Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse

Source: Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

TheTyee.ca

By William E. Rees 

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

July 17, 2017

‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing.

Too many people consuming too many resources and deepening inequality a prescription for disaster. Tokyo photo by Marco Verch, Creative Commons licensed.

Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.

The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.

What truly intelligent species would attempt to fly spaceship Earth, with all its mind-boggling complexity, using the conceptual equivalent of a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle driver’s manual?

Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet. A recent ringing example is Kaushik Basu’s glowing prediction that “in 50 years, the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20 per cent per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so.”

Basu is the former chief economist of the World Bank, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Cornell University, so he is no flake in the economics department. But this does not prevent a display of alarming ignorance of both the power of exponential growth and the state of the ecosphere. Income and consumption doubling every four years? After just 20 years and five doublings, the economy would be larger by a factor of 32; in 50 years it will have multiplied more than 5000-fold! Basu must inhabit some infinite parallel universe.

In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.

Little wonder. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem — carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)

Meanwhile, wild nature is in desperate retreat. One example: from less than one per cent at the dawn of agriculture, humans and their domestic animals had ballooned to comprise 97 per cent of the total weight of terrestrial mammals by the year 2000. That number is closer to 98.5 per cent today, with wild mammals barely clinging to the margins.

The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”)

Ignoring overshoot is dangerously stupid — we are financing growth, in part, by irreversibly liquidating natural resources essential to our own long-term survival.

And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce — in this century — dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence.

But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature — another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).

The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.

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Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

The conversation between plants and soil

Source: The conversation between plants and soil

phys.org/news

By Daryl Holland

June 6, 2017

Plants have a finely balanced relationship with soil, depending on it for vital resources. Credit: Pexels

To a child, soil is just dirt – a home for worms. To a gardener, soil is a collection of organic matter and nutrients. But to plants, soil is a hotbed of chemical activity. And plants don’t just observe, they actively participate in this activity.

Plants release chemicals into the soil, called exudates, that tell microbes to turn on or turn off certain chemical processes. Scientists are beginning to understand these signals and are hoping to exploit them to improve the efficiency, sustainability and environmental impact of the trillion dollar agricultural industry.

The three main nutrients plants need to grow are carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. A plant’s carbon needs come from air in the form of carbon dioxide, but the nitrogen and phosphorus needs come from the soil, and often nitrogen is the element in shortest supply naturally – and so to increase their yields, farmers add nitrogen to the soil.

Artificial nitrogen fertiliser is an essential component of an agricultural system that feeds more than 7 billion people, but it comes with a huge environmental cost. As the population grows, and as feeding habits change to more meat-based diets, nitrogen pollution looks set to become even more of a problem.

Combatting nitrogen pollution

“The extent to which we’ve meddled with the nitrogen cycle globally is astonishing,” says Professor Herbert Kronzucker, head of the University of Melbourne’s School of BioSciences.

“210 million tonnes of nitrogen per year are taken from the atmosphere and turned into a solid form of nitrogen through human activities. And most of this ends up as fertiliser in agricultural soil.

“But less than half of this can actually be captured by plants. The rest is lost to the atmosphere as nitrogen gas or the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, or leaches into waterways where it is a major pollutant.

“In the US, more than half of all lakes are badly impacted by too much nitrogen or phosphorus.”

But what if instead of adding more and more nitrogen to the soil, we help plants to better use the nitrogen that’s already there?

Professor Kronzucker and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Laval University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are looking for crops that communicate with the soil in a way that reduces their nitrogen requirements. 

“We became interested in the relationship between chemicals from plants and the impact these have on soil microbes,” says Professor Kronzucker.

Human meddling

Nitrogen takes many chemical forms. The most useful forms for plant growth are nitrate (NO3-) and ammonia (NH3). Chemical processes in the soil transform nitrogen between these and other forms.

One example is a process called nitrification, which turns ammonia into nitrate. Nitrate is problematic in the soil because, while plants love it, it doesn’t stick around like ammonia does. It tends to dissolve in water and is washed out of the soil through rain and groundwater. Also, soil microbes turn nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is useless to plants.

All of these processes are reversible, and eventually nitrogen gas is returned to the soil through another microbial process called nitrogen fixation, but this process is too slow for industrial agricultural systems. Farmers have to keep adding more and more nitrogen, and usually this is in the form of artificial nitrogen fertilisers.

