Global Grand Challenges

Global Grand Challenges

Hint: Disclaimer: This page is a work in progress, and items are not listed in order of importance. The meaning of some of the following items may be different than what you may think, so please limit your assumptions. Further explanations will be provided and published in a forthcoming book, after being vetted and peer reviewed for general consensus and best practices

1. General ecocide (Whole World issue)
2. High Gini Coefficient
3. High Cost of Living, preventing honest pursuit of Self-Determination by most people (a First World issue)
4. Standing armies
5. Deforestation and desertification
6. Genocide
7. Resource scarcity - water rights, clean air, clean food (Whole World issue)
8. Patent system and other legal fictions for enclosing public knowledge
9. Lack of public access to published journals. Solution possibility: cross subsidization or institution only pay for the service
10. Limitation of liability (ie, fundamental unaccountability baked into the operation of enterprise)
11. Biodiversity loss
12. Alienation from work (related to high Cost of Living
13. Access to healthcare
14. Illiteracy, and especially collaborative illiteracy
15. Innumeracy and Scientific Illiteracy
16. Corporate funded research
17. Pollution, especially water pollution
18. Corrupt institutions
19. Economic system based on proprietary development as opposed to open source product development
20. Training as opposed to education
21. Disciplinary thinking
22. Agricultural monoculture
23. Fossil fuel energy
24. Global supply chains via cost extrernalization
25. Externalization of social, environmental, and lifetime costs
26. Slavery, including wage slavery
27. Consequences of Colonialism + Neocolonialism
28. Depression
29. Insurance Racket
30. Corrupt Officials and Bribes

Universal Solutions

1. Universal access to education (upgrading the operating system in peoples' heads)
2. Circular Economies
3. Open Source Product Development
4. Transparency
5. Ethical Economics
6. Distributed Production - Distributed Manufacturing - and especially Distributive Enterprise
7. Democracy
8. Transparency
9. Afforestation - planting trees. For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to biofuels can be accomplished by repurposing wasteland and other use to Integrated Polyculture biomass production
10. Agricultural perennial polyculture
11. Renewable energy
12. Regenerative development of land
13. Economics based on full cost accounting
14. Building of (Renewable and self sustaining) Economies + Medical Sysytems + Infastructure in Developing and/or Island countries, Or rural areas of ones

that do not fit those prior conditions, yet face similar problems