A crowd of people rapidly rush down a busy street

Moving too fast, thinking short-term, breaking the planet

We’re driving ecosystems toward ecological collapse. One million species could be at risk of extinction soon due to human activity.

The cost-efficient choices justify nature loss

BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black traces key milestones, scientific discoveries, technical innovations and political action.

A brief history of climate change

Our wealth and income, as individuals, depends on the efforts and achievements of the many generations who came before us. However we tend to underestimate our relationships and lineages with past generations and future populations.

Persistent selves

Anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System have reached a scale where abrupt global
environmental change can no longer be excluded.

Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity 

Our inability to look beyond the latest news cycle could be one of the most dangerous traits of our generation, says Richard Fisher.

The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat

, fueled by our short-sightedness. Every year, a new model is introduced, obsoleting the model of last year. Every minute, we are flooded with new information on our smart phone. We easily lose sight of the "long time" of the planet: the time it took for the forests to grow, the glaciers to form, the coral reefs to build.

Elise Boulding, a sociologist, wrote on our "temporal exhaustion": "if one is mentally out of breath, all the time from dealing with the present, there's no energy left for imagining the future.

How can we embrace long-term thinking?

Moving too fast, thinking short-term, breaking the planet