future generations essay

What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

Disclosure statement

Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future . It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.

MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count

It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people

Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast : much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.

While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel . Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion , it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.

MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be.

Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more . Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more: Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better

Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain ?

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people . Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?

MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.

For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.

Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.

The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book.

That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.

MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future.

The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation , safe development of artificial intelligence , reducing risks from nuclear war , and other threats to humanity.

Read more: Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations

Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).

MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions.

For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?

The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective.

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours , which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism .

Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.

• Climate change
• Generations
• Future generations
• Effective altruism
• Longtermism

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How Future Generations Will Remember Us

History is a long series of moral abominations.

The Romans enslaved people , enforced a rigid patriarchy, and delighted in the spectacle of prisoners being tortured at the Colosseum. Top minds of the ancient Western world—luminaries such as Aristotle, whose works are still taught in undergraduate lectures today—defended slavery as an entirely natural and proper practice. Indeed, from the dawn of the agricultural era to the 19th century, slavery was ubiquitous across the world. It’s hard to understand how our predecessors could have been so horrifically wrong.

We have made real progress since then. Though still very far from perfect, society is in many respects considerably more humane and just than it once was. But why should anyone think this journey of moral progress is close to complete? Given humanity’s track record, we almost certainly are, like our forebears, committing grave moral mistakes at this very moment. When future generations look back on us, they might see us like we see the Romans. Contemplating our potential moral wrongdoing is a challenging exercise: It requires us to perceive and scrutinize everything that humanity does.

Some of our sins are obvious with even a small amount of reflection. Take, for example, how we treat incarcerated people. Unlike the Romans, we mostly no longer stage the suffering of prisoners as public spectacle. Still, we subject them to conditions—such as extended solitary confinement —that enlightened future generations will likely regard with horror. The massive harm we inflict on incarcerated people (and their innocent families) is often greater than the harm inflicted by beating and caning—practices we’ve rightly left behind.

Or consider how we treat animals. Every year, humanity slaughters 80 billion land animals to satisfy our culinary preferences. Most of these are chickens, and their lives are miserable: Male chicks of layer hens are gassed, ground up, or thrown into the garbage, where they either die of thirst or suffocate to death; female chicks have their sensitive beaks cut off, and most are confined to cages that are smaller than a letter-size piece of paper. On average, a regular meal containing chicken or eggs costs at least 10 torturous hours of a chicken’s life—and more chickens will be killed within the next two years than the number of all humans who have ever lived . Similarly, pigs are castrated and have their tails amputated, and farmed cattle are castrated, dehorned, and branded with a hot iron—all without anesthetic. If animals matter at all, our treatment of them is a crime of epic proportions .

These ethical failures share a pattern. Disenfranchised and marginalized groups—such as the global poor, incarcerated people, migrants wrested from their families by our immigration system, and even humble farm animals—are out of sight and out of mind. Future generations will observe how we hid these groups from society’s gaze, allowing ourselves to ignore their basic interests. This is not a new point . But there’s another dimension that’s less discussed. When future people look back on us, they are bound to notice our disregard for another disenfranchised group: them .

Future generations can’t vote in our elections, or speak across time and urge us to act differently. They are voiceless. It’s easy to imagine that in the year 2300, our descendants will look back on us and deplore our failure to take their interests into account. And the stakes of this potential failure are incredibly high. Because of the sheer number of future people, and because their well-being is so utterly neglected, I’ve come to believe that protecting future generations should be a key moral priority of our time . When we consider which groups we’re neglecting, it’s all too easy to forget about most people who will likely ever live.

