Future of Humanity at risk, warns World Health Conference

By julian CRIBB

The survival of human civilisation, and potentially the human species itself, faces a grave emergency from ten intersecting catastrophic risks, the Public Health World Conference 2026 in Singapore was told today.

Emeritus Professor Bob Douglas, a distinguished epidemiologist and co-founder of the Council for the Human Future, said that all ten threats were driven by the same factors: global overpopulation, overconsumption and pollution. Without an urgent plan of action to mitigate them, the future of every person, each society and all countries was equally at risk, he said.

The threats are: global overheating, life system collapse, water and resource crises, universal chemical pollution, deepening food insecurity, new pandemics, nuclear weapons, out-of-control technologies and global misinformation.

“These threats are all deeply connected. They cannot be solved one at a time. They present a clear and present danger to all human health and to the health of the Earth’s life support systems,” he told the world’s premier public health congress.

“While many acknowledge individual risks, at present few understand the sheer scale or immediacy of this combined menace to our common future. There is no global plan of action to deal with it – nor even a world agreement to act.

Professor Douglas then proposed the following resolution to the conference:

“This global meeting of public health experts is deeply concerned that no country on Earth is yet working to counter, in a systematic way, the growing challenge to continued human existence that results from a series of globally documented and interacting catastrophic threats. The challenge to human survival is desperately serious and cannot be dealt with adequately by dealing with the threats piecemeal.

We call upon governments everywhere to work with the United Nations on a program to implement an Earth System Treaty. This will be a global agreement addressing each of the 10 catastrophic risks that confront us, which commits humanity to taking safe action to remedy them all, without making any of them worse.

The Treaty will bind all signatory countries to a safer human future. As Earth Citizens, everyone will be able to sign and support it if they wish. The Treaty will commit us to living within the safe boundaries of the Earth. Its aim is to ensure our children and grandchildren have a habitable Earth on which they can both survive and thrive.’

Professor Douglas warned that without a global agreement to act, in the form of such a Treaty, no concerted action would ever happen to lessen the danger.

He concluded “The is without doubt the greatest challenge and the noblest cause ever to face humanity. It calls for urgent, determined and co-ordinated action by all who care about our future on this Planet.”

He urged all people who care about the future of their children and their planet to sign the petition calling for a Healthy Earth: https://chng.it/P86G2tBZGb