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The final reality we must confront, and perhaps the most devastating, is the continued and increasing degradation of the environment caused by our economic system and the life-threatening risks posed by global warming, extreme weather events, and continued overproduction of waste and pollution.

While most reports on the environment today home in on global warming, that is only a subset of a much larger issue. The economic system we have created is utterly unsustainable, notwithstanding the hopeful signs in environmental Kuznets curves. The World Economic Forum first raised awareness on this emerging problem in 1973. Then, Aurelio Peccei, who was the president of the Club of Rome, a think tank, gave a speech in Davos about his famous study on “The Limits to Growth.” The publication of this study a year earlier had “caused a sensation for calling into question the sustainability of global economic growth.” The authors, who had “examined several scenarios for the global economy,” outlined in Davos “the choices that society had to make to reconcile economic development and environmental constraints.”⁶¹

They warned that with the current growth trajectory, there would be a “sudden and serious shortage” of arable land in the next decades.⁶² They warned that there was only a limited supply of freshwater on earth and that with increasing demand, competition and conflict would arise over who would get access to it.⁶³ And they warned that many natural resources, such as oil and gas, were overused and that they led to exponential rates of pollution.⁶⁴

But their warnings were to no avail. The worst of the scenarios the Club of Rome laid out did not come true, so much of the message was forgotten. After a lull in the 1970s, economic production has reached record levels almost every single year since, and left an ever-larger ecological footprint. Despite the Club of Rome's inaccuracies about short-term resource depletion, today we can see just how much foresight the Club of Rome had. In 1970, a mere two years before The Limits to Growth was published, humanity's global ecological footprint was still below what the earth could regenerate, albeit only by a small margin. If we had continued to produce and consume the way we did then, we may have stayed in equilibrium, keeping the earth habitable and fertile for many generations to come.

But things took another turn as the global population kept rising. Today, the world has about double the number of people it did in the early 1970s. And with standards of living going up as well, the Global Footprint Network (GFN) calculated⁶⁵ that by 2020 humanity had used “nature's resource budget” for the entire year by sometime in August, meaning that we overused natural resources during the equivalent of four to five months each year (see Figure 2.6). (The COVID-19 crisis, including the months of mandatory confinement and the halting of many economic activities, did positively affect the “overshoot day,”⁶⁶ though it certainly wasn't sustainable.) The caveat, as GFN's chief science officer David Lin told us, is that our “ecological footprint” is of course only an accounting measure: there is no way of saying for sure just how detrimental our economic production and consumption processes really are. But it is clear the world's use of natural resources is unsustainable and is exacerbating many other harmful trends, such as global warming. What exactly is our record on this front?

Figure 2.6 “Earth Overshoot Day” Has Been Taking Place on an Earlier Date Almost Each Year since 1970

Source: Redrawn from Global Footprint Network and Biocapacity Accounts 2019, Earth Overshoot Day.

Consider first fossil fuels, which can regenerate only over millions of years. Even though they can only be used once, coal, oil, and natural gas still account for about 85 percent of the world's primary energy consumption⁶⁷ and two thirds of world's electricity production.⁶⁸ In fact, their use has nearly doubled about every 20 years in the past century. Despite calls to phase them out, their production even increased in 2018. It is a statistic that unnerved even BP's chief economist Spencer Dale:⁶⁹ “At a time when society is increasing its demands for an accelerated transition to a low-carbon energy system,” he wrote in his group's 2019 Statistical Review, “the energy data for 2018 paint a worrying picture.”

It is not only fossil fuels. More broadly, over the past five decades, the use of natural resources tripled, according to the UN Environment's International Resource Panel.⁷⁰ Their extraction and processing have “accelerated” over the last two decades, and “accounts for more than 90 percent of our biodiversity loss and water stress and approximately half of our climate change impacts,” the organization warned.

These trends coincided with one of increased pollution of at least three sorts: water, air, and soil.

Take first the issue of water. UN Water, the agency coordinating the United Nations work on water and sanitation, estimated that globally 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress,⁷¹ often due to climate change. But even when water is available, it is often heavily polluted. Globally, the agency said,⁷² “it is likely that over 80% of wastewater is released to the environment without adequate treatment,” with pollution often happening because of “intensive agriculture, industrial production, mining and untreated urban runoff and wastewater.” It threatens the access of clean water everywhere from cities to rural areas and poses a great health risk.

Moreover, there is the issue of plastics, whose impact will be felt most dramatically in the coming decades, as the plastic that is currently accumulating in the world's oceans may affect life on land in a myriad of ways. Microplastics have become ubiquitous in the world's water, in part because they take decades to decompose: by current measures, it is estimated we could end up with more plastic than fish in our oceans by 2050.⁷³ The most famous example in popular imagination is the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” consisting largely of the debris of microplastics in the Pacific Ocean. But the issue is a global one, affecting all of the world's bodies of water.

