All Change

Right now, we are confronting something that most of us find hard to accept: fundamental change.

Human success is based on adaptability, yet we tend to dismiss suggestions that the future will not be an extension of the past. Adapting to change requires more mental and physical energy than maintaining the status quo, so we mostly prefer things to stay as they are.

Having spent many years forecasting and promoting the adoption of new technologies in conservative markets like aviation and maritime, I am familiar with this animosity to the suggestion of change. Hence I was struck by these words from Greg Waldren in Flight Global, about the current plight of Airbus. “Every assumption we had about the industry has been totally upended.”

As a forecaster, I often clashed with people whose method was to project past performance and its drivers. Their forecasts were more comfortable than mine but they failed to account for major disruption.

Consider the demand for runways at UK airports. Airport owners didn’t embrace my idea of including a major economic depression in their forecasts. I didn’t expect it to be driven by disease, but that just shows why continuity is not a good long term assumption.

Before Covid-19, we were adjusting to a greater but more gradual disruption, in our climate. In this respect, one teenager has influenced society more than any government or scientific community. Lots of people fight for the environment: Greta Thunberg stands out because she makes people believe things can change.

Yet although climate change is a big deal, it is not the cause of all our current crises. It is one consequence of the root cause, which is too many people.

I give some credence to the Gaia principle, of the Earth as a self-regulating entity. Our species has become a threat to the whole biosphere. The natural resolution is a cull. We can manage it ourselves, or have it done to us: but either way there will be profound change.

Our numbers have trebled in 70 years. We should never have abandoned the mantra, “Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control”.

In this sense Covid-19 is a warning shot. Next time the death toll may be 10% not 0.1%. But plenty of other things will also cull us, if we choose not to act. Many are related to climate but others, like pollution, we have created all by ourselves.

For Westerners born after 1945, our difficulty in accepting the idea of radical change is partly a failure of imagination, due to us having known only peace and stability. Yet far from being the norm, the last 75 years are an aberration.

Many countries large and small are failing, as their growing populations fight over limited resources and are stricken by natural disasters. Somalia, Libya, Mali, Eritrea, South Sudan, DRC, North Korea, Venezuela, Haiti, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan: the list of those that have collapsed or are on the brink grows ever longer.

Here is a forecast to plan against: the average number of countries collapsing each year will rise from one to three, so that by 2040 they include most of Africa and the Middle East and large swathes of Asia and Latin America. As the UN and China are already doing, we will either take over these failed states, to stabilise them and secure their resources, or abandon them, with dire consequences.

If unchecked, the resulting mass migrations will overwhelm us. The EU was nearly broken by two million refugees arriving on its borders. What will happen when there are 20 million? With two billion people vulnerable to dislocation, no country will remain unaffected.

We face the same choice as the Roman Empire: fight to keep them out, or deal with letting them in. Like us, the Romans vacillated between the two. It didn’t end well for Rome’s rulers, although many people assimilated and thrived.

There is a third option, to fix the problems that create refugees. The Millennium Goals were defined to do that but we have conspicuously failed to deliver them.

Some think science will enable us to feed ten billion people and save the planet. They are as deluded as those who believe that God will save us, no matter how irresponsibly we behave. Others say developing countries have a right to grow and prosper as we did and that we should balance this by reducing our own profligacy. A Nobel Prize for whoever can resolve that equation.

If there is a solution, it must involve both changing our lifestyles and reducing our numbers. If adopted globally, “I’m stopping at two” would gradually bring our population into equilibrium with the planet. We just need to give up two absurd ideas: that God wants us to breed like rabbits; and that growth in GDP is the best measure of human progress.

Some of the necessary changes are already underway, accelerated by Covid-19.

If it can be done by robots, it will be. Teleworking will permanently reduce travel and office space. Lockdown and environmental concerns will make consumerism a bit more mindful. Societies will advance or regress as they resolve the legal and moral issues of AI, Big Data and mass surveillance.

On the dark side, we must not ignore how society’s response to Covid-19 inadvertently led to mass euthanasia, by not prioritising effective protection for old people in care homes. We have even given a nod to eugenics, by failing to counter the disease’s targeting of disadvantaged ethnic communities.

Is this how it is going to be? Or will we now drive towards better disaster preparedness, improved public health and a war against inequality? The answers are in our hands: but only to the extent that we are prepared to change.