HEAD IN THE SAND?

Whilst nothing is certain, some things that may lie ahead are now very, very probable indeed. If taking a short-term horizon of a year or two they can perhaps be ignored. However, any medium- or long-term planning now has to include at least an awareness of those effectively inevitable future challenges as listed below.

Peak Oil

All industrialized societies are based on oil. It is, in fact, quite difficult to overstate just how dependent on oil human civilization has become, with oil not only being the lifeblood of most means of travel, but also being relied upon to fertilize and transport most of our food. Indeed, every calorie we eat on average consumes about ten calories of oil. Many products are also manufactured in whole or part from oil, including all plastic bags, casings and containers, DVDs, nylon clothing, many medicines, and the tarmac on our roads. It should therefore be of great concern that we are fast approaching the situation of "peak oil" where there is less oil left in the ground than we've taken out.

When Peak Oil becomes a reality the result will be a gradual fall-off in production - with estimates ranging from 2% to 13% a year - meaning that demand for oil will outstrip supply. A significant rise in the price of oil - maybe by a factor of ten by 2015 or 2020 - is therefore exceedingly likely. In turn, when Peak Oil hits we will experience an Oil Crash. This is because, as LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net explains, "An oil based economy . . . doesn't need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10 to 15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty."

We should also be aware that Peak Oil and a resultant Oil Crash may be even closer than we think. Quite alarmingly, a recent report from TheOilDrum.com notes that "Only 14 out of 54 oil producing countries and regions in the world continue to increase production, while 30 are definitely past their production peak, and the remaining 10 appear to have flat or declining production". We therefore need to start planning for a world with less oil.

Peak Water

With oceans covering over seventy percent of the planet, the idea that we may in the near future run out of water may seem ludicrous. However, "peak water" refers to a state of affairs in which our supply of fresh water is not replenished at the rate it is consumed.

Ninety-seven per cent of all water on the Earth is salty. The majority of all fresh water is then frozen in the polar icecaps. Most of the rest is in the soil or inaccessible deep underground. The tiny percentage of fresh water suitable for human and animal consumption therefore comes from lakes and accessible underground sources.

Because the clean water in lakes and accessible underground aquifers behaves like a finite resource, if current usage patterns continue the United Nations predicts that by 2025 1.8 billion people could be short of water, with two thirds of the world population experiencing stressed or restricted supplies. Indeed, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has repeatedly warned that water scarcity will threaten economic growth, human rights, health and safety and national security within a couple of decades.

Climate Change

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), increases in average global air and ocean temperatures, a widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising sea levels, all signal that our climate is changing. Indeed, the IPCC AR4 Report of November 2007 makes absolutely explicit their view that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal".

The link between climate change and the emission of greenhouse gasses resulting from human activity is also now largely accepted by most citizens and governments. As a result, whether or not and to what extent this link really exists is becoming pragmatically irrelevant. This is because most of us now find ourselves living in and/or trading with countries in which both government action and consumer behaviour are at least partially directed toward a reduction in greenhouse gasses. Businesses therefore now need to strategically plan within an environment that is changing not just physically, but also in terms of market regulation and consumer expectation.

Population Ageing

Around the world, human beings are -- on average -- living longer. As a result we are witness to the phenomenon of "population ageing". This is where older age groups make up a bigger and bigger proportion of the population. Indeed, as reported by the New England Centenarian Study, in developed nations people over 100 are the fastest growing segment of the population. The second-fastest-growing age group is then people over 85.

As the population ages, businesses need to question their attitudes and practices towards employing older workers. Traditionally the old have been stereotyped as physically and/or mentally unable to work. However, whilst for some this remains the case, many individuals reaching a traditional retirement age are perfectly capable of continuing to be productive members of the labourforce. Indeed, their knowledge can be invaluable. NASA, for example, recently set up a panel of retired engineers from its 1960s Lunar Module Reliability and Maintainability Team to provide advice to current employees charged with returning a man to the Moon by 2020.

An ageing population will increasingly present a challenge to both public and private healthcare and welfare provision. New medical technologies will increasingly be able to improve the quality of life for the old and even facilitate life extension. However, this does not mean that they will be able to be afforded for the majority in potentially any nation. Over the coming decades, retirement ages will therefore almost certainly have to rise if welfare systems are not to collapse and if the majority of the old want to enjoy a reasonable fraction of the quality of life potentially available to them. Businesses therefore now also need to start becoming far more alert to the requirements of the old as an increasing proportion of their customer base. One thing today that we can be fairly certain about is that "grey power" is on the rise.

