1. Introduction
As with any era, finding ourselves in the early part of the 21st century, it is prudent to look ahead to
see where we are headed, to forecast the environments in which we will be living, to position ourselves
for opportunities and to prepare for challenges. For several decades, the word "sustainability" has
influenced our thinking about the future. Some businesses and industrial associations have realized that
significant changes in their environmental footprints must be instituted in order to sustain production
and markets. There exist others, however, that expect our businesses and our ways of living and
behaving, with minor tweaking and fiddling, will steadily show continuous improvements and
economic growth far into the future. It is the contention of this paper that the latter opinion is wishful
thinking and that our future is going to be fraught with many challenges, which will necessitate our
changing the way we live and behave, or changes will be imposed on us by Nature.
This paper will summarize some of these challenges and discuss how they might be approached.
2. “Sustainable Development”
Within the business world over the last four decades, sustainability has become a common word.
Some companies have changed their organizational structures, renaming what were once called
Environment, Health and Safety to Departments of Sustainability, which recognize that protecting
environmental and workers’ health and respecting the communities in which they operate are core
values that help retain a "license to operate." Businesses have joined together to promote larger
industrial ventures, such as Sustainable Mining and Sustainable Chemistry, in anticipation that the
introduction of certain business objectives or standards of operating will provide a firm basis for
being "green."
However it is packaged, the word sustainability means to support and maintain a condition so that it
continues without interruption, diminution, giving way, fading, or yielding [1]. It means that we want
whatever we are doing to continue to be done in the future. It was, in fact, just such a concern with
"business as usual" and the perceived environmental degradation resulting from it, that inspired the
Club of Rome in 1972 to issue a report [2], which urged the adoption of a global equilibrium that
would be sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse and that was capable of satisfying the
basic requirements of all the world’s people. This report was one of the first uses of the term
.sustainable. aimed at operating modern businesses. It was, however, viewed by most economists and
business leaders at the time as being voiced by a fringe group that lacked pragmatism.
2.1. Global Initiatives
In 1983 the General Assembly of the UN created a special, independent World Commission on
Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. Tasked with formulating a global
agenda for change, the Commission proposed environmental strategies for achieving "environmentally
sustainable economic development," shortened to sustainable development, by the year 2000 across
all nations. While the goal set by the Commission was not met in their desired time frame,
the Commission assisted in having most informed people accept that (1) it was impossible to
separate issues of economic development from environmental and social issues; and (2) sustainable
development was not a final state, but rather was a manner of behavior and a process of decision-making
that met current needs without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs [3]. It stated the belief that the process to achieve sustainable development was to integrate
aspects of each development with its social issues and with accurate and holistic estimates of its
environmental effects and costs.
As a result of growing international concern with ecological degradation, an Earth Summit was
held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While this Summit succeeded in raising attention on the issue of
environmental sustainability, few positive steps to tackle most of the issues on a widespread basis have
been successful. An example of one successful initiative was the forum created out of Rio called the
Business Council for Sustainable Development, consisting of multi-national businesses which wanted
to lay the framework and sustainability principles upon which businesses could operate. In 1995 this
forum joined the World Industry Council for the Environment to create the World Business Council
for Sustainable Development, which has the potential for significant impact and influence on the
philosophy and operating practices of industry in areas of environmental stewardship, maintaining
open and competitive markets, in reducing poverty and in maintaining licenses to operate in society.
2.2. Inaction Is Rife
It has been 25 years since the World Commission on Environment and Development released
its recommendation and it is appropriate to ask how the world has responded. Many people are
talking the talk, but walking the talk is more difficult. The reason is no mystery: the relative scarcity of
capital. Industries are almost always focused on a relatively short horizon because shareholders want a
fairly rapid return on their investment. Truly proper attention to environmental impacts of a new
development can be trumped, no matter how progressive and predictive of long-term success those
attentions might be, by this quarter’s bottom line.
But industry is not alone in this approach. Most social institutions, indeed all governments, are
resistant to change and are especially good at equating a go-slow philosophy with stability. It is difficult
for governments to rapidly embrace new ways of managing or regulating economic development.
