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

by Hannah Ritchie

the most important metrics of human well-being: the percentage of people living in extreme poverty, the number of children dying, how many girls did or didn’t get to go to school, and what percentage of children are vaccinated against diseases.

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.

that while these problems are big and pressing, they are solvable. We will have a future. By ‘we’ I mean us, collectively, as a species. Yes, many people could be severely impacted, or even have that future taken away from them, so it’s up to us to decide how many people, based on the actions we take. If you believe people have the right to the truth, then you should be against these exaggerated doomsday stories.

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.

As Dr Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA, puts it: ‘I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life.’7

Optimism is seeing challenges as opportunities to make progress; it’s having the confidence that there are things we can do to make a difference.

Complacent optimism is the feeling of a child waiting for presents. Conditional optimism is the feeling of a child who is thinking about building a treehouse. ‘If I get some wood and nails and persuade some other kids to help do the work, we can end up with something really cool.’

Don’t mistake criticism for pessimism. Criticism is essential for an effective optimist. We need to work through ideas to find the most promising ones.

the world has never been sustainable. What we want to achieve has never been done before.

In 1987, the UN defined sustainable development as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

We think that the world used to be sustainable, but our environmental damage has kicked things out of balance. That’s the wrong conclusion. For thousands of years – more so since the agricultural revolution, but also before then – humans haven’t been environmentally sustainable. Our ancestors hunted hundreds of the largest animals to extinction, polluted the air from burning wood, crop wastes and charcoal, and cut down huge amounts of forest for energy and farmland.1 –3

‘Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.’

But communities that achieved environmental sustainability were always small, and that’s because rates of child mortality were high: losing children stopped the population from growing.

Stopping children from dying has been humanity’s greatest achievement. The majority of us think there’s a natural order to death: it’s the old not the young that die. But this sequence is a very recent development. The prospect that a child would outlive its parents is not a ‘natural’ occurrence at all: it’s something that we’ve had to fight hard for.

As recently as 1800, about 43% of the world’s children died before reaching their fifth birthday.9 Today that figure is 4% – still woefully high, but more than 10-fold lower.

but we have achieved the unthinkable: our ancestors could never have imagined a world where the death of a child was so rare.

Within 200 years, life expectancy has doubled.ii

In the 1970s, around 35% of people in developing countries did not get enough calories to eat. By 2015, this had fallen by almost two-thirds to just 13%. Many still face huge problems. In 2021, around 770 million people in the world – almost one in 10 – did not get enough food.12 But it doesn’t have to be this way. The world now produces far, far more food than it needs. Many countries have come close to eradicating hunger. We need to make sure that every country can do the same.

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.

In his 2014 TED Talk, one question that had Hans Rosling’s audience stumped was ‘In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?’ Most people thought the answer was 20%. The correct answer was 60%. By 2020, this figure had increased to 64%. The share of boys in low-income countries that complete primary school was higher, at 69%. In most countries – even many of the poorest – it’s more likely than not that a girl will finish primary school and get a basic education.iii

We should set our aspirations much higher than this poverty line of $2.15. There is good news there too: more and more people are surpassing higher poverty lines – of $3.65, $6.85, or $24 per day. In the past, poverty was always the default. We can build a future where it is the exception.

Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; it uses half of the world’s habitable land, 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawals, and the leading driver of biodiversity loss. 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.

The global population growth rate – the change from one year to the next – peaked a long time ago. In the 1960s it was growing at more than 2% per year.17 Since then, this rate has more than halved, to 0.8% in 2022. And it will keep falling in the decades to come. For population growth to be ‘exponential’ the growth rate would have to stay at 2% per year.

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.

That’s right: to lift everyone out of poverty, with a level of equality like Denmark, the global economy would need to increase five-fold. If everyone in the world lived on $30 per day with zero inequality (so the richest and poorest both get $30), the global economy would need to more than double.

What I once thought of as a luxury has been one of humanity’s biggest silent killers. It still is. Humans started burning wood for fire at least one and a half million years ago.11 It gave us heat, fuels for cooking and protection in the darkness. But it also gave us poor health from the pollution it created.

Despite all the fossil fuels, cars and pollution we produce today, Montgomerie believed the levels of pollution thousands of years ago were not much different.

In the world’s most polluted cities today, Delhi often tops the global pollution rankings, but if 18th- or 19th-century London were to enter the race it would be guaranteed to win this title, based on levels of suspended particulate matter.

SO2 emissions in the US were cut by around 95% from their peak in the 1970s.16 In Europe, they’ve fallen by 84%, and in the UK, by 98%.

The air I breathed as a child was much cleaner than my parents ever experienced in their youth, and much, much cleaner than my grandparents enjoyed. We’re breathing air that is cleaner than it has been for centuries.

It’s not just emissions of SO2 that have fallen in the UK. Emissions of local air pollutants are just a fraction of what they were. Nitrous oxides are down 76% from their peak. Black carbon is down 94%, volatile organic compounds down 73% and carbon monoxide down 90%.

To put these numbers into context, this is similar to the death toll from smoking: around 8 million.29 It’s six or seven times higher than the number of people that die in road accidents: 1.3 million. Hundreds of times more than the number that die from terrorism or war each year. Air pollution is the silent killer that doesn’t get enough headlines. It doesn’t shock us like images of a flood or a hurricane, but it kills around 500 times more people a year than all ‘natural’ disasters combined, in most years.v

There are societal costs to not taking action that we forget to factor in. We might think that spending hundreds of millions of dollars is expensive. But that’s because we ignore the alternative: the costs of not fixing the problem.

