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2020 vision: why we have 10 years to save our planet

The news is stark: if we keep on abusing and pillaging our natural resources, we have a decade till meltdown. John Gibbons charts the chilling catalogue of environmental crises that threaten the future survival of the earth and its inhabitants... including humans

1: Rainforest-loss costs up to $5 trillion a year

7: Declining oil supplies will lead to more disastrous spills

2: 50,000 species are becoming extinct every year

9: International efforts to head off climate change have failed

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The business of making predictions is a notoriously hazardous enterprise – especially when they involve the future. Environmental science is, however, more about projections than predictions, and these are based on masses of evidence from multiple sources across the spectrum of physical sciences.

While arguments rage around the edges, the central consensus is unambiguous: earth systems are in profound crisis. Were it a person, its medical prognosis might read: "multiple organ failure imminent; medical intervention and dramatic lifestyle changes urgently needed."

The good news is that our home planet is a tough old rock, and it should – eventually – heal itself. The bad news is that the timescales involve millennia, and few of the species alive today, including homo sapiens, are likely to be around to witness a recovery.

Our longer-term prospects belong in the realm of the theoretical. What is abundantly real is the panoply of near-term threats to our safety, security and yes, even survival. Here's a guide to 10 unfolding environmental crises that collectively will reshape our world by 2020.

1. Deforestation

The world's tropical forests produce around a quarter of the planet's oxygen; they also remove around five billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. The Amazon rainforest pumps an astonishing 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere every day. Apart from being havens of biodiversity, intact forests perform critical functions, from flood control to water purification, whose value to humanity is incalculable. A recent EU study entitled 'The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity' estimated that the annual cost of forest loss alone is running at $2-$5trillion. Yes, trillion and yes, that's every year. Every seven months, an area of forest the size of Ireland is permanently destroyed. According to conventional economics, a forest is really just a pile of timber. This logic is akin to slaughtering a champion racehorse to make dog food. By 2020, expect the last remaining great forests of south-east Asia to be in their death throes, and the Amazon to be teetering closer to the edge.

2. Species Extinctions

Our planet has been supporting abundant life for over half a billion years. In that time, five major planetary 'extinction events' have been identified. The most devastating of these occurred some 241 million years ago, and brought the Permian era to an abrupt end. The cause was a relatively sudden increase in average temperatures of around 6°C, and this wiped out around 95% of all land and marine species. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the world is currently undergoing a 'Sixth Extinction'. Species are disappearing at the eye-watering rate of around 50,000 a year. That's the permanent loss of an entire species every 10 minutes. Human fingerprints are invariably at the murder scene. Hunting, habitat destruction, invasive species that accompany human movement and the constant encroachment of agriculture are punching more and more holes in the fabric of life. By 2020, another half a million species will have been obliterated.

3. Ocean Acidification

Two-thirds' of the planet's surface is covered in water and the oceans comprise some 97% of the total biosphere. Two centuries of industrialisation have seen almost 1,000 billion tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Luckily for us, much of that has been reabsorbed into the oceans and dissolved as carbonic acid. By soaking up this heat-trapping gas, the oceans have so far kept the planet a good deal cooler than might be expected. However, the sheer quantities of CO2 are changing the very chemistry of the seas – surface ocean acidity has increased by a third in the last century. According to the UN, it will take the world's oceans thousands of years to recover from "this large-scale rapid human-induced perturbation". Continuing on our current business-as-usual path of CO2 emissions may well take our oceans to a critical tipping point by 2020.

4. Water Crux

Precious little of the planet's abundant water supply is fresh water. Its supply is both fixed and finite. During the course of the last century, human water usage increased nine-fold, with agriculture by far the thirstiest consumer, accounting for 70% of all fresh water. Agriculture in the American mid-west depends on the great Ogallala aquifer, but it is being rapidly drained. The other major sources of reliable water are the mountain glaciers. Virtually every glacier on earth is shrinking; the vast Tibetan plateau provides fresh water for over two billion people. Global warming has thrown its network of glaciers into decline. Tensions over scarce shared water resources are already heating up between the nuclear-armed India, Pakistan and China. A Pentagon report delivered to President Bush in 2004 predicted one or more full-scale "water wars" by 2020.

