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Headlines from the Future !!!
1). Economies Go Underground
This is the decade of the do-it-yourself city. Already more than 800 million people--almost one in seven inhabitants of the planet--live in shantytowns, often in tar-paper shacks without water, sewers or electricity. There's no government, no Donald Trump or other real estate mogul anywhere on the globe with the means or desire to build enough homes to make these communities disappear. Instead they will grow by 16,000 people per day, the U.N. has projected in its "State of the World's Cities 2010/2011" report, to hit a total of 889 million in 2020.
Similarly more than half the workers of the world--or 1.8 billion people--now earn their wages in unauthorized street markets and other businesses that are not registered, not licensed and not counted in official employment statistics. The number of people in these firms will grow to two-thirds of the global workforce by 2020, according to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a think tank devoted to fostering free market institutions. There's no government, no Daddy Warbucks, no corporate conglomerate that can rival this scale of job creation.
So the future belongs to the people in the world's sprawling shantytowns and burgeoning street markets. Over the coming decade, squatters and informal businesses will key their own economic advancement.
Shack dwellers in South Africa are pushing a new community empowerment agenda. The first step: legal access to electricity, because overturned candles and kerosene lanterns have caused many deadly fires. Then, self-determination and development. "The house on its own cannot solve the problem," says S'bu Zikode, who lives in Durban's Kennedy Road shack settlement and is president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a squatter organization. "It's not only money that creates dignity. All governments should accept that our communities are part of the greater society."
Three thousand miles north, in Lagos, Nigeria, the street markets are like a swap meet on steroids. At Alaba International Market, porters carry stacks of stereos on their heads, barefoot haulers pull handcarts piled high with high-definition flat-panel TVs, and vendors hawk the latest cellphones and accessories from stalls fashioned out of sticks and twine. The better businesses are in pockmarked concrete structures topped with rusting sprouts of rebar. In muddy lots at the rear of the market, workers rake the moldering bric-a-brac of outdated electronics into piles and set them ablaze.
Sitting in his air-conditioned showroom, James Ezeifeoma laughs at the cacophony. He doesn't extol the disorder, but says it takes time to harness growth. Twenty years back, Ezeifeoma's business was a crude kiosk in the bush. Today his firm is one of the largest importers of name-brand electronics in West Africa. "Because our market is haphazard and informal, people think we are criminal," he says. "But we play a very big role in the global economy."
In the U.S. and Europe, too, street businesses will scale up through the decade. Though the mainstream economy will continue to stagnate through 2015, these moonlighting operations will emerge as a powerful economic engine, helping people survive and thrive during the economic turmoil.
By the start of the 2020s the combined economic might of the world's quasi-legal, DIY businesses and communities will rival the total economic output of the United States, and they will represent our planet's best hope for egalitarian growth and sustainable economic development.
2). The Struggle For Asia's Water Begins
The remote alpine lake and glacier grasslands of the 11,000-foot-high Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas may seem to be one of the unlikeliest hot spots of 2020. But this vast land of Buddhist monks and nomadic herders stores abundant wealth of an indispensable resource that is in increasingly contested supply across the region--fresh water.
The Tibetan Plateau is also known as the "water towers of Asia." The headwaters of the mighty rivers Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej, among others, all originate in its mountain snow packs and glaciers. More than 1.5 billion people downstream depend upon its waters. In the next decade they're going to need every drop they can get. Heavily populated nations from Pakistan and India to China and Cambodia face mounting, grave threats from a widespread crisis of fresh-water scarcity.
Through its political control of Tibet it is China that lords over the commanding heights of Asia's water towers. It is now moving aggressively--and unilaterally--to exploit them for its own ends.
Driven by its unquenchable thirst for power to sustain its economic juggernaut while weaning itself off dirty coal energy, China has launched an ambitious new program of hydropower expansion. Its goal is to raise its exploitation of national hydropower potential from one-third to 60% by 2020. The best hydropower locations are almost all in the Tibetan plateau.
