Swedish futures
Carl Folke: Sweden can help shape a future of sustainable prosperity
"Sweden is well prepared and offers fertile ground for a sustainable future. But the moment demands that we dare to demonstrate leadership, act as a strong, unifying force for international cooperation, and remain steadfast on the path towards sustainable development," writes Centre co-founder Carl Folke.
Change is often unsettling. In these turbulent times, rocked by geopolitical tensions, overlapping crises, accelerating climate change and transformative technological advances, one pressing question recurs: Is there hope?
In this essay, published for the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), Centre co-founder Carl Folke reflects on how we can move towards a brighter future – for our country and for our living planet.
As the legendary singer Neil Young proclaimed last year:
Big change is coming
Coming right home to you
Big change is coming
You know what you gotta to do
Big change is coming
Could be bad, and it could be good.
The world is changing profoundly. To understand how Sweden should respond, we must understand not only Sweden’s place in the world, but also humanity’s place on Earth.
Sweden is part of the biosphere, that thin layer of our planet, barely two miles high, in which life exists and evolves. It is a truly unique place in an immeasurably vast universe. Life flows in us and through us. Our bodies are constantly renewed by some 20 chemical elements: water sustains us; microorganisms support our physical and mental health and regulate our immune systems; our guts host live bacteria that communicate with our brains, their origins reaching back to the time before the Earth’s atmosphere contained oxygen.
We are interwoven with all life in the biosphere.
Today, however, we are leaving the Holocene, an exceptionally favourable epoch for humanity, during which agriculture emerged, civilisations flourished, and the foundations of our modern globalised world were laid.
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