These fertilisers are produced using an energy intensive industrial process that ‘fixes’ nitrogen gas by turning it into ammonia. This process, called the Haber-Bosch process, was a major factor in the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s and now provides food for more than 7 billion people.

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The conversation between plants and soil

The Great Acceleration and Obliteration

“Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!”

Source: The Great Acceleration and Obliteration

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Robert Hunziker

May 16, 2017

Homo Sapiens live in an epoch unlike anything throughout history, figuratively speaking, as far back as Adam and Eve, especially since 1950 “the times they are a changin’” with headlong speed. In fact, ever since 1950, The Great Acceleration has taken off like a spaceship destined to hit warp speed, accelerating faster and faster. As this evolves, humanity risks becoming “a bug looking for a windshield.”

Here’s the issue with The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems” (J.R.McNeill/Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2014, pg. 208).

Still, Earth spins within the solar system at the same rate as it has for eons, whereas in stark contrast to that steady timeless global spin, humanity’s anthropogenic spin turbocharges the entire planetary ecosystem. This has never happened before, and thus, people need to brace themselves for a major jarring to the ecosystem. In fact, it’s already started!

Silently unreported by mass media, The Great Acceleration inadvertently destroys life systems. It happens right before our eyes. Not only that but regrettably, Trumpeters will assuredly accelerate that destructive capacity. That’s guaranteed, a “done deal” for sure. The “bug looking for a windshield” has never looked more certain than when world leaders (ahem), like Trump, look away from and ignore and downplay and denigrate everything about the ecosystem, which is referred to as “home” by pretty much everybody.

Curiously, overcrowding the planet has turned the planet small, as electronics and air travel shrink the world: “In the span of one human lifetime, 1945 to 2015, global population tripled from about 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion. This bizarre interlude, with sustained population growth of more than 1 percent per annum, is of course what almost everyone on Earth now regards as normal. It is anything but normal,” Ibid, pg. 41.

The tripling of population “within only one lifetime” is remarkable, sobering, breathtaking. Woefully, that is only the beginning of a process that may run out of control because unpredictably the repercussions of The Great Acceleration are like a drunken driver on the Italian Amalfi Coastline dangerously close to going over cliff’s edge at each and every turn.

In fact, death traps already exist, as for example, from 1950 to 2015 one of the principal byproducts of The Great Acceleration, air pollution, killed 30-to-40 million people, mostly Chinese as of late, which is roughly equal to the death toll from all wars throughout the world since 1950 (source: Ibid, pg. 24).

Furthermore, industrialization is on a tear, goosing up The Great Acceleration. Since WWII, motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million and plastics production increased from one million tons to 300 million tons. Those numbers are not only signals of acceleration but off the charts! Still, everybody assumes it’s normal, except for climate scientists.

Normality is belied by the conditions of the biosphere itself as human activity shifts carbon stored over millennia from the lithosphere (Earth’s upper mantle and crust) into the upper atmosphere at unsustainable rates running from 1,200 million tons per annum in 1945 to 9,500 million tons in 2015, 8xs faster within only 70 years. Eight times anything is a big number, e.g., if everyone’s wages multiplied 8xs, everyone would be rich.

Even at the unsustainable rate of 8xs, carbon emissions continue accelerating, pre-Trump, post-Trump, forever-Trump, getting a huge boost ever faster during Trump days. For example, CO2 emissions during the 2000s have been running at a 3.3% annual rate of increase versus a rate of 1.3% during the 1990s. That’s a 150% increase within only one decade. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is already filling up with CO2, the primary cause of global warming. It can only take so much before the thermostat gets stuck wide-open… relentless heat scorching agriculture.

As such, humanity has become a vast experiment; nobody’s been here before, nobody. Meanwhile, the United States, under the direction of Trumpeters, cut public links to information about the crucial carbon cycle by cutting NOAA’s budget “to the bone.” Either that’s an honest mistake or it’s a mean-spirited mistake; chose your poison. Regardless, scientists are out of favor: According to a USA Today headline: “Trump’s Proposed NOAA Budget Cuts Rattle Scientists” d/d March 6, 2017.

