Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

‘Three minutes with Hans Rosling will change your mind about the world.’

Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year until decades pass and the world has been altered beyond recognition.

If we want clarity we have to take in the full picture, and that means giving ourselves some distance. If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.

If we’re already screwed, then what’s the point in trying? Far from making us more effective in driving change, it robs us of any motivation to do so.

I can assure you that after reframing how I saw the world, I have had a much, much bigger impact on changing things. When it comes down to it, doomsday attitudes are often no better than denial.

Accepting defeat on climate change is an indefensibly selfish position to take.

Don’t mistake criticism for pessimism. Criticism is essential for an effective optimist.

things are changing, and we should be impatient about changing them faster.

think we could be the first generation. We have the opportunity to be the first generation that leaves the environment in a better state than we found it. The first generation in human history to achieve sustainability. (Yes, that seems hard to believe. Stay with me and I’ll explain why.)

When it comes down to it, though, most of us want to build a better world, where our children and grandchildren can thrive.

(1) We face big and important environmental challenges

We must act. It must be large-scale. And so much quicker than we have done before.

Reduce the damage from climate change and we reduce other risks too.

(3) You will have to hold multiple thoughts at the same time

We have made impressive progress, but we still have a long way to go. As my colleague Max Roser puts it: ‘The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.’10 All three statements are true.

(4) None of this is inevitable, but it is possible

(5) We cannot afford to be complacent

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given governments even more reason to ditch fossil fuels and invest in low-carbon energy that they can control.

There are two important lessons here. The first is that, on our journey to a sustainable world, there will be blips along the way. Events that force us to stall, or maybe even regress, on fixing our environmental problems. We should expect this, and not panic when it happens. Where we end up is determined by what we do over the next few decades, not the next three months.

The second is that we need to develop systems that are resilient to world events that ...

(6) You are not alone in this

meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’

That definition has two halves. The first is making sure that everyone in the world today – the present generations – can live a good and healthy life. The second half is about making sure that we live in a way that doesn’t degrade the environment for future generations. We shouldn’t create environmental damage that takes the opportunity of a good and healthy life away from our great-great-grandchildren.

A world full of avoidable human suffering does not meet our definition of sustainability.

The world has never been sustainable because we’ve never achieved both halves at the same time.

principles. As the Native American proverb goes: ‘Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it.’ Similarly, the ancient Kenyan proverb: ‘Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.’ Our understanding of sustainability starts there.

upward. Every day, 300,000 people get access to electricity and a similar number get clean water, for the first time. This has been the case every day for a decade.

There’s one main cause: human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Growing enough food is not the problem – it’s about growing and using this food in a smarter way. Make better decisions and we can feed 9 or 10 billion people without frying the planet at the same time.

Biodiversity loss is driven by many of the problems covered in this book: species are affected by climate change, deforestation, habitat loss through expanding land, hunting for meat, plastic pollution and overfishing.

Plastic is the most ‘modern’ problem we’ll look at in this book. It is both a miracle material and an environmental disaster.

Newspapers and documentaries have been filled with scary headlines about the state of our oceans. The most popular claim is that they will be empty by the middle of the century.

Our collective environmental impact is quite simple when we break it down: it’s the number of people multiplied by everyone’s individual impact. When we put it that way, two grand solutions emerge: reduce the number of people on the planet or cut our individual impacts by intentionally shrinking the economy. These arguments – referred to as depopulation and degrowth – are represented by very loud advocates in environmental debates. But neither of these options is viable.

For population growth to be ‘exponential’ the growth rate would have to stay at 2% per year.

Take a moment to think about what that means: there may never be more children in the world than there were in 2017. Global population growth will peak when all these children reach old age. The United Nations projects this will happen in the 2080s at 10 to 11 billion people.19 From there, it expects the world population will start to shrink.

Here’s the thing: if we were to accept for a moment that this was the optimal number of people (which I don’t), it’s not possible to reduce the population quickly enough for that to help address our environmental problems. If anyone argues that it is, they don’t understand how demographic change works.

Trying to ‘control’ population in any humane way (if there is such a thing) might reduce it a bit, but not by that much. Our sustainability solutions need to be scalable for many billions of people.

The end goal that we’re aiming for is to reduce our impacts per person to zero – or at least very close to zero.

This argument hinges on the fact that, historically, economic growth has been linked with more resource-intensive lifestyles. As we got richer, we used more energy from fossil fuels, had a higher carbon footprint, used more land and ate more meat.

But as the chapters that follow will show, new technologies are allowing us to decouple a good and comfortable life from an environmentally destructive one.

Historically, countries have become rich from fossil fuels and other resources. That means many people now assume that growth equals ‘bad’. But there is no reason for it to stay that way. If a country, or an individual for that matter, can lead the way in providing a cheap, low-carbon energy source that could power the world, I would be more than happy for them to get rich from it.

There is a massive ‘solutions vacuum’ for our environmental problems.

Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact. In this book I’ll show that we can reduce our environmental impact and reverse our past damage while becoming better off. The big question here is whether we can decouple these impacts fast enough. The answer to that depends on what actions we take today.

it wasn’t a temporary flex for its international visitors. It was a permanent change demanded and achieved by the city’s population itself. But how?

By 2013, public anger boiled over. Citizens demanded proper air-quality monitoring and data. Even Chinese state media were reporting on the terrible pollution that cloaked not just Beijing, but cities across the country.5 The Chinese government responded and in 2014 declared a ‘war on pollution’. It moved quickly, bringing in tough regulations on industrial plants; it took old cars off the road, shut down coal stations near the city, and switched from coal to gas boilers, which produce much less pollution.i

Between 2013 and 2020, Beijing’s pollution levels fell by 55%.6 Across China as a whole, they fell by 40%. The health benefits of these changes are huge: it’s estimated that the life expectancy of the average person in Beijing has increased by 4.6 years.

China’s air is still not perfect. It’s still well above the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, and several times higher than you’d find in a city in the United States or Europe. Its work is not done. But its example offers us an important lesson in how quickly we can act when we have the tools: a demanding citizenship, the money and political will.

Air pollution is caused by one very simple principle: burning things. When we burn stuff – whether that’s wood, crops, coal or oil – we generate small unwanted particles at the same time. This is the root of the problem, and the key to solving it.

The chairman of DuPont – the largest global manufacturer of CFCs – said the theory was: ‘a science fiction tale… a load of rubbish… utter nonsense’. The leading producers formed the Alliance for Responsible CFC to coordinate their efforts and launched intense PR campaigns discrediting the theory of ozone depletion.

Tackling climate change and some of the other problems in this book will be more difficult, but there are still important lessons to learn from both the acid rain and the ozone success stories. Humans can solve real global problems. Every country has the opportunity to be involved. And we can take action quickly when we’re up against it. It serves us well to remind ourselves that we are capable of cooperating on such global problems.