The United Nations held its first ever Summit of the Future at the end of September 2024. 

Given the UN's history of more than 50 years of global conferences on aspects of sustainable development, it was somewhat surprising that the future was singled out for such VIP treatment for the first time.

A report called A Pact for the Future preceded the summit and among many other topics it emphasised the urgent need for humanity to live in harmony with nature.

Predicaments

“We are deeply concerned about rapid environmental degradation, and we recognize the urgent need for a fundamental shift in our approach in order to achieve a world in which humanity lives in harmony with nature," the report stated. 

"We must conserve, restore and sustainably use our planet’s ecosystems and natural resources to support the health and well-being of present and future generations. 

"We will address the adverse impacts of climate change, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, pollution, water scarcity, floods, desertification, land degradation, drought, deforestation and sand and dust storms.”

The summit acknowledged that humanity is facing a profound, existential challenge: the unwelcome prospect of a finite future. 

Until not so long ago the future had seemed infinite, with no time horizons in sight. But then the ever-menacing prospect of nuclear annihilation and, more recently, of a looming ecological and climatic Armageddon has raised profound concerns about the predicaments faced by future generations. 

Megacities

There is much evidence that cultures across the world have shared value priorities: we all want a good life for our children and grandchildren, a life of good health and well-being, good educational and economic opportunities, freedom from violence and harmony with nature. 

But, looking at the long term, such ethical considerations are barely being raised – even as an afterthought. 

The Second World War produced a proliferation of new technologies – in energy, transport, communication, chemicals, weapons. Post-war economies grew at an astonishing rate. 

Equipped with many powerful new tools, the world’s resources were there for the taking, never mind the consequences. 

And with unprecedented population growth in many countries, villages were expanding into new towns, cities and even megacities. 

Justice

In 1972 a seminal book was published called Limits to Growth, A report to the Club of Rome. it was widely publicised, with millions of copies sold across the world. 

It posed a profoundly uncomfortable question: what would the consequences of never-ending economic growth be on our home planet? Would the future be finite, not infinite, or was there an alternative?

The book was a dramatic challenge to prevailing economic orthodoxy, and was widely discussed all over the world. 

The race to save the planet is being impeded by a global economy that is contingent on the exploitation of people and nature. 

But the “empire” was bound to strike back: there could be no departure from mainstream growth economics. The world needed increasingly more of everything, regardless of the consequences.

This evident unwillingness of governments, companies and economists to change their minds helped trigger environmental and social justice movements across the world. 

Senseless

Journalists began writing about a world of limits. Documentary film makers started to highlight the collision course between humanity and its future. 

New environmental NGOs and university departments did much essential research, and, increasingly, government ministries emerged and began formulating environmental policies, however half-heartedly.

In recent years, faced with a proliferation of global crises, relations between humans and nature have risen up the global agenda. 

There is growing high-level awareness that in the victory in our war against nature we will find ourselves on the losing side. 

António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, was particularly outspoken. He called on world leaders to end a “senseless and suicidal war against nature ... I appeal to leaders in all sectors: lead us out of this mess.” 

Predictions

Pope Francis went even further: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social. … Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

In one way or another, all the recent UN conferences have addressed the deeply problematic relationship between present and future generations. Yet, so far, even minimal systemic changes seem to exceed the maximal political implementation capacity. 

Institutional blockages keep delaying appropriate action: politicians have their eyes on the next election, and business leaders are fixated by quarterly balance sheets. Such short-termism invariably leads to compromised values and ethics.

Another reason why many crucial issues have so far not been adequately addressed is the fact that those benefiting most from the status quo are also best able to escape any negative consequences. 

Meanwhile it is no longer just low-income countries that are experiencing climate chaos and biodiversity loss. Flash floods, forest fires, droughts and storms are causing havoc in an ever-wider range of geographies. The predicted outcomes are not good.

Humanity

What is the state of play in global discussions about the future? Recently, in preparation for the 2024 United Nations Summit of the Future, a UN commission published the Maastricht Principles on the Human Rights of Future Generations. The twenty-one-page text summarises the existing, binding legal obligations of states and other actors.

"The foundations for international law to address the rights of future generations are established in international instruments in an array of subject areas spanning nearly a century … in the laws, traditions, and cosmologies of indigenous peoples from every continent; and in the doctrine of major faith traditions representing the majority of the world’s people."

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing future life is how the detrimental environmental impacts of our prevailing economic and energy systems can be overcome. 