Here’s just one example of our disregard for future people. Despite the devastating wake-up call of COVID-19, most governments remain almost entirely underprepared for future pandemics. For instance, the U.S. still spends only less than $10 billion a year on preparing for pandemics, compared with about $280 billion on counterterrorism. Since 9/11, about 500 people have died on U.S. soil as a result of a terrorist acts. More than a thousand times as many have died from COVID: The excess-death toll from COVID in the U.S. is more than a million people. If we don’t massively ramp up our meager attempts to prevent the next pandemic, it’s highly likely that a pathogen much deadlier than the coronavirus will eventually cause devastation. The risk of accident from experimentation on the very deadliest pandemics will only increase, and soon, as such dangerous research becomes rapidly more accessible .

Read: America is sliding into the long pandemic defeat

If our descendants live in a postapocalyptic dystopia, how will they see our failure to prevent catastrophe? And what will our descendants think of our choice to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Carbon dioxide will pollute the air they breathe for thousands of years ; sea level will continue to rise for 10,000 years. And when it comes to climate change and pandemic preparedness, there are concrete steps we can take today. We can invest in the most promising clean-energy technology, like batteries, solar panels, and enhanced geothermal power, to mitigate climate change. To avoid the next pandemic, we can develop next-generation personal protective equipment and early-warning systems that detect new pathogens in wastewater, and we can get the cost of far-UVC lighting down low enough so that we can easily and safely kill viruses in the air. If we don’t act now to safeguard the future, our descendants will predictably—and fittingly—judge us for our shortsightedness .

But climate change and pandemics aren’t the only catastrophes that deserve much more attention. How can we mend a breakdown in international relations and mitigate the risk of spiraling into World War III? Artificial intelligence is rapidly progressing—how can we prevent it from being weaponized by bad actors, and how can we ensure it stays aligned with humanity’s values? And how can we prevent authoritarian and illiberal ideologies from gaining currency, and ensure that moral progress continues long into the future?

These are difficult problems. But over the past decade or so, we’ve made real progress on them. Groups such as the Alignment Research Center are working to ensure that AI benefits humanity rather than destroys it. Forecasters at sites such as Metaculus are learning how to make careful, evidence-based predictions about the future, and how to score those predictions impartially. And organizations such as Alvea , the Nucleic Acid Observatory , and the SecureDNA Project are developing concrete solutions to protect people, now and in the future, from biological catastrophe.

But there is so much more to be done. Society still devotes an embarrassingly small portion of its time and resources to tackling the most important problems. We need more impact-driven research , forecasting tournaments , prediction markets , and truth-seeking public debate. We need a social movement committed to protecting the future, and public-advocacy campaigns for the interests of our descendants. We need creative experiments to represent future people—and other powerless populations—in our political institutions . We need to continue expanding the circle of moral concern so that it includes the global poor, incarcerated people, immigrants, animals, and all other beings that can flourish or suffer—now and far into the future .

We also need to recognize just how much we might be missing. The most important moral causes in previous centuries might be obvious to us now, but they were only dimly apparent at the time. We should expect the same to be true today. So we can’t address just the problems that strike us, today, as most obviously pressing. We must also cultivate our society’s wisdom, foresight, and powers of reflection—so that we, and our children, can make progress in discovering what the most important problems truly are. This process of moral reflection could take considerable time, but it’s one we can’t afford to skip.

To truly understand the most important problems we face, and to find the most effective solutions, is no small task, and we’ve barely gotten started. But with hard work and humility, we can steer toward a future that our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, will be glad to inherit.

What will future generations think of us? Perhaps they will see us as selfish and myopic. Or perhaps they will look back on us with gratitude, for the steps we took to leave them a better world. The choice is ours.

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How to Prepare the Next Generation for Their Future—Not Our Past

Moving forward, young citizens will create jobs, not seek them, and collaborate to advance an increasingly complex world

In this Issue:

• Spring 2020 View All Other Issues
• Notes From the President: The Learning Curve
• Crunch: Lifelong Learning
• Foreword: Learning Is a Science
• Neuroscience in the Classroom
• Prepare the Next Generation for Their Future
• Lifelong Learning
• Americans and Lifetime Learning
• Personal Learning
• Machines Are Learning
• Five Questions: How the Brain Learns
• Voices: Learning Requires...
• View All Other Issues

Almost 12 million students who took the global test known as PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) were not able to complete even the most basic reading, mathematics, or science tasks—and these were 15-year-olds living in the 72 high- and middle-income countries that participated in the last test in 2015.

