The climate crisis is only one of the many global sustainability challenges we are facing. Not only are the impacts of centuries of mismanagement and exploitation right at our doorsteps, but we are also neglecting the faulty systemic structures which favour societal and environmental collapse. 

This article aims at presenting the interconnected sustainability challenges of the 21st century. If you want to understand the scope of the challenges beyond the climate crisis, you came to the right corner of the internet.

This article shall act as a basis for you and me to remind ourselves where there is a need for action. Where do we need full-scale solutions? What are the most pressing areas? What role do we play in overcoming the many challenges?

As a matter of fact, there is more to do than simply reducing and removing carbon from the atmosphere. For our societies to thrive, we need systemic change by fixing the issues at their root. Too many solutions only treat the symptoms of the causes, but we need various, context-based solutions. Solutions that work for us instead of against us.

The visualisation below shows the interconnectedness of the different global sustainability challenges we are experiencing. Although there should be definitely more red lines, I didn’t want our beautiful earth to disappear underneath them. Without underlying systemic change, there is little hope to reverse what has been doing badly for so long: living on the costs of the planet.

To solve our global sustainability challenges we have to take all crises into account

Related article:

 From A Carbon Tunnel Vision To A Holistic Collaboration Approach

Population

While the global human population will hit 8 billion in November 2022, the demand for food, water, housing, energy, healthcare services etc. will rise too. In the graphic below, you see the projections for population growth until 2100. Human overpopulation is a concept about our ability to sustain our presence/lifestyles within the Earth’s capability to provide us with resources and functioning ecosystems.

Prediction for the world population till 2100 and the declining global fertility rate (purple line) 

The elemental issue: Human population growth strongly contributes to all the crises.

If you are interested to find out more about the link between human population growth and global crises, I recommend you to read this informative policy brief of the UN:

Why population growth matters for sustainable development

Poverty

Economic growth is portrayed as a remedy that solves poverty. Unfortunately, this pretentious perspective does the opposite: it doesn’t reduce poverty, it enhances it. In fact, having a job is not a guaranteed ticket out of poverty. Poverty doesn’t only determine monetary wealth, it also impacts the educational level and has a long-term impact on access to opportunities and social mobility. 

Facts about poverty:

• Worldbank: The international poverty line sets at 2.15US$ (1,5 €) per person/per day (according to this 648 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2019)
• Worldbank: Covid-19 drove an additional 97 million people into extreme poverty in 2020 
• Worldbank: Children and youth account for two-thirds of the world’s poor, and women represent a majority in most regions

Our World in Data: Powerful visualisations which shows in what wage brackets the majority of the world’s population sits

Nonetheless, statistics fail to represent the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship of everyday life in poverty. The most vulnerable are women, youth, and low-wage and informal workers. According to reliefweb, there are 11 causes of global poverty:

1. Inequality and marginalisation
2. Conflict
3. Hunger, malnutrition and stunting
4. Poor healthcare systems (especially for mothers and children)
5. Little or no access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene
6. Climate change
7. Lack of education
8. Poor public works and infrastructure
9. Lack of government support
10. Lack of jobs or livelihoods
11. Lack of reserves

The thing with poverty is that it can happen to any of us, as this Oxfam quote highlights:

Over a quarter of a billion more people could crash into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 because of COVID-19, rising global inequality and the shock of food price rises supercharged by the war in Ukraine.

Health

Humanity made a big jump concerning health technologies and public health practices. Although some health issues and curable diseases (like tuberculosis, malaria etc.) are still prevalent, life expectancies rose significantly. 

In many countries, lifestyle-related diseases and issues are out of control such as obesity and mental health. Health turned into a medical industry where the focus lies on bringing money in instead of helping people with their health. During the Covid-19 pandemic, different flaws in the medical sector were exposed: medical worker shortages, criminally low wages, mental health issues, etc. Preventing and managing a global pandemic exceeded the health system’s limits. 

Furthermore, we are more likely to experience more pandemics in the future due to destroying natural habitats, antibiotic-resistant drugs, multimorbidity etc.

Here are some challenges identified by WHO

• Build global solidarity for worldwide health security
• Speed up access to medicines and vaccines
• Advanced health for all
• Tackling health inequities
• Provide global leadership in science and data
• Revitalise efforts to tackle communicable diseases
• Combat drug resistance
• Prevent and treat non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and mental health conditions
• Build a better and sustainable healthcare system
• Act in solidarity

Other challenges are

• Rising healthcare costs
• Tiering of healthcare
• Growing numbers of elderly people
• The uninsured
• New technologies
• New and reemerging infectious diseases
• Threat of terrorism
• Rediscovery of lifestyle-related health

Our health depends heavily on well-functioning systems. The interconnectivity of all the sustainability challenges highlights that, for example, the climate crisis is also a health crisis. The poverty crisis is a health crisis. The population crisis is a poverty crisis. 

