* <\/strong>Increasing financial risk of climate and environmental change. Now deemed by insurers as their industry\u2019s top risk, the report notes the first climate-change-related bankruptcy: California\u2019s largest electric utility fir, PG&E went under last year after sparking a huge forest fire.<\/p>\n * <\/strong>Trends in migration, and the impacts of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, on sustainability.<\/p>\n *<\/strong> The ecological and social science of climate change, our food systems, and the collapse in biodiversity; developments in regulating the high seas; the rise of green finance mechanisms; the new field of studying \u201ctransformations\u201d in society: How, exactly, can we uproot ingrained ideas about economic development or wellbeing and wrench them into new, more sustainable frameworks?<\/p>\n \u201c2020 is a critical time to look at these issues,\u201d says Amy Luers, executive director of Future Earth. \u201cOur actions in the next decade will determine our collective future on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n We are a vast global population facing unprecedented environmental challenges, yet we still have the time and the capability to prevent extreme outcomes. The past year has been one of extraordinary social awakening to the hazards of environmental change and of demands for action towards a sustainable future. \u201cGreen deals\u201d have been proposed by several nations and, if passed into legislation, they could prove transformative. The global population is expected to be 9.7 billion by 2050. Their future is in our hands: Can we make it more sustainable, resilient and fair?<\/p>\n Over the last 18 months, major assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US National Climate Assessment, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), have all argued that time is running out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to warm.<\/p>\n This has inspired declarations of a climate crisis or climate emergency by the leaders of more than 700 cities, states and governments. Yet, during 2019, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached more than 415 parts per million, and the five years from 2014 to 2018 were the warmest recorded over land and ocean since 1880.<\/p>\n Despite the evidence, \u201cmany countries have not yet risen to the challenge or are reversing prior commitments\u201d. What is needed to dial down the heat.<\/p>\n Right-wing populism is on the rise around the world: a breed of politics that exploits peoples\u2019 fears during times of economic decline and growing inequality and that focuses on nationalist tendencies to clamp down on borders and reject immigrants. Populism is often characterised by a \u201cdenial of complexity\u201d, preferring to identify simple, seductive culprits for the erosion of society, the economy and the welfare of the masses. This often leads to a denial of climate change facts or effects. But grassroots organisations are emerging as a potentially strong, countervailing force. But is it politically strong enough and will it work?<\/p>\n More than 3 billion people are dependent on marine ecosystems as their primary source of protein and the livelihoods of nearly half of humanity are linked to marine and coastal biodiversity. While the ocean was once considered too big to be significantly altered through human activity, it is now clear that it too has entered the Anthropocene, an age in which humans are the dominant influence. Stressors from climate change to pollution, fishing and shipping, have\u00a0 nearly doubled over the past decade. Officials from around the world are now negotiating a new United Nations treaty to govern the high seas (Biological diversity of areas Beyond National Jurisdiction), which may be hashed out this year. What are the expectations and challenges for regulating fish, seafloor mining, biodiversity and more?<\/p>\n As of September 2019, the Syrian conflict had resulted in more 5.6 million refugees seeking refuge mainly in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. As of 2018, 800,000 people had fled their home countries in North Africa as asylum seekers and refugees, some embarking on often-deadly boat trips across the Mediterranean. For many observers in the wealthy, industrialised North, the influx of migrants from Central America and the Middle East has been seen as a sign of an impending flood: their assumption is that climate change effects will spur violence and\/or push hundreds of millions of people into their borders, causing yet more violence and other problems. The truth is more nuanced. Humanity is not at the mercy of forces seemingly beyond our control: It is policy, not climate change, behind the real crises. The flow of information in the world is changing. Today, around half of the planet\u2019s 7.6 billion people are online, where they are deeply influenced by social media, search engines and ecommerce algorithms. These digital platforms tend to favour the spread of information designed to engage with emotion over reason, can cause the propagation of \u201cfake news\u201d and can lead to social harms such as an erosion of trust in vaccines. Some politicians are now calling for the tech giants to be split up, arguing that their power and dominance is bad for democracy. Digital information technologies and media, although messy, could support global action for sustainability. Yet it remains unclear whether information technologies will drive the Earth towards a pandemic or away from it; towards a destabilised climate or a potentially-manageable 1.5\u00b0C warmer world.<\/p>\n Humans have now \u201csignificantly altered\u201d 75 percent of our planet\u2019s land area; about a quarter of species in assessed plant and animal groups are threatened. In 2018, the world\u2019s last male northern white rhino died in his Kenyan enclosure. The Brazillian blue parrot, Spix\u2019s Macaw, was declared extinct in the wild, among a handful of other birds. And yet studies continue to show that biodiversity helps to make landscapes more resilient to climate change. Countries are now in the process of negotiating a \u201cGlobal Deal for Nature\u201d: a new global biodiversity framework to be discussed through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) this year. Reversing the trends of loss of life on this planet will require some new ways of thinking about conservation. Finance is a risky business. But the global situation today \u2013 economic, political, and environmental, especially thanks to climate change \u2013 is conspiring to make it riskier. Examples such as the 2019 bankruptcy of the Californian utility PG&E illustrate the effects of climate on financial risk; recent reports such as that by the Network for Greening the Financial Services show how the financial world is starting to take this seriously. Efforts such as the nascent Task Force on Climate Related Disclosure are helping to grapple with the issue.<\/p>\n The \u201cgreat acceleration\u201d of economic growth over the 20th century put a lot of pressure on earth systems. There is an opportunity now to reverse this trend.<\/p>\n The amount of food produced per person on the planet has gone up more than 40 percent since the 1960s. Yet, paradoxically, the prevalence of undernourishment \u2013 which had been declining for decades \u2013 has started to tip upwards again: the total number of people undernourished in 2018 stood at more than 820 million people, up from a record low of 785 million in 2015. We will need to squeeze ever-more food out of the same amount of land for our growing population in our changing climate.<\/p>\n Strains on food production are expected to increase, as a result of various forces including climate change, biodiversity loss, and a global population on the rise. Solutions may include eating less meat, precision agriculture supported by new technologies, ensuring less waste, and taking a holistic approach to food production that looks at water, ecosystem protection, social welfare and more. This will all cause massive disruption to labour markets, democracies, and our understanding of the planet and humanity. So far, these technological changes have largely been used to increase consumption, economic growth and resource extraction, rather than saving the planet or promoting just and fair societies. But the digital sector has immense potential for reducing emissions and empowering people to monitor and protect ecosystems. A new field of digital sustainability could be forged to encourage positive action. When more than 150 world leaders met in 2015 to develop the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, their key phrase was \u201ctransforming our world\u201d.\u00a0 Massive amounts of data, new computational abilities and artificial intelligence are spurring disruptive progress. Technical systems are becoming as good (even better) than humans at recognising faces and voices, diagnosing cancer, translating languages and producing news articles, music and paintings. Artificial general intelligence, a technical system able to accomplish any cognitive task at least as well as humans, could be achieved in the 21st century.<\/p>\n Future Earth is an international research organisation, collaborating with science and society on solutions to global sustainability challenges<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Put aside Coronavirus and look at the cascading effects of climate, biodiversity, food and water crises globally<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3688,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"Firefighters hose down trees as they battle against bushfires around the town of Nowra in the Australian state of New South Wales on December 31, 2019. Thousands of holidaymakers and locals were forced to flee to beaches in fire-ravaged southeast Australia on December 31, as blazes ripped through popular tourist areas leaving no escape by land. AFP","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[400,772],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/capitalcambodia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/starving-child.jpg\")