Yet more and more evidence is being amassed that warns of dramatic consequences waiting in
the not-too-distant future if certain problems are not addressed very soon. For example, an Earth
system framework has been quantified by Rockström and colleagues [4] to define a safe operating
multi-dimensional space for humanity. This space is defined by planetary boundaries which, should
they be crossed by human activity, would risk irreversible or abrupt environmental changes that would
likely negatively impact the sustainability of the entire system. While the location of these boundaries
is far from exact, this work provides a framework by which a variety of issues can be debated, refined
and acted upon.
It seems that humanity has a dilemma. The continued growth of our collective environmental
footprint must change in order for it to be sustainable. But humans, and particularly human institutions,
are afraid of changing too much too fast. We are a cautious species and, while this trait may have
contributed to our success over the last 10,000 years, our current caution about societal threats and our
failure to act on them will likely have drastic consequences that we would do well to fear much more
than the fear of change.
History shows that inactions by societies under threat have been linked with their subsequent
collapses. Diamond [5] concluded that the factors causing the collapses of many societies have
remained constant over thousands of years: (a) local environmental damage (the Mayans and Easter
Islanders); (b) climate change (the Anasazi in North America); (c) hostile neighbors (Mycenaean
Greeks); (d) weakened important trading partners (Greenland Norse); and (e) the inadequacy of a
society’s response. The one factor that remained universal was the inability of a society to respond
appropriately to the serious challenge(s) it faced. These societies became inflexible, they lost the
means to respond, or they did not even recognize the need to respond.
A full litany of all the challenges our global society faces is beyond the scope of this paper. Several
challenges are selected for discussion to characterize the breadth and seriousness of what we face: the
growing human population, the continued reliance on "dirty" energy sources, the decreasing supplies
of fresh water, and global climate change.
3. Human Population
The global population reached 7 billion people in late 2011. It’s instructive to look at how we
have attained this number. In 8000 BC it is estimated that there were 5 million people alive on Earth.
By 1 AD the number was around 200 million, then 275 million in 1000, 1 billion in 1894, 2 billion in
1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion by 1975 and 6 billion in 1999 [6]. The very rapid rise in population
has occurred in the last 80 years. It will continue its meteoric rise to 9 billion by the middle of the
21st century and, if birth rates continue to decrease, will likely stabilize at 10–11 billion by 2100 [7].
This population, of course, is not distributed uniformly and neither are its energy consumption or
carbon emissions. For example, while greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in 2000 was
about 34 billion tons of CO2 equivalent, which equates to 9.5 tons of CO2 per person, the highest per
capita annual emissions were for North America at 24 t, Australia at 19 t, Japan at 11 t, and Europe at
10 t. The largest geographical population densities in China and India contributed only 4 t and 2 t,
respectively, but these per capita annual emissions are increasing at a staggering rate. In addition, the
accumulated historical emissions per person per year over the period 1880–2004 show that the U.S.
contributed 9 t of CO2 equivalent compared to only 0.5 t for China and 0.2 t for India [8]. This widely
differing historical impact feeds into ethical questions about the responsibility for reducing emissions,
and it also feeds into the challenges associated with the much higher rate of pollution to be generated
by developing nations like China and India in the short term future. Challenges of providing
necessities of not only energy, but also food, and water, and desirables like health care and education,
are related directly to population.
Furthermore, we live in a truly global world. No longer are problems encountered in one region
limited only to that region. Globalization may have its advantages because people in distant parts of
the world can lend assistance to those in trouble in another part, but globalization has the disadvantage
that no part of the world is insulated from any other. Other peoples’ problems become our problems.
The pressure human population puts on the global society, and the concomitant challenges we face and
will face when we fail to provide for the essentials for life, permeates and affects every other action we
want to take to sustain the way we are living.
