ABSTRACT
What is the most viable way in the future for eight billion humans to live on an Earth that is experiencing extreme weather events? Can sustainable practices alone achieve a globally stable planet? Constant predictions based on present catastrophic natural disasters suggest a grave future for human-Earth coexistence. The prospects for dealing with the stresses of humanity’s impact on the earth by formulating global sustainable futures are impeded where continental regions have become inaccessible due to human conflicts of war and terror. Exacerbating these human conflicts are the effects of acute climate change leading to food insecurity, water scarcity, and environmental land degradation. As a quarter of the world’s population face food and water insecurity, formulating sustainable practices is not viable if it does not directly deal with the realities of their daily survival. With gross global inequality spurred by governments’ focus on sustaining economic growth at all costs, backed by gross environmental abuse from resource corporations and corruption, sustainability is far more abstract than feasible reality for many people across the world. Where turbulence oscillates in the atmosphere sending catastrophic consequences to the earth’s surface, humans and their societies must be flexible to move across countries and continents as a way of adapting to climate change to attain a globally sustainable future.
