ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the areas of risk in our world system, such as climate change, attrition of natural resources, population issues – especially overpopulation, income and wealth inequality, the challenge to democracy, the dangers of war and the gamble on new technology. In 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, humanity, through the agency of the United Nations and its International Panel on Climate Change, committed itself to ‘stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level which prevents dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’. The climate and environmental crises are both related to another source of imbalance: the fact that there are so many of us on this planet. Growing economic inequality also manifests itself as a crisis of democracy, as the superior wealth of the few is translated into political power at the expense of the many.