Food Shortages

The near-future "perfect storm" of peak oil, peak water, climate change and population ageing -- not to mention rising population levels and the rampant planetary cancer of global industrialization -- will within a few decades drive serious food shortages in many parts of the world. Already Europe imports most of its fish and a lot of its fruit and vegetables from countries that cannot feed themselves. Parched regions of the planet also regularly now sell "virtual water" to relatively saturated nations via their food exports. Almost certainly, whilst peak oil may change our way of life and peak water may alter further how we live, it is pending global food shortages that are likely to spur the greatest human suffering within the next few decades.

Current Western dietary habits are simply not sustainable anymore -- let alone in the future, let alone for the whole industrializing planet. Indeed meat-rich, oil-hungry ways of eating are only still being made possible for a few fortunate billions because so many of our fellow human beings are being allowed to starve on far more sustainable diets. The West has drained its own fish stocks, given up on seasonality, and is now raping the lands and natural resources of the poor to keep the richness and variety of food that it desires and "needs" in its TV dinners. But things will change. And pretty fast for us all.

Viral Pandemics

For the latest on Swine Flu please click here.

A pandemic is a disease that spreads across a wide geographic area -- potentially the entire World -- and which affects a large proportion of the population. Human viral pandemics have occurred in the past in the form of influenza pandemics with fairly devastating results. For example, it is estimated that between 40 and 50 million people died in the 1918-1919 "Spanish Flu" pandemic, between one to two million in the 1957-1958 "Asian Flu" pandemic, and towards one million in the "Hong Kong flu" pandemic of 1968-1969. Based on a repeating cycle of roughly 30 years, scientists believe that we are overdue for another pandemic.

In the midst of the swine flu pandemic we will hopefully gain focus on that particular threat. However, more broadly we need to become aware that the natural world is starting to react more and more forcefully to the global contagion that is the human race. In 2009 alone, alongside swine flu we saw Ebola transmitted from pigs to humans and several reported cases of bubonic plague. What most needs to be appreciated is therefore that it is not any one particular pandemic that matters, but the implications for humanity of the broader occurrence of deadly global diseases on an overcrowded planet.

For more information on viral pandemics and the latest swine flu update, please see the viral pandemic page.

Resource Depletion

Sustained economic development is impossible within an effectively closed system like Planet Earth. It is therefore more than a little surprising how much attention today is being focused on climate change and yet how little is being directed toward the potentially far more pressing issue of resource depletion. Fortunately these two challenges are inter-linked to the extent that most measures intended to combat climate change do involve using less resources and/or recycling precious materials. However, the fact that nobody has won mass public or political attention to the cause of using less resources because they will run out -- as opposed to using less resources because doing so may help us to combat climate change -- remains more than a little bizarre.

Coping most successfully with resource depletion requires a broad range of strategies. These include improved recycling, the end of our disposable culture and a return to taking care of things and repairing them when they go wrong(!), and making investments in renewable and alternative energy sources, including wind farms and nuclear power. The latter may include the development of "clean" nuclear fusion power plants using off-world fuels such as helium-3, and as explained on the Helium-3 Power page. Indeed more broadly, developments in space travel are likely to constitute the only long-term solution for sourcing those future natural resources required if the human race is to continue to expand, evolve and thrive.

Some excellent sources of information on resource depletion and its implications include Alternative-Energy-News and this excellent New Scientist Article auditing the Earth's "natural wealth".

Religious Tensions

Across much of the 20th century, within industrialized nations the dictates of religion were largely sub-servant to the dictates of democracy, capitalism and the state. Community boundaries -- largely those of countries or regions within -- were generally also synonymous with religious belief. However, neither of these states holds so true today.

The aims and objectives of this website do not include becoming embroiled in religious debate. That said, it would be foolish in the extreme not to recognise the very significant challenges that will lie ahead as organizations and in particular governments wrestle to implement laws and policies on a range of topics (from genetic engineering to life extension and women in authority) that may not sit easily with significant proportions of their population, and who may increasingly find their allegiance to their religion or other fundamental belief system in conflict with that of the governance systems of their nation.