Over the past decade, there has been virtually no improvement in the learning outcomes of students in the Western world, even though spending on schooling rose by almost 20 percent during this period. And in countries like the United States, the quality of learning outcomes can still best be predicted by a school’s ZIP code.

So it might be tempting to click on some other article and drop any thought about improving education. Is it impossible to change anything as big, complex, and entrenched in vested interests as education? Well, keep on reading and consider this: The learning outcomes among the most disadvantaged 10 percent of Vietnamese and Estonian 15-year-old students now compare favorably with those among the wealthiest 10 percent of families in most of Latin America and are on a par with those of the average student in the United States and Europe.

Consider that in most countries, we can find excellence in education in some of the most disadvantaged schools—and that many of today’s leading education systems have only recently attained these top positions. So it can be done. 

But change can be a struggle. Young people are less likely to invest their time and energy in better education if it seems irrelevant to the demands of the “real” world. Businesses are less likely to invest in their employees’ lifelong learning if those workers might move away for a better job. And policymakers are often more likely to prioritize immediate concerns over long-range issues.

But this long-range view is necessary. For those with the right knowledge and skills, digitalization and globalization have been liberating and exciting, while for those who are insufficiently prepared, they can mean vulnerable and insecure work, and a life with few prospects. Our economies are shifting toward regional hubs of production, linked by global chains of information and goods but concentrated where comparative advantage can be built and renewed. This makes the distribution of knowledge and wealth crucial, and that is intimately tied to the distribution of educational opportunities.

In this digitalized global age, the next generation of young citizens will create jobs, not seek them, and collaborate to advance an increasingly complex world. That will require imagination, empathy, resilience, and entrepreneurship, the ability to fail forward. The most obvious implication of a world that requires learners to constantly adapt and grow is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning. People used to learn to do the work; now learning is the work, and the post-industrial era will require coaching, mentoring, teaching, and evaluating that can build passion for learning.

There must be an appreciation for the value of learning well beyond high school, beyond college graduation. People need to take ownership over what they learn, how they learn, where they learn, and when they learn. And lifelong learning requires people not only to constantly learn new things but also to unlearn and relearn as the world changes.

Governments can help. The easiest way is telling young people more of the truth about the social and labor-market relevance of their learning. Education systems can be incentivized to help learners choose a field of study that resonates with their passions, in which they can excel, and that allows them to contribute to society, putting people on the path to success. Unfortunately, many educational institutions still focus on marketing fields of study that are easy to provide, which leaves some university graduates struggling to find good jobs even as employers say they cannot find the people with needed skills. In many countries, such skill mismatches keep rising.

Lifelong learning requires people not only to constantly learn new things but also to unlearn and relearn as the world changes.

Also needed moving forward is a shift from qualifications-based certification systems to more knowledge- and skills-based certification systems. That means moving from documenting education pathways and degrees to highlighting what individuals can actually do, regardless of how and where they acquired their knowledge, skills, and character qualities. As the digital transformation diversifies training and learning opportunities, this certification of knowledge and skills becomes increasingly important, and businesses are increasingly testing knowledge and skills on their own while relying less on diplomas.

The dilemma for education is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach have become easy to digitize and automate. There is no question that state-of-the-art knowledge and skills in a discipline will always remain important. But the modern world no longer rewards us just for what we know—Google knows everything—but for extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge creatively in novel situations. The industrial age taught us how to educate students so they could remember what we told them; in the age of artificial intelligence, we will need to think harder about how we can pair the artificial intelligence of computers with the cognitive, social, and emotional skills and values of people.

