A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years

US: Chelsea Green, 2012. Paperback. Good. With clarity, conscience, and courage, global-systems pioneer Jorgen Rander s and his distinguished contributors map the forces that will shape the nex t four decades. Forty years ago, The Limits to Growth study addressed the grand question of how humans would adapt to the physical limitations of planet Earth. It pre dicted that during the first half of the 21st century the ongoing growth in the human ecological footprint would stop-either through catastrophic "ove rshoot and collapse"-or through well-managed "peak and decline." So, where are we now? And what does our future look like? In the book 2052, Jorgen Randers, one of the coauthors of Limits to Growth, issues a progres s report and makes a forecast for the next forty years. To do this, he aske d dozens of experts to weigh in with their best predictions on how our econ omies, energy supplies, natural resources, climate, food, fisheries, milita ries, political divisions, cities, psyches, and more will take shape in the coming decades. He then synthesized those scenarios into a global forecast of life as we will most likely know it in the years ahead. The good news: we will see impressive advances in resource efficiency, and an increasing focus on human well-being rather than on per capita income gr owth. But this change might not come as we expect. Future growth in populat ion and GDP, for instance, will be constrained in surprising ways-by rapid fertility decline as result of increased urbanization, productivity decline as a result of social unrest, and continuing poverty among the poorest 2 b illion world citizens. Runaway global warming, too, is likely. So, how do we.