Decades of scientific warnings have done little to change humanity’s course. A new warning looks at the interconnected pressures facing the planet and what can be done about them.

“We humans are facing the greatest emergency of our entire million-year existence.”

With those words in 2023 the Council for the Human Future delineated the crisis that is approaching all people and nations, as 10 man-made, catastrophic threats combine and collide.

The warning will shortly receive powerful reinforcement from the world’s leading scientists, in the form of a third notice which speaks of a planetary emergency driven by escalating human pressures and crossing many safe boundaries.

Like the hollow tolling of a passing-bell, these warnings have sounded over more than three decades, growing louder and more imperative with each repetition. Yet still humanity, its governments and enterprises, blocks its ears in our obsessive pursuit of narrow goals, and distraction from reality.

The first Warning to Humanity was published in July 1992 by the Union of Concerned Scientists and signed by 1,700 eminent scientific figures, including Nobel laureates. It stated: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course,” detailing the damage caused by overexploitation of the planet, and proposing five major courses of action.

“A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the........

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