Whether artificial intelligence will destroy or create more jobs will very much depend on our success with this and whether our imagination, our awareness, and our sense of responsibility will help us harness technology to shape the world for the better. It is telling that employment in Europe’s creative industries—those that specialize in the use of talent for commercial purposes—grew at 3.6 percent during the crucial period between 2011 and 2013, a time when many European sectors were shedding jobs or showing stagnant employment rates.

Moreover, technology and artificial intelligence are not magic powers; they are just extraordinary amplifiers and accelerators that add speed and accuracy. Artificial intelligence will amplify good ideas and good practice in the same way that it amplifies bad ideas and bad practice; i.e., artificial intelligence is ethically neutral. However, it is always in the hands of people who are not neutral. That is why education in the future is not just about teaching people something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass to navigate an increasingly complex, ambiguous, and volatile world. Ethics will be at the heart of 21st-century learning.

There are other important dimensions too. The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But modern societies create value by synthesizing different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated. That requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields.

Not least, social skills are rising in labor-market relevance, so tomorrow’s citizens will need to think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship. Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we share and integrate knowledge. Employers increasingly seek to attract learners who easily adapt and can share, apply, and transfer their skills and knowledge. At work, at home, and in the community, people will need a deep understanding of how others live in different cultures and traditions and how others think, whether as scientists or artists. Digitalization can enrich this capacity but also put it at risk.

The challenge is that developing such cognitive, social, and emotional capabilities requires a very different approach to teaching and learning, well beyond imparting and absorbing prefabricated knowledge. In the most advanced education systems, teaching has become a profession of advanced knowledge workers who own their professional practice and who work with a high level of professional autonomy and within a collaborative culture. In Finland, there tend to be nine applicants for every teaching post, not because teaching is financially more attractive than in other countries but because teaching in Finland is intellectually attractive.

The past was divided, with teachers and content divided by subjects, and students separated by expectations of their future career prospects. Nowadays, education is becoming more integrated, with an emphasis on the interrelation of subjects and the integration of students. It is also becoming more connected, with learning closely related to real-world contexts and contemporary issues and open to the rich resources in the community, becoming project-based, and helping students to think across the boundaries of subject-matter disciplines.

Some education systems also embrace technology in ways that elevate the role of teachers as co-creators and designers of innovative learning environments. Digital learning systems cannot just teach us science; they can simultaneously observe how we learn and determine the kinds of tasks and thinking that interest us—as well as the kinds of problems that we find boring or difficult. These systems can then adapt learning to suit our personal learning style with far greater granularity and precision than any traditional classroom setting possibly can. Similarly, virtual laboratories give us the opportunity to design, conduct, and learn from experiments rather than just learning about them.

Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we share and integrate knowledge.

There are good examples of technology enhancing experiential learning by supporting project- and inquiry-based teaching methods, facilitating hands-on activities and cooperative learning, and delivering formative real-time assessments. There are also interesting examples of technology supporting learning with interactive, nonlinear courseware based on state-of-the-art instructional design, sophisticated software for experimentation and simulation, social media, and educational games. These are precisely the learning tools that are needed to develop 21st-century knowledge and skills. Not least, one teacher can now educate and inspire millions of learners and communicate ideas to the whole world.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of technology is that it not only serves individual learners and educators, but it also can build an ecosystem around learning to create communities that make learning more social and more fun, recognizing that collaborative learning enhances goal orientation, motivation, persistence, and the development of effective learning strategies.

Similarly, technology can build communities of teachers to share and enrich teaching resources and practices and to collaborate on professional growth and the institutionalization of professional practice. It can help system leaders and governments develop and share best practices around curriculum design, policy, and pedagogy. Imagine a giant crowdsourcing platform where teachers, education researchers, and policy experts collaborate to curate the most relevant content and professional practice to achieve education goals, and where students anywhere in the world have access to the best and most innovative education experiences.

The challenge is that such system transformation cannot be mandated by government, which leads to surface compliance, nor can it be built solely from the ground up.

