Humanity is facing a compounding crisis driven by population growth, consumption, pollution and power. These interconnected threats cannot be addressed one by one if civilisation is to endure.

We are now living amid the greatest emergency in humanity’s million-year tenure of the Earth.

This is a compounding catastrophe created by our relentless exploitation of the planet’s finite resources, natural systems and resilience – and the terminal overpressure of our exploding numbers. Collapse, according to Bill Rees, may prove inevitable.

Yet no government or global organisation has a systematic plan to address it – or any way to arrest the compounding damage.

World science has been warning us for over half a century that we are hurtling towards disaster, driven by ten catastrophic risks. However, these risks are rarely discussed together or even seen as part of the same process.

All ten threats are propelled by four main forces: overpopulation, overconsumption, overpollution and money.

Because they are so deeply interlinked, they cannot be resolved one at a time – but must be solved together – and by integrated solutions that make none of them worse.

1. Extinction

Our civilisation is switching off the Earth’s life support system.

Three quarters of large wild animals are already gone, in just a few decades. So are most birds, fish, reptiles and frogs.

Humans and our livestock now make up 96 per cent vertebrate life on land.

We are transforming  forests into deserts and  oceans into dead zones.

We are poisoning the biosphere, which threatens our own existence too.

2. Resource scarcity

Every year, in just seven months, human consumption surpasses what the Earth can renew.

Together, we use  105 billion tonnes of materials annually – 12.8 tonnes each – destroying soils, water and wildlife along the way. Our resource consumption has quadrupled since 1970. It is projected to soar to 160 billion tonnes by 2050.

Acute freshwater scarcity now affects over half the world’s people. Under humanity’s dominion, the forests are falling and the oceans are dying.

3. Global poisoning

We are poisoning every living thing, every day. Especially our children, whom we fill with plastic microparticles and other toxins even before they are born.

Human chemical emissions exceed 220 billion tonnes a year, five times larger than our climate emissions.

They kill 14 million people annually (WHO). This is the largest mass homicide in history. Nobody cares.

Neurotoxins are increasingly linked by science to a 13 point loss in human intelligence since 1975, guaranteeing a dumber race.

4. WMD

12,000 nuclear warheads menace all life on our planet. Even a small nuclear war could kill 2-3 billion people, mostly by starvation.

The Doomsday Clock now sits at 89 seconds to midnight – the closest humans have ever come to absolute annihilation.

5. Hothouse Earth

Despite all the promises and good intentions, emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise sharply.  The world is on track for +2°C by 2050 and +3-4°C by 2100. Beyond that, scientists are warning, it could reach a  point of no-return, becoming totally uninhabitable to large animals, including humans.

So far,  climate predictions have seriously underestimated actual temperature increases.

Under such hostile conditions  many food and water supplies will fail, causing nations and societies to collapse and  refugees to flood worldwide.

Methane from melting permafrost, the ocean floor and tropical wetlands is already venting. This means the Earth is now heating itself - and there is nothing humans can do to stop it.

6. Food scarcity

Our modern food system  wastes over a billion tonnes of food a year. At the same time, it destroys the soils, water, ecology and the very climate it depends on. It is engineered for its own destruction.

The stable climate on which our food supply depends is already extinct. The new one is hostile to farming. Water and soil to grow food are running out. Just feeding a single person for one day costs the Earth the loss of 8.2 kilos of topsoil. In 2024,  295 million people faced acute hunger.

We must urgently replace our present system with  renewable food that recycles all its nutrients and water, uses far fewer resources and is climate-proof.

7. Uncontrolled technologies

We are unleashing a swarm of  dangerous new technologies — AI, global surveillance, robot killers, nanopollution, man-made viruses, and geoengineering.

These have  no regulation, ethical or public oversight or means of control. Nor do the greedy billionaires who promote them and tout their benefits while ignoring their downsides.

Like fossil fuels before them, these tools can each inflict vast global harm if misused or unregulated by society.

8. Pandemics

Since 2000, we’ve had nine pandemics. Several are still running. More are on the way.

All pandemics are man-made: they mainly result from overpopulation, overcrowding, environmental destruction, global travel, misinformation and bad science.

Rogue scientists continue to  create deadly new viruses.

WHO warns the next pandemic may be worse than COVID.

9. Overpopulation

The human population has tripled in a single person’s lifetime.

Each year, we add 70 million more people to a planet already strained to breaking point.

An animal is reckoned by science to be overpopulated when its demands begin to destroy the environment it inhabits and basic needs for its survival. Humans are now considered by many authorities to be well past that point, and thus overpopulated.

Mass migration could run into the billions as climate, conflicts, resource and food scarcities and sea level rise displace entire regions.

10. Misinformation

The  fossil fuel sector pioneered paid disinformation. Politicians, media and other corporates have seized on it.

Mis/disinformation now poisons public discourse, disables democracy, kills individuals and prevents society from taking actions urgently needed for our own safety.

The human emergency

All these megathreats are connected and must be solved together, not one at a time. That way lies only disaster. The Council for the Human Future describes this constellation of threats as ‘ the human emergency’.

Global action by a united humanity is not only necessary – but possible. The Internet enables global discussion, rational decision and positive action. (As well as lies and nonsense).

Beneficial solutions to the main threats already exist and some (such as abandoning fossil fuels) are well-known – but, as yet, there is no global plan to implement them.

A plan

If we want to survive, humans must first agree to survive. Without a strong global consensus on how to secure our future, there is no safe way forward.

We must agree to tackle all ten catastrophic threats to our future, together – and as a matter of absolute urgency.

That is why the Council for the Human Future considers we need an Earth System Treaty – a single, binding, legal agreement to act on all the threats that surround us.

An umbrella agreement that any individual, as well as any group, company or nation can sign and pledge themselves to.

This would be the first truly global act of democracy, open to all members of our species, an agreement to secure our children’s future.

The Treaty

An Earth System Treaty is an agreement among rational, concerned citizens to work together to prosper on a habitable planet.

It seeks to safely abate each of the ten massive risks which confront us – and commits us to taking safe action to remedy them all.

Especially, it binds us to lowering human numbers and moderating our consumption of resources by re-use.

It commits us to living within the  safe boundaries of the Earth, as defined by the Stockholm and Potsdam institutes and many others.

Its aim is to ensure our grandchildren can survive on a habitable planet – instead of a ruined one.

It is among the most important, inspiring and noble causes ever undertaken by humans.

Earth Citizens

The Council for the Human Future also considers that now is the time for a new kind of human to emerge – the Earth Citizen.

An Earth Citizen is one who believes in preserving a green, habitable Earth, rich in plants, animals and other diverse species, for our grandchildren.

Not the charred, desecrated cinder we are presently creating for them.

An Earth Citizen supports positive action against all major threats to human survival and the Earth system that sustains life.

An Earth Citizen has a personal commitment to do something positive, every day, to help build and secure a sustainable Earth in future.

An Earth Citizen is loyal to our common humanity and the planet that gives us life, rather than the competing nations, religions, businesses and cultures that would destroy it.

Let us all strive to become Earth Citizens – and uphold these simple values.

Unless we first agree together to survive, we probably won’t.