Water Security

Global freshwater is leaving the land faster than it returns, while coastal cities fend off steadily rising seas. Rivers are shrinking, aquifers are draining, and groundwater levels are falling. Polar ice sheets and glaciers are losing hundreds of billions of tons every year, and even the clouds are fading. Much of the lost freshwater later returns to the ocean, adding to sea-level rise. To address our water requirements, governments and private organizations must increase regional capacity of reactor‑driven desalination, closed‑loop reuse (see Singapore's results here), vapor harvesting, and strict stewardship of natural catchments and aquifer recharge to secure reliable freshwater supplies for the decades ahead. At the same time, storm surges and sea-level rise call for Dutch-grade defenses: levees, pumps, and room-for-water basins—before coasts are redrawn.

Ending the Plastic Era

Microplastics now ride the jet stream and cross the placental barrier. Regulating production, chemically recycling (read: burning) plastic waste, and pivoting to truly circular materials must outpace the rate at which our society sheds this permanent, toxic dust. Governments must rapidly address and ban the manufacture and recycling of all non-essential plastics or society risks contaminating several generations of human development with plastic dust.

Stabilizing Atmospheric Heat

Rising concentrations of CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, and water vapor have driven Earth’s atmospheric heat well beyond its natural rhythm: clouds thin, less sunlight is reflected to space, oceans acidify, record‑hot summers scorch crops, and entire regions edge toward unlivable heat. Cutting emissions and hauling carbon back from air and sea are the only ways to cool the planet before atmospheric heating runs away. Trapped heat manifests as extreme events—megadroughts, category‑5 storms, and floods that bankrupt insurers. Climate volatility is projected to impose a $19–$59 trillion (Kotz, M., Levermann, A. & Wenz, L., Nature, 2024) annual toll by 2049. Because today’s emissions remain in the atmosphere for decades, at-risk communities will have to harden in place or retreat from floodplains, heat waves, drought zones, and fire corridors.

Securing Forests

Forests store carbon, water, and life. To temper extreme heat, we must protect intact ecosystems, restore corridors (such as the Amazon or the Great Green Wall), and end forest loss as urgently as cutting carbon—without pollinators and keystone species, food systems and climate resilience unravel together. Yet forests can return; humans have guided regrowth for millennia. We must defend the last old‑growth stands, restore more land into diverse, self‑sustaining carbon sinks, and weave continuous forest belts around our cities and farms (the Dutch Randstad does this well). Protecting and expanding these green reservoirs preserves the biomass networks on which all habitats depend. Finally, carbon offsets and tokens should not in any way be directly linked to forests, because trading forests as tokens risks them masking or financing ongoing deforestation.

Thawing Permafrost

Permafrost still blankets about 16 million km²—roughly one‑sixth of Earth’s land—and locks away nearly twice the carbon already in the air. As it softens, tens of millions of tonnes of carbon‑rich gases leak out each year, and models show that tens of billions more could follow this century, amplifying every other climate trend. The ice also traps toxins and ancient microbes, including more mercury than the world releases annually and sulfur‑bearing minerals that are already turning Arctic streams rust‑orange. Monitoring and actively containing thaw fronts is urgent; the longer we wait, the faster and more irreversible the permafrost leak becomes.

Nuclear Renaissance

From 20 MW microreactors to $50 billion gigawatt-scale plants, fission is back on the critical path for our most energy-intensive applications: desalination, industrial heat, and the growing demand for silicon compute and cold data centers. Every decade of delay in expanding nuclear capacity locks in decades of fossil infrastructure. We must lean on governments and private industry to agree on the fuel cycle of uranium and other fissile isotopes for the future. Global buildout depends less on chemistry and more on licensing reform and public trust.

Resilient Grids

A climate-proof grid must be decentralized, rich in solar and wind, and anchored by at least 80 percent low- or zero-carbon baseload. Supercritical CO₂ turbines, renewable microgrids, and bidirectional EVs can de-risk grids and keep the lights on even during deep blackouts, like the one that preceded southern Europe’s massive black-start in April 2025. There is an increasingly strong case to keep state-run grids less digital: closed to the internet with deep analogue redundancy.

Extraterrestrial Industry

Over the next few centuries, relocating heavy industry to the Moon and the asteroid belt could complement today’s efforts by reducing the resource-extraction burden on Earth’s land, water, and ecosystems. Lunar regolith is iron-rich, the poles hold water ice, and there is no precious atmosphere or soil to destroy. The asteroids contain millennia’s worth of minerals that can be mined and refined far from Earth's surface and brought home as needed, or remain in orbit to continue expanding industry off-world. As with anything of this magnitude, mining and manufacture in space must be a public-private partnership to safely manage the shared and sometimes delicate resources in orbit above our planet.