First, we need to improve surveillance and early warning. We have reasonable global surveillance systems on climate, energy markets, agricultural output and food markets, but when you get down to ground level, coverage is a lot more patchy. We're not sure how climate change will impact specific places. We don't really have a real time sense of where the most water scarce places are. Where we do have scientific data like this, it's not well integrated with data about conflict risk, or human vulnerability, or political economy dynamics. The new Global Impact and Vulnerability Alert system that the G20 commissioned from the SG in April could prove to be an extremely important first step here - but only a first step.

Second, because of the ways scarcity issues are linked to each other through feedback loops - which creates a major risk of unintended consequences when we try to tackle one scarcity issue, without taking the others into account. Like when the US invests in biofuels to improve energy security - and in the process accidentally helps create a food security crisis. Or when Gulf states use desalinization technology to improve their water security - but at a fearful cost in terms of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Or when South Asia achieves incredible crop yield growth by increasing irrigation during the Green Revolution - but 40 years later, faces a crisis of depleted water tables and aquifers.

First, because they share common drivers. Whether you're looking at energy, food, water, land or 'atmospheric space' for our emissions, demand is skyrocketing - both because of the growing size and affluence of a 'global middle class', and because of a rapidly growing world population. As we've heard, global demand for energy is set to rise 45% by 2030; for food, 50% by 2030 (before biofuels are taken into account); for water, 25% by 2025. And at the same time, as we've been discussing, there are serious reasons for doubting that the supply of any of these resources can rise indefinitely.

Well, we are living in a time of unprecedented, exponential change. There is no question about this in terms of population growth, species depletion, science discoveries, natural resource usage, technological invention, and information and knowledge growth (among many other metrics). The size and metabolism of the system in which we live is getting far larger and more complex at such extraordinary rates that it is now beyond human ability to understand it. (In the financial arena alone, the honest experts will tell you that at a fundamental level they don't know exactly what they are doing in their manipulations of the national and global system because it is too complex to understand.)

“Energy, food and water crises, climate disruption, declining fisheries, ocean acidification, emerging diseases and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity,” say the researchers, who come from Australia, Sweden, the United States, India, Greece and The Netherlands.

New technologies are never created from nothing. They are constructed—put together—from components
that previously exist; and in turn these new technologies offer themselves as possible components—building
blocks—for the construction of further new technologies.1 In this sense, technology (the collection of
mechanical devices and methods available to a culture) builds itself out of itself. 2 Thus in 1912 the amplifier
circuit was constructed from the already existing triode vacuum tube in combination with other existing
circuit components. The amplifier in turn made possible the oscillator (which could generate pure sine
waves); and these with other components made possible the heterodyne mixer (which could shift signals’
frequencies). These two components in combination with other standard ones went on to make possible
continuous-wave radio transmitters and receivers. And these in conjunction with still other elements made
possible radio broadcasting.