4. Energy
Increasing the complexity of a system from a simpler state requires the input of energy. Such a
decrease in the entropy in a portion of a system, if done spontaneously, must be carried out far from
equilibrium and often is the result of a system having within it extremes of temperature. Thus, the
development of life on Earth, obviously where a simple system became more complex, was enabled by
conditions far from equilibrium due to large temperature differences between the Sun and the
Earth [9], and was sustained by a resulting massive flux of energy to the Earth. Likewise, inputs of
additional energy by collections of humans organizing into groups, tribes, settlements and cities
resulted in non-spontaneous developments of complexity, which resulted in significant gains in the
collective abilities of people to provide for themselves, among other things, food, protection from
adverse weather and enemies, and education. The maintenance of even static complex groups requires
immense continued energy inputs [10].
Our global society, therefore, requires significant sources of energy just to maintain its current
complexity, not even taking into account the increased energy investment that must be made to
become even more complex (as, for example, with the increasing network of global systems of trade
and with global communications networks such as the Internet). If, for some reason, a human society’s
supply of energy becomes less than it needs to maintain its complexity, it will collapse, often very
rapidly. This is a fact we should look at very seriously for our current reliance on fossil fuels. While
some people contend that the current energy situation looks rosy [11], such arguments should not be
based on the estimated reserves of oil, coal and natural gas alone, but have to also consider what
effects the continued use of these fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates will have on atmospheric
constituents that contribute to climate change (see below). The fact is that fossil fuel sources on Earth
are large, but they are dirty due to the deleterious effects of their by-products. It is clear that
humanity’s current reliance on the growth of fossil fuel use has to be, staring now, tempered with a
search for (and research on) clean energy alternatives, improving the efficiencies of energy conversion
into doing useful work, and reducing the per capita use of energy, particularly in developed countries
around the world. Society needs to transform its energy source to one or several that are reliable and
clean far into the future. Without such a transformation very soon, our continued uncontrolled usage of
dirty energy will cause an environmental crisis with which we will be ill-prepared to contend [12].
5. Fresh Water
Water is essential for life and it has no substitute. Humans can live for a month without food,
but most survive only a few days without water. It can be called not only an essential resource but an
urgent resource. This resource, however, is taken for granted. Water appears to be plentiful because it
covers 71% of the Earth’s surface with a volume of some 330 million cubic miles [13]. Because there
seems to be a huge amount of water available, we do not treat it as precious. The difficulty with water
on Earth is that 97% of it is too salty to drink. Of the remaining 3% that is fresh water, 90% of that is
currently frozen, leaving 0.3% of the total inventory as fresh and accessible [14]. However, the issue is
further complicated by the fact that only 1% of fresh water is easily attainable in the rivers, streams
and lakes of the world [15]. The remainder is underground. So, of the total water on the planet,
only 0.003% of it is easily available, and that amount is not spread evenly across the world.
5.1. Drinking Water Supply Is Low
How is the human population doing in sharing valuable fresh water? In 2000, it was estimated
that 1.1 billion people lacked safe drinking water [16]. That number has climbed dramatically since
then. Just 4 years ago 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion people had contentious
water supplies [17]. This number, plus other information, fed into a Pentagon study pointing to fresh
water shortages as a special factor in international security [18].
5.2. Diet
Diets influence water use. Increases in the consumption of meat in many parts of the world are
requiring increases in water for raising the animals. An example of this is the Chinese, who have
increased their meat consumption per capita from 20 to 50 kg/year over the 34 year period of 1985 to
2009. Raising the animals to feed this consumption requires 390 km3 of water/year. This incremental
amount of fresh water use for a change in Chinese diet is nearly equal to the total use of fresh water by
all of Europe [19].
5.3. Underground Aquifers
Pumping fresh water from underground aquifers is occurring at alarming rates. The biggest user of
water stored underground is agriculture. For example, in 2005 irrigation in the U.S. used 62% of all
freshwater withdrawals [20]. And this will only grow with time. The United Nations estimates
that 60% more water will be used by agriculture by 2025 [21]. Even though fresh water return to the
Earth comes through precipitation, rain and snow events do not occur evenly and are not necessarily in
the very places that need fresh water the most. The result is water scarcity in many regions, such as
happened in the U.S. Midwest in the summer of 2012 when food production in this major food
growing area was cut by severe drought. With 2 billion more people coming into the world by 2025,
it is critical that major centers of food production operate at optimum levels because more people and
less food and water are a recipe for widespread discontent and potential violence.