Urbanisation

More than 4 billion people live in urban areas. Population migration is a key trend that needs to be taken seriously. If more than half of the world’s population are urban dwellers, then we urgently need to make cities sustainable. Megacities will become the norm and predictions show that 1 in 4 people will live in a slum by 2030. Another key point is the increase in sustainability challenges linked to health and poverty which are already out of control

Urban threat facts

• UN: By 2050, about 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas
• Public Health Reviews: Major health problems resulting from urbanisation 
  • poor nutrition
  • pollution-related health conditions
  • communicable diseases
  • poor sanitation and housing conditions
• Over 60% of the land projected to become urban by 2030 is yet to be built

Resource depletion

“During the twentieth century more aluminium, copper, iron, and steel, phosphate rock, sulphur, coal, oil, natural gas and even sand and gravel were consumed than in all previous centuries combined.” 

– From Sustainability Marketing by Frank-Martin Belz and Ken Peattie

In 1972, the report Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome warned societies of the risk of overshooting if population and economic growth trends continue. This was 50 years ago. 50 years ago it was already evident to a few people that we will reach our limits and deplete natural resources to the point of no return – consuming resources at a faster rate than it’s possible for ecosystems to renew them. The leading causes are overpopulation, poor farming practices, logging, overconsumption, pollution etc.

Effects:

• Water shortages
• Oil depletion
• Loss of forest cover
• Depletion of minerals
• Extinction of species

You might be familiar with Earth Overshoot Day 2022. It marks the date when we have used all the natural resources that the Earth’s systems regenerate in an entire year. For the year 2022, Earth Overshoot Day landed on July 28 which means that since then we live at the cost of our future generations.

Earth Overshoot Days show which countries contribute most to resource depletion

The graphic shows that every country has their own Earth Overshoot day. Surely, we have to collaborate globally to exist within the Earth’s limits, but some countries need to take on more responsibility. In particular, affluent nations need to find ways of reducing their destructive social and environmental impact. For too long, we have been living at the cost of the well-being of other people and the planet.

If you want to know the calculation method of the Earth Overshoot Day, here is a shortcut link: https://www.overshootday.org/2022-calculation/

Most pressing issues due to resource depletion

• By 2025, 1.8 billion people will have no access to drinking water
• Climate Analytics: To meet the Paris Agreement, coal needs to be phased out by 2040
• According to The World Counts
  • There will be no fish by 2048
  • 45% of intact coral systems are left
  • If global food systems are not transformed, only 27 years are left to be able to produce food
  • Currently, we need 1,8 planets to sustain our lifestyles (we only have one)

Ecosystem Damage

According to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 60% of our world’s ecosystem services are degraded and the species extinction rate runs between 100 and 1000 times faster than naturally occurring. Our lives depend on the health of the natural environment and the impact of human development on the natural systems is severe. 

Ecosystem services maintain the ability to support life and provide resources on which we depend. Moreover, intact, natural ecosystems regulate the climate and temperature, prevent floods and diseases, and manage water quality and waste. In this light, you can see the Earth as a central business, contributing to the well-being of everyone.

Unfortunately, the economy we are praising is demolishing the capability of the Earth’s systems to sustain us:

• Our World In Data: Around 80% of natural forests are lost, and 5-10% of tropical forest species will become extinct every decade
• Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: 60% of world ecosystem services have been degraded and species extinction is running between 100 and 1000 times the ‘natural’ background rate
• Our World In Data: 27% of our coral reefs have been destroyed
• The World Counts: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches from the North American West Coast to Japan and is the size of India, Mexico and Europe combined. It approximately contains 45-129 thousand tons of plastic
• UN: 40% of the Earth’s land has been degraded

There are many more facts about ecosystem damage, the list is sadly too long.

Eroding Cultural Diversity

Globalisation brings an immense toll on our world. The fast pace and consequences of resource turnover are sort of understood now, but what is overlooked is the impact of a globalised economy on cultural diversity.

Homogenisation is an underestimated threat to culture. Increasingly, it becomes easier to identify ourselves with certain brands than with our social and cultural backgrounds. The economy massively benefits when we identify with values from brands and icons. Consequently, they promise us a feeling we desire while they desire the money in our pockets and accounts. 