Scores of huge Chinese dams are being developed upriver on the Yangtze beyond Three Gorges, on the heretofore lightly dammed upper Mekong that downstream becomes the fishery and agricultural wellspring of Indochina, and on the upper Brahmaputra, which runs through Tibet before feeding eastern India and Bangladesh. China is also eyeing the upper Salween, Myanmar's lifeline.
How China builds and manages its dams, and exerts it power, will have a major impact on the seasonal river flows, water quality and ecosystems in the lower reaches--and on the food security, energy production, and political stability of the nations there.
Earlier this year Mekong nations in the throes of the worst drought in 50 years blamed--unfairly--China's dams on the upper Mekong for the record plunges in the river. Tensions are likely to worsen by 2015 as Lower Mekong nations erect their own main stream dams--compelling traditionally secretive China to fully join, and gradually lead, the cooperative Mekong River Commission.
India is warily watching China build giant hydropower dams on the Brahmaputra and worrying--despite vigorous dismissals by China--that China might divert the river to supplement its gigantic South to North Water Diversion Project designed to alleviate China's severe national water shortages. China has one-fifth as much water per person as the U.S., and crippling shortages in its parched north.
Within 10 years expect China's opening of the world's largest hydropower dam at the Brahmaputra's great bend to feed headlines about China and India's contentious south Tibetan border disputes. Geostrategic balances are likely to tilt in China's favor, especially as international support for Tibetan independence wanes after the aging Dalai Lama eventually dies.
Cooperation can offer positive sum benefits like providing cheap, renewable regional hydroelectric power and evening out the wide, monsoonal variations in river flows. China wants to be viewed as cooperative. It is moving in the right direction by sharing data and other gestures. But far and fast enough?
And looming over the Tibetan plateau is the ominous cloud of climate change: More extreme monsoons and the thinning of some plateau glaciers are warnings about how little we know about the effects of global warming on the rivers that rise there. If the water towers start to go empty, everyone is in trouble.
Source: Forbes (only selected headlines considered).
1). Economies Go Underground
This is the decade of the do-it-yourself city. Already more than 800 million people--almost one in seven inhabitants of the planet--live in shantytowns, often in tar-paper shacks without water, sewers or electricity. There's no government, no Donald Trump or other real estate mogul anywhere on the globe with the means or desire to build enough homes to make these communities disappear. Instead they will grow by 16,000 people per day, the U.N. has projected in its "State of the World's Cities 2010/2011" report, to hit a total of 889 million in 2020.
Similarly more than half the workers of the world--or 1.8 billion people--now earn their wages in unauthorized street markets and other businesses that are not registered, not licensed and not counted in official employment statistics. The number of people in these firms will grow to two-thirds of the global workforce by 2020, according to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a think tank devoted to fostering free market institutions. There's no government, no Daddy Warbucks, no corporate conglomerate that can rival this scale of job creation.
So the future belongs to the people in the world's sprawling shantytowns and burgeoning street markets. Over the coming decade, squatters and informal businesses will key their own economic advancement.
Shack dwellers in South Africa are pushing a new community empowerment agenda. The first step: legal access to electricity, because overturned candles and kerosene lanterns have caused many deadly fires. Then, self-determination and development. "The house on its own cannot solve the problem," says S'bu Zikode, who lives in Durban's Kennedy Road shack settlement and is president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a squatter organization. "It's not only money that creates dignity. All governments should accept that our communities are part of the greater society."
Three thousand miles north, in Lagos, Nigeria, the street markets are like a swap meet on steroids. At Alaba International Market, porters carry stacks of stereos on their heads, barefoot haulers pull handcarts piled high with high-definition flat-panel TVs, and vendors hawk the latest cellphones and accessories from stalls fashioned out of sticks and twine. The better businesses are in pockmarked concrete structures topped with rusting sprouts of rebar. In muddy lots at the rear of the market, workers rake the moldering bric-a-brac of outdated electronics into piles and set them ablaze.
