Chapter 1
Global Mega-challenges

The ‘plague years’ of Covid-19 have imprinted two contrasting messages. First, our entire world is interconnected: a catastrophe in any region can cascade globally; no nation is truly safe until all are. Second, international science can be our salvation – as in the development of vaccines. Let’s hope that, when this crisis has passed, nations can focus on ensuring that we’re better prepared for the next pandemic. Moreover, it has been a ‘wake-up call’ that should deepen concern about other future threats that could be even more catastrophic; it should stimulate effective actions to confront all the longer-term challenges the world faces.

I’d highlight three interlinked mega-challenges:

1. Providing food and energy for a rising and more demanding population, while avoiding depletion of the biosphere and dangerous climate change.
2. Coping with the ethical and security challenges posed by ever-advancing biotechnology while harnessing its benefits for health and agriculture.
3. Enabling artificial intelligence, the cybernet and social media to transform our economy and our society, despite vulnerability to malfunctions (natural or malicious) that could cascade globally.

The alarm having sounded, these are items which have long been on humanity’s collective agenda but which we now need to consider anew.

1.1 Threats to the biosphere: population growth and biodiversity loss

The backdrop to current geopolitical challenges is a world where humanity’s collective footprint is getting heavier. There are about 7.8 billion of us on this planet – twice as many as in the 1960s. Nonetheless, despite doom-laden forecasts by Paul Erlich (1968)1 and the Club of Rome (1972),2 food production has, thanks largely to advances in plant science (the ‘green revolution’), kept pace with rising population. Famines still occur, and many people, especially children, remain undernourished; but the most distressing episodes, such as those in Afghanistan, Yemen and Ethiopia, are mainly due to conflict or maldistribution, not overall scarcity.

Population growth has now slowed. Indeed, the number of births per year, worldwide, is now declining: in most countries it has fallen below the ‘replacement level’ of 2.1 births per woman; for instance, it is 1.5 in Japan, 1.56 in Canada, and 1.64 in China, leading to concerns (especially in Japan) about an over-dominance of the elderly. But world population is nonetheless forecast to rise to around 9 billion by 2050.3 That’s partly because most people in the developing world today are young, owing to persistent high fertility in recent decades and welcome falls in infant mortality. These young people are yet to have children, and they will live longer. Moreover, the transition to low fertility hasn’t happened everywhere – particularly in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Most of the 7.8 billion people on the Earth today are still impoverished by the standards of the ‘Global North’ – though, according to the World Bank, the proportion below the official ‘extreme poverty’ threshold, which currently stands at $1.90 per day, has dropped from around 60 per cent in 1950 to 10 per cent today.4 World food production needs to double again by 2050, not only to cope with the rise in population but to ensure that all those in the Global South (where the main population growth in the coming decades will be) become as well nourished as most people in Europe and North America.

It’s true that food production has doubled in the last 50 years; but a further doubling is more problematic. There will be constraints on energy, on the quantity of fertile land, and on the supply of water. This will require further improved agriculture – low-till, water-conserving and genetically modified (GM) crops – together with greater efforts to reduce waste (via refrigeration, for instance) and improve irrigation. We need modes of farming that can produce crops efficiently in a changing climate, and avoid encroaching on natural forests. The buzz-phrase is ‘sustainable intensification’.5 There will be consequent pressure to enhance the yield from the oceans, without allowing over-fishing to drive species to extinction. There will certainly need to be changes in the typical ‘Western’ diet: for instance, we can’t all consume as much beef as present-day Americans.

Some dietary innovations are feasible without deployment of ‘frontier’ science: for instance, converting insects and maggots into palatable food, and making artificial meat from vegetable protein. ‘Beef’ burgers (made from wheat, coconut and potato, moisturized with beetroot juice) are now being marketed in the US by companies called Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. It will be a while, though, before these ‘pseudo-burgers’ will satisfy carnivorous gourmands.

These novel foods are best characterized as clever or exotic cookery rather than entailing advances in a laboratory. But biochemists are now making breakthroughs that portend more fundamental innovations; they ‘grow’ meat by taking a few cells from an animal and then stimulating their replication with appropriate nutrients. In 2020, Singapore’s food regulatory agency approved the sale of ‘cultured’ meat developed by a US start-up called ‘Eat Just’. Meat substitutes acceptable to fastidious carnivores are clearly an ecological benefit. The concern is whether they can be produced sufficiently cheaply for a mass market. Let’s hope so, because for many of us they would be a welcome ethical advance too; future generations may look back in horror and disgust at the ‘factory farming’ techniques that prevail today.

But it’s an open question how readily these seemingly ‘un-natural’ foods will be accepted, even if they become affordable – it would be dismaying if they were only welcomed as petfood. The history of GM crops is a worrying augury. Despite their clear benefits – and despite the fact that 300 million people in North America have eaten GM crops for two decades without manifest harm – they have been banned in the European Union, where an extreme ‘precautionary principle’ is adopted. GM crops have even been rejected when sent to Africa as ‘food aid’ to alleviate famine.

There’s a well-known estimate from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) that the world is already despoiling the planet, by consuming natural resources at around 1.7 times the sustainable level.6 Such considerations (and others) suggest that a decline in world population – provided that it were gradual – would be optimal. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not feasible to define a definite ‘carrying capacity’ for the world. The present global population would be massively unsustainable if everyone lived like present-day Americans. (Diets rich in animal products have much higher footprints than those based on plant products. If pastureland and land used for livestock feed are combined, animal agriculture already uses nearly 80 per cent of global agricultural land.) On the other hand, one can imagine – without recommending! – a sustainable science fiction dystopia where 20 billion people could live in capsules, travelling little and contentedly experiencing ‘virtual reality’. There are choices to be made every step of the way in seeking to solve such problems.

If humanity’s collective impact on nature pushes too hard against what the Swedish environmentalist Johan Rockström calls ‘planetary boundaries’,7 the resultant ‘ecological shock’ could impoverish our biosphere irreversibly. In densely populated countries, there’s widespread anxiety about the consequences for wildlife of urbanization, pesticides, and so forth – though there is understandably an undue focus on birds and on charismatic or cuddly mammals rather than on worms, insects and microfauna that are more crucial to a balanced ecosystem. The negative impact of biodiversity loss is still too low on the global agenda. This is partly because those in poor countries, though at the sharp end of its impacts, excusably have a shorter time horizon; and partly because some ecosystems are spatially extensive and straddle many national boundaries. The oceans, as a prime example, remain largely a ‘common resource’ that will need firmer regulation.

Biodiversity is threatened when land is built on, cultivated or overgrazed – also when large areas are subdivided – and its loss would be aggravated if the extra land for food production or biofuels encroached on natural forests. Changes in climate and alterations to land use can, in combination, induce ‘tipping points’ that amplify each other and cause runaway and potentially irreversible change.

Diverse ecosystems are more sustainable, more resilient. When conditions change, some minority species with different traits may get an advantage. They are, as it were, ‘waiting in the wings’, to take over if required to do so. Sparser ecosystems can’t respond so well to changing conditions – rather as a sports team with substitutes on the bench is best placed if there’s a range to choose from with different skills. To quote the...