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Hosted by:
The Club of Rome
The Council for the Human Future

Roundtable on the Human Future
Online, July 2024

Link to the Report

Summary
1.1 The Human Predicament

Humanity is facing its greatest emergency, a crisis consisting of many, interlinked, catastrophic risks.
The crisis is already here, and will get worse. Its combined scale and impact are so great that few
grasp it. Together, these risks endanger our ability to maintain a civilization, possibly even to survive
as a species. Global solutions are now urgent. To act later will be too late.

The crisis is vast, complex and interconnected. It will affect everyone on Earth, for generations to
come. There is at present no plan of action to resolve it, nor even a concerted effort to develop one.
Dimensions of the human predicament highlighted by leading international organisations who took
part in the Roundtable on the Human Future on July 27/28 include:

• Humanity faces multiple global catastrophic risks, now arriving together. These pose a
  mounting security threat to all nations and to every person.
• Global risks call for global solutions.
• There is currently no World Plan of Action for dealing with all these risks, or even agreement
  to form one.
• There is a universal failure of leadership and governance to address the global problems we
  face. The current system of international cooperation is clearly not fit to meet the
  unprecedented challenges humanity confronts. Stronger international governance is
  becoming essential.
• This “polycrisis” is an interconnected web of challenges including climate change,
  biodiversity loss, global poisoning, food insecurity, resource depletion, retreat from
  democracy, nuclear proliferation, spread of war, uncontrolled use of AI, misinformation,
  economic social and gender inequality, rising inequity, failing healthcare systems and
  geopolitical instability. These spell greater insecurity for all.
• Solutions continue to be siloed yet the problems are interconnected. We must adopt
  systems thinking and acting, to address 21st century challenges.
• We will not stay within safe planetary boundaries unless we also address poverty and
  inequality.
• There is a growing world scientific consensus that human civilization is in trouble and faces
  potential collapse in the mid-late C21st. Under certain climate and war scenarios, humans
  could become extinct.
• A driving cause of the crisis is the overshoot of the human enterprise beyond the Earth’s
  capacity to sustain: overpopulation, overconsumption, an extractive mindset, rising
  inequality and inequity, poor choice of technologies, poor social arrangements and inability
  to work together. These multiply all the existing threats.
• There is a grave lack of awareness, worldwide, among governments and ordinary citizens
  about the looming crisis, it’s dangers, scale, speed and what to do about it.
• Young people and women, especially, are being excluded from the decision-making and
  leadership needed to remedy the emergency.