Not enough attention is paid to protecting the diversity of human culture. It’s easier to manipulate the masses when there is little room for cultural identity left. Policies also favour corporations rather than protecting ethnic minorities and indigenous lifestyles. The plight of those culturally dense communities shows the fights they have to endure every day to exist in tune with the Earth and not economic beliefs.

Mineral resource exploitations as well as tourism, industrial agriculture and technologies are pushing cultural diversity to extinction. We urgently need to raise awareness that capitalistic/business ‘culture’ can never replace human culture – only at the cost of our and the Earth’s health. 

Food Crisis

Our food security is massively under threat. Not only in regard to food production but also to food-related crises such as malnourishment, overweight, eating disorders, famines, waste etc. 

Food systems are to the biggest extent commodified, meaning that their purpose is to generate revenue and not contribute to healthy nourishment. Health and environmental stability are not taken into account in industrial food production. There is a lot at stake if we do not transform food systems to be sustainable.

Food crisis facts:

• Environment
  • Our World In Data: World has passed peak agricultural land (~ 5 billion hectares), and arable land use per capita is declining
• Social
  • Our World In Data: 39% of adults in the world are overweight, and 13% are obese (WHO: around 1 billion people: 650 million adults, 340 million adolescents and 39 million children)
  • Our World In Data: 8.9% (663 million people) of the world’s population are undernourished
  • Action Against Hunger: 14 million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition
  • WHO: More than 820 million people are hungry globally
• Economic/Social
  • FAO: global volume of food waste amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes (because it is estimated the number is probably a lot higher); carbon footprint is 3.3 billion tonnes; lost water 250km3; 28% of agricultural land is used for food waste; economic loss of $750 billion annually
  • 1.3 billion tonnes of food waste can feed an estimated 1.5 billion people

Other issues connected to food production are increasing oil prices (agriculture depends heavily on fossil fuels), competition for agricultural land (food, feed or fuel), increasing extreme weather patterns, and growing demand for meat. Those are only a few factors that for example increase global food prices.

Water Crisis

Access to freshwater is highly linked to the quality of life and development. But our access to clean, usable freshwater is under threat due to scarcity, pollution, and extreme weather in the form of droughts and floods.

Water crisis facts from the UN:

• WHO/UNICEF 2019: 
  • 2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services
  • Almost 2 billion people depend on health care facilities without basic water services
  • Over half of the global population or 4.2 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services
  • 297,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases due to poor sanitation, poor hygiene, or unsafe drinking water
• UN 2019: 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress
• UNISDR: 90% of natural disasters are weather-related, including floods and droughts
• SIWI: Around two-thirds of the world’s transboundary rivers do not have a cooperative management framework
• FAO: Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water withdrawal

Climate Crisis

You see, all of the crises above are strongly interlinked and the climate crisis is no exception. Therefore, the climate crisis is not a standalone issue and shouldn’t be treated predominantly. Our livelihoods are severely under threat, thus addressing all sustainability challenges is crucial. It’s not all about carbon, it’s about securing a future for us. There is a strong scientific consensus that human activity is the primary catalyst of the climate crisis.

NASA evidence that since the industrial Revolutions atmospheric CO2 has increased

Climate Crisis facts:

• Climate NASA
  • The Earth’s average surface temperature alread rose to about 1 degrees Celsius
  • Oceans are 0.33 degrees Celsius warmer
  • Ice Sheets shrink approximately 427 tonnes per year
  • Glaciers are disappearing and snow cover is decreasing
  • Global sea levels rose about 20cm
  • Extreme weather events are increasing
  • Ocean acidification about 30%
  • etc.

There are many sustainability challenges to digest

Global sustainability challenges are no joke or fiction. It’s real, it’s right at our doorsteps. With this article, I don’t want to discourage you from believing that it’s too late. In many articles, I refer to the interconnectedness of the crisis and I hope that with the provided facts you have a better understanding of what needs to change. 

All those crises are human-made, so there should be opportunities for us to revert them.

All those sustainability challenges depict the urgent need for systemic change. We owe that to our future selves. Never in history before, had ordinary people like you and me access to such a big pool of resources to achieve change. Simply put, we need a bit more confidence in our ability to create change, to become the change we want to see.

Change is inevitable. Of course, it might be scary, but it can not be as terrifying as inaction. Today, we have the chance to make decisions that can change the course of the world. Are you ready to commit?