http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=11141

More uncertainty lies ahead for public services

If there is one thing certain about the nature of the century that lies ahead, it's uncertainty. From climate change to water, energy and food supplies, Earth's life-support systems are creaking under the strain of humanity. For those who run public services, the prospect of a series of overlapping emergencies, each involving the raw materials of survival and each affecting unprecedentedly large numbers of people, is a formidable new challenge.

That may sound unduly apocalyptic – but then apocalypse is in the air, the subject of an increasing number of books, articles and official reports. The New Scientist earlier this year carried a discussion on the "end of civilisation". The American academic Jared Diamond's Collapse was one of a spate of recent books examining how societies break down. Gaia scientist James Lovelock has gone further, suggesting that humans could be reduced to a "rump" of half a billion "survivors" (the world's population is currently 6.8bn) with large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable as climate change bites.

The main reason for this recrudescence of 1970s-style alarums is, of course, climate change – like the threat of nuclear war, an emergency on a planetary scale. Perhaps the key feature of climate change is unpredictability: not only will places face new extremes of temperature and rainfall but global "tipping points" – a sudden pulse of methane from ocean floor or tundra, for example – will superimpose larger patterns of instability.

Yet at the same time humanity is pressing up against the planet's resource limits. The analyses published by the Global Footprint Network in its Living Planet series measure humanity's ecological footprint against the planet's renewable resources – its biological capacity – and shows that we crossed into "overshoot", when footprint exceeds biocapacity, in the late 1980s and now use up 25 per cent more each year than the Earth can produce. By 2050, on present trends, we will be taking out nearly two planets' worth of resources each year – if such a thing is theoretically possible.

The finer print of this overshoot has recently become all too visible. Many experts believe "peak oil", when production levels plateau out while demand keeps on rising, has already arrived. Water supplies may be similarly peaking – two thirds of humanity will live in water-stressed areas, where demand exceeds supply, by 2025; recently water has had to be shipped in to centres such as Barcelona. This year has also produced, apparently out of the blue, a fully-formed food crisis, complete with riots and shortages, rocketing prices, the spread of food export bans and the appearance of a phenomenon labelled "resource nationalism."

Given the slow decline in per capita food production for several decades, the food crisis should have come as a surprise only to those who have forgotten the crucial role of numbers - specifically human numbers – in environmental calculations. World population, currently growing by some 75-80 m a year – not far off one London a month - is up from 2.5bn in 1950 to 6.8bn today and is projected to reach 9.2 billion in 2050. Environmental groups no longer acknowledge the fact, for fear of alienating supporters, but human numbers play a part, often a decisive part, in virtually every facet of environmental crisis.

Numbers are also key to the management of public services. Headlong population growth during the 18th and 19th centuries turned many of Britain's cities toxic. The recent wave of immigration has seriously overloaded schools, hospitals, health services. Overcrowding has major costs in both health and economic terms, whether it involves housing or transport systems. Big numbers are intrinsically harder to manage than small numbers, necessitating complex, finely balanced systems that are vulnerable to instability – and go wrong on a grand scale. Superimpose on these too-big, too-fast-growing numbers an environment of chronic instability and you have a recipe for a form of permanent emergency on the part of states and government agencies..........