Meanwhile, at the core of The Great Acceleration, capitalism works… at the top! Proof: Everything is accelerating as if there are no limits to growth and more growth. That’s capitalism par excellence. But cautionary flags are ubiquitous, e.g., according to certain academic circles, there is another side to the story: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long,” Ibid, pg. 5. Expanding balloons eventually pop.

One major risk within the context of The Great Acceleration is human behavior itself because people have a tendency to dither away precious time when it comes to life-threatening issues that appear too big to tackle and too difficult to wrap arms around, like the planet: “Whilst the US and China fiddled for 20 years from 1995-2015, arguing about terms and conditions of the Kyoto agreement, the total tonnage of global carbon emissions from the energy sector nearly equaled that of all human history prior to 1995,” Ibid, pg. 78. That’s big league acceleration!

How does it end? Regrettably, not very well with Trumpeters at the helm. They’ve publicly denounced any and all concerns about the health of the planet and/or its inhabitants, as for example, the American Health Care Act, an oxymoronic title after reading its contents, makes deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, by $800 billion. “Donald Trump is attacking low- and middle-income families, children, seniors and people with disabilities in order to hand a $6 trillion tax break to his wealthy friends―the largest tax break in U.S. history” (Source: socialsecurityworks.org).

Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!

Still, as it happens, within the context of The Great Acceleration, Trump’s 1% have opted to go out in flaming glory, as they are the primary beneficiaries of all that floats to the top, but then again, some of the 1% are attempting to “get out of Dodge” by escaping to planets far, far away, leaving the hordes behind to fight over tillable land.

Evidence of The Great Acceleration is far and wide. After all, it was only one generation ago in 1986 when the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson (Harvard) presciently sounded the alarm in a book titled Biodiversity (The National Academies Press): “It carries the urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the environments that have fostered the diversity of life forms for more than a billion years,” Ibid, pg. 84.

Alas, there’s no way E. O. Wilson could have foreseen Trump would come along to “seal the deal” for his prognostications and in the process actually speed up the negative aspects of The Great Acceleration, as America becomes great again, maybe/probably not, but if so, for very, very short duration.

Withal, don’t stand underneath national monuments. Those are subject to severe budget cuts, poor maintenance, and unexpectedly crashing down forevermore as the nation loses its soul.

Postscript: Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017 that is extraordinarily relevant to The Great Acceleration:

“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”

“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”

That’s Global Warming!

That is horrific news, almost as bad as it gets especially this early in the repercussions cycle of The Great Acceleration. It now appears that nature is competing head-to-head with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an apocalypse film project.

Looking ahead, one option scientists cannot rely upon is help from the anti-science Trump administration. Ipso facto, The Great Acceleration fallout is about to leap forward like never before. Batten down the hatches!
And, Trump thinks health care is tough…

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com

Apocalypse Soon: Cataclysmic Disasters And Mass Death Are In Humanity’s Future

Source: APOCALYPSE SOON: CATACLYSMIC DISASTERS AND MASS DEATH ARE IN HUMANITY’S FUTURE |

govtslaves.info

MICHAEL SNYDER

May 8, 2017

 Are we on the verge of the worst times in all of human history? We live at a moment when prominent leaders in the scientific world and in the religious world are both urgently warning that humanity could soon be facing a nightmarish apocalyptic future. Weather patterns are rapidly changing, the crust of our planet is becoming increasing unstable, “superbugs” that are resistant to antibiotics threaten to completely render our best medical treatments obsolete, the number of global terror attacks continues to rise year after year, and thanks to weapons of mass destruction humanity now has the capability of completely destroying itself several times over. They often disagree about why it will happen, but an increasing number of scientific and religious leaders have come to the exact same conclusion that the future of humanity is very bleak.

Despite the fact that technology is increasing at an exponential rate, many top thinkers in the scientific community now believe that there is a very good chance that the human race will be facing extinction by the end of this century. The following comes from an outstanding Salon article…

The late microbiologist Frank Fenner, for example, whose virological work helped eliminate smallpox, predicted in 2010 that “humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction, and climate change.” Similarly, the Canadian biologist Neil Dawe reportedly “wouldn’t be surprised if the generation after him witness the extinction of humanity.” And the renowned ecologist Guy McPherson argues that humanity will follow the dodo into the evolutionary grave by 2026.

Those are some very sobering words.

