How to Fix Our Broken World

Broadly speaking the world faces 7 crises:

• A resource crisis (the peaking of oil, water crisis, population growth, depletion of resources, over-fishing, overconsumption...);
• An ecological crisis (climate change, deforestation, desertification, biodiversity loss, land degradation, coral reef destruction, toxic pollution, eutrophication...);
• A health crisis (HIV/AIDS, obesity, lack of access to healthcare, child mortality, pollution-induced conditions, mental health problems...);
• A welfare crisis (poverty - hunger, inadequate sanitation, homelessness, refugees, slums...);
• A humanitarian crisis (war, persecution, genocide, human rights abuses, human trafficking, child exploitation...);
• A social crisis (crime, loss of community, addictions, prison overcrowding...);
• An economic crisis (gap between rich and poor, outsourcing, recession...).

These crises have the following characteristics:

• They cause an immense amount of suffering.
• They affect everyone: not just 'developing' countries but 'developed' too; not just 'poor' people but 'rich' too; not just humans but all forms of life.
• They are all interlinked. They feed on each other. For example, the ecological crisis is decreasing yields, which makes the resource crisis more potent. All of the crises have a negative impact on the welfare crisis, e.g. conflict displaces people and intensifies poverty. In many ways, we are dealing with one enormous crisis.
• Either on their own or together, they threaten to precipitate a catastrophic collapse of society on a global scale.

Note also that the list of problems above is definitely not exhaustive.