Decades of scientific warnings have done little to change humanity’s course. A new warning looks at the interconnected pressures facing the planet and what can be done about them.
“We humans are facing the greatest emergency of our entire million-year existence.”
With those words in 2023 the Council for the Human Future delineated the crisis that is approaching all people and nations, as 10 man-made, catastrophic threats combine and collide.
The warning will shortly receive powerful reinforcement from the world’s leading scientists, in the form of a third notice which speaks of a planetary emergency driven by escalating human pressures and crossing many safe boundaries.
Like the hollow tolling of a passing-bell, these warnings have sounded over more than three decades, growing louder and more imperative with each repetition. Yet still humanity, its governments and enterprises, blocks its ears in our obsessive pursuit of narrow goals, and distraction from reality.
The first Warning to Humanity was published in July 1992 by the Union of Concerned Scientists and signed by 1,700 eminent scientific figures, including Nobel laureates. It stated: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course,” detailing the damage caused by overexploitation of the planet, and proposing five major courses of action.
“A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated,” it concluded.
The Second Warning to Humanity came out a quarter of a century later, in 2017, when it was more than apparent the human species had turned a deaf ear to the first one or, at best, made only token gestures to address it.
“Since 1992, with the exception of stabilising the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse,” it said, providing an iron chain of irrefutable evidence to back up its claim. Released by the Alliance of World Scientists, 17,000 eminent researchers signed it.
“To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business-as-usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.”
Five years later, in 2022, the Alliance issued a third, more specific caveat: the World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency, which stated “We are now at ‘code red’ on planet Earth. Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency”. And the latest science reveals things are very much worse than they were when climate code red was declared.
The following year the Council for the Human Future aggregated all 10 of the threats that menace humanity in How to Fix a Broken Planet (Cambridge 2023), in the first unequivocal warning of the greatest compound emergency ever to confront humanity. This included several threats not mentioned by the earlier admonitions including nuclear holocaust, global poisoning, pandemic disease, out-of-control technologies and the paralysing global avalanche of lies and deceit.
The Council argued that, since all 10 mega-threats are connected by their causes – overpopulation, overconsumption and overpollution – trying to solve them one at a time will not work. They must all be addressed together, and by measures that make none of them worse. Focusing on issues such as climate or extinction alone will not mitigate the overall crisis, it cautioned.
It called for an Earth System Treaty, a foundational agreement for humanity to work together to alleviate the crisis. The Treaty would form the basis for a World Plan of Action, as recommended by the Roundtable on the Human Future (2024).
Thus, humanity has had no fewer than four crystal-clear warnings, by the most knowledgeable people on the planet – and will shortly receive a fifth – that we are bound for disaster.
The new warning of a planetary emergency, due to appear in the journal Bioscience, will focus on actions that must be urgently taken to address the destruction of global life support systems, increasingly fragile water, food and economic systems and the need to eliminate fossil fuels and cut global pollution.
Humanity has the technology and resources to save itself and a habitable planet.
But not, apparently, the resolution nor the brains. Nor a sound enough grasp of the compound nature of the emergency now engulfing us.
Unfortunately, the third warning skates around the greatest elephant on the planet: the fact that it has four times more humans than it can sustain. Unless overpopulation is also addressed, all other solutions must fail.
The Human Emergency will not be resolved by individual nations squabbling amongst themselves or blaming the UN for their own failures. Nor will it be overcome by technological fixes alone, including AI, which may create new challenges of its own.
The emergency can only be addressed by as many good people as possible determining to act together to save a habitable Earth for our grandchildren to inherit.
By humans learning to act as Earth Citizens rather than allowing nationalism, religious and ethnic divisions, greed and blind competition to stand in the way.
Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of six books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is “How to Fix a Broken Planet” (Cambridge University Press, 2023)