From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
By the middle of century, the temperature and humidity in parts of the world will be so high at parts of the year that the human system will not be able to cool itself, you are effectively being cooked. One of the places this will happen first, with potentially grave consequences, is the Arabian Peninsula- disrupting Hajj.
We're heading to a world where all our energy is derived from the sun and from renewables, a world where we will have a squanderable abundance of energy. There's 6,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the Earth than we consume as a species.
Much of the mistreatment of animals is due to economics; it's cheaper to raise animals for food when they're kept in a confined 'economical' way rather than letting them graze in fields. In my view, we should actually only have the free-range farms – meat would then be more expensive and more people would become vegetarian, vegan, and find alternative protein foods so that we don't cause this terrible animal suffering.
The world lacks creative imagination when it comes to mother nature- we believe that we have the power to bend nature to our desires and forget that we're vulnerable. Nature is a combination of biology, physics and chemistry- they are collectively much stronger at bending the world than we are.
In China, we have been working closely with the Chinese Supreme Court prosecutors and administrative environment. In the last two years, these prosecutors have initiated over 100,000 cases- they do things in a big way- and want to transform the landscape such that companies know they will get hammered if they don't comply.
We are the master race. We are the creatures who impose our will on virtually everything that lives and breathes. It's deeply shocking when you start to think about the scale of it.
If you view the world from a moral perspective, you have no option but to address climate change in a timely fashion. The good news is that the moral imperative is backed-up by economics, technological advance and capital shifts.
We've entered the age of Peak Water - where the easy sources are already being used and future supplies will be harder to find, more expensive to develop, and come with greater environmental and social costs.
It is difficult to imagine a graver threat; or an area of human endeavour or global ecology in which the profound consequences of runaway climate change would not be disastrous. Already, it is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year as a direct result of climate change.
Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.
Water is like energy - it can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. But unlike energy, water is essential for every single biological process. We're not just managing a resource, we're managing life itself.
Today, there is uncertainty like we've never seen before. We are not only facing economic risks, but real social, political, geopolitical, technological, and environmental risks too.