Perhaps you have never heard of any of those guys before, but I know that virtually all of you have heard of Stephen Hawking. According to Hawking, we have now reached “the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity”…

“Now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.”

The last 100 years have been unlike any other era in human history. We have constructed towering cities all over the planet, we have developed remarkable technologies that have enabled us to make the impossible more than possible, and the population of this planet has shot up to a staggering 7 billion people.

But in order to feed our exploding population, we are going to need another miracle. According to Megan Clark, the head of Australia’s national science agency, more food will need to be produced over the next 50 years than has been produced throughout the rest of human history combined…

“It is hard for me to comprehend that in the next 50 years we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed over our entire human history,” she said.

“That means in the working life of my children, more grain than ever produced since the Egyptians, more fish than eaten to date, more milk than from all the cows that have ever been milked on every frosty morning humankind has ever known.”

These are the types of things that keep scientific thinkers up late at night. At this moment, great famines are already hitting places such as Venezuela and Yemen, and this trend is only going to accelerate in the years ahead.

Hopefully mass death for the human race will be delayed for as long as possible, but one thing that is already happening is widespread species extinction among wild animals all over our planet. The following comes from one of my previous articles…

It has been called “the long extinction”. Our planet is in the process of dying, and as you will see below, this process of death and destruction appears to be accelerating. According to a report that was put out by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, the number of wild animals around the globe appears to be decreasing at a rate of about 2 percent a year. 2 percent may not sound like a lot to you, but over 10 years that would mean that 20 percent of all wild animals in the world would be gone. And according to that same report, it is being projected that the total loss of wildlife during the 50 year period from 1970 to 2020 will be a staggering 67 percent.

For religious leaders, the concerns are often more spiritual in nature.

Many Christians are convinced that the return of Jesus Christ is rapidly approaching, and meanwhile many Muslims are expecting a figure known as “the Mahdi” to come back soon. Here is more from the Salon article that I quoted earlier…

Returning to religion, recent polls show that a huge portion of religious people believe that the end of the world is imminent. For example, a 2010 survey found that 41 percent of Christians in the U.S. believe that Jesus will either “definitely” or “probably” return by 2050. Similarly, 83 percent of Muslims in Afghanistan and 72 percent in Iraq claim that the Mahdi, Islam’s end-of-days messianic figure, will return within their lifetimes.

As I discussed in The Rapture Verdict, I certainly believe that anyone that is able to stay alive through the cataclysms that are coming will have the opportunity to witness the return of Jesus Christ. So many ancient prophecies found in the Bible are being uniquely fulfilled in our generation, and it is truly an exciting time to be alive.

Unfortunately, many are not prepared for the great challenges that we will have to face before Jesus comes back. The following prophecy was recently given by Jeff Byerly…

There are a lot of men who are taking puzzle pieces and forcing them in places they do not go and it is making the picture unclear. The end of this season will bring clarity and you will understand exactly where you are when the fiery “kickoff” event happens. The financial collapse will soon follow. Then food will be hard to come by and many will starve but my remnant will feed even greater multitudes than I did, for I have gone to the Father. The whole world shall once again go to war and over one fourth of the inhabitants of the earth shall be killed by guns and bombs, by famine, disease and the beasts of the land. There will be many martyred during this time and I will avenge their deaths when the number of them has been fulfilled.

All this will happen before the day of the LORD. The great day Our indignation, vengeance, retribution and wrath shall be poured out upon the children of disobedience. No man shall hide from Us. We shall find all those deserving just punishment. There will be a global earthquake caused by an asteroid hitting the sea. There shall be tsunamis worldwide and every mountain shall be moved and every island will be out of place. The very atmosphere will be ripped open and recede like a rolled up scroll. The sun will be black and the moon will be blood, gross darkness shall cover the people and the whole earth for three days as in the time of Exodus, but My the houses of My people shall have light and people shall become light for they will be changed and My glory shall be shown on them. My children will be shown clearly to the world who they are!

Of course many other men and women of God have been warning about many of the exact same things, but most people are choosing not to listen.

Personally, I am entirely convinced that we are living during one of the most critical times in all of human history. The years ahead will be incredibly difficult, but for those that are part of the Remnant they will also be incredibly thrilling.

Great shaking is about to begin.

For those that know who they are, who they belong to and where they are going, that is actually very good news.

