good at analysing lots of material, even the curious and conflicting stuff that is coming to them from the planet Earth. They have the task of sending back a summary report to their leaders on Mars, or wherever the spaceship has come from. What will they say about us, and our planet? What will impress them?

My guess is that the first thing they will report is that this is a LIVE planet, unlike so many of the barren ones they have visited in the galaxy. Not only is the Earth breathing and changing, with the seasonal alterations and the daily ritual of rainfalls and evaporation, but it contains millions of species which are also living and breathing and active. And of all those species – birds, animals, fish, insects – one in particular seems dominant. It is called HOMO

SAPIENS, a two-legged mammal of various colors and sizes and two genders that lives about 75 years on average and dwells on land rather than in the water or in the air. This species has other notable

characteristics. It lives in societies of many sorts and numbers, it is immensely creative, it dominates all other species, it has increasing control of the natural environment, and for better or worse it has immense powers of destruction, whether locally or globally... Right now, the Martian spaceship reports, one part of this species seems to be showering all sorts of projectiles upon another part, at a place the locals call Serbia. No other species does anything like this.

Members of the Homo Sapiens species by no means possess the same resources as each other or live in the same circumstances as each other, which is very odd indeed to our extraterrestrial observers. All the other creatures on this earth, whether they be peregrine falcons or codfish or church mice, have as a species very similar daily lives and surroundings. But the human species is different. Some societies have levels of income 200 times higher than others. One of the spaceship’s satellite cameras came low over a place called Silicon Valley and found a veritable hive of organizations creating immense wealth through the production of electronic software and hardware.

Of course this technology was still very primitive compared with that on Mars, but the human beings themselves clearly thought this was an important activity and were proud of what they were doing

there. On the other hand, there were also many instances where members of this same species were experiencing totally different circumstances, hungry, homeless, torn by war, bereft of material goods, and living lives as wretched as those of their cattle or their dogs.

The reporting teams could not understand how or why this species Homo Sapiens could tolerate such vast discrepancies, especially since their very own global communications made people in the richer societies frequently aware of their poorer brethren, through a primitive imaging and transmission system which they called television. Perhaps it was that many people in those richer lands seemed to spend so much of their time watching quaint sports events and talk shows and so-called sit-coms that they managed to forget about the rest of the world. This suggested to the extraterrestrial observers that this Homo Sapiens species had some real problems which it might not be wishing to deal with.

The reason why the extraterrestrial observers believed that there were real problems on this planet Earth is not just the existing gaps between rich and poor societies, but also another sort of gap,

that relating to population increases. Whereas the numbers of the other species on the Earth seem relatively stable, or in some cases have actually declined because of the pressures from humankind,

the absolute numbers of Homo Sapiens have been rising for centuries and still seem to be increasing. Roughly speaking, there appear to be six billion humans on this planet and about 85 million extra persons are added to the total every year. From the population projections that the humans themselves have made, they expect that the Earth’s total of buman beings may be as many as 8 or 9 billion by 2030 and might be many more at the end of the next century. There is a great debate among the Earth people as to what that means. Can the land feed 9 billion people comfortably? Can they find employment for 3 billion young people? Will the environment be destroyed?

Such questions, although important, would probably seem to the Martian analysts to be directed at second-level issues. They would guess that the Earth people are clever enough to produce enough food and sustenance for extra billions, and they are also becoming more environmentally aware, at least in the richer, middle-class societies. Agricultural production has a great potential for expansion, albeit through the uncertainties of biotechnology, and there is much room for creating and using energy much more efficiently.

No, the big problem that our extraterrestrial scientists are likely to point to is not the absolute

increases in the human population but the very skewed, or unbalanced pattern of these demographics between one region and the next.

Roughly speaking the peoples of the Earth are divided into two types, those in what are called developed regions which are rich, technology-heavy societies, and those termed developing countries which are usually much poorer and have great social and economic deficits. The really interesting thing is that the total population of the richer lands is hardly expected to increase at all over the next 50 years whereas that in the developing regions is growing very rapidly indeed. One might have thought that the richer folks, having lots of resources, would want to enjoy lots of children; and that the poorer folks would be scared to have a large family. But these humans don’t appear to think like that. Generally, the rich peoples seem to spend their money on material goods rather than on extra children; and the poorest societies have the greatest tendency to produce large families even if this strains local resources and hurts the environment. This discrepancy is broken down into forecasts of population increases by each region of this planet, and the pattern is confirmed: Africa, Asia and Latin America all expect big rises in overall population,

whereas those areas called Europe, Japan and North America will be stable or will probably decline in absolute numbers.

What makes this especially intriguing is that this socio-economic and technological "gap" between rich and poor societies is not accompanied by complete and severe geographical and physical barriers. It is true that horribly disadvantaged Africa is separated from prosperous Europe by waters called the Mediterranean Sea, and that a large river called the Rio Grande separates the rich united Sates from its poorer neighbors to the South. But those boundaries are porous, especially the second one, and in any case the United States is actively leading a campaign for what is described as "globalization", that is, the ever-increasing integration between all societies on the Earth, aided by technologies such as the Internet and the television, by increased travel opportunities, by student exchanges, by massive investments of private capital in overseas countries, by cultural interactions and international organizations.

In fact, many of these Americans believe that if all the world lived like themselves, everything would be well. But the question that is rarely answered by them, or answered convincingly, is "How can the poorer, resource-depleted countries become

prosperous, stable democracies like the USA and Europe when they suffer from so many handicaps to begin with?"

As this planet Earth goes into the twenty-first

century, it appears that the economic and technical gaps between developed and developing countries are enormous and, in some cases, growing. Consider, for example, some simple data which compares scientific developments in one of the richer countries – in this case, Sweden – with the virtual absence of such technological activity in a poor country in Africa, namely, Uganda.

Closing that gap is the single most important challenge facing the Earth’s governments, yet not too many of them appear to appreciate that fact. Indeed, despite the admirable work of the World Bank, the UNDP and a large number of non-governmental organizations in addressing this challenge, the citizens of many rich countries seem hardly to consider it to be a problem.

Still, it would be grossly inaccurate to suggest that a simple division could be made of the peoples of the planet Earth into rich or poor, with nothing in between. For reasons that are deep in human history but probably make no sense to extraterrestrial observers, the inhabitants of the Earth have divided themselves into more than 190

separate units which they call nation-states; each has some form of governance, national symbols like a flag and an anthem, security forces, and so on. Each attends a curious and often ineffective body called the United Nations, and joins in an Assembly

to vote on international matters. Some of these nations are very large and populous, others are quite small. Given the pressures toward globalization, and transparency, and universal trading standards, it would be surprising if all developing countries were as poorly equipped as Uganda and all developed countries were as rich as Sweden. There are a goodly number of countries at an "in-between" stage, and they are perhaps the most interesting societies of all.