Last week, I summarized five of the eight critical shifts identified in a recent UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Navigating New Horizons, which is “a global foresight report on planetary health and human well-being.”
I also touched on a sixth critical shift: persistent and widening inequalities.
This week I will dig deeper into this sixth challenge, as well as two remaining challenges that are really about governance: misinformation, declining trust and polarization (to which growing inequalities doubtless contribute) and polycentricity and the diffusion of governance.
The UNEP report is blunt: “Immense inequalities of income and wealth intensify within and between countries worldwide.”
For example, “while the top 10 per cent account for more than three quarters of total global wealth, the bottom 50 per cent of the world population own just 2 per cent or almost nothing.”
Moreover, “between 1995 and 2021, the top 1 per cent captured 38 per cent of the global increase in total wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent again accounted for just 2 per cent.”
In particular, the report notes, “inequalities of wealth and income lead to ecological inequities,” with marginalized populations experiencing “unequal access to clear air and water, fertile soil, stable climate and vibrant biodiversity” — and that, in turn, exacerbates forced migration as places become uninhabitable due to ecological changes.
This level of inequality can only exacerbate polarization and distrust, the seventh critical shift we face.
It does so in two ways: First, “this growing concentration of wealth … confers huge economic and political power on a tiny elite.”
But even worse, it contributes to “social stratification and undermining public institutions and social solidarity,” thus undermining confidence in governments.
In addition, and further contributing to the loss of trust and faith in governments, these inequalities are a failure of governance: “income inequality is rising due to unequal access to education, limited employment opportunities and inadequate social services, as well as regressive tax policies,” the report notes.
Turning then to the seventh critical shift — misinformation, declining trust and polarization — the report notes: “Misinformation and disinformation, increasingly powered by AI, is identified as the most severe global risk over the next two years in the latest Global Risk Report of the World Economic Forum (2024), undermining social cohesion, trust in institutions and fuelling political divides.”
This situation is due in part to the decline of mainstream media, “further undermining the ability to provide accurate news,” as well as the deliberate campaigns to undermine science, especially climate science, coming from some political and corporate sectors.
The resulting weakening of trust in science undermines democratic institutions, the report notes, making it “much harder to design and deliver effective policies to tackle societal challenges, including the climate crisis.”
The final critical shift is a diffusion of governance, partly because of “a recognition that national governments have been unable to address global sustainability challenges — either operating individually or multilaterally.”
But also governments have “allowed some relocation of power and responsibilities” in the face of a plethora of non-state actors that have been engaged as “agents of change.”
Such diffusion of power, creating a more polycentric governance system, is not necessarily a bad thing if it is genuinely a sharing of power and not just an abdication of responsibility.
But it does require an assurance of “very high levels of transparency, accountability and integrity,” which is not often apparent.
But surprisingly perhaps, in the face of these eight critical shifts, the message of the UNEP report is not one of despair.
On the contrary, there is hope: “The good news,” states the UNEP, “is that just as the impact of multiple crises is compounded when they are linked, so are the solutions.”
Thus we can “shift the momentum from the brink of polycrisis to polystability.”
The report suggests there are two key changes we need to make: “a focus on intergenerational equity and a new social contract reinforcing shared values that unite us rather than divides us.”
A third important change that will help bring about the needed transformation, UNEP notes, is “placing a new global emphasis on well-being metrics rather than pure economic growth.”
I will examine these key changes next week.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
