A Perfect Storm

While smart-technology innovations around the globe percolate, two intertwined megatrends have laid the foundation for their eventual use. One trend is growing awareness of threats to the sustainability of the earth's natural environment. The second is the rapid rise in the number of people moving into and living in cities. Combined, these large-scale shifts create a perfect storm for urban innovation.

Megatrend One: Climate Change

News of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, famine, chronic disease, toxic waste, nuclear winter, and species extinctions have become too frequent to count. Epic storms with human names—Katrina, Sandy, Haiyan (in the Philippines)—increasingly terrify and devastate. A 2010 article in Scientific American, darkly titled "How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth's Resources," presented a long and frightening list of concerns: glacier melt (in some places more than a half meter per year); oil scarcity (by 2050 we will have used all but 10 percent of the earth's available oil); freshwater scarcity (by 2025 renewable water reserves may drop below 500 cubic meters per person per year, considered the minimum for a functioning society); and even mass extinction (biologists warn of events on par with those that killed the dinosaurs). Climate change threatens to alter everything about our lives, from agriculture and food supplies to productivity and the frequency of extreme weather events. The Scientific American article also estimated that even coal, long thought inexhaustible, would dwindle to nothing by 2072, given the current rates of extraction.

Our ability to feed ourselves in the future has been increasingly revealed as precarious. Even today roughly 925 million people are hungry. And the number is growing; the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that by 2080, 600 million additional people could be at risk of hunger as a direct result of climate change. In addition to those who face starvation, many more will be chronically malnourished. The Scientific American report predicted that counteracting the ill effects of climate change on nutrition would cost more than $7 billion per year by 2050, while the FAO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned that the direct impacts of climate disruptions on food production patterns would lead to more "extreme volatility events on international food commodities markets."

Ecological footprint analysis, introduced in a 1992 University of British Columbia doctoral dissertation, compares human demand on nature with the biosphere's ability to regenerate resources and provide services. It does this by assessing the biologically productive land and marine area required to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb the corresponding waste using prevailing technology. The WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund), a proponent of this approach, claims that the human footprint already has exceeded the biocapacity (the available supply of natural resources) of the planet by 20 percent. Yet, as readers well know, the earth's population continues to rise. The United Nations (UN) estimates that the global population will grow from 6.5 billion in 2010 to 8.5 billion in 2050. Moreover, the average standard of living across the globe, which translates into greater per capita resource consumption, has also risen steadily. Clearly, with more people consuming more, the ecological footprint problem is exacerbated.

Megatrend Two: Urbanization

We are fast becoming an urban planet. With 180,000 new people moving into cities each day, the twenty-first century is the era of urbanization. In 2008 the world reached an invisible but profound milestone: half of its population was living in cities, for the first time in history. By 2050, according to UN estimates, 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities.

Many of these cities have yet to be built. China's announcement in spring 2013 of plans to move 250 million people into cities over the next 15 years sent ripples through the blogosphere. Some estimate a need for more than 10,000 new cities by 2050 to house an anticipated 3 billion new urban inhabitants. Such estimates represent a massive construction project.

Should this construction occur in the same way as it did in the creation of today's existing cities? Logically, given environmental challenges, technological advances, and the relative speed of the growth in urbanization, this would not be the best approach. Letting cities merely evolve, as in centuries past, is likely to lead to sprawling slums and suburbs, excessive use of personal cars, divergent economic opportunities, inadequate infrastructure, and a lack of open space. Coming up with better-designed and more coordinated alternatives, however, requires collaborative innovation on an unprecedented scale.

The specter of uncontrolled growth, marginalized slums, health issues, and social unrest in megacities with populations of more than 10 million also looms large. By 2013 Tokyo, New York, Mexico City, and Shanghai had populations in excess of 20 million. The Endless City, published in 2007, with its sequel, Living in the Endless City (2011), showcased writings by architects, mayors, urban planners, policy makers, and others on concerns about physical growth in cities and on how to improve the quality of life in megacities. Some expressed a faith in technology to solve social and physical problems associated with growth; others put faith in visionary leadership.

Cities are places of modernity and opportunity. Nonetheless not all of tomorrow's new urbanites will relocate voluntarily. In his October 2011 speech on World Habitat Day, Dr. Joan Clos, executive director of the UN Human Settlements Programme, warned that by 2050 we can expect more than 200 million environmental refugees from the effects of floods, drought, overheating, and other climate-related disasters. Left to chance, urbanization is unlikely to proceed optimally for both the environment and the residents.

Adding 2 billion people to the planet is like adding two Chinas to the number of people alive today. Leaving aside for now the issue of whether forecasts are destiny, it is clear that large numbers of people will need food, water, and other resources on a planet that, as noted, already faces stretched resources. Leading scientists in climate-related fields have argued that human activity is already shaping climate and the web of life.

Together these megatrends call for innovation that is no less significant than a third era in the history of cities, no less than a new order of things. How can leaders today—armed with ambitious visions and complex, fallible technologies and organizations—help bring this about? The rest of this book explores this question. See Five Leadership Lessons for Building the Future: A Preview for a summary of the lessons that unfold in the chapters ahead.