On the 12th of January 2025, Secretary General Ann Clearly gave a historic speech at the Geneva Headquarters of the United Nations. The Gaia Roadmap was officially launched in front of a full assembly and received a standing ovation. Resolution 80/42 is shown below, including the GAIA Roadmap to 2100, before the full transcript of Ann Clearly’s speech.
General Assembly Resolution 80/42: Adopted on 12th January 2025 the GAIA Roadmap to 2100
Gaia Roadmap to 2100
1- In this year 2025, it is accepted as fact by scientific communities that the human population of planet earth will stand between 400 million and 1.4 billion in 2100. Our current world population trajectory means our dietary needs will intersect with the capacity of the world to grow food between the years 2070 and 2090.
2- Maintaining biodiversity is essential to the future of the natural world and of humankind. Actions to protect habitats and biodiversity are paramount. A deep rethink of our economic system will form an integral part of that aim. A New World Order will be enforced by the United Nations coming together and acquiring the required powers to unite the world and achieve those stated aims of preservation of the biosphere and resetting of the economic model. Despite those actions, it is estimated that our encroachment on ecosystems, climate change and pollution will reduce biodiversity by 75% by 2100 from pre-industrial levels.
3- Even a drastic reduction in births will not always avoid the intersection of our dietary needs and food production in all countries. The United Nations Science division has produced potential population pathways which will minimize the impact of the intersection when it is unavoidable. Countries are to decide of their own population strategy and will be eligible for food solidarity programs if there is demonstrated a minima adherence to the proposed pathway. The United Nations Peace Corps will assist on the ground with maintaining peace and order within and between countries.
Transcript of Secretary General Ann Clearly’ speech to the General assembly on 12th January 2025
Delegates of the countries of the United Nations, members of the press, ladies and gentlemen of the assembly, As you would recall, the newly created United Nations Science Branch was tasked 8 months ago with drafting a document that would define the path of humanity to the year 2100AD as it had become clear that as a globalised thermo-industrial civilization,
humanity was now at a crossroads. Sustainability is a word that had crept up in our everyday language and become a catchphrase in many speeches for many years, and I thought I had a good handle on what it meant but we needed to truly assess our progress so far, and more importantly, to examine the direction in which the world was heading. Are we really sustainable?
I now know that “Sustainable development” or “more sustainable” are nonsensical expressions, and that we are far from sustainable.
As research into the issues that humanity is facing progressed, it quickly appeared that we needed to redefine sustainability because nothing we currently do is leading us on a path of true sustainability as a species, as a civilization, and unfortunately as an integral part of the biosphere. Either we are sustainable, or we are not; being “more sustainable” just means we will take longer to get to our demise, and that may actually be worse than going all out into the looming brick wall. The sustainability we really need to consider looks not to the year 2050 as previously, or even beyond 2100, but ad infinitam, or at least until we start to feel the effects of the fuel in our sun starting to run out.
Until that time billions of years from now, our planet, our tiny blue speck in space, is not immune to a smite from a comet or to a burst of radiation from an exploding celestial body nearby. However, in the current period in the history of our planet started a blink of an eye ago, the Anthropocene, we carry a duty of stewardship to ourselves and to the natural world on which we ultimately depend. I am here today to tell you that we have failed miserably to be good stewards of this earth, as has been revealed to me by my team at the UNS.
Whether we like it or not, our world is finite and is regulated by a set of inescapable physical laws.
As much as we would like to, we do not have unlimited stocks of minerals, arable land, inorganic fertilizers or water, and we cannot get energy for nothing.
The first point of the Gaia Roadmap shows that our human world is about to be taught a lesson in true sustainability. Within this century, our need for food will intersect with our ability to grow that amount of food due to resource depletion, notably of our resources in phosphates, water and topsoil.
There are currently almost 8 billion people living on the planet. In 2100, it is now estimated that the human population will be 1.4 billion at best, as we will only be able to grow enough food for that number. This is in stark contrast with the world population models that would have us 10 billion strong by then. No matter how you try to twist and contort around it, there is no avoiding this discrepancy, that is the hard fact we must now face.
Human population levels and agricultural production since the green revolution have been artificially propped up by the use of artificial non-renewable fertilizers and irrigation, phosphate and water are the bottlenecks that will run out first. From that point onward, food production levels will crash rapidly and future production will be limited in theory to pre-green revolution levels, with higher productivity in regions of active volcanism and in alluvial plains.
