Biggest Problems in the World

We’ve established that humanity is the root cause.

Great… what now?

Well, we’re here and we’re staying, so there’s no turning back.

Question is – How do we move forward?

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Table of Contents show

Defining the Problem(s)

We should first ask ourselves:

“What issues have [or, will have] the most impact on the greatest number of people? Or, more generally, all life.”

The answer to that question should prioritize what order we tackle the world’s problems. This is where our collective resources should be allocated. We also have to take into account issues we’re causing indirectly and what problems are secondary symptoms of broader problems.

Let’s take a look and see what the ‘internet’ deems are the biggest difficulties facing humanity and the world today.

A Plethora of Issues

If we do a generic google search, we come up with a cornucopia of problems. Here are some of the big problems, in no particular order (and definitely not comprehensive!):

Overpopulation
Over-consumption
Food insecurity
Water scarcity
Climate change
Global warming
Pollution
Habitat destruction
Biodiversity loss and species extinctions
Deforestation / Desertification
Ocean acidification / water pollution
Waste and waste disposal
Resource depletion
Wealth Inequality / Financial Uncertainty / Poverty
Inclusive growth
Sustainable development
Future of work / unemployment / economic opportunity
Job opportunities
Pandemics
Future Technology uncertainties / Nanotechnology / AI
Future of the internet / Fourth Industrial Revolution
Gender / Race equality
Long-term investment / Investment strategy
Future healthcare / well-being
Happiness
Education
War and violence / Nuclear Weapons
Safety and security
Religious conflicts
Government corruption and accountability

Yeah… so quite a few things. If you looked at just the above list, you’d probably throw up your hands in disgust. It’s just way too overwhelming. The world looks pretty much screwed. Unfortunately, there are no easy fixes to any of these problems – otherwise they would be solved already. And the sad part is, the list can probably keep on going for a few more pages. Also, it is worth noting that we have all these issues due to the root cause.

But, the thing of it is, that a lot of these difficulties have already been solved locally to some extent. Just not for EVERYONE. So, there is hope! Again, the list above is a broad overview of the ENTIRE worlds’ issues.

Fortunately, the UN made up their own list for Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, which is a bit more… digestible. See the infographic below:

And you can do a deep dive yourself into all those goals here: **sdgs.un.org/goals**

Still, having 17 HUGE things wrong with the world is a pretty daunting prospect to tackle. Let’s put on our first principles ‘hard hat’ and get to work. What do humans need to survive and work our way up from there. What will affect the most people? It seems to me that some of the goals are secondary products of other, underlying issues. But let’s dive in!

A Dearth of Basic Needs

Most of the problems that plague humanity now are the same difficulties that have beleaguered humanity for as long as humans have been around. If we are supposedly living in the future, then why is a big portion of humanity still stuck at the base of Maslow’s pyramid.

(A little background: Maslow was this dude who took a look at all the ‘stuff’ that an individual needs in life and prioritized it into a nifty pyramid for us. Essentially, once one’s basic needs are met at the bottom of the pyramid, an individual can then build on that foundation. To lead a more ‘rewarding’ life, one can add on successive upper levels to achieve full self-actualization, or complete self-fulfillment and contentment.)

It seems like a lot of humanity can’t even get off of the two bottom floors of this pyramid. Actually about 50% of the world’s population is stuck on these two rungs. It’s really sad that in today’s day and age, people are still starving, thirsty, and have no roof over their heads.

Directly and indirectly these basic needs are still primary issues facing humanity. These basic needs will have to be addressed in order to level up everyone to the same “base level”. Satisfying basic needs for all is a necessity if we really want to make a positive change in the world. Advancing our civilization requires all of us to step up and create a sustainable planet for all its inhabitants.

We have to make sure our basic needs are prioritized before moving forward.

We need to ‘attack’ the issues, from the bottom up. I was in boy scouts for a stint growing up. I specifically remember one survival lesson – the rule of 3’s. Man can survive only up to 3 minutes without oxygen, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. Of course, this is a rule of thumb, and a little different for everyone, but it stuck with me. Humans need these baseline needs met in order to survive. Once these requirements are met completely and fully, then we can think about attacking other issues.

