5 Future Perspectives on Human Prosperity

Introduction

In this unit we will look at the possible futures for the Earth and humanity.

We will begin with looking at the Sustainable Development Goals. What happened with the SDGs from their adoption in 2015 until 2025? We will read the two introductory pages to the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 which vividly describe the current state of human affairs.

Then we explore the various possible paths to a sustainable future. This will confront us with a huge responsibility because the choices and efforts we make now will shape our future. We will end our study with spiritual perspectives that can motivate and guide us through the challenging times ahead.

Discussion

1. How are economic, social and environmental dimensions linked?
2. What do scenarios tell us about the sustainability of present material civilization?
3. What changes are necessary to make society more sustainable?
4. What are some of the spiritual principles that would make those changes possible?

Reading 1: Introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 (read pages 4 and 5) 

In the 2025 SDG Goals Report, which marks a decade since the goals were established, Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United-Nations, describes a stark assessment of the conflicts, climate disasters, and financing shortfalls have hindered progress towards achieving the SDG goals, with only 35% of targets on track. There are however six areas (critical transitions) where concentrated effort can drive systemic change:
1. Food Systems: Moving toward regenerative and sustainable agriculture.
2. Energy Access: Accelerating the shift to renewables, now the fastest-growing power source.
3. Digital Connectivity: Closing the divide and governing AI for the public good.
4. Education Reform: Transforming learning for a rapidly changing world.
5. Jobs and Social Protection: Ensuring dignity in the face of economic shifts.
6. Climate and Biodiversity: Halting nature loss and meeting net-zero goals.

He concludes with a call to shift into overdrive, emphasizing that while the situation is grave, success stories in universal electricity access and disease eradication prove that transformation is possible with political courage.

Paths to a Sustainable Future

As you have learned, sustainability requires the integration of all the dimensions of development in one systems framework including the stability of the Earth system and therefore its ability to support human prosperity in the future. Systems of human society and nature are interdependent and linked. In essence people are part of ecosystems and shape them from local to global scale, from the past to the future. They are dependent on the capacity of these systems to provide for human well-being and societal advancement. We are confronted with a huge responsibility because the choices and efforts we make now will shape our future.

One way to learn systems thinking is to imagine what the future will, or should, be like. While we cannot predict the future, we can have a vision of the future we would like to have, and, more scientifically, we can imagine or model various alternative futures by making some assumptions and then using systems thinking and computer modeling to project their consequences to various times in the future. These projections are called scenarios, and they address the significant but unknowable future, perhaps 50 years ahead, with plausible and pertinent alternative stories.

One well-known set of scenarios proposes three alternatives:

The Market World sees business as usual continuing into the future with little change. Economic and human progress are driven by free markets and human initiative, but after a few decades the world is faced by serious environmental and social instabilities. This is in fact already happening.

In the Fortress World, industrialized countries give up on the developing world and close themselves behind their borders. The unattended social and economic problems in the rest of the world produce rising conflict and violence, which eventually affect the entire planet. This is a negative but plausible projection of some current political trends, and is already happening in some countries.

In the Transformed World, with some optimistic assumptions, sustainable development is shown to be technically possible. Human ingenuity and compassion can offer a better life to all humanity if we accept fundamental changes in society.

The UNEP Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, released in early 2026, uses scenarios to explore alternative paths to a sustainable society. Their conclusion, much like this course, is that neither incremental improvements nor purely technological fixes are enough, rather a deep transformation is needed, including changing mindsets and visioning the kind of future we want. The GEO 7 report presents two alternative scenarios of the transformation required, one focussed on behaviour and the other on technology. It calls for a "Future We Choose" by transforming five key systems: Economy & Finance, Energy, Food, Materials & Waste, and Environment. The report highlights that we must anticipate "shocks"—pandemics, climate disasters, or economic shifts—and use them as catalysts to sweep away "vested interests" that block progress.

Reading 2: United Nations Environment Programme (2025) Global Environment Outlook 7, Scenarios - Transformation to a Sustainable Environment. 

As Unit 2 showed, our global materialistic civilisation is dependent on many resources like fossil fuels on which its material prosperity is based, while creating accelerating climate change. The scenarios show that this cannot continue and that fundamental changes are needed. One requirement is to shift more towards renewable energy and resources like sustainable and regenerative agriculture as the basis of civilisation. The institutions of society also need to change to become more socially and politically sustainable. Despite the many positive efforts to achieve sustainability described in this course, effective change is still largely blocked by powerful vested interests in the present system.

One challenge with scenario development is anticipating the unexpected. Sustainability scenarios make assumptions about redirecting society and the economy towards alternative futures. Pandemics, worsening climate change impact, acute social unrest, or even a global war are examples of a sudden disruption that could accelerate the disintegration of present society, and/or open the way to the more rapid construction of an equitable and sustainable world civilization by sweeping away vested interests and roadblocks to change.

The scenarios define clearly the challenges facing society, but do not give us the key to making the fundamental transformation in values that is required. They can indicate where we want to go, but not how to get there. This requires motivation, political will and a willingness to sacrifice for the common good. Given the failure of material solutions, what are the alternatives that can come from a consideration of spiritual principles? Readings 3, 4, and 5 present a broad and coherent alternative vision of the future and how to get there.

Reading 3: Bahá'í Quotations on Transformation - a New World Order (The link brings you directly to these quotations which are the last quotations in the Economic Sustainability section.)

This selection includes the late Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, Shoghi Effendi's own scenario from 1936 of the world that will result from the application of spiritual principles. Part of the challenge of sustainable development is to redefine the goals of development and the concept of prosperity in a way more broadly acceptable to all of humanity.

Reading 4: The Eco Principle, chapter 9, Visions of an eco-civilization (pp. 157-179)

This reading provides a hopeful vision of the prospects for sustainable development, showing that new information technologies combined with spiritual values will make a new, more organic, knowledge-based society possible.

For another Bahá'í-inspired perspective on this century, Paul Hanley's book Eleven explores our immediate future in some detail from the perspective of environmental, social and spiritual sustainability. See the webinar or reading about the book below.

Reading 5: Summary review of Paul Hanley's book "Eleven" (2014).

Hanley starts with the latest UN population projection that suggests that there will be eleven billion people on this planet in 2100, and asks how the planet could support so many people, when we are already overshooting planetary boundaries with 7 billion. After a critique of what is wrong with the present consumer society, he demonstrates that, with a fundamental transformation of our economic and social systems, we could manage such a population. He concludes by suggesting that it is the kind of change proposed in the Ruhi Institute process that could bring about the necessary transformation in time.

Instead of reading the summary, you  watch the Wilmette Institute webinar Eleven - The Future of Global Population, with Paul Hanley. 1:25

Watch: The Heart of the Matter, A Systems Approach to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by Fritjof Capra (29 minutes) Fritjof Capra explains how understanding the dynamic interaction of systemic issues such as climate change, war, economic problems etc. is essential for attaining sustainability. 

Resources

This file of voluntary resources features the 30-year update of the classic report to the Club of Rome on the "Limits to Growth" by Donella Meadows et al. as well as a list of relevant books.

Resources for Unit 5

Go to Unit 6