Being 1.4 billion humans on earth in 2100 is a best case scenario that will require for us to adopt a mostly vegetarian diet. It will also require us to pursue and intensify our efforts in mitigating climate change to avoid further potential losses in productivity. We will need to deeply revise our need for growth. One main driver of our energy consumption is our insatiable need for consumer goods. This economic growth is not sustainable and cannot be substituted in the longer term with a green economy which is simply an extension of our extractive model carried out at a slower pace, an approach that is doomed in the only slightly longer term.
There are of course actions which we can and must absolutely partake to soften that massive blow to our human world. We have vast cropping areas from land clearing, which we can now use for growing food for ourselves rather than to grow fodder for the animals we eat. We have cultivars that resist diseases, are drought tolerant, and can grow in nutrient constrained environments. We will need all the help we can get to fight soil erosion, soil degradation via salinization and sterility, shifts in growing areas due to climate change, and aquifers drying out from overuse.
The greater the shift to a vegetarian diet, the greater the carrying capacity of the Earth will be for humanity, ranging between 400 million with average 2025 dietary habits to a billion vegetarians, or 1.4 billion vegans. Basically the more trophic levels that can be skipped between the sun and our mouths, the more people the earth will sustain as for each trophic level that is skipped, much less food production is needed to feed us. Our energetic strategy and decarbonation efforts will also impact significantly on that carrying capacity, and will affect other factors in the list such as soil erosion and water availability. Food will simply not grow as well in a hotter climate, we will need more water, there will be more evaporation, growing regions will shift, and some areas will become uninhabitable. In some regions, the soil or water depletion will have major localized impacts before the phosphate bottleneck eventually becomes the first great leveler of earth’s carrying capacity. If we do not curb our dependency on fossil fuels, migration of climate refugees will also cause tensions and possible wars in many regions of the globe. Wet bulb temperatures will make some parts of the earth simply uninhabitable for hundreds of millions of humans and for many species of animals, forcing the migration and the extinction of many more species.
2100 is chosen as a “middle of the road” hypothesis for the Gaia Roadmap as it represents the time when humanity will have run out of its capacity to maintain its drawdown on resources, as those reserves will have been fully depleted. In other words, 2100 is the time when humanity will no longer be able to outstrip the carrying capacity of the earth as resources that have allowed our population overshoot thus far will no longer be there.
Our own body fat reserves will be the only reserves left.
Humanity will still have some capacity to maintain energy supply by switching to alternatives to fossil fuel and by embracing renewable energy. Or humanity can choose to pursue its current timid path out of our fossil fuel reliance and suffer catastrophic climate change as a consequence. The two strategies will lead to very different outcomes for the planet and its climate, and is part of the reason for the uncertainty range in the outcome. Every tenth of a degree gained against global warming will avoid the migration of tens of millions, millions of tonnes of lost food production and countless species lost to extinction.
Eventually, phosphate depletion and in some areas low water availability, will be the two real drivers deciding the human carrying capacity of planet earth in 2100. Ultimately, global energy needs will also have to be reviewed as renewable and alternative energies are based on extractive industrial models, and will also cause resource depletions in an only slightly more distant future. They are not a long term solution and addressing this bottleneck will be the next fire to put out, right now our work will deal with the more pressing matter of survival through this century.
Additionally, and as an indispensable prerequisite to climate change mitigation, a severe rationalization of our material needs is needed as well as a rethinking of our addiction to a growth economy. The economy will have to re-evolve into a true market economy, with a re-purposing of money solely for the intent of facilitating commerce of tangible goods, and simply put those goods will have to be what we need rather than what we want. The UN International Trade Organization will be reinstated in substitution to the GATT agreements. The World Bank and the IMF will operate, as per the initial intent of those institutions, under the cusp of the United Nations.