5. Arctic Meltdown

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report predicted that the Arctic ice cap could be completely melted in summer by 2050. The IPCC data appears to have been far too conservative. Studies of recent satellite data point compellingly to the top of the world being entirely ice-free every summer by 2020. This is the equivalent of switching off one of the planet's two main air-conditioning units. The loss of the floating Arctic ice cap won't directly affect sea levels, but it will accelerate the rate of planetary heating. Ice reflects 90% of incoming sunlight back into space; as it disappears, this ice 'albedo effect' is lost and more and more solar energy is absorbed in a vicious cycle of heating. The disappearance of the Arctic ice pack will disrupt ocean currents as well as hastening the destruction of the massive Greenland ice pack. This commits us to dramatic sea level rises over time, and the eventual abandonment of coastal settlements like Dublin and Cork.

6. People Pressure

"Whatever your cause, it is lost unless you limit population growth," author Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968. Since then, the world has to find the wherewithal to feed another three billion mouths. It took humanity 10,000 years to reach one billion in number. We now add that number every 12 years. Global population grows by over 1.5 million people every week – that's the annual equivalent of adding the entire population of Germany. Since half the world's population is under the age of 25, and with 350 million couples having no access to contraceptive services, there is no way this population bubble can deflate naturally for at least several decades. The need to feed a rapidly expanding human population makes further destruction of the natural world virtually unavoidable in the next 10 years.

7. Peak Oil

The financial crash of September 2008 could not be attributed solely to high energy prices, but oil prices that year of nearly $150 a barrel undoubtedly contributed. The world currently burns over 80 million barrels every day of this strictly finite resource. Global demand for oil by 2020 is expected to have topped 100 million barrels a day. However, the International Energy Agency admits that sharply declining "currently producing fields" will barely be able to provide 40% of that total. This massive energy gap will lead to dramatic oil (and gas) price spikes. These in turn will trip up global economic recovery, leading to a downward spiral of price shocks, recessions, recoveries and deeper recessions. There simply isn't the time to plug the energy chasm left by declining oil supplies, and desperate attempts to tap hard-to-reach sources will lead to further disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

8. Peak Food

The 'green revolution' in food production from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s was driven by the introduction of extensive irrigation, massive increases in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide usage, as well as the development of high-yielding varieties of cereals. This huge increase in food production facilitated a doubling in the world's population in a matter of just a few decades – but at a price. Irrigation has severely strained the world's fresh water supplies, while also leading to soil loss from salinisation and water pollution from fertilizers. Rising energy costs threaten the ability of agriculture globally to continue to produce food cheaply, while droughts and shifts in rainfall patterns due to climate change are threatening food output among already vulnerable populations. The prediction for 2020: hundreds of millions more people living with food insecurity.

9. Climate Change

To borrow a line from Gerry Adams, this one hasn't gone away. Climate change threatens many of the systems upon which all life on earth depends. International efforts to head off its worst impacts foundered in Copenhagen last December. Meanwhile, a powerful and well-funded 'climate denialist' lobby has worked tirelessly to spread misinformation about climate change, mainly through 'think tanks' and the blogosphere. Many, including within the Irish media, have been taken in by their pseudo-science tactics, which are modelled on the methods successfully employed by 'Big Tobacco' to stave off controls on cigarette promotion for decades. The unusually cold weather in Europe over the winter further added to public confusion about whether climate change is in fact really happening. It is. By 2020, we will have nudged perhaps half a degree centigrade closer to the point of no return – which is reckoned to be 2°C above pre-industrial average temperatures.

10 black swan events
These are incidents that are rare and difficult to predict but because they are potentially very high risk, they have to be factored into planning scenarios. Methane clathrate is a case in point. Vast deposits of methane lie frozen in crystalline structures at very low temperatures on the ocean floors. Even a slight rise in deep-ocean temperature may be sufficient to cause these clathrate deposits to become unstable, convert back into gas and rise explosively to the ocean surface. It has happened before, with devastating consequences. Such a scenario would be a 'tipping point' to rapid runaway global warming and lethal to most species on earth – including humans. There are many good reasons for rapidly turning down CO2 emissions and arresting global warming while we still have some influence. Reducing the risk of 'black swan' events is in all our interests. Even if we have to pay some insurance – in the form of putting a realistic price on carbon emissions – surely risks of this magnitude are worth hedging against?

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator. He is founder of the not-for-profit Climatechange.ie and blogs at ThinkOrSwim.ie