Hi. In this lecture what I'd like to do is give you an overview of the state of the world. I want you to have a sense of the greatest vulnerabilities that exist in the world today. This is important, because as me move onto bigger issues, you may have to make a choice about the arenas that you're working in. Having a sense of where the greatest challenges are may help you choose actions that will have the most impact. The topics I want to cover are population, water, food, urbanization, and a little bit about education. Having a sense of how the world is likely to change in the next 30 or 50 years is important because it'll help you prepare your company for these changes. This could be recognizing risks to creating new products and services to satisfy the emerging needs of a changing world. As I wrote this lecture, the world's population was about 7.37 billion people. This graph shows the UN's projections for population through the year 2100. This forecast is the UN median variant. The median variant which is the most often cited among the various series assumes a growth in the use of family planning in growing countries that will result in reductions in fertility in patterns similar to what occurred in other countries. Population growth is slowing, but there's something called population momentum, which means that overall growth continues for several generations. Population momentum is the tendency of populations to continue grow after fertility rates have fallen to replacement levels. The interesting about population growth is where it'll take place over the next 30 to 60 years. The graph shows population projections through 2100 with countries divided into developed and less developed. All of the growth, that is 100% of the growth over the next 80 years will occur in less developed countries. These are the countries with the fewest resources to provide the housing, the food, water, healthcare, transportation, jobs and so on for several billion more people. Another demographic trend that separates industrialized and developing countries is population aging. Particularly in Japan and Europe, low birth rates and increased longevity combine to increase the ratio of elderly, so people over 65 to working age people. And that's arbitrarily set at 15 years to 64 years of age. So there are fewer workers to support each elderly person. As the graph shows, the US is behind Europe and Japan. What does this mean for business? Because there's fewer workers to provide old age support programs through taxes. Older folks like me will be working longer, [LAUGH] changing the way your company looks at career trajectories is important. Making adjustments for older employees might be necessary. Outside the company, there may be some opportunities. But, the elderly don't tend to buy as much stuff as younger people who are setting up households and raising children. Elderly people do need services and some products adopted to aging. I want to mention one last thing about population. I attended the UN conference on population and development in 1994 and at that conference, new evidence was presented about the linkage between educating girls and young women in slowing population growth. The longer women stay in school, the later they start families, and those families tend to be a bit smaller. On top of the population effects, these women are better prepared for the work force. They'll make a larger contribution to the economic well-being of developing countries. So, educating girls is important. If your company's supply chain ebcourages girls to leave school, these benefits are lost and reduced. I want to talk about urbanization. The next graph shows projections about rural to urban migration through 2050. All, again 100% of growth, will be an urban areas. This has a lots of ramifications about what people will need. Designs for cost efficient and energy efficient urban infrastructure will be in demand. This means housing, other buildings, transportation, water and sewage, sanitation, energy transmission, health care, emergency service, the list is really long. There are dozens of mega cities. These are huge cities which are magnets for the rural poor seeking opportunities. These huge cities have pluses and minuses. From an infrastructure perspective, they're efficient because a set of infrastructure supports more people. But their size creates problems especially for transportation, with commuting time losses, traffic accidents, and lots of pollution from traffic. They also tend to have a large impact. You can see from this image from the Guardian Newspaper, that with just 6.7% of the world's population, Mega Cities produce 12.5% of the solid wastes and use 9.3% of all electricity. We also produce 14.6% of the world's GDP or economic production. With careful planning and design, these cities can be important places for sustainability improvements. If your company operates in the transportation, logistics, or engineering areas, it should looking about how it can get involved in improving how Mega-cities work. Now let's shift to water. Here are two maps from a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute. They show water stress or water scarcity today and in 2030. There are lots of measures of water stress and water scarcity. The one used in these maps is the proportion of water withdrawn compared to renewable supply. Scarcity which is shown in red, occurs when human withdrawal exceeds 40% of renewable supply, this is considered an unsustainable level of use. With withdrawals of 20 to 40% of supply showing yellow and orange, implies it during droughts are going to be problems and that water has to be transported to regions with low access. Now there are other measures of stress in scarcity that personally make more sense to me, but this is what these maps use. What the maps show is a slight increase in water stress or scarcity through time. Companies that use lots of water will have to deal with shortages and plan on sharing with communities and the environment. We'll return to this issue when we take a closer look at context based sustainability related to water. It also means that new products will have to be designed to use less water to help conserve or reuse water. Coca-Cola and Pepsico have faced these challenges for sometime. Listen to Pepsico's plans for its water use in Latin America. This is from October of 2016. PepsiCo will restore or protect a handful of watersheds in Latin American countries in which it operates including Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Guatemala. The company plans to replenish all of the water used during manufacturing in high water risk areas by returning it to the water shed from which it was taken. That's pretty amazing. Replenish all the water it uses. Now I want to talk a little bit about food and hunger. This map from the World Food Program shows the prevalence of under nourishment. This is from 2015. The red areas are countries where 25% or more citizens suffer from under nourishment. The darker areas are 35% or higher. So, in 2015, hunger is a huge issue. The World Food Program estimates about 800 million people are under nourished worldwide. The World Resources Institute produced the next three graphics. Population growth means food production, actually calorie production has to increase by 69% between now and 2050 to feed the expected 9.6 billion people that will be on the earth at that time. In the next map, the pink, the peach, and the red areas show where climate change will probably reduce crop yields between today and 2050. The darkish red is a predicted yield decrease of 40 to 50%. Now, if we could overlay population growth on this map, we'd see that many of the countries with the highest population increase, will also have the greatest food production decreases. This is a huge problem. You might say that the green areas where production are increased will just have to send the food to the other areas, but it isn't that simple. Many of the red and pink country's poor, so can't buy food. Giving food away is not an answer either. To have a viable agricultural sector, that is for a country to feed itself. Farmers can't compete with free food. Unless a country is really rich, it has to feed itself to prevent hunger and starvation. Can your company participate in alleviating hunger? Doesn't have to be directly involved in growing food. To grow more food in developing countries requires better transportation, better storage, better communication resources. It also requires banks to offer credit and education about best practices. If your company sources agricultural products from developing nations, you need to very sensitive to how your purchases affect hunger in those countries. We'll come back to this supply chain issue in a couple of weeks. I've posted a two minute video titled, Hunger: What We Need to Know. It's a great example of social marketing and it conveys a lot of information about what's needed to overcome real poverty and hunger. Try to find time to look at it. These are some of the biggest issues facing the world in the next 25 to 30 years. An issue underlying water and food is climate change. We begin to examine it next. Then, we'll take a closer look at water. Thanks.
