Why should we care about phytoplankton (and climate change) and nine other things that surprised me when I was writing a book on the future of the world
The future is my profession. I have examined the future for a few decades now, and written books about different future perspectives, such as technology and consumer trends. My latest book dealt with the future of our entire planet. It focused on the big changes in the world, megatrends, and their impacts in different areas of our lives — such as work, housing, transport, health, nutrition, globalization and our digital lives. However, this article is by no means an advert for my book — nor could it be, as my book has been written in my mother tongue Finnish, and therefore can be understood only by the 5.5 million or so Finnish-speakers. In this article, I would like to bring up issues raised during the writing process — which is above all a research process when writing a factual book — that were new even to me, a futurist following the changes in the world. I shall present here ten different things that surprised me when I was examining the future of the world.
Surprise Number One: Population growth has been incredible and there is more to come
I knew, of course, that population growth had been rapid especially during the past century, but it surprised me entirely how fast it has actually been. In the fall of 2019, there are more than 7.7 billion people on the earth. When I was born approximately 48 years ago, there were “only” 3.76 billion people on the earth. The world population has therefore doubled during my lifetime! According to the most probable forecast by the UN, there will be 11.2 billion people inhabiting the earth in 2100. Growth is therefore ongoing in the future, even though global birth rates have started to decrease.
Surprise Number Two: The third largest country in terms of population in 2050 will be…
The largest countries in the world based on population are China, India and the United States. In 2050, the situation may be different, if we believe the UN population forecasts. They are forecasting the order to be as follows: India, China and Nigeria (tip: look up Nigeria on the map and keep it in mind). Africa is a continent with an exponentially rising population. Currently, there are about 1.3 billion people living in Africa, and according to the most probable population forecast by the UN, there will be as many as 2.5 billion people in Africa in 2050 and nearly 4.3 billion people in 2100.
Surprise Number Three: In some countries, aging population is not a problem
The world population is aging. For the first time in the history of the earth, there are more 65-year-olds than there are under 5-year-olds. Japan is often brought up as an example of an aging nation, and it is predicted that more than 40 percent of Japanese people will be over 65-year-olds in 2060. However, aging is not a problem only in Japan, but for example European states are aging — including my home country Finland, which is the fourth most aging nation. Aging, measured in terms of percentage of over 65-year-olds of the total population, is a growing trend also in the United States and China. However, the surprising thing is that in some countries, there are a lot of young people and this poses challenges to the employment and education of youth. In India, young people of under 25 years old constitute about half of the population — more than 600 million. Africa is also a continent with a young population. For example, in Uganda approximately 70 percent of the population consists of under 25-year-olds.
Surprise Number Four: Change the city, change the future!
Urbanization is on the list of megatrends for each futurist — and for a good reason. Now more than half of world population lives in cities and it has been forecasted that in 2050 almost as much as 70 % of people live in cities. When we keep in mind that the world population is expected to grow, the number of city-dwellers will increase from the current four billion to seven billion by 2050. The number of people is not the only reason why cities merit our attention. Cities are veritable power units when it comes to financial activity, consumption and environmental pollution. The following figures managed to surprise yours truly: cities take up only a few percent of the world surface area, but cities produce 80% of the GDP in the world, nearly two thirds of energy is consumed in cities, and more than 70 % of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from human activity is produced in cities. Therefore cities, above all, should take interest in preventing climate change, if only for their own sake, as many cities are located in coastal areas that are most vulnerable due to climate change, rising sea levels and storms.
Surprise Number Five: Robots and artificial intelligence don’t steal our jobs
Robotics and artificial intelligence stealing jobs in the future? Partly yes, they replace some jobs and they will become mostly our colleagues and assistants, but this is not among the most critical challenges, at least not in the near future. We will have a shortage of talent in the future, as technology in particular changes the nature of many jobs and needs for skills. Therefore, robots and artificial intelligence bring about, above all, need for new kinds of competence. In the global Talent Shortage Survey 2018, conducted by Manpower company, nearly 42,000 employers were interviewed in 42 countries, and the result was that 45 percent of the employers said that they had problems finding skilled employees. In many aging countries, such as Finland, the biggest problem will be the lack of work force. When the baby boomers retire, who will take over their jobs?
Surprise Number Six: Slavery is not in the past
Information technology, clothes, fish products and cocoa are the most imported products to G20 countries, in the production of which slave workforce is used at some point of the chain. Slavery is not in the past but a shockingly big problem even today and also in Western countries. There are slaves working in cocoa farms, mines, clothes factories, construction sites, restaurants, home care and forced sex slaves all around the world. There are over 40 million slaves in the world, the majority of whom — 71 % — are women. 15.4 million women live as slaves through forced marriage.
