At the recent G7 summit in Cornwall, Sir David Attenborough described the decisions currently facing the world’s richest countries as “the most important in human history.” He is right. The summit was held against a backdrop of crises, including the pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and an “infodemic” of misinformation.
As 126 Nobel Prize laureates note in a recent call to action, “The future of all life on this planet, humans and our societies included, requires us to become effective stewards of the global commons.” This consensus emerged from the first-ever Nobel Prize Summit, Our Planet, Our Future, which was jointly hosted by our organizations in late April. Nobel laureates and other experts from around the world came together to assess the risks posed by our hyper-connected world. In an era characterized by acceleration, scale, and systemic shocks, we explored what can be achieved now and in the coming years to put the world on a more sustainable path.
The challenge is as daunting as it is straightforward. Unless we embrace transformational action this decade, we will be taking a colossal risk with humanity’s future. Collectively, we are failing to appreciate the value of social and environmental resilience by allowing for large-scale, irreversible changes to the Earth’s biosphere. Given the stakes, the ambitions that governments bring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November must be commensurate with the scale and urgency of the challenge.
We are hurtling toward dangerous tipping points. We know this not just from scientific theories and complex equations supported by computer models, but from what we can see with our own eyes. Major parts of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting. Major stores of carbon in the roots, trunks, and soils of the Amazon rainforest and in permafrost regions are weakening and potentially destabilizing as we speak. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that redistributes heat globally is slowing down.
At the same time, many countries’ politics are being destabilized by high levels of social and economic inequality and the increased spread of misinformation and disinformation. As this process has now been fully industrialized by digital technologies and platforms, the infodemic threatens our ability to respond effectively to global crises.
International networks of scientific institutions also will need more investment. Universities should embed concepts of planetary stewardship in their curricula. And education at all ages should include a strong emphasis on the nature of evidence and the scientific method, in order to help build herd immunity against lies and misinformation spread by special interest groups and partisan media.
The end of the fossil-fuel era entails a monumental economic transformation that is already underway. But we will not make the progress that we need without economic dynamism. While G7 countries have signaled an intention to phase out coal, most have yet to specify a clear date and strategy for doing so. With a rapidly dwindling carbon budget, such dithering is not compatible with preserving climate stability at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, relative to preindustrial levels.
Humanity’s long-term survival depends on the decisions that we make right now. World leaders gathering at the G7, the G20, and the biodiversity and climate summits this year must think in terms of centuries and generations, not years or months. Like the Nobel Prize, they should be guided by one question: What is of the greatest benefit to humankind?
