The BAU (Business As Usual) Scenario

• There is no real change in the world in the way business is conducted, resources are exploited and energy is produced.  This leads on the one hand to a worsening global economic crisis, and on the other to major climate change due to the accelerated warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.
• In some regions global warming produces drought, in others devastating storms, and in many areas it leads to harvest failures. In coastal areas vast tracts of productive land are flooded, together with cities, towns and villages.  Hundreds of millions are homeless and face starvation.
• Massive waves of destitute migrants flow from coastal regions and areas afflicted with lack of food and water, above all in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, toward inland regions where the basic resources of life are more assured.  The migrants overload the human and natural resources of the receiving countries and create conflict with the local populations.  International relief efforts provide emergency supplies for thousands, but are helpless when confronted with millions.
• In futile attempts to stem the tidal wave of destitute people India builds up its wall along the border with Bangladesh, the U.S. along the Mexican border, and both Italy and Spain build walls to protect their northern regions from their overrun southern regions.  
• The world’s population fragments into states and populations intent on protecting themselves, and masses of desperate people facing imminent famine and disease.  The conflicts create unsustainable stresses and strains in the structure of international relations.  Social and economic integration groups and political alliances break apart.  Relations break down between the U.S. and its southern neighbours, the European Union and the Mediterranean countries, and India and China and the hard-hit Southeast Asian states.  
• Global military spending rises exponentially as governments attempt to protect their territories and re-establish a level of order.  Strong-arm régimes come to power in the traditional hot-spots and local food- and water-wars erupt between states and populations pressed to the edge of physical survival.
• Terrorist groups, nuclear proliferators, narco-traffickers, and organized crime syndicates form alliances with unscrupulous entrepreneurs to sell arms, drugs, and essential goods at exorbitant prices.  Governments target the terrorists and attack the countries suspected of harbouring them, but more terrorists take the place of those that are rounded up and killed or imprisoned.
• Hawks and armaments lobbies press for the use of powerful weapons to defend the territories and interests of the better-off states.  Regional wars fought initially with conventional arms escalate into wars conducted with weapons of mass destruction.  
• The world’s interdependent and critically destabilized economic, financial and political system collapses.  The environment, its productive processes and vital heat balance impaired, is no longer capable of providing food and water for more than a fraction of the surviving populations.  Chaos and violence engulfs peoples and countries both rich and poor.  

Here, however, is another scenario...Timely Transformation.