5.4. Conflicting Resources
Often resource needs conflict with one another. The Ogallala aquifer in the central U.S. is one of the
largest in the world. It lies underneath 8 states and varies in thickness from 30 to 120 m [21].
Its volume of water would cover the continental U.S. to a depth of 0.6 m. Water from this aquifer is
being pumped at a high rate. If all pumping were to cease today, it would take 6000 years to refill the
aquifer naturally [22]. Plans have been put forward to run a major oil pipeline from Alberta to Texas
across land above this aquifer. Oil from Alberta is an important component in North America’s energy
supply strategy. But the protection of the aquifer from unintended oil spills is also important. These
conflicting needs are currently causing other options to be explored.
6. The Energy-Water Connection
6.1. Oil Sands
In mentioning the crude oil expected to come from Canada to be refined in the southern U. S,
it is instructive to look at the connections between energy and water. Harvesting the bitumen-rich
sands in Alberta is the world’s largest energy project. It is expected to add $1 trillion to Canada’s GNP
by 2020. The oil resources in the Alberta tar sands contain more oil than in Russia, Kuwait, and
Norway, combined. Under the assumption that only 10% of it is ultimately tapped, it is still the largest
oil reserve after Saudi Arabia. All this sounds very promising. But a challenge is that extracting the
bitumen to yield 1 barrel of crude oil takes 3–4 barrels of fresh water [23]. In addition, 280–350 kwh
of energy is needed to extract and upgrade the bitumen to a barrel of synthetic crude [24]. This energy
is supplied mostly by natural gas at the present time. The energy efficiency of the entire process, often
quoted in terms of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is only 5–6. Some newly developed oil
sands processes transform by-products into fuels, which can replace natural gas as the energy source,
but the EROEI is only marginally improved.
6.2. Fracking for Natural Gas
Another example of the energy-water connection is related to the expectation that natural gas will
serve as an energy source far into the future. The problem is that 90% of all natural gas wells in North
America use hydraulic fracturing as the preferred method to crack open shale where the gas is trapped.
The amount of water injected into each well amounts to 3–8 million gallons of fresh water [25].
With more than 450,000 gas wells currently operating in the U.S. alone, and with more being drilled
each week, the continuing amount of fresh water consumed by these operations is not insignificant.
As fracking adds chemicals to the water for extraction, there is also concern about the potential for
widespread pollution of underground water sources, as well as pollutants released to air.
6.3. Desalination
Many people hail desalination as the answer to supplying fresh water in the future. But that is
not without its own set of challenges, namely, that it requires significant amounts of energy and it
produces by-product brine that poses difficulties in its proper disposal.
7. Global Climate Change
7.1. The Sun and the Earth
One of the most significant challenges is climate change. In trying to understand climate change,
it is important to understand variations in the Sun’s and Earth’s behaviors. Most energy received by the
Earth ultimately is the result of radiant energy received from the Sun. This radiant energy has varied
over its history from a somewhat lower luminosity when it was a young star to its luminosity at the
present time. This change in luminosity, however, occurs on the scale of billions of years and it is not
something that is an important factor in understanding Earth’s climate on the scale of thousands or
hundreds of years. Sunspot activity, on the other hand, has a much more frequent cycling period of
about a decade, and certainly can affect the Earth’s climate. We know, for example, that the last
50 years has had an overall decline in sunspot activity and that 2008 was a very low year [26].
The Earth’s behavior plays a very active role in balancing the energy it receives with the energy
it emits. The Milankovitch cycles describe variations in the Earth’s distance from the Sun, and in
the tilting and precession of its rotational axis, but these have relatively long periods of 20,000 to
100,000 years. Atmospheric gas composition is a very important factor because certain gases, such as
CO2 and CH4, absorb infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface and end up acting like a blanket in
preventing this radiation from dispersing into space. The result, which was extremely fortunate for
developing life on Earth, is that the climate is warmer than it would be had these gases been absent.