Second, almost two-thirds of the world's cities also exceed WHO guidelines on air pollution, according to Greenpeace.⁷⁴ Many of the large metropoles of Asia are so polluted it is unhealthy even to walk outside,⁷⁵ as many who live or have been there will be able to attest. And third, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO),⁷⁶ soil pollution is a hidden reality all over the world and a direct threat to human health.

This rapid exploitation and pollution also started to wreak havoc on the world's natural ecosystems and threatened to make global warming spin out of control, with major consequences for people in regions hit hard by climatic change and for future generations. Other data also reveal the human impact on the environment.

The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBES) concluded in a 2019 report that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history,” with species already becoming extinct “at least tens to hundreds of times faster than the average over the past 10 million years.”⁷⁷ Quoting the research, the Financial Times also wrote that “one million of Earth's estimated 8 million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction.”⁷⁸

Another specialized UN agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued a warning late 2018 that the current path of CO₂ emissions would also lead to an unstoppable cycle of global warming—with major disruptions for life on earth—if major reductions weren't achieved by 2030. It said, “Pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems.”⁷⁹ But hopes for even that narrow path to a limited global warming of 1.5°C had all but evaporated two years later. The World Meteorological Organization, another UN-affiliated institution, in July 2020 said that a 1°C warming would already be a reality in the next five years (2020–2024) and believed there was a one in five chance that warming would already reach 1.5°C in that period.⁸⁰

There is no one who hasn't experienced at least some of the realities of a changing climate. As I write this, the past two summers have once again been among the hottest on record.⁸¹ Even high in the Swiss Alpine town of Zermatt, where I go to walk in summer and where temperatures are usually quite moderate, global warming and extreme weather events are hitting home—literally. The Theodul Glacier is retreating further every year, and when I visited in the summer of 2019, the melting glacier caused flooding in the valley, even though not a drop of rain had fallen in days.⁸²

Faced with these changes down the ages, people have responded with one simple act: they have started moving. Today, the UN Migration Agency IOM warns that “gradual and sudden environmental changes are already resulting in substantial population movements. The number of storms, droughts, and floods has increased threefold over the last 30 years with devastating effects on vulnerable communities, particularly in the developing world.”⁸³ It expects that the total number of climate migrants alone will by 2050 be as great as the total number of international migrants in the world today, at 200 million people.⁸⁴

Business leaders know environmental risks are rising, as they rank them ever-more prominently in the World Economic Forum's yearly Global Risks report. For the first time in 2020, it said, “Severe threats to our climate account for all of the Global Risks Report's top long-term risks.”⁸⁵ It pointed to the risks associated with extreme weather events, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, human-made environmental damage, major biodiversity losses, resulting in severely depleted resources, and major natural disasters.

We should not take these risks lightly like we did in the 1970s, especially as the next generation is already looking over our shoulder, wondering what legacy we plan to leave. That would be nothing short of a betrayal of future generations.

Indeed, the dangers posed by global warming have become a major worry for the next generation of youth these past few years, as they start to demand more urgent climate action. Inspired to a large degree by peers such as Swedish school student Greta Thunberg, hundreds of thousands of climate activists have been hitting the streets, giving speeches to whomever would listen and changing their own habits where possible. We understand their concerns and for this reason invited Greta Thunberg to speak at our Annual Meeting in 2019. Thunberg's foremost message was that “our house is on fire”⁸⁶ and that we should act with an utmost sense of urgency.

We hope we will heed the next generation's call to create a more sustainable economic system with more urgency than in 1973. Since Aurelio Peccei's speech, decades have passed. Since then, we failed to act with sufficient results and have, in doing so, worsened the economic, health, and environmental outlook for future generations—and still left many people behind economically. It was Kuznets’ final curse. He had never suggested that our economic system was indefinitely sustainable.

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We did not listen to Simon Kuznets’ cautious warnings: he told us GDP was a poor measure for broad societal progress, as it was more geared toward measuring production capacity than any other signs of prosperity. He wasn't convinced that the declining income inequality during the 1950s would be a permanent feature but rather saw it as a temporary effect of the specific technological advances that favored inclusive growth at the time. And he never subscribed to the notion of any “Environmental Kuznets’ Curve,” which hypothesized that harm to the environment would decline as an economy developed. We are now paying the price for it.

But before we try to make up for those errors in our economic development though, we must first ask: Is another development path already available? And to what extent can it be found in the East, in the rise of Asia?