Governments cannot innovate in the classroom, but government has a key role as platform and broker, as stimulator and enabler; it can focus resources, set a facilitative policy climate, and use accountability and reporting modifications to encourage new practice. But government needs to better identify key agents of change, champion them, and find more effective approaches to scaling and disseminating innovations. That is also about finding better ways to recognize, reward, and give exposure to success, to do whatever is possible to make it easier for innovators to take risks and encourage the emergence of new ideas. The past was about public versus private; the future is about public with private.

The challenges look daunting, but many education systems are now well on their way toward finding innovative responses to them, not just in isolated, local examples, but also systemically. This is essential if we are to create a future for millions of learners who currently do not have one. That task is not about making the impossible possible, but about making the possible attainable.

The Takeaway

The most obvious implication of a world that requires learners to constantly adapt and grow is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning.

Andreas Schleicher is the director for education and skills and special adviser on education policy to the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Future of Learning: A Career of Learning

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Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

Students are often asked to write an essay on Save Environment for Future Generations in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

Introduction.

The environment is our life giver. It provides air, water, and food, essential for our survival. However, it’s under threat due to human activities.

Why Save Environment?

Saving the environment is crucial for the survival of future generations. If we don’t act now, they might not have a healthy planet to live on.

We can save the environment by reducing waste, recycling, using renewable energy, and planting trees. Each small action counts towards a larger goal.

Let’s pledge to save our environment for future generations. It’s not just our responsibility, but also our necessity.

250 Words Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

The imperative of environmental conservation, human activities and environmental degradation.

Human activities have significantly contributed to environmental degradation. Industrialization, deforestation, and excessive use of natural resources have led to climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. These activities, if continued unchecked, could lead to irreparable damage, making the planet uninhabitable for future generations.

The Role of Sustainability

Sustainability is the key to preserving the environment for future generations. It entails the responsible use of resources, ensuring their availability for future generations. By adopting sustainable practices, we can mitigate the negative impacts of human activities on the environment.

Individual Responsibility and Collective Action

While systemic changes are crucial, individual responsibility also plays a significant role. Simple actions like reducing waste, recycling, and using renewable energy can make a difference. However, to bring about substantial change, collective action is necessary. Governments, corporations, and communities must work together to implement policies and practices that protect the environment.

In conclusion, saving the environment for future generations is not just a moral obligation but a necessity for our survival. By adopting sustainable practices and taking collective action, we can ensure that future generations inherit a healthy and thriving planet. It is high time we realise that our actions today will determine the future of our planet.

500 Words Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

The environment is an integral part of our lives, providing the necessary resources for human survival, such as air, water, food, and shelter. However, human activities have led to environmental degradation, threatening the survival of future generations. It is, therefore, paramount to save the environment for future generations.

The Current State of the Environment

Implications for future generations.

If the current rate of environmental degradation continues, future generations will inherit a planet that is vastly different from the one we know today. They will face severe water and food shortages due to reduced agricultural output caused by climate change. They will also have to deal with the health effects of air and water pollution, including respiratory diseases and waterborne illnesses. Furthermore, they will lose the opportunity to enjoy the planet’s natural beauty and biodiversity due to habitat destruction.

Strategies for Environmental Conservation

To save the environment for future generations, it is essential to adopt sustainable practices. This includes reducing, reusing, and recycling resources to minimize waste. It also involves shifting from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Role of Technology

Technology can also play a crucial role in environmental conservation. For instance, advancements in clean energy technologies can help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Similarly, technology can help improve waste management, with innovations such as waste-to-energy conversion and biodegradable materials.

