In 2024, humanity - as a whole - took a purposeful stride towards engineering the collapse of modern civilisation.
Author Julian Cribb FRSA FTSE is an Australian author and science communicator.  His career includes appointments as scientific editor for The Australian newspaper, director of national awareness for the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), editor of several newspapers, member of numerous scientific boards and advisory panels, and president of national professional bodies for agricultural journalism and science communication. His published work includes over 9000 articles, 3000 science media releases and ten books. He has received thirty-two awards for journalism. His previous books include The Coming Famine (2010), Poisoned Planet (2014), and Surviving the 21st Century (2017). As a science writer and a grandparent, Julian Cribb is deeply concerned at the existential emergency facing humanity, the mounting scientific evidence for it and the deficit of clear thinking about how to overcome it. |
Here is the state of the main catastrophic risks for 2024, based on trusted information:
- Forest loss: 488 m ha tree cover lost since 2000. Current loss is around 25mha/ year to all causes, including agriculture, development, wildfires and climate.
- Water: 4.1 billion people experienced severe water scarcity for at least part of 2024. This is expected to worsen in 2025.
- Soil loss: 40% of the world’s topsoil is lost or degraded, damaging food and nutrition for 3 billion people.
- Fish: 38% of world capture fisheries are now rated unsustainable.
- War: the Doomsday Clock stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the highest threat level since WW2 and the 1980s.
- Climate: 2024 is the hottest year ever recorded at +1.54 degrees above preindustrial levels. Humans emitted 41.6 bn tonnes of CO2 in 2024. Atmospheric carbon levels were 425ppm in December and rising at record rates.
- Pandemics: Covid: 770m cases and 7m deaths since 2020 and still spreading. HIV: 88m cases and 44m deaths and still spreading. Emerging pandemic risks include Avian Flu, Marburg, Zika and Nipah.
- Food scarcity: Food prices remain high, globally. 770 million people face hunger and 343 million, acute food scarcity. Climate, soil loss, water scarcity and eco-decline are major drivers.
- Extinction: 73% decline in global wildlife populations in past 50 years, driven by habitat loss and degradation due to agriculture and development, overharvesting and spread of toxic chemicals.
- Pollution: 14 million deaths (24%) are linked to a polluted environment, soil, water, food, homes and cities.
- Technology threats: several advanced technologies pose catastrophic risks, driven by industry competition and political manipulation. These include AI, robotic killing machines, nanotechnology, cyber theft, gain-of-function biotechnology and universal surveillance.
- Population: The Earth’s human population reached 8.2 billion in 2024. It is currently growing at 70m a year and is forecast to peak at 10.3bn in the mid-2080s.
- Migration: world population movements hit a new peak of over 400m in 2024, comprising 281 million voluntary migrants and 123 million forced migrants. On average 4% of the human population is on the move each year.
- Misinformation: misinformation, anti-science and lies reached a new peak in 2024, affecting national elections, the climate debate, conflict, social media, mainstream media, advertising, public trust in medicine, and conspiracies.
- This brief summary of current threat levels of the main catastrophic risks menacing the human population overall show that the problem is far more complex that many people seem to think.
It is not just about climate. Or even the threat of nuclear war. It is the whole railway-smash of multiple catastrophes coming together at one time.
If you scrape away the politics, the propaganda and other forms of misleading information, you are left with an undeniable, scientifically-evidenced truth: the root of the problem lies in human overpopulation, overconsumption and over-pollution.
Humanity is now exploding past the liveable boundaries of Planet Earth, as the Stockholm Resilience Centre has been warning us, for fifteen years now.
Any farmer can tell you what happens if you try to graze 1000 cattle in a field large enough to support only 250. They die horribly, as feed and water run out. There are countless examples of this in both nature and human affairs.
According to a growing number of scientists, humans have currently overpopulated the planet by a factor of three or four – and the decline in natural resources, climate crisis, food crisis, pandemics, spreading poisons, extinction rates, soaring migration and resulting social pressures are the direct and self-evident consequences.
No country on earth has a solution to this problem, for the simple reason that countries and their blind self-interest, are the main cause of it. By uniting ourselves into ever-larger territorial units and then vying over the Earth’s dwindling resources we are perfecting an engine for our own extermination – an engine decorated with flags, anthems, symbols, ‘national pride’ and other chauvinistic rubbish.
It is a brutal truth of modern politics that countries are never going to agree with one another to save humanity, or how to do it, before it is far too late to do so. Indeed, many now seem bent on installing crude, autocratic regimes that will accelerate their ruin. 2024 marked an ominous milestone in that grim regression.
If humans are to have any chance of avoiding the collapse that is now so powerfully indicated, then it is only by the individual citizens of the Earth, led by women, joining hands to do so – despite the corruption of rulers, the ignorance of oligarchs and the self-interest of corporations, ethnicities and beliefs.
If we humans are to survive, on a planet fit to be inhabited by our grandchildren, then first of all we must agree to survive. There is no other choice.
An excellent starting point would be to forge a world agreement to survive, which pledges us to addressing each of the catastrophic threats we face. That is what the Earth System Treaty proposes.
Let 2025 be the Year of the Treaty – first first-ever democratic agreement by the people of the Earth to build a brighter, safer future.
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