How do “chemtrails” relate to depopulation? (2 min)

https://www.intellihub.com
HOLLYWOOD (INTELLIHUB) — The editor-in-chief of Intellihub News Shepard Ambellas managed to capture chemtrail researcher, activist and renown filmmaker Michael Murphy for a one on one interview.

Some of the footage made Ambellas’s new documentary film SHADE the Motion Picture, a film that exposes sinister globalist operations taking place worldwide.

These unsettling images from NASA show just how fast Earth is changing

Source: These unsettling images from NASA show just how fast Earth is changing – ScienceAlert

ww.sciencealert.com

DAVID NIELD

24 JAN 2017

This is not a drill.

We know that Earth is changing in dramatic ways on a daily basis, but sometimes you need a bird’s eye view – or a satellite feed – to really appreciate the evolution of our planet.

That’s exactly what you get with a new set of images recently released by NASA, showing dramatic shifts in forest sizes, water levels, and ice cover over the last 40 years. 

Some of the pictures really are shocking, like the comparison below of Lake Urmia in Iran, showing its shrinking size and changing colours.

This distinct green/brown contrast took place over just a few months, and was caused by summer heat and growing populations of algae and bacteria:

Lake Urmia, Iran. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

“Some of these effects are related to climate change, some are not,” says NASA. “Some document the effects of urbanisation or the ravage of natural hazards such as fires and floods. All show our planet in a state of flux.”

Check out the shrinkage of the Great Salt Lake in Utah between 1985 and 2010, caused by reduced snowmelt and rainfall:

Great Salt Lake, Utah. Credit: US Department of the Interior/US Geological Survey

Or the reduction in size of Owens Lake, California, over the same time frame, prompted by diverted water and toxic chemicals:

Owens Lake, California. Credit: USGS Landsat Missions Gallery

Several of the images show how the spread of our towns and cities has impacted the natural landscape.

Take these shots of the Baban Rafi forest in Niger, showing huge chunks of forest disappearing between 1976 and 2007:

Baban Rafi forest. Credit: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

Much of that forest was cleared to make way for farming land – the country’s population increased by 40 percent across the same time period, according to NASA.

The effects of urbanisation can also be seen in these 1991 and 2016 pictures of New Delhi in India:

New Delhi, India. Credit: US Department of the Interior / USGS and NASA

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These unsettling images from NASA show just how fast Earth is changing – ScienceAlert

Global population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016, UN report finds

A UN agency says the world’s population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016 from 7.3 billion last year, with a substantial youth bulge challenging political and social systems across the planet. The report focuses on the well-being of 10-year-old girls as indicators of development success or failure.

Source: Global population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016, UN report finds – World – CBC News

http://www.cbc.ca

The Associated Press Posted: Dec 01, 2016

UN agency highlights opportunities for girls, report also shows Canada’s population up to 36.3 million

The world’s population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016, according to a newly released UN report. (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

A UN agency says the world’s population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016 from 7.3 billion last year, with a substantial youth bulge challenging political and social systems across the planet.

The report said the world’s population grew 1.1 per cent to 7.433 billion from 7.349 billion the previous year, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2016 State of the World Population report, released Thursday in Amman, Jordan.  About 26 per cent of the global population is under age 14.

Canada’s population grew to 36.3 million from 35.9 million last year, with 16 per cent of the population under 24.

Daniel Baker, regional humanitarian co-ordinator and head of the fund’s Jordan country office, highlighted the potential fallout — and gains — to be had by overcoming the world’s clear gender inequality among global youth.

“Failing to invest in girls is nothing less than planned poverty. Unless we invest in girls, we’re planning to have a poorer future,” Baker said.

• Canada ranks 35th on World Economic Forum gender gap list

The report focuses on the well-being of 10-year-old girls as indicators of development success or failure. 

“Failing to invest in girls is nothing less than planned poverty. Unless we invest in girls, we’re planning to have a poorer future,” Baker said.

Refugee schoolchildren receive their new books on the first day of the new school year at one of the UNRWA schools at a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. Investing in girls’ education is key to boosting economic development, the UN says. (Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)

The report estimated that developing countries could generate or lose at least $21 billion US depending on their investments in the health and education of their 10-year-old girls today.

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Global population grew to 7.4 billion in 2016, UN report finds – World – CBC News