Agricultural practices will need to be reexamined. In particular, intensive monocultures dependent on fuel and mineral inputs from extractive industries and propped up by pesticides or hormones will need to be replaced with systems which allow the meshing in of biodiversity as a resilience strategy, and become functional cycles. Currently, 10 calories of energy are needed on average to produce one calorie of food energy, an untenable position in a world with diminishing energy reserves, and in stark contrast with a few hundred years ago, when the ratio was closer to one calorie of human labor to produce 50 calories of food. We need to get back to that position where we reaped more than we sowed. This new agriculture will also play an important role in the fight against climate change by providing valuable carbon sinks, way more effective than the raft of greenwashed green growth schemes that have cropped up in recent years. Small plots of high yield polycultures which do not rely on fertilizers or irrigation will have to become the dominant system and its early adoption will greatly help to push back the intersection of food needs and food production. Ancient crops and herds will have to be brought back to revive the genetic diversity we have been systematically culling in the name of profit and productivity, but which in the long term will only make us less able to face what changes are coming, including changes we cannot foresee.
Moving on to the second point of the Roadmap, we absolutely need to preserve biodiversity. It is our duty as stewards of this earth who have now encroached on every ecosystem on this planet, but we will also be more resilient if we are part of a diverse biosphere. Safety is not in numbers but in diversity of life. The richer the web of life around us, the more services we can extract from it, and the more we can give back. The International Court of Environmental Justice, the ICEJ, will grant the environment the representation it needs in our human world, it will acquire the power to enforce treaties and protect the environment in an effective way. As it is, the world is in the grip of the 6th mass extinction, with current extinction rates a thousand times higher than background rates, and we are set to lose 75% of all biodiversity by 2100 despite the current ambitious and unprecedented plan to reverse this trend. The International Court of Environmental Justice will have as its aim to limit that loss.
A taskforce will be created to become the arm of the ICEJ and ensure that 75% loss of biodiversity is an upper figure; vast off-limit areas will be set up in every country and enforced by that dedicated UN corps, the Biodiversity Preservation Unit, or Green Helmets. Where possible, corridors linking habitats will be created to reach critical ecosystems sizes that will sustain all trophic levels up to top predators. Unhindered North-South circulation of animals and plants will need to be possible to allow for shifting species ranges due to a changing climate.
Adhering beyond the Paris agreement and all other conventions on the reduction of pollutants on land, in the air and the sea, will be paramount to the objective of limiting biodiversity loss. The natural world too is suffering from the climate change and all the other effects we humans have induced.
Preserving biodiversity as much as possible has the double objective of helping humanity survive the impact of the resource depletion via restriction to habitat encroachment, hence forcing a restriction of the growth and demography of humans, and increasing future resilience for the human world through and beyond a difficult period that is coming.
The more functioning, diverse and resilient ecosystems that are left, the more humanity will be able to tap into whatever services are left to sustain itself. Do not confuse this last sentence with a statement of any legitimate master/slave relationship, we need the natural world much more than it needs us, and we can never forget that fact. In all fairness, even if we pull this plan off and survive as humans with a minimum of suffering into the next century, the Gaia Roadmap is still not sharing the planet anywhere near equitably with the natural world, our dominance would still remain, the natural world will still be under the constant threat posed by us having escaped tens of thousands of years ago now from the shackles of natural selection. We can never forget that either, we absolutely need to reign in the hubris that has made us so successful up to this point, a healthy biosphere is a prerequisite for a healthy human world into the immediate future and beyond.
Indeed, the exhaustion of resources constricting food production will see a tremendous amount of pressure placed on the natural world by a desperate and hungry population. The more protection is afforded and applied to the natural world between now and the depletion, the smaller the impact will be during the possibly now inevitable final onslaught. The smaller the impact on the natural world, the better the chance of maintaining diversity. For the whole biosphere, including humans this will increase the chance of a rebound into a more resilient future.
Finally, as hinted by the first point of the Gaia Roadmap, it will be obvious by now that humanity faces some very difficult choices as to its population level. Natural attrition via a restrained fertility may not always be sufficient to avoid an intersection of our needs, but it is a far better alternative to an increase in mortality through famine and war.
Demographic control via the restriction of births has been unsuccessful via coercion, and voluntary measures are currently restricted to increasing access of women to education and birth control. A corollary of the humanitarian aid via food, vaccination and health care programs has been a decrease in overall and infant mortality in developing country, compounding the issue of an increase in food consumption. We can no longer avoid the intersection of the food consumption curve with the food production capacity curve, predicted to occur between the years 2070 and 2090.
Paths to the carrying capacity of each country have been calculated between 2025 and 2100AD. It is up to individual nations to retain sovereignty on their chosen d