Earth’s reflectivity varies with the extent of ice and type of plant growth and is an important factor in
climate. Also important, but episodic in nature, is the amount of dust in the atmosphere. Such dust,
which has a global impact, is usually the result of a meteor impact or volcanic activity and it causes
cooling due to its decreasing the amount of radiant energy being received by the Earth’s surface.
7.2. The Status of Polar Ice
One of the main ways to monitor temperature change on the Earth is to watch the behavior of
ice at the Arctic ice cap, the Greenland ice field, Antarctica’s ice fields and the world’s glaciers.
The evidence being collected is alarming. Arctic ice, for example, floats on water just below
water’s freezing point. Its average thickness has decreased from about 6 feet 50 years ago to 3 feet
currently [27]. The extent of Arctic ice is receding in area each summer at an accelerating rate [28] and
it is forecasted that the Arctic could be completely ice free all year within a few years [29]. Very rapid
changes in the extent of Arctic ice formation were observed in the summer of 2012. In just 5 days in
early August information from satellite images showed that the thickest portions of ice just north of
Greenland and north of the Bering Strait had disappeared [30]. This shows how susceptible Arctic ice
is to relatively minor variations in temperature.
Another consequence of the Arctic potentially being ice free is that this might interfere with the
Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift. These major ocean currents are greatly influenced by
thermohaline circulation [31]. If ice does not form off Greenland, then the salt level in surface water
will not increase and this water will not sink. Such action, combined with other behavior, could
potentially block the Gulf Stream water from bringing warmth to Europe with the result that Europe
could experience profound climatic changes [32].
Greenland has an ice field bigger than the area of Mexico. It is second in ice volume only to the ice
on Antarctica. Its ice fields are receding in area each year. During one period in the summer of 2012
the complete surface of Greenland’s ice field was liquid water [33]. This resulted in significant volumes
of water seeping through cracks in the ice and lubricating more rapid movement of glaciers as they
transported fresh water to the sea [34]. The importance of Greenland’s ice is that the melting of all this
ice would raise oceans by 20 feet. This rise is small in comparison to Antarctica’s ice fields, which, if
melted, would raise the seas by 200 feet [35]. It is clear that not all of this ice is going to melt any time
soon. The point of doing these calculations, however, is to recognize that any melting of polar ice
raises sea level, and even a modest rise could have enormous impacts on humans living close to the
sea. Each 1 m rise of the sea is equivalent on average to a 100 m horizontal spread [36]. Currently 108
million people live on land that is no more than 1 m above current sea level [37].
7.3. Glaciers
Glaciers are another indicator of climate warming. The Athabasca glacier between Banff and
Jasper, Alberta, is about 6 km long and is 90–300 m thick. It moves several cm per day. Its nose has
receded 1.5 km and it has lost one-half of its total ice volume over the past 110 years [38]. Its rate of
recession is increasing. Similar symptoms are being observed for all the world’s glaciers. For example,
glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park numbered 150 in 1850, but there are fewer than 30 glaciers
still present there today [39]. Himalayan glaciers, which number 15,000 with a combined volume of
12,500 cubic kilometers of freshwater, are melting and receding [40].
7.4. Permafrost
Permafrost, another important frozen state of water, is also rapidly melting. For instance, in 1970
tundra travel could be carried out for more than 7 months each year. That has now been reduced
to only 4 months per year [41]. When permafrost melts, it releases stored methane. Atmospheric
concentrations of methane taken recently over a large area in Siberia showed that the amounts of
methane being released were far higher than was predicted several decades ago [42]. Because methane
is 20 times more effective in absorbing infrared radiation than is CO2, increasing rates of methane
emissions will increase the rate of global climate change.
7.5. Greenhouse Gases Increasing
The most watched greenhouse gas continues to be CO2. Prior to 1750 and the industrial revolution,
CO2 concentrations in air varied narrowly around 275 ppm [43]. It then began a steady increase due to
humanity’s increasing reliance on burning fossil fuels for energy, and it is widely held that this
combustion has played and will continue to play a dominant role in influencing atmospheric CO2
levels. The best record of its concentration in air is from Mauna Loa in Hawaii, which has 50 years of
data [44]. In 1960 atmospheric CO2 was 315 ppm; by 2013 it had reached 400 ppm [45]. Its rate
of change is also increasing to its current 2.5 ppm per year. It is likely that CO2 will reach 450 ppm
before 2033. As shown by ice coring results, CO2 is higher today than at any time in the past
420,000 years [46].