Sitting in his air-conditioned showroom, James Ezeifeoma laughs at the cacophony. He doesn't extol the disorder, but says it takes time to harness growth. Twenty years back, Ezeifeoma's business was a crude kiosk in the bush. Today his firm is one of the largest importers of name-brand electronics in West Africa. "Because our market is haphazard and informal, people think we are criminal," he says. "But we play a very big role in the global economy."
In the U.S. and Europe, too, street businesses will scale up through the decade. Though the mainstream economy will continue to stagnate through 2015, these moonlighting operations will emerge as a powerful economic engine, helping people survive and thrive during the economic turmoil.
By the start of the 2020s the combined economic might of the world's quasi-legal, DIY businesses and communities will rival the total economic output of the United States, and they will represent our planet's best hope for egalitarian growth and sustainable economic development.
2). The Struggle For Asia's Water Begins
The remote alpine lake and glacier grasslands of the 11,000-foot-high Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas may seem to be one of the unlikeliest hot spots of 2020. But this vast land of Buddhist monks and nomadic herders stores abundant wealth of an indispensable resource that is in increasingly contested supply across the region--fresh water.
The Tibetan Plateau is also known as the "water towers of Asia." The headwaters of the mighty rivers Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej, among others, all originate in its mountain snow packs and glaciers. More than 1.5 billion people downstream depend upon its waters. In the next decade they're going to need every drop they can get. Heavily populated nations from Pakistan and India to China and Cambodia face mounting, grave threats from a widespread crisis of fresh-water scarcity.
Through its political control of Tibet it is China that lords over the commanding heights of Asia's water towers. It is now moving aggressively--and unilaterally--to exploit them for its own ends.
Driven by its unquenchable thirst for power to sustain its economic juggernaut while weaning itself off dirty coal energy, China has launched an ambitious new program of hydropower expansion. Its goal is to raise its exploitation of national hydropower potential from one-third to 60% by 2020. The best hydropower locations are almost all in the Tibetan plateau.
Scores of huge Chinese dams are being developed upriver on the Yangtze beyond Three Gorges, on the heretofore lightly dammed upper Mekong that downstream becomes the fishery and agricultural wellspring of Indochina, and on the upper Brahmaputra, which runs through Tibet before feeding eastern India and Bangladesh. China is also eyeing the upper Salween, Myanmar's lifeline.
How China builds and manages its dams, and exerts it power, will have a major impact on the seasonal river flows, water quality and ecosystems in the lower reaches--and on the food security, energy production, and political stability of the nations there.
Earlier this year Mekong nations in the throes of the worst drought in 50 years blamed--unfairly--China's dams on the upper Mekong for the record plunges in the river. Tensions are likely to worsen by 2015 as Lower Mekong nations erect their own main stream dams--compelling traditionally secretive China to fully join, and gradually lead, the cooperative Mekong River Commission.
India is warily watching China build giant hydropower dams on the Brahmaputra and worrying--despite vigorous dismissals by China--that China might divert the river to supplement its gigantic South to North Water Diversion Project designed to alleviate China's severe national water shortages. China has one-fifth as much water per person as the U.S., and crippling shortages in its parched north.
Within 10 years expect China's opening of the world's largest hydropower dam at the Brahmaputra's great bend to feed headlines about China and India's contentious south Tibetan border disputes. Geostrategic balances are likely to tilt in China's favor, especially as international support for Tibetan independence wanes after the aging Dalai Lama eventually dies.
Cooperation can offer positive sum benefits like providing cheap, renewable regional hydroelectric power and evening out the wide, monsoonal variations in river flows. China wants to be viewed as cooperative. It is moving in the right direction by sharing data and other gestures. But far and fast enough?
And looming over the Tibetan plateau is the ominous cloud of climate change: More extreme monsoons and the thinning of some plateau glaciers are warnings about how little we know about the effects of global warming on the rivers that rise there. If the water towers start to go empty, everyone is in trouble.
Source: Forbes (only selected headlines considered).