What are the relevant national and global policy initiatives that are needed to protect and regenerate ecosystems, to provide secure water supplies, to stabilise the climate, and to assure insect pollination of crops?

Truth

When we started up the World Future Council in 2004, the first piece of work we initiated was a brochure called Policies to Change the World, written by our colleague Miguel Mendonza. It listed twelve sustainability policies implemented somewhere on the planet which, we thought, should be adopted in other countries as well.

At the WFC we don’t shy away from asking deep questions. Humanity is still aiming to build a prosperous future, yet an unbridled, globalising economy is threatening this very future. The current practice of utilising natural resources, whilst largely ignoring negative externalities, undermines nature’s inherent capacity to regenerate.

Among other things, our 2025 World Future Policy Award will seek to identify plausible pathways for transforming our economic systems towards assuring the well-being of all living beings, now and in the future. 

For this purpose, new measures for human progress are urgently needed and, critically, ways must be found for the prices of resources and products to tell the ecological and social truth. 

Closing the circle 

It was the American biologist Barry Commoner who defined four laws of ecology in his book The Closing Circle, in 1971. These laws are as relevant as ever:

1.  Everything is connected to everything else. There is one biosphere for all living organisms and what affects one affects all.

2.  Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which it can be thrown. 

3.  Nature knows best. The absence of a particular substance from nature is often a sign that it is incompatible with the chemistry of life.

4.  Nothing comes from nothing. Exploitation of nature always carries ecological costs and these costs are significant.

Economics

It is becoming apparent that much of what we are doing breaks these four laws. Crucially, the depletion of natural wealth is barely accounted for in the performance and valuation of companies, in a situation which effectively amounts to market failure. 

We need new, full accounting methodologies as a basis for appropriate strategies to work towards a zero-waste society.  

Faced with this reality, then, the WFC is focused on searching and spreading new policy solutions. Destruction of nature, resource depletion and pollution are not acceptable as a seemingly inevitable price of progress. 

A precondition for a world in harmony with nature must surely imply factoring environmental externalities into national and company balance sheets and the price of products.

There is much available work now on ecological and bio-physical economics, concerned with creating a regenerative relationship between people and planet. 

Externalities

The term “regenerative” is used in a great variety of ways: regenerative farming, development, design, nutrition, medicine, economies, cities.

“The race to save the planet is being impeded by a global economy that is contingent on the exploitation of people and nature,” says the UN’s outgoing leading environment and human rights expert David Boyd. 

"We are entering a new era where “states failing to take meaningful climate action and regulating polluting industries could soon face a slew of lawsuits.”

Across the world an ever-growing number of firms are now active in the field of environmental law and externalities, often acting on behalf of NGOs and supported by environmental charities. 

Liable

In 2023 just one London-based law firm, ClientEarth, launched thirty legal actions:

• We’ve saved Europe's oldest forest from destruction, 
• smoothed the way for environmental lawsuits in China,
• and helped communities in Africa's last great rainforest cut illegal logging.  
• We're challenging the proposal for Europe’s largest plastics project in court.   
• We're taking the UK government to court for the second time over its climate inaction.
• We've filed a legal complaint against food and drink giant Cargill over deforestation and human rights failings in Brazil.
• We've taken food giant Danone to court over its plastic footprint.
• We help governments to write environmental laws and regulators to enforce them.

In February 2023, ClientEarth filed a case against Shell’s board of directors for failing to move away from fossil fuels fast enough. This was the first ever case seeking to hold corporate directors personally liable. 

Whilst the case was dismissed by the UK High Court, it nevertheless points the way to many more similar cases in the coming years.

One up-and-coming charity, Stop Ecocide International, is driving global conversation on the recognition of ecocide as an international crime.

It states: “Climate and ecological emergency is the result of many years of harmful industrial activities. Most of the risks have been known for decades by the companies choosing to continue these practices. The responsibility lies with decisions made at the top of industry, finance and government.”

Stimulate

The issue of negative, environmental externalities has been discussed for decades, with only gradual progress being made. 

It is becoming apparent that if such externalities are directly experienced at the local level, there is a good chance that they will eventually be addressed, particularly where people’s personal health is at stake. Examples are policy measures to deal with the effects of smoking, asbestos pollution and contaminated drinking water. 

At the wider, national level, economists have attempted to quantify the ecological costs of economic activity since the 1980s. 

In a pioneering study in 1986, economist Lutz Wicke costed the environmental damage caused by the West German economy at six per cent of the country’s gross national product. 