Predictions of future CO2 levels and the concomitant warming that will occur depend on
future global economic activity and CO2 emission rates, as well as the timing for significant uses of
non-carbon energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Such predictions are difficult to make and have
uncertainties. Despite this, it has been widely accepted that a 2 °C rise in average global temperature
is associated with a CO2 concentration of about 450 ppm. This level became a target by which
strategies for controlling emissions could be formulated. Even with this seemingly small rise in global
temperature, the negative effects on the environment and humans are predicted to be significant. These
include a disruption in productivity of farms, forests and fisheries, a potential decrease in the resilience
of plant and animal species that would cause some species extinctions and significant alterations in
biodiversity, increased risks for coastal areas caused by sea level rise, increased erosion and flooding,
increases in extreme weather events, particularly damaging storms and high localized rainfall,
alterations in the spatial distribution of infectious diseases, increases in malnutrition and more stresses
to drinking water supplies [47].
However, since only marginal actions have occurred on the world stage for controlling emissions
to the amount needed not to exceed 450 ppm by 2030, a target of 450 ppm CO2 is in great danger of
becoming obsolete. What is a meaningful new target? If a business-as-usual scenario is considered,
taking into account expected changes in population and extending current demographic and economic
trends, it is estimated that a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels (to 550 ppm) will occur by 2060
and would result in a 3 (±1) °C temperature rise [48]. If a leveling off at 550 ppm were to be
targeted, global emissions of CO2 would have to level off at 40 billion tons/year by 2035 (from
23.5 billion tons/year in 2000) and then be reduced to 22–26 billion tons/y by 2100 and further reduced
to 11–14 billion tons/y by 2200. This kind of adjustment, while not impossible, would take, given the
current lack of meaningful actions, a Herculean effort by the entire world.
We should not fool ourselves. Expecting to attain a target of 450 ppm CO2 is rapidly becoming a
fantasy. Even a higher target of 550 ppm CO2 will be extremely difficult to achieve and will result in a
world close to being roasted and unlike anything humans have experienced thus far. These predictions
put into context just how dangerous and challenging our situation is.
7.6. Barriers to Action
If the scientific information about global climate change or any of the other societal threats is so
compelling, and if the consequences that are certain to arise are so dire for the human condition, then
why are humans unable or unwilling to take action? While certainly not an exhaustive list, there appear
to be both psychological and societal reasons behind inaction [49]. On the psychological side, humans
have, like other animals, an ability to respond rapidly to an immediate crisis. However, despite our
brain capacity for analysis and planning, we are not adept at recognizing crises that take a long time to
develop. One obvious reason for this is that we are too busy taking care of the multitude of minor
problems that happen in daily living. Another reason is that a slowly developing crisis, particularly one
that has not happened before, and one that will significantly alter the view of our security on which we
have come to rely, can be too easily dismissed as an unlikely fiction. This enables us to keep putting
off attending to this kind of potential crisis while it inexorably advances to becoming a reality.
On the societal side there are an enormous number of institutions and groups of powerful people
who are heavily invested in propagating the current socio-economic model of continued growth.
Governments of all sizes and types adhere to this paradigm and society in general embraces rules and
personal behaviors that promote this as the best possible way for the world to function. Responses to
societal threats would likely cause a serious readjustment of this world view. Furthermore, needed
actions would cause deployment of massive financial attention to dealing with such threats. Neither of
these results are favored by this paradigm. It is much easier and less worrisome to brush aside the
threats and focus on continued economic growth.
7.7. Adaptive Cycles
There is, however, the question of whether the present cycle of growth can continue far into the
future. Studies by Holling and his colleagues [50] about the natural adaptive cycles that exist for all
living systems describe the repetitive phases of growth, collapse, regeneration, and the start of growth
again. While growth is a phase we mostly associate with good health, Holling’s message is that
growth inevitably will result in a system that is characterized by a highly integrated complexity and a
loss of redundancies. Such a system, given a shock from the outside, can rapidly collapse. While not
necessarily a bad thing for the very long term health of the system because the collapse liberates
enormous capabilities for creative reorganization and another phase of growth, a system collapse is not
a happy situation for the components of the system suffering a collapse.
