Delivering the Human Future Conference – Final Report

Humanity faces an existential emergency comprising many interlinked catastrophic risks which are now arriving together.

Their collective scale is so great that few grasp it. Together, these risks endanger our ability to maintain a civilization, possibly even to persist as a species.

The basic cause is the sheer scale of the human enterprise: overpopulation, overconsumption, inequality, poor choice of technologies and poor social arrangements.

The crisis is vast, complex and interconnected. It affects everyone on Earth. Dimensions described by speakers at the conference include:

• Decline in the Earth’s resources especially freshwater, but also soil, forests, fish and climatic stability.
• Extinction of species and collapse of ecosystems that support human life on a scale we have never before witnessed.
• We are approaching a point of no return, where the Earth’s climate could go out of control, pitching us into hothouse conditions that can spell disaster for our civilization.
• Despite the lessons of Covid, we are still unable to identify and prevent future pandemics.
• The world food supply rests on a knife-edge, endangered by declining resources and climatic instability.
• The world is facing a freshwater crisis. Millions die preventable deaths and the food supply is increasingly at risk.
• The threat of nuclear war is higher than at any time in our history. Nuclear weapons will be used – unless they are abolished.
• Global poisoning by human chemical emissions is out of control, claiming 13 million lives every year and damaging the biosphere.
• Artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies are poorly understood and even more poorly regulated, posing new threats to society and the human future.
• The human population is growing faster than ever; discussion of ways to alleviate the issue is often silenced.
• Our interconnected social and economic systems are the main cause of the breakdown in global environmental stability. Most countries remain focused on growth in consumption.
• The current economic model is broken and needs to be replaced.

However, the Conference also concluded that there is much that can be done to curb the danger, limit the threats, reduce the number of lives lost to them – and improve human prosperity and wellbeing as a consequence.

The Conference called on the governments, companies and communities of the world to develop and implement an urgent plan of action that addresses all the risks and their integrated nature.

Continue reading and download the full report at humanfuture.org.