![The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith](/cover_659403.jpg "The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith")
Waste, especially plastic waste, is a serious global problem on both land and sea.
ENERGY USE World energy use is increasing, especially in the most rapidly developing economies.
CLIMATE CHANGE The build-up of carbon emissions has reached a critical point.
PLANETARY BOUNDARIES There are limits beyond which human impact on the Earth’s balanced ecosystems will have as yet unknown consequences.
Vital Statistics
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Smith is Secretary General of the London-based
international peacebuilding organization International Alert, and
former Director of the International Peace Research Institute
in Oslo. He has also held fellowships at the Norwegian Nobel
Institute and Hellenic Foundation for Foreign and European
Policy and was, for over a decade, the Chair of the Institute for
War and Peace Reporting.
He is the author of The State of the Middle East, as well as
successive editions of The State of the World Atlas and The
Atlas of War and Peace. At International Alert he produced
the path-breaking A Climate of Conflict (2007) report on the
links between climate change, peace, and war. He is regularly
invited to advise governments and international organizations
on policies and structures for peacebuilding, including through
his membership of the Advisory Group for the UN Peacebuilding
Fund, of which he was Chair until 2011.
He was awarded the OBE in 2002, and blogs on international
politics at www.dansmithsblog.com
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Introduction
Ours is a period of change – continual, multi-form, and
multi-level – technical, scientific, economic, and political.
Scientific discovery feeds into technical innovation at dizzying speed,
changing how we communicate with each other, what we can know about
far-flung parts of the world and how quickly we can know it, how we do
business, what we understand about the natural world and how the human
brain works, how many diseases we can cure, and the kinds of energy supply
we can utilise. In every corner of our lives as individuals and as communities
and societies, there is change.
THE THREE GREAT CHANGES
The theme is repeated in the big global picture. Five major issues and how
the world – its leaders, governments, companies, international organizations,
individuals, everybody – responds to them will define our future. To take
them on, change is needed. And three great changes at approximately ten-
year intervals over the past two decades will set the terms and the tone of
how that response shapes up.
In the 1980s, the Cold War seemed stuck fast, likely to be a long-enduring
feature of world politics. Yet in half a year in 1989 its basic components
unravelled, and in a second series of events the Soviet Union came to an end
in five swift months of 1991.
For the 1990s, then, the USA seemed set to enjoy a golden age as the
sole superpower while its allies basked in the security it generated. Those
comfortable assumptions were detonated in 2001, not only by the force of
the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but by the wide-
reaching, aggressive, and ultimately self-defeating, US “war on terror”. The
golden age was gone and there was a widespread sense of insecurity as the
9/11 attacks were followed by others in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere,
as well as by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Underneath that, however, was a different kind of security. Economic growth
and prosperity seemed broadly dependable. There were winners and losers as
always, but for most people in the rich world times were pretty good, and for
many