One of the more important aspects of Holling’s work is panarchy theory, which views all
living systems as having a nested combination of many adaptive cycles with varying periodicities.
This means that while some parts of the system are nearing the end of growth, others may be able to
build in overall resilience so that the inevitable collapse, when it occurs, may not be as deep or as
calamitous as it would have been without the resilience in place. If global society is a panarchy of
adaptive cycles with many economic and technological aspects operating in their late growth cycles,
humans should anticipate that the system will collapse at some point. We need to be taking steps now
to improve the resilience of our society so that we can best set the stage, when the current cycle of
growth ends, for rapid creativity, reorganization and new growth.
8. Conclusions
Attending to the threats discussed above, as well as to other ecological and social concerns,
requires an immense effort along multiple avenues. An agenda for action would certainly include some
of the following:
(a) There must be an international commitment very soon to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at
450–550 ppm. This would include a reduction of carbon emissions through international
frameworks and funding strategies. Since fossil fuels as energy sources are likely to be used
by humanity for a long time, there must be increased research on efficient capture and
sequestration of CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Research should be increased on storage options
for spent fission reactor fuels and on using fusion reactors. There should be increased attention
on how to harvest energies present in ocean currents, in atmospheric winds, and in solar energy.
(b) Research on climate change and other planetary boundaries must be funded to better define
where thresholds exist for irreversible ecological changes. This work would increase the
understanding of mechanisms and kinetics of the world’s natural CO2 sinks. It would also
improve models for predicting the way human parameters adversely affect ecological systems.
In the issue of fresh water, more research is needed on how to effectively interact with the
global weather system to provide precipitation events where they are most needed.
(c) There must be an international plan to reduce population growth. This should include research
on and implementation of the most effective approaches for educating people on family
planning worldwide.
(d) There must be international actions to address the widening economic inequality across the
world. As these inequalities are often the seeds of civil unrest, violence, and further ecological
destruction, improving the lives of people in developing regions in areas of education, health,
and social welfare is an alternative to solving these issues eventually by wasteful and destructive
military means.
As can be seen by the repeated emphasis of international attention in this partial agenda, separate
national or geographical policies and institutions are no longer able to cope effectively with the
complexity and enmeshed issues of security and sustainable development for human society. However,
it appears that the political leaders of the world are not inclined to act rapidly or meaningfully on this
agenda, let alone on a more comprehensive list of challenges. The world needs another kind of
leadership and passionate dedication on these issues. Another group of people, scientists from many
disciplines, must step forward in large numbers to catalyze world action. Scientists cannot be silent
waiting for leaders to come forward with appropriate strategies or for the international community to
engage in prolonged debates about priorities. Scientists have been educated to honestly evaluate
information and form it into reliable knowledge.
While we must continue to apply this knowledge to
create technical innovation in our fields of expertise, our obligations to society go much deeper. Our
society needs its scientists to recognize the challenges society faces, to prioritize them, develop ideas
and options for dealing with them, and to courageously articulate opinions and conclusions to others in
plain language. Scientists can do this as individuals, but more importantly as groups using the
professional and technical societies to which they belong. Lone individuals can be dismissed as
mavericks, but a call to action by important and large scientific institutions would be far harder to
dismiss. In doing this we would be using our talents to help define how all of us should behave in
business and in our personal activities so that the people who come after us will have the best chance
to enjoy the wonder of being alive.
Conflict of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Bruce R. Conard is a scientist, educated as a Physical Chemist, who was employed by Inco Limited for 32 years. Retiring in 2004, Dr. Conard is now a consultant (BRConard Consulting, Inc.) specializing in the toxicology of metals and occupational hygiene. Having conducted research in process metallurgy in areas of pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy and electrochemistry, Dr. Conard is well-versed in metallurgical processes to produce nickel, copper, and cobalt.
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