2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. By Jorgen Randers, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012; 304 pages. Price US24.95 ISBN 978-1-60358-467-8

The following paragraphs are reproduced from the website of the publisher [1].

Forty years ago, The Limits to Growth study addressed the grand question of how humans would adapt to the physical limitations of planet Earth. It predicted that during the first half of the 21st century the ongoing growth in the human ecological footprint would stop—either through catastrophic “overshoot and collapse”—or through well-managed “peak and decline.”

So, where are we now? And what does our future look like? In the book 2052, Jorgen Randers, one of the co-authors of Limits to Growth, issues a progress report and makes a forecast for the next forty years. To do this, he asked dozens of experts to weigh in with their best predictions on how our economies, energy supplies, natural resources, climate, food, fisheries, militaries, political divisions, cities, psyches, and more will take shape in the coming decades. He then synthesized those scenarios into a global forecast of life as we will most likely know it in the years ahead.

The good news: we will see impressive advances in resource efficiency, and an increasing focus on human well-being rather than on per capita income growth. But this change might not come as we expect. Future growth in population and GDP, for instance, will be constrained in surprising ways—by rapid fertility decline as result of increased urbanization, productivity decline as a result of social unrest, and continuing poverty among the poorest 2 billion world citizens. Runaway global warming, too, is likely.

So, how do we prepare for the years ahead? With heart, fact, and wisdom, Randers guides us along a realistic path into the future and discusses what readers can do to ensure a better life for themselves and their children during the increasing turmoil of the next forty years.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface: What Will the Future Bring?
• Part 1 Background
  • 1. Worrying about the Future
  • 2. Five Big Issues toward 2052
• Part 2 My Global Forecast
  • 3. The Logic behind My Forecast
  • 4. Population and Consumption to 2052
  • 5. Energy and CO2 to 2052
  • 6. Food and Footprint to 2052
  • 7. The Nonmaterial Future to 2052
  • 8. The Zeitgeist in 2052
• Part 3 Analysis
  • 9. Reflections on the Future
  • 10. Five Regional Futures
  • 11. Comparison with Other Futures
  • 12. What Should You Do?
• Closing Words
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index

* Editor’s Note: The brief summary and the contents of the books are reported as provided by the authors or the publishers. Authors and publishers are encouraged to send review copies of their recent books of potential interest to readers of Sustainability to the Publisher (Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Kandererstrasse 25, CH-4057 Basel, Switzerland. Tel. +41-61-683-77-34; Fax: +41-61-302-89-18; Email: [email protected]). Some books will be offered to the scholarly community for the purpose of preparing full-length reviews.