In conclusion, saving the environment for future generations is not just a moral obligation, but a survival necessity. It requires collective action from all sectors of society, from individuals to governments. By adopting sustainable practices, leveraging technology, and protecting our natural resources, we can ensure that future generations inherit a healthy and vibrant planet. It is a challenging task, but with concerted efforts, it is a goal within our reach.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Write a Letter to Future Generations About The World you Hope They Inherit: Check Samples & Format

• Updated on  
• May 3, 2024

Reflecting on a future is always full of expectations. And what if the future holds hopes and dreams for the upcoming generations who will one day inherit the Earth? Everyone dreams of a world where people can live regardless of race, gender, or nationality and are treated with dignity and equality. A world powered by renewable energy where climate change is no longer a threat. A world where advancement in technology is used ethically to empower humanity rather than endanger it. Though today we are facing conflicts but believe in a world where people at present can build a world that is more peaceful tomorrow if paved with conscience, care, and collective action.

Let us delve into 3 samples of letter writing where we will be talking about all positive actions and changes that we can do today for the betterment of future generations about the world we hope they inherit. Further to help you more refer to the format and ideas that can be written more about it.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Table of Contents

• 1 Ideas and Points to Include in Letter to Future Generations About the World You Hope They Inherit
• 2 Sample 1: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit
• 3 Sample 2: Write a Letter to Future Generations About the World you Hope They Inherit
• 4 Sample 3: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

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Ideas and Points to Include in Letter to Future Generations About the World You Hope They Inherit

Here are some ideas and points you could include in a letter to future generations:

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Sample 1: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

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Sample 2: Write a Letter to Future Generations About the World you Hope They Inherit

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Sample 3: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

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Ans: Here are the ideas to start a letter to the future generation: Start a letter to future generations with Dear Future Generation. Express your hopes and dreams for the world you wished for them to inherit. Moreover, share your vision, for equality, compassion, and sustainable development. 

Ans: I hope to give future generations a word that is free from violence, discrimination, destruction, and poverty. 

Ans: To write a letter to the future, raise your voice about the hopes, dreams, and guidance about the world you hope to live in. Also discuss the values, advances, and changes that you wish to see in the society for their future. 

Ans: The future generation will shape the destiny of the world. We must pave the path for the future generation through our actions, ethics, policies, and progress. It is important to understand that our today is their tomorrow.

Ans: The concept of future generation refers to our responsibility towards what we are building for our future. We must care for the planet and should create a world as well as remedies to all the problems throughout our past and in the present for an improved world for them. 

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Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with educational and informative content expertise. She has hands-on experience in Education, Study Abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and analysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particularly in the education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs related to her field to expand her expertise further. In her personal life, she loves creative writing and aspires to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

By Cody Fenwick · Published March 2023

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On this page:

• Introduction
• 1.1 1. We should care about how the lives of future individuals go
• 1.2 2. The number of future individuals whose lives matter could be vast.
• 1.3 3. We have an opportunity to affect how the long-run future goes
• 1.4 Summing up the arguments
• 2 Objections to longtermism
• 3 If I don’t agree with 80,000 Hours about longtermism, can I still benefit from your advice?
• 4 What are the best ways to help future generations right now?
• 5 Learn more
• 6 Read next

When the 19th-century amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and exposed them to sunlight, she uncovered a curious fact. Carbon dioxide became hotter than regular air and took longer to cool down. 1

Remarkably, Foote saw what this momentous discovery meant.

“An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in 1857. 2

Though Foote could hardly have been aware at the time, the potential for global warming due to carbon dioxide would have massive implications for the generations that came after her.

If we ran history over again from that moment, we might hope that this key discovery about carbon’s role in the atmosphere would inform governments’ and industries’ choices in the coming century. They probably shouldn’t have avoided carbon emissions altogether, but they could have prioritised the development of alternatives to fossil fuels much sooner in the 20th century, and we might have prevented much of the destructive climate change that present people are already beginning to live through — which will affect future generations as well.

We believe it would’ve been much better if previous generations had acted on Foote’s discovery, especially by the 1970s, when climate models were beginning to reliably show the future course of warming global trends. 3

If this seems right, it’s because of a commonsense idea: to the extent that we are able to, we have strong reasons to consider the interests and promote the welfare of future generations.

