Breaking news in 2037: the thawing of Arctic ice releases a 40,000-year-old virus that doctors have never seen before. Another unintended consequence of global warming, and a reminder that our world is changing dramatically right now.
- How would your business respond to another pandemic lockdown?
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the news. It’s the 12th of March, 2037. And breaking news this evening is that scientists have now confirmed that the latest pandemic source is actually from Siberia.
That’s right, the pandemic that for the last few months has kept us once again, locked down in our homes and countries and borders quarantined from each other, has come from an ancient virus It’s thought to be over 45,000 years old, that was released into the air as the permafrost in the northern parts of Russia have now melted completely.
We’ve known for some time that the melting of the polar ice, especially in the northern hemisphere, is providing one benefit, at least, opening up the Arctic Ocean Sea lanes and ships being able to move across the northern part of the planet, at least during summer. But of course, there have been unbelievably bad consequences, including those raging fires across the north of Canada, the north of China, and the north of Russia that have caused massive smoke problems across most of the northern hemisphere for the last two summers.
And that melting of the ice has released many interesting things. We’ve discovered a few of those fossils and some of those woolly mammoths that are now on display in our museums, wonderfully preserved fossils from ancient times. But along with those fossils come the diseases that may or may not have been the cause of some of its extinction’s centuries and millennia ago. Now, today, we are facing a race against time to find vaccines and cures for these diseases that haven’t been known on planet Earth during modern humanity’s time on this planet.
Unintended consequences of climate change and the warming of the planet. And so once again, we are faced with an angry planet fighting back against what humans are doing to it. All the best to you and yours in these difficult times.
Welcome to ThrowForward Thursday to the Future, where we jump into the future, try and imagine what news headlines will look like, and then ask what it might mean for us today. This one feels a little bit scary, it feels like something that we’re probably hearing a lot about. But we can’t remind ourselves enough that if our planet warms up much more than it is already, we are going to be dealing with all sorts of consequences in all sorts of ways. And we are going to have to get used to a different type of planet, a planet with different peaks of high and low temperatures, with different diseases arriving, with different weather conditions and patterns.
And over the next 10 to 15 years, we are going to see remarkable shifts in the way that our world works, and we’re going to have to work out how we live and work in a remarkably different world.
As always, thank you for joining us in the ThrowForward Thursday Studio. We can’t solve all of the problems, but at least we can prepare for some of them, and hopefully, just hopefully, make sure that we don’t succumb to the worst scenarios of the future.
If our team can help you and your team to plan for the future and to think about how you can respond to the threats and grasp the opportunities, well, please get hold of us. It’s what we do every day. We love doing it, and we love to do it with you.
See you next week in the future, again.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.