In my dream world, there would be no need to own a car, especially if it does nothing 23 hours a day.

In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan was hit by a tsunami after the country’s largest recorded earthquake. Remarkably, no one died directly from the incident. Several years later, the government announced that one man died from lung cancer which might be linked to the disaster. Overall, that is quite remarkable: a nuclear power plant was hit by a tsunami and there was only one possible death.

Those who squabble about whether nuclear death rates are a little bit higher than solar, or a little bit lower, or whether solar is more deadly than wind are completely missing the point. Separating these is like splitting hairs. The big headline is that all of them kill far, far fewer people than any fossil fuel. Millions die from fossil fuels every year, with estimates ranging from 3.6 to 8.7 million – 1 to 2.5 million come from electricity, and most of it from coal.43 Nuclear and renewables are hundreds, if not thousands, of times safer. And, importantly, they all emit very little CO2, so are much safer for our climate too.

We worry a lot about climate change, and the fact that it could kill many people in the future. But air pollution is already killing millions every year and has done so for a long time.

A 6°C warmer world might be short-lived – it could quickly spiral into 8°C, 10°C or more. It would be a massive humanitarian disaster. Only a few years ago I thought this was where we were headed. Forget 1.5°C or 2°C – we were destined for 4, 5 or 6°C and there was nothing we could do about it. Most people still think that this is the path we’re following. Thankfully, it’s not.

My perspective flipped quickly after studying the data, not newspaper headlines. I didn’t focus on where we are today, but on the pace that things have moved at in the last few years, and what this means for the future. One organisation – the Climate Action Tracker – follows every country’s climate policies, and its pledges and targets. It combines them all to map out what will happen to the global climate. At Our World in Data I sketch out these future climate trajectories, and update them every year. Every time they get closer and closer to the pathways we would need to follow to stay below 2°C.

What’s most promising is how these pathways have shifted over time. In a world without climate policies, we’d be heading towards 4 or 5°C, at least. This is the path that most people still think we’re on. That would be a scary world indeed. Thankfully, over time, countries have stepped up their commitments. As we saw with the example of the ozone layer, incremental increases in ambition can make a huge difference.

After Hans Rosling taught me that extreme poverty and child mortality were falling and education and life expectancy were rising, I went looking for other areas where my preconceptions might be wrong. I started with data on ‘natural’ disasters. I would have bet a lot of money that more people were dying from disasters today than a century ago. I was completely wrong. Death rates from disasters have actually fallen since the first half of the 20th century. And not just by a little bit. They have fallen roughly 10-fold.3, 4 It’s at this point that I should make one thing clear: none of the above means that climate change is not happening. The decline in deaths from disasters does not mean that disasters are getting weaker or less common. Deniers often misuse this data to downplay the existence or risks of climate change. But that’s not what the data shows us at all.

Deaths have fallen – not because disasters have become less frequent or severe, but because our infrastructure, monitoring and response systems have become much more resilient to them.

But the success also comes from being a lot richer. These sophisticated networks and infrastructure need money. There’s no point in designing quake-proof buildings if no one can afford them. No point in planning escape routes if there are no roads to drive on, or vehicles to drive in. No point in designing new farming techniques if farmers cannot afford the seeds and fertilisers. Fewer people die from disasters today because the world is richer.

Historically, the richer you were, the more CO2 you would emit, and it was mostly rich countries that were responsible for the world’s carbon emissions. That changed in the second half of the 20th century when booming economies started to emerge. The rise of China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and South Africa has been a human triumph. It has alleviated massive amounts of poverty and suffering. But it has been powered by fossil fuels and added hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. At the same time, many richer countries have started to reduce their emissions, while getting even richer at the same time. With low- and middle-income countries coming up, and rich countries coming down, the world’s carbon emissions per capita have started to converge.

The picture is also skewed when we look at each country’s historical responsibility. To do this we add up all of a country’s emissions since 1750. The US is way out in front, having contributed 25% of the world’s emissions. The EU comes in second at 17%. China slips down the list to third place, having contributed only half as much as the US. India is even further down, having emitted just 3%. These perspectives can be useful. But when we turn climate change into a blame game, there is no end to it. People are not really fighting about the numbers. They’re fighting about what numbers they should be using in the first place. If they don’t agree on that – which they often don’t – the fight goes nowhere useful. This battle has plagued international climate agreements for decades. The US and EU blame China and India, who then pick another (very reasonable) metric and fire it back.

These massive strides in technology mean that we use much less energy than we did in the past, despite appearing to lead much more extravagant energy-intensive lifestyles. The notion that we need to be frugal to live a low-carbon life is simply wrong. In the UK we now emit about the same as someone in the 1850s. I emit the same as my great-great-great-grandparents. And I have a much, much higher standard of living.

In the US, since 2005, emissions have fallen by a quarter both domestically and when we adjust for offshoring.

This is a narrative that rarely makes it into the headlines. Economic growth and emissions reductions are often framed as being incompatible. But countries are proving that they can be. This doesn’t mean that rich countries are making reductions anywhere close to fast enough. They can, and should, be making them much faster. But it shows us that reducing emissions is possible. And it does not have to mean tanking the economy at the same time.