North looks set for pole position

IN April 2006, a businessman shot a strange animal on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic, having paid $45,000 for the privilege of doing so.

The victim turned out to be a ‘grizzlar’, the offspring of a female polar bear and a grizzly which had wandered far north of its normal range.

In 2010, another hybrid was shot. For Laurence Smith, these incidents are prophetic. As the Doha Climate Conference demonstrated, governments worldwide have no intention of grasping the greenhouse gas nettle. As we head towards climate catastrophe, what kind of world will emerge? Smith’s The New North, the World in 2050 is one vision of the future.

If we could harness nuclear fusion, our energy and climate problems would be solved. However, no breakthrough is expected for at least half a century. A world war or an unstoppable pandemic may alter the course of history. Assuming no such disaster strikes, four main factors, in Smith’s view, will shape the future: population growth, resource consumption, climate change and globalisation.

Before the emergence of agriculture, there were about a million people on Earth. By 1800, we had a thousand million. It took 12,000 years to produce the first billion, but only 130 to reach the second. The 3rd was attained in 30 years, the 4th in 15 and the 5th in 12. The 6th billion arrived in 1999. We now have 7 billion.

In the prosperous West, population growth has ceased; affluent couples have fewer babies. As the standard of living improves worldwide, population growth should stabilise. There’s a delay of several decades between rising prosperity and a decline in fertility, the so-called ‘demographic transition’. All going well, the world population should have stabilised at around 9.2bn by 2050.

Globally, rural dwellers are moving into cities; the urban population grows by about three million each week. There are now more people in cities than on the land and their numbers will soon double. The 21st century, declared the UN, will be ‘the century of the city’. The rural segment of the population should peak at 3.5bn in 2018. It will have fallen to 2.8bn in 2050.

Age profiles are changing. A ‘grey’ society, unprecedented in human history, is emerging. It will be wiser and less violent but a strain on health care systems. People will work beyond current retirement age, perhaps for as long as they are able. The average age in Japan is 44. In some Middle Eastern countries, it’s less that 20. The growing age disparity worldwide will spawn a mass migration of carers from poorer youthful societies to affluent elderly ones.

’Resource consumption’, the 2nd of Smith’s key factors, continues to rise. In 1900, the average American used 22 gallons of oil per year. Consumption nowadays is 24 times that. If a Kenyan small farmer has an overall ‘consumption factor’ of 1, the average American’s is around 32.

It may seem odd that globalisation is one of Smith’s ‘four key factors’. In our increasingly interconnected world, a level playing field in trade and commerce is developing. The cheapest labour and materials can now be located immediately, irrespective of where they are in the world. Businesses migrate accordingly, with massive implications for employment and financial security. “The world appears to be in the early phase of an economic transformation into something bigger than anything seen before.” There are huge social implications. Consider how IKEA is spreading Swedish culture throughout the globe.

Smith has no time for climate change scepticism. The world has just experienced some of its hottest years and 2005 was a record year for tropical storms in the US. A heatwave in Europe in 2003 killed 35,000 people. Sea levels have risen 10cm since the 1940s. We face increased water shortages, heatwaves and coastal flooding.

The book’s title suggests that the world in 2050 will have ‘a new north’. As life further south becomes unsustainable, populations, like the fathers of the two ‘grizzlars’, will move northwards. The high Arctic, the sea-ice gone, will be a landscape of new towns, subject to rain instead of snow, dark for half the year. We humans, he thinks, “will survive anything, even if polar bears and Atlantic cod do not”.

It’s not bedtime reading, but this thoughtful book is provocative and accessible.

* The New North, the World in 2050. Laurence Smith. Profile Books. £9.99.