![The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith](/cover_659403.jpg "The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith")
people in poorer countries conditions were also improving a little.
Much of that was destabilized by the third great change of the recent era,
as unsustainable patterns of lending and borrowing fed a shattering credit
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crunch in 2007 and 2008, triggering recession and a financial catastrophe
whose full effects had not played out some four or five years later.
If we look back over those 20 years, we can see how quickly confidence about
the future can be generated and then lost. We need something rather better
than that moodiness, something more stable and persistent, if we are going
to be successful in facing up to the five big challenges we face as a global
community: wealth and poverty, war and peace, rights and respect, and the
health both of the people and of the planet.
WEALTH & POVERTY
The world is marked by large inequalities of wealth. Multiple further
inequalities flow from that starting point – dramatically different degrees
of access to education, health care, good food, clean water, sanitation,
reasonable housing. Though the proportion of the world’s population that
lives in the extreme poverty of less than $1 a day is declining, progress is slow
and more than one-third of all people live on less than $2 a day. The benefits
of economic growth are not being distributed evenly or anything like it, and
at the same time the model of economic development is environmentally
unsustainable.
At the start of the century, world leaders undertook to make a major new
effort to help developing countries move forward. In the confident spirit of
that time, more money was committed and targets were set with a fixed date
of 2015. These Millennium Development Goals have guided Western countries’
official development assistance ever since. In the much less confident spirit in
which these donor governments are working a decade on, still reeling from
the economic aftershocks of 2008, it is clear that there has been progress
but the targets will not be met. And some of the most significant economic
development and alleviation of poverty in the last decade seems to have
owed very little, if anything, to the Millennium Development Goals.
Above all, on the economic front, the events of 2008 and since have
generated a growing realization of another axis of change. For a long
time it has been recognized that the economic output of China and India
was growing much more quickly than that of Europe and the USA. China’s
eventual assumption of the position as the world’s largest economy – and
India’s as the third largest, with the USA staying second – has been long
anticipated. Whether that makes them in a meaningful sense two of the
three wealthiest countries is another matter, because their output per person
remains much lower than in the USA and Europe. There is, nonetheless, a
distinct political weight that comes with economic size. And the effect has
been emphasized because, while the USA’s recovery from 2008 has been
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halting and uncertain, Europe has faced a serial crisis and renewed recessions.
The contrast with China has only served to emphasize its rise. The European
Union’s combined economic scale remains huge; it is the largest single market
in the world. But the combined political weight of its member states, which
has always seemed less than the sum of its parts, has diminished because of
the political leaders’ seeming inability to find a solution to Europe’s problems
that retains credibility for more than a few months.
WAR & PEACE
This is not a peaceful world, and yet it is more peaceful today than at
any time since before the First World War and, some argue, ever. Military
spending remains high, and armed conflict remains a major cause of death,
yet by comparison with earlier times, there are markedly fewer wars and they
are less lethal. There has been an avalanche of peace agreements in the two
decades since the end of the Cold War, and a major, sustained if quiet effort
not only to make peace, but then to lay the foundations for long-term peace
in conflict-affected countries.
It would be wrong to look at the issues of war and peace and declare job
done. In many countries, it is not so much a case of having achieved peace
as, rather, of bottling up conflict. Indeed, declaring job done prematurely is
a repeated failing of the Western governments who often offer themselves
as custodians of peace processes in war-torn countries. In many countries,
there are patterns of violent conflict that are from a different mould than
civil wars. They are generated by, and reinforce, a dangerous intersection
between crime and politics, and in several cases they revolve around the
trade in illegal narcotics or other illegal and massively profitable enterprises.
The main international institutions on which we rely for responding to armed
conflicts are strikingly ill-prepared for this kind of violent conflict. A high
United