That was true in the 1850s, it was true in the 1970s, and it’s true now.

But despite the intuitive appeal of this moral idea, its implications have been underexplored. For instance, if we care about generations 100 years in the future, it’s not clear why we should stop there.

And when we consider how many future generations there might be, and how much better the future could go if we make good decisions in the present, our descendants’ chances to flourish take on great importance. In particular, we think this idea suggests that improving the prospects for all future generations is among the most morally important things we can do.

This article will lay out the argument for this view, which goes by the name longtermism .

We’ll say where we think the argument is strongest and weakest, respond to common objections, and say a bit about what we think this all means for what we should do.

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Table of Contents

The case for longtermism

While most recognize that future generations matter morally to some degree, there are two other key premises in the case for longtermism that we believe are true and underappreciated. All together, the premises are:

• We should care about how the lives of future individuals go.
• The number of future individuals whose lives matter could be vast .
• We have an opportunity to affect how the long-run future goes — whether there may be many flourishing individuals in the future, many suffering individuals in the future, or perhaps no one at all. 4

In the rest of this article, we’ll explain and defend each of these premises. Because the stakes are so high, this argument suggests that improving the prospects for all future generations should be a top moral priority of our time. If we’re able to make an exceptionally big impact, positively influencing many lives with enduring consequences, it’s incumbent upon us to take this seriously.

This doesn’t mean it’s the only morally important thing — or that the interests of future generations matter to the total exclusion of the present generation. We disagree with both of those claims.

There’s also a good chance this argument is flawed in some way, so much of this article discusses objections to longtermism. While we don’t find them on the whole convincing, some of them do reduce our confidence in the argument in significant ways.

If we’re able to make an exceptionally big impact, positively influencing many lives with enduring consequences, it’s incumbent upon us to take this seriously.

However, we think it’s clear that our society generally neglects the interests of future generations. Philosopher Toby Ord, an advisor to 80,000 Hours, has argued that at least by some measures, the world spends more money on ice cream each year than it does on reducing the risks to future generations. 5

Since, as we believe, the argument for longtermism is generally compelling, we should do a lot more compared to the status quo to make sure the future goes well rather than badly.

It’s also crucial to recognise that longtermism by itself doesn’t say anything about how best to help the future in practice , and this is a nascent area of research. Longtermism is often confused with the idea that we should do more long-term planning. But we think the primary upshot is that it makes it more important to urgently address extinction risks in the present — such as catastrophic pandemics , an AI disaster , nuclear war , or extreme climate change . We discuss the possible implications in the final section.

But first, why do we think the three premises above are true?

1. We should care about how the lives of future individuals go

Should we actually care about people who don’t exist yet?

The discussion of climate change in the introduction is meant to draw out the common intuition that we do have reason to care about future generations. But sometimes, especially when considering the implications of longtermism, people doubt that future generations matter at all.

Derek Parfit, an influential moral philosopher, offered a simple thought experiment to illustrate why it’s plausible that future people matter:

Suppose that I leave some broken glass in the undergrowth of a wood. A hundred years later this glass wounds a child. My act harms this child. If I had safely buried the glass, this child would have walked through the wood unharmed. Does it make a moral difference that the child whom I harm does not now exist? 6

We agree it would be wrong to dispose of broken glass in a way that is likely to harm someone. It’s still wrong if the harm is unlikely to occur until 5 or 10 years have passed — or in another century, to someone who isn’t born yet. And if someone else happens to be walking along the same path, they too would have good reason to pick up the glass and protect any child who might get harmed at any point in the future.

But Parfit also saw that thinking about these issues raised surprisingly tricky philosophical questions, some of which have yet to be answered satisfactorily. One central issue is called the ‘non-identity problem’ , which we’ll discuss in the objections section below. However, these issues can get complex and technical, and not everyone will be interested in reading through the details.