To deal with this damage he recommended a comprehensive ecological tax reform to help stimulate the emergence of a regenerative economy. Such recommendations are gradually being taken up in legislation being passed by the European Union and other transnational bodies.

Extraction

Today we are faced with an unprecedented globalisation of externalities, intimately linked to the proliferation of global trade. 

Climate change is the ultimate global externality of an urban-industrial civilisation powered by fossil fuel energy. Yet, despite a looming climate emergency, the world community still refrains from adopting significant corrective measures.

Today we are also seeing unprecedented mining of mineral resources, often in former rainforest settings. 

Anders Wijkman, a WFC councillor, says this: “Global material use has more than tripled since 1970 – from 30 billion tonnes to 106 billion tonnes a year. And it is taking a heavy toll on our planet … At the current rate, material extraction will increase by at least another 60 per cent by 2060.” 

Consumption

What can be done in response to this situation, particularly in a European context?

“By combining efficiency and effectiveness, Wijkman responds, "the European economy would experience win-win-win. Lower costs, less carbon emissions, and more employment. 

"Very good news in a situation where environment and resource concerns too often have been seen mainly as a cost and threat to competitiveness.”

This view is shared by WFC Councillor Ernst von Weizsäcker. In his book Factor Five, he argues that transforming the global economy through an 80 per cent increase in resource productivity will stimulate a great variety of regenerative methodologies. 

“Improve resource productivity by a factor of five or so, and you can increase the wealth of developing countries fivefold without increasing pressures on nature; and the rich countries can reduce their resource consumption fivefold and enjoy their current prosperity.” 

Physics

US ecological economist John Fullerton has a similar perspective: “Just as human health depends on the robust circulation of oxygen, nutrients, etc., so too does economic health depend on robust circulatory flows of money, information, resources, and goods and services to support exchange, flush toxins, and nourish every cell at every level of our human networks.”

Harmony with nature requires key policy initiatives:

• Full accounting of all costs associated with resource use.
• A regenerative relationship between the realms of ecology and economy. 
• Efficient, circular processing of materials in the technical system.
• Mainstreaming efficient, renewable energy systems across the world.  
• Creating appropriate policy frameworks for “well-being economics”.

Moving towards regenerative systems of resource use requires a clear perception of the differences between ecological and technical systems. First, we need a new understanding of the self-healing qualities of living systems. 

According to quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger, “life seems to be [an] orderly and lawful behaviour of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up…" 

He adds: "From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics.”

Regenerative

Under the right conditions, biological systems will always tend to renew themselves: the inherent regenerative capacity of forests, soils and aquatic ecosystems is evident for all to see. 

To strengthen that capacity is of crucial importance for the health of the biosphere and for the well-being of future generations.

In contrast, the wastes produced by technological processes are very problematic to deal with. This is the case more than ever before, since modern products contain a proliferation of many different materials, combined in ever more complicated ways. 

Mobile phones or electric cars are some of the most striking cases in point. The jury is still out on how best to deal with these materials.

We need to assess what kinds of policies and legal instruments can help create regenerative, technical systems compatible with the world’s ecosystems. 

Implemented

How can we value economic products and services regarding their full impacts on society and nature? How can the emergence of a broad range of new ecologically compatible livelihoods be supported by appropriate economic policies? 

Without constant renewal and regeneration there can be no sustainability. 

In my view, then, a key task towards assuring harmony between humans and nature is to articulate plausible steps towards the emergence of regenerative economies across the world. 

Here is a list of possible new rules and legal instruments for human action:

• Rewarding decision-making based on longer time horizons. 
• Alternative discounting methods to ensure significant investments in climate protection and ecosystem regeneration.
• Avoiding unintended consequences of technology choices for nature and society.
• Meeting human needs while rewarding ecological regeneration and sustainable livelihoods.
• Quantifying the true cost of ecosystem regeneration in business planning. 
• Revising company laws to ensure that corporate interests adhere to human rights, social justice and environmental protection principles.

Finding new ways to live in harmony with nature is one of the greatest challenges for an urbanising, industrialising humanity with unprecedented numbers. Let us trust that humanity can yet draw up and enact appropriate policies to turn the juggernaut around.

This Author

Herbert Girardet is an author, filmmaker and consultant on aspects of cultural ecology. He is a cofounder of the World Future Council. He is a trustee of the Resurgence Trust, which owns and publishes The Ecologist online.