Surprise Number Seven: People are very efficient in destroying their own planet
I must admit that this is not a complete surprise. The irresponsible behavior of humankind that destroys the environment can be seen in many ways, but the scale of the activity surprised me. The efficiency of people’s capability for destruction converted into figures is shocking: more than 90% of the world population lives in areas where the air quality is poor due to pollution, every second an area the size of one football pitch of forest is cut down, 80% of waste water produced by people is let back to waterways unpurified, and due to human actions, 60% of animal species studied by WWF have been extinct since the 1970s, and on estimate half of the corals in the world have died during the past 40 years. There is about 2 billion tons of waste produced on earth annually, and according to careful estimates approximately a third of it is not processed in a safe manner in terms of the environment. The amount of waste is expected to grow by 2050 by 70 %. The amount of electronics waste produced in one year is the equivalent of 4500 Eiffel towers in weight. According to Ellen McArthur Foundation, in 2050 there is more plastic than fish in the sea, if we keep dumping plastic in the seas in this manner.
Surprise Number Eight: We will be lacking sand
Lacking sand? How could that be? We have the vast deserts of Sahara, after all. It is hard to imagine sand as a raw material that might run out. But this is the case, and now we are not talking about sand that can be found in the desert, but at the bottom of lakes and seas and on beaches. This is called angular sand, which is used in the construction industry as raw material for concrete. The rounded, wind-tumbled grains of sand in Sahara are not suitable for this purpose. We are using up sand as the use of concrete — mainly due to urbanization — has been on the rise in the past decades. In Asia and China in particular, the construction boom has been unbelievable. Between 2011–2013 more concrete was used in China than in the US during the entire 20th century. The price of sand has multiplied by five in the past 30–40 years. Sand has become so valuable that even criminal activity has formed around it, sand mafias. Naturally, sand is not the only raw material with which we will have challenges in the future. Also clean water, phosphorus (used in agricultural fertilizers), lithium and helium may be running out in the future.
Surprise Number Nine: Your fridge is listening to you
Your fridge is probably not listening to you yet, but in the future, when we move even more towards the Internet of Things (or, rather, Internet of Everything, as also people and animals are a part of the internet in the future), even your fridge will have a microphone and it will certainly be a part of the internet. Today mostly smart phones (check how many applications you have given permission to use the microphone) and smart speakers do the listening. Digital information about us is, of course, collected in many different ways and we are basically shoving it into different free social media apps and search engines. But as the information security people tend to say: if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product. The information collected about us is vast: journalist David Curran downloaded the information that Google had about him for his story at the Guardian, and the number of results was startling. Google carried information about him that amounted to more than 3 million documents: what he had searched online, where he had been, what events he had attended, what videos he had viewed on YouTube and so on. There is data generated about us and this data equals currency and power. It makes easier to target right messages for us and even help predict our future actions. In dystopic visions of the future, democracy has broken down and human rights thrown out the window: who has access to our information and is it used against us?
Surprise Number Ten: It’s all about phytoplankton
For a futurist, climate change is a self-evident matter, and IPCC reports and NASA statistics on the rising global average temperature, among others, are very familiar. When writing the book, it became even clearer to me that climate change will affect every area of our lives in the future: what we eat, what we fall ill of, where we live, how we move, how people migrate, and so on. In my view, climate change is our greatest challenge for the future. Solving it is a matter of life and death for humankind. The problem is that we don’t have full knowledge of the problems caused by climate change on our planet, and I would venture to say that we don’t even understand everything that climate change could affect in our lives. When I was writing, information about the fateful dependency of phytoplankton surprised me. Phytoplankton is an important cornerstone in the food chain. It also produces approximately 70 % of the oxygen in the atmosphere and absorbs carbon dioxide in the air. Sea temperatures in particular are rising due to global warming. Warming of the seas is bad news for phytoplankton, and it is estimated to have dropped by 40 % since 1950. According to some researchers, the death of phytoplankton would be disastrous for the earth, as we would run out of oxygen, which would lead — at worst — to the mass extinction of living species (including human beings) on the planet.
Finally,
We have made great advancements in development during the past decade: infant mortality and absolute poverty have decreased, education levels have increased, we are able to cure many diseases, our knowledge of the universe has increased. However, we are facing many challenges in the world, related to population growth, climate change, reducing resources and biodiversity, to name a few. Since these issues concern our entire planet, I see international and constructive cooperation as the only possibility to overcome these challenges. The UN has presented 17 sustainable development goals for 2030, aiming for clean water and improved sanitation, obliterating poverty and hunger, working for the climate, and so on. Therefore, we have great global objectives in place already. We just need more bold actors for implementing them, so that we can provide our children and their children a planet where life is possible.
Translation of the article from Finnish by Marja-Liisa Helenius
Are you interested about my ideas? If so, you could book my webinar lectures and key-note speeches via my web page www.elinahiltunen.com
