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Thursday, 3 January 2008
Last Updated: Tuesday, 8 January 2008
Ray Hammond is Europe’s most experienced and widely published futurologist. For 25 years he’s researched, written, spoken and broadcast about how future trends will affect society and business.
He is the author of four futurist novels, 10 non-fiction books and lots of films and TV and radio dramas. He tells us what life is going to be like in 30 years and about the business opportunities that are going to arise from these changes.
To listen to the Lunch with Ray Hammond, click here. To download this mp3 file and listen to it later, right-click this link and "Save target as..." to your computer (Macs; option-click).
Amanda Gome: In the world of 2030, what are some of the big changes that we’re going to see that could let Australian entrepreneurs jump ahead and start thinking about future business opportunities?
Ray Hammond: Well there are six key drivers of the future and these six key drivers are going to make the world a very different place to today.
The first is an explosion in world population. We are currently about 6.6 billion people on the planet. By 2030 we’re going to somewhere between eight and 8.5 billion, and by the middle of the century somewhere between nine and 12 billion people, if you can believe it. Almost doubling.
Now there’s good and bad to that. The good is that we of course have got an ever-growing global market. More and more consumers. The downside is how are we going to feed them? How are we going to find the water for them? How are we going to find the energy for them?
And all at a time when we have to reduce our carbon footprint, so for business, clearly, there’s massive opportunities to help these people but there are also massive opportunities to provide renewable energy forms. To provide improved agriculture, to provide new ways of extracting, refining and desalinating water. Wonderful opportunities. But on the other hand the challenges are immense.
What about in Australia? What are particularly good opportunities for Australian entrepreneurs?
Renewable energy, right at the top. Australia has been blessed with the most immense natural resources. I think of, for example, the immense amount of coal in this particular country. However we know it’s dirty and we know that Australians – not their fault – but they are among the most polluting people on the planet because of burning this coal.
But beneath our feet, on this continent, there’s enough geothermal heat to provide all the energy needs, not just for the whole of Australia but to export as well. The opportunities are immense and of course think about the solar power opportunities.
And the second one?
The second key driver of change is climate change. Now, I firstly would suggest we’re not thinking properly about climate change. We haven’t got the right language. I think you should (think of it as) climate crisis, or climate catastrophe, or climate cataclysm. What we mustn’t think of it is a cosy thing like global warming. Sounds almost a nice thing. But it’s not.
We’ll all be like Florida.
It’s a really serious challenge, and what we have to do is we have to provide for this growing world population. Most of them aren’t in Australia, this growing population. They’re not in Europe, they’re not in North America, but they’re definitely in Africa and they’re definitely in parts of Asia and they’re definitely in parts of Latin America.
We have a real difficulty. How do we double our output while at the same time make sure that our carbon needs go down.
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