What will the world look like in 2050?

A best-case scenario vision for the future

By Sarah Wilson. This excerpt is from a 2021 article published in The Big Issue. Republished with permission.

2050 is the target set for the world to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions. So what would the world look like if we get it all right?

The world stuck to its climate ambitions and successfully drove down greenhouse gas emissions from 2020 onwards. Most countries including the UK achieved net zero emissions on target, but historical greenhouse gases mean that the Earth is now 1.3 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures.

It’s 6am when your sleep assistant wakes you by tuning into the radio and gradually dialling up the brightness of your bedside lamp. When you bought it, the shop assistant promised the device would monitor your sleep rhythms and rouse you at the optimal moment. Judging by your grogginess, you’ve been ripped off. 

It’s early December and there’s a chill in the air, so you reach up to the control panel above your bed and click the heating on. Two floors below, you hear the heat pump whirr and your well-insulated room quickly fills with warm air. The DJ plays a teaser track from Adele’s upcoming album, 60, as you throw on a robe and marvel at her stamina.

Pulling back the curtains, you’re relieved to see that the two straight weeks of torrential rain has finally ceased, with the sun now straining through a thin grey cloud. The radio news bulletin says last week’s flooding almost breached barriers in York and parts of London. You think of Susan, who came to the co-living complex a decade ago after her home in Fairborne, Wales, was reclaimed by the sea. You feel lucky to have chosen to live here. Most of your housemates have stories like this – hurricanes, wildfires, floods and typhoons forcing them from their homes. 

Your thoughts are interrupted by the smell of bacon wafting in from the kitchen. The best cook in the building is on breakfast duties. Today’s meal is a plate of toast, “fake-on”, (70 per cent lab-grown meat, 30 per cent pea protein) spinach and a couple of eggs from the coop in the buildings’ shared garden. Meat is a rare treat these days. When you do have it, it’s usually produced in a lab and mixed with alternative proteins. The bread is homemade, courtesy of the retirees living in your building whose enthusiasm for baking just about makes up for the endless nostalgia for the “good old days” of snow at Christmas and diesel cars. 

You’ve been living here for five years now and, bar one odd housemate who only ever emerges at night, you get along well with everyone. Co-living complexes with shared communal facilities first sprung up in the 2030s, when the climate crisis began displacing millions and developers were forced to innovate. At first the goal was extra space, but over time complexes went a long way to easing loneliness, community tensions and, thanks to government-subsidised rent, social inequalities.

Your housemates linger in the kitchen after breakfast. As it’s Friday, most have now finished their four-day week and will head off to various volunteering projects during the day. 

For most, the five-day week is a distant memory. The first time the four-day week was rolled out it was an emergency measure to reduce carbon footprints, but today, 80 per cent of the workforce enjoy a three-day weekend. Originally, mass rollout saw a big push to encourage volunteering on the free day, though you personally enjoy using your Monday off to lie horizontally on the sofa.

The constant rain has been irritating, but it does mean no faffing with spare water supply for your shower. The water for bathing comes from a rainwater tank on the roof, which trickles through the pipes to be heated and treated before coming out of the shower head. 

Pushing for time now, you finish up, hurry back to your room and pull on some clothes. Your jeans are a “lifetime” pair bought in 2030, with the distressed finish produced by lasers instead of the water-intensive methods once used in the early 2000s. The shirt you pull over your head is made from recycled orange peel, and your anorak is second hand, lined with fleece made from old plastic bottles. Your boots are vintage leather, exchanged for a pair of brogues at a swap shop down the road. 

You don’t own as many clothes as you used to. Vintage, second hand and independent retailers dominate the market, and huge discounts on new clothes are available for taking unwanted garments back to clothing stores, who either sell them on or upcycle them into new life. Thanks to the success of a huge public campaign some years back, the old re-use, repair and recycle mentality has returned, with schools making sustainability – and needlework – a core part of the curriculum. 

Once dressed, you briefly contemplate taking your bike to work but decide the risk of getting stuck behind the school “bike bus” isn’t worth it. You open your Ryder app instead. In almost every big city now, some variation of this app allows you to hitch a ride with others going in the same direction, keeping millions of cars off the road. There’s three people going your way, so you tap the one with the most normal-looking profile picture (sorry, Mr Lycra) and head out to wait by the building’s charging points.

You’re picked up by a chatty woman from the local area who tells you all about her recent holiday on a high-speed inter-rail ticket. Since railway-building accelerated in the late 2020s, international trains are fast, cheap and appealing. Plane travel hasn’t stopped, but it has shrunk dramatically, with flights now relying mostly on hydrogen fuel and domestic journeys banned. Like almost every car on the road, the one you’re travelling in today is electric. 

You whizz past the high street and watch local cafe owners roll back the covers over their outdoor seating for the first time in weeks. The area is already teeming with families, dog walkers and joggers, all with plenty of space to move since pedestrian and cycle space was vastly expanded into the road. 

The “15-minute city” hasn’t emerged perfectly everywhere, but amenities, shops and entertainment are accessible without a car for most people, meaning local business has boomed. In city centres where footfall declined, empty shops were given over to arts and charity organisations to create extra space for culture, leisure and community services. 

Green space is everywhere you look thanks to the urban forests planted long ago to soak up carbon and cool the intense summer temperatures that strike cities every summer. The air is cleaner. Long-gone wildlife is returning, and a complex system of fences and sensors has been devised to keep as many animals as possible away from the roads, where quiet electric car motors can often prove deadly. 

After a short ride, you’re dropped off by the shuttle boat that takes you out to the offshore wind farm where you’ve worked as a turbine engineer for the last couple of decades. When wind farms started cropping up in enormous numbers off Britain’s coastlines years ago, naysayers complained that they were spoiling the view. When gas shortages started crippling those same households, they soon fell silent. 

Your working day finishes around six and you grab a bus home, where a vegetable box has been delivered to your doorstep by the local farm. Thanks to droughts and crop failures around the world, supermarket shortages are not uncommon, but an increased reliance on seasonal British-grown produce provides a degree of food stability.

You take the box inside, thinking back in disbelief to the days when fruit came individually wrapped in plastic. The ocean remains full of it to this day, but single-use plastic has been almost entirely phased out of production processes, and mass cleanup operations are underway to remove as much as possible from global water supply. 

Your evening plans involve a drink at a local bar with a friend. Ever since pedestrians claimed back vast swathes of cities, street lighting has been vastly improved, and footfall is high even at night. You know your neighbours and feel safe walking alone to the bar, where you sit down with your friend and order two glasses of 2040 English wine. 

You feel a little guilty when the drinks arrive, remembering that where parts of England won better climes for wine-growing out of the climate crisis, parts of the Mediterranean have burned. As ever, the conversation quickly turns to these unluckier parts of the world, and those nations who have unfairly paid the price for emissions produced by wealthier countries.

Things are by no means perfect, but the world is a far better place than it would have been had leaders failed to hit the brakes on emissions in the 2020s. Bit by bit, the Earth is getting cleaner and greener, and in time, scientists say temperatures will begin climbing back down.

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This is an excerpt from an article published in The Big Issue. Read the full article here.