Despite these puzzles, there are many cases similar to Parfit’s example of the broken glass in the woods in which it’s clearly right to care about the lives of future people. For instance, parents-to-be rightly make plans based around the interests of their future children even prior to conception. Governments are correct to plan for the coming generations not yet born. And if it is reasonably within our power to prevent a totalitarian regime from arising 100 years from now, 7 or to avoid using up resources our descendants may depend on, then we ought to do so.

2. The number of future individuals whose lives matter could be vast .

Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. It seems like we could persist in some form for at least a few hundred thousand more.

There is, though, serious risk that we’ll cause ourselves to go extinct — as we’ll discuss more below. But absent that, humans have proven that they are extremely inventive and resilient. We survive in a wide range of circumstances, due in part to our ability to use technology to adjust our bodies and our environments as needed.

How long can we reasonably expect the human species to survive?

That’s harder to say. More than 99 percent of Earth’s species have gone extinct over the planet’s lifetime, 8 often within a few million years or less. 9

It’s possible our own inventiveness could prove to be our downfall.

But if you look around, it seems clear humans aren’t the average Earth species. It’s not ‘speciesist’ — unfairly discriminatory on the basis of species membership — to say that humans have achieved remarkable feats for an animal: conquering many diseases through invention, spreading across the globe and even into orbit, expanding our life expectancy, and splitting the atom.

It’s possible our own inventiveness could prove to be our downfall. But if we avoid that fate, our intelligence may let us navigate the challenges that typically bring species to their ends.

For example, we may be able to detect and deflect comets and asteroids , which have been implicated in past mass extinction events.

If we can forestall extinction indefinitely, we may be able to thrive on Earth for as long as it’s habitable — which could be another 500 million years, perhaps more .

As of now, there are about 8 billion humans alive. In total, there have been around 100 billion humans who ever lived. If we survive to the end of Earth’s habitable period, all those who have existed so far will have been the first raindrops in a hurricane.

If we’re just asking about what seems possible for the future population of humanity, the numbers are breathtakingly large. Assuming for simplicity that there will be 8 billion people for each century of the next 500 million years, 10 our total population would be on the order of forty quadrillion . We think this clearly demonstrates the importance of the long-run future.

And even that might not be the end. While it remains speculative, space settlement may point the way toward outliving our time on planet Earth. 11 And once we’re no longer planet-bound, the potential number of people worth caring about really starts getting big.

In What We Owe the Future , philosopher and 80,000 Hours co-founder Will MacAskill wrote:

…if humanity ultimately takes to the stars, the timescales become literally astronomical. The sun will keep burning for five billion years; the last conventional star formations will occur in over a trillion years; and, due to a small but steady stream of collisions between brown dwarfs, a few stars will still shine a million trillion years from now. The real possibility that civilisation will last such a long time gives humanity an enormous life expectancy.

Some of this discussion may sound speculative and fantastical — which it is! But if you consider how fantastical our lives and world would seem to humans 100,000 years ago, you should expect that the far future could seem at least as alien to us now.

And it’s important not to get bogged down in the exact numbers. What matters is that there’s a reasonable possibility that the future is very long, and it could contain a much greater number of individuals. 12 So how it goes could matter enormously.

There’s another factor that expands the scope of our moral concern for the future even further. Should we care about individuals who aren’t even human?

It seems true to us that the lives of non-human animals in the present day matter morally — which is why factory farming , in which billions of farmed animals suffer every day, is such a moral disaster. 13 The suffering and wellbeing of future non-human animals matters no less.

And if the far-future descendants of humanity evolve into a different species, we should probably care about their wellbeing as well. We think we should even potentially care about possible digital beings in the future, as long as they meet the criteria for moral patienthood — such as, for example, being able to feel pleasure and pain.

We’re highly uncertain about what kinds of beings will inhabit the future, but we think humanity and its descendants have the potential to play a huge role. And we want to have a wide scope of moral concern to encompass all those for whom life can go well or badly. 14