Back to the Fundamentals

Jumping back to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals above, I noticed that some of the goals can be loosely grouped together. And going with the premise that people require their basic needs be addressed before considering other less immediate concerns, two of these goals stand out and move to the front of the pack – Zero Hunger and Clean Water:

I want to note, that while poverty / wealth inequality can be seen as intrinsically tied to clean water scarcity and food shortages, they should be treated separately. Because, usually, if you have no money, you typically aren’t able to buy food. But I want to bring up that money is a man-made construct. One cannot just survive on money alone (it is a means to an end, in this case food is the end). Since food and clean water is needed for survival, I believe food and water should be a given for all humans, and for that matter, all creatures. The “fictional” construct of money should not be tied to basic human needs. Minimal decency demands that food and clean water should be available to all. After all, if you are malnourished or thirsty, good luck trying to do anything else productive.

Once humanity’s immediate consumption needs are met, we should make sure that our “home” planet and the biosphere are in good working order. How are we supposed to function with the world falling apart around us? How can we be expected to climb out of Maslow’s bottom two tiers, if we can’t rest, feel safe, or secure if the world’s climate and ecosystem is in complete bedlam. We have to make sure we are not inadvertently causing disastrous consequences down the road with what are seemingly slight perturbations today. The outwardly benign actions of today, could compound to cause dire effects tomorrow.

That being said, all these initiatives are pretty closely related and for our purposes can be combined into an overall problem area for safeguarding our home [planet] and curtailing environmental impact:

The five goals above: Affordable and clean energy, Responsible consumption and production, Climate action, and life below the water, and life on land, are all interconnected and affect one another. These should be looked at as a whole system when coming to an all-inclusive solution towards safeguarding our planetary environment.

All said and told, the biggest problems that affect the most people are Fresh Water Scarcity, Food Shortages, and Environmental Impact. These are the BIG 3 issues that we need to prioritize and deal with first before addressing other major issues. We need to get these first steps right to build a better tomorrow.

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Fresh Water Scarcity

Years ago, admittedly, I was surprised to learn water was not abundant everywhere. I couldn’t believe it, fresh, clean water for most of the world’s population is hard to come by (and getting harder). We learned in elementary school that 70% of the world is covered in water. That’s a crap-ton of water. The world is huge – you look at a picture from space and basically the entire globe is blue. But, when you take a look at how that water is actually distributed, it’s a completely different picture. The portion that is readily accessible that is fresh water isn’t a big piece of the pie at all.

In my area of the US, there is a lot of water. We hardly know what to do with it all. Of course, intuitively I knew areas surrounding deserts and drier climates didn’t have as much water. But, I thought there was at least ‘enough’ to get by. Once I did a little digging, I realized I was very mistaken. Millions around the globe do not have drinking water. As the world’s population increases and modernizes, clean, fresh water becomes a pretty finite resource. Also, ‘pockets’ of fresh water can be very localized – Canada might have a crap-ton of water, but South Africa, has major restrictions in place for water usage.

Below is a diagram showing the breakdown of water on earth.

Saline, or salt water, makes up a vast majority of the water on earth. When you break it down, less than 1% of the world’s water is accessible to humans in surface water form. Fresh water is harder to come by then you would think. As you can see above, most of the surface sources of fresh water comes from lakes, swamps, and rivers. But even then, those have to be treated before they can become clean drinking water. The Wait but Why team has a great visual breakdown of the earth’s water too.

Arguably, one could make the case that tapping into the ground water would provide a semi-accessible larger source of fresh water, but this unfortunately isn’t as simple as one might think. First off, a decent portion of the ground water is widely dispersed throughout the top layers of the earth and is not readily ‘harvest-able’. So unfortunately, water doesn’t always amass in a neat and tidy aquifer for us to tap into.

Don’t get me wrong, there are aquifers and they are plentiful in some parts of the world, but it still isn’t within most people’s means to get access to aquifers. When we tapped our well – 40 years ago, we had to hire a specialized drilling company and it was about $10,000 – a price tag not many could afford. Local principalities and cities can benefit from economies of scale and tap into water sources on a larger scale for the use of its residents; but, local fresh water sources and aquifers are still only finite resources.

A lot of areas of the earth are naturally drier and don’t have an abundant supply of these sources. With climate change, a lot of the currently “okay” areas might go through more severe droughts and have less water down the road.

Another factor to consider is that in areas of the world where there is little access to readily available fresh water, fighting drought conditions and putting out big wildfires is going to be next to impossible to combat. The inhabitants of regions already prone to lack of water issues have a really bleak outlook ahead. These disasters will potentially displace more people – creating more destruction and making an already bad situation, worse. This is only going to be exacerbated in the coming decades due to climate change. We’ll see more severe droughts and forest fires.

In essence, fresh water is hard to come by and clean drinking water is even harder to come by. Some estimates say that 11.5% of humans (about 900 million people) do not have access to clean fresh water. Water scarcity will only get worse as time progresses. We need to put a plan into action to provide water to those places and people who need it.

Food Insecurity

Going hand in hand with providing clean water for all, is providing sustenance for everyone on the planet. No one should be allowed to starve – human and otherwise. This is not negotiable.

According to the UN, 9.9% of humanity is malnourished or starving. That means that about 800 million people are currently literally dying of hunger. This is unconscionable. While there is so much excess for some, others have practically nothing to eat.

There are many factors that can be blamed for the malnourishment of hundreds of millions of people. Unfortunately, it’s looking like the amount of people who go hungry will increase over the coming decades. Not only will we have to feed more as the population explodes, but food insecurity will be exacerbated by climate change as well. As the effects of climate change becomes more prevalent, we’ll see fertile land dwindle, mass desertification, upswings in droughts and forest fires, less effective pesticides, more invasive blights, and the list goes on and on.

First off, we have a land problem to look at. Of the total surface area – humanity uses 35.4% of the earth’s total land surface area (for settlement, crops and livestock). Furthermore, if you take out the uninhabitable land (barren and glaciers), humanity uses almost 50% of the remaining land area which is eating into the forests more and more every year. There is something wrong with this picture. Humans take and take and take… soon there won’t be anything left. (See The Giving Tree book recommendation below.)

What it really boils down to though is inefficiency. Inefficiencies across the board: in farming methods, processes, equipment, strategies, and unsustainable practices. There is no uniformity between nations or farming practices.

Not only is humanity using much of the habitable land, the current food model is unsustainable. For every pound of beef, you need six pounds of feed. We produce more grain worldwide to feed cattle then ourselves. There’s something wrong with that picture.

We are “strip mining” and raping the land. First, by deforestation, then by pulling all the nutrients we can out of the soil for mass production. This process has already occurred in the last few hundred years in many developed countries, including the US and most European countries.

And it’s still occurring today in many developing nations. South American countries are blitz farming the Amazon Rainforest. Our planet’s greatest source of biodiversity and one of the biggest natural carbon converters. Southeast Asian and African nations are turning important ecosystems into plantation farms. Local ecosystems all over the planet are being destroyed to make way for humanity’s consumption and living needs.

Overall, with more and more people, land is becoming a scarce resource. If we don’t act now to protect the natural biomass we have left, people will chop down entire forests for farming or livestock to feed the multitudes. This is unacceptable. Farming practices need to be completely overhauled and streamlined, if we are going to have any chance of feeding the world’s billions over the next few decades. More sustainable farming practices are out there. We just need to refine and educate the populations of the world on how to use them.

The world depends on implementing better methods and creating new breakthroughs in agriculture if we want to survive and thrive into the next century.

Environmental Impact of Humanity

There is a fault in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – it only addresses the individual. However, the individual doesn’t live in a vacuum. Each one of us lives in the real world; we are affected by everything that surrounds us. This is the real world:

In order for the individual to thrive, we need to ensure that external conditions are acceptable in two ways. One, the “bedrock of society” has to be solid and supportive. And secondly, and MOST importantly, the world’s environment has to be conducive to facilitate normal human operations. After all, how can you expect to complete your normal errands if there’s a snow storm, hurricane, forest fire, or heat wave when you walk out your front door? The sadly ironic part about the whole thing is, we have no one to blame for the degrading environment, but ourselves.

The effect of almost 8 billion people on the planet, both directly and indirectly, is mind boggling in scale. Man is having and will have a calamitous effect on the environment, the ecosystems of the planet, and all its inhabitants for centuries to come if we do nothing.

Here is an abbreviated list of some of the human activity causing ecological devastation:

Excess greenhouse/atmospheric compounds causing global warming and climate change
Trash and excessive waste disposal
Contaminants dumped into the world’s water systems
Ecosystem damage, biodiversity loss, and habitat destruction
Deforestation / desertification
Ocean acidification / ocean flora decline
Extinction of endangered species
Overfishing / Overhunting marine and land animal populations
Superfluous agricultural activity

And the list can just keep on going and going…

It really is downright overwhelming. We could leave fixing the environmental problems to someone else – make it a problem for our children and grandchildren to solve. But that’s really not fair to them. We have to take responsibility; we have to draw a line in the sand and do the right thing for the planet and the future.

So where do we even start?

We have to ask – What is the highest priority and potentially the most potent problem? If we had to choose, what would be the one thing that would eclipse all the other issues listed? In other words, what is the one thing that if taken to an extreme would have the most detrimental effect on the world?

That one thing is CLIMATE CHANGE.

While the other issues could wipe out whole ecosystems and a multitude of humans, climate change, theoretically, has the capacity to destroy nearly all life on Earth if left unchecked. Climate change, taken to an extreme, could cause a runaway greenhouse effect. And possibly, given time, could make the Earth uninhabitable. We only have to look at our closest neighboring planet, Venus, to exemplify this. On Venus, it rains liquid sulphuric acid and temperatures exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The atmosphere is almost entirely composed of CO2 and pressures exceed 90 times that on Earth.

That is the doomsday scenario for Earth if we do nothing. Will it get that bad? Probably not (well I hope not), but anywhere even remotely close to that is bad news. All other problems are essentially moot if climate change is not addressed. This is why our top priority should be in reimagining how our civilization operates and gearing human activities to head off the worst of climate change.

I want to back up a second though, this section is not called climate change or environmental pollution. It’s called Environmental Impact. In the 21^st century, humanity literally has an impact on every part of the world. While climate change is the most pressing issue in safeguarding our future, it is not the only issue. All the other instances of humanity’s environmental impact should not be ignored. But, I feel that if there is a strong focus on climate change measures and a bold solid plan to combat climate change, the public will be more cognizant of other environmental impact factors as well. Thus, I believe, if climate change is addressed seriously, it could have a positive domino effect on all the other problems associated with humanity’s environmental impact simply due to communal awareness.

Addressing climate change in its entirety is where all mankind needs to focus its efforts for the foreseeable future, if there is to be a bright future at all. This is the Big Picture we should be concentrating on. It is humankind’s ultimate trial to safeguard the future. If we don’t fix this mess, every living thing on the planet will be negatively impacted for centuries to come.

We need to restore nature to its ‘default settings’ and learn how to be symbiotic with the natural world, not be in direct competition with it. The future depends on it.

“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change”
– President Obama

The Start of Something Grand

Another way of looking at what problems face the world is to understand what issues have the ability to affect the most lifeforms on the planet. Yes, all life. While, these three big issues are not the only problems, they are the greatest problems humanity faces. In the upcoming decades, these problems will affect the greatest number of people. Once the big three issues are addressed, we can start stacking on solutions to other problems to find even more ways to improve the quality of life for all.

If I were to pick, of the three main problems in the world – Fresh Water Scarcity, Food Insecurity, and humanity’s environmental impact (with an emphasis on climate change), protecting the environment should take the highest priority.

I believe that stabilizing the impact of climate change is the one thing that we MUST get right to ensure humanity, our civilization, and our planet prospers into the future. First, we need A BOLD PLAN in place to address climate change. Then, we can work out ways to attack the problem of fresh water scarcity and food shortages.

It’s not that all the other issues facing the world are not important. The simple fact of it is, if we don’t address the above issues first, we won’t have the time, the capacity, or frankly, the need to solve those other problems because humanity and the planet will be in complete ruin.

If we don’t act soon, we’ll end up having to be constantly reactive instead of proactive. Thus, I’ve prioritized the problems above because, I feel, these, are the worst the planet and humanity faces. There’s no telling what we can accomplish if we make a concerted and conscious effort to work together. Let’s make sure our combined efforts are focused on attacking the problems of greatest concern first.

So yes, humans are the reason for the problems we see in the world. We have outgrown our natural ecological niche and our proverbial footprint spans every continent. We now have to learn to coexist with the natural world and realize that we can’t take our only planet for granted. If we get the biggest three problems in the world – fresh water scarcity, food shortages, and climate change under control, we can branch out to work on the next set of problems. If we don’t reign in our superfluous habits, the consequences for the future will be dire.

We can do better; we NEED to do better.

Let’s come to the realization that no one person is going to swoop in and save the world. No one can save us but ourselves. We have to choose to want a brighter future, we have to understand why, and we need to protect the only home we have. Our environment is really a fragile thing. If we want humanity to continue and live on the only planet suitable for all our needs, we need to draw a line in the sand, come together, and realize enough is enough. This planet is our only home. We need to treat it and all life with respect so that we can make the Earth, once again, a paradise for all to prosper.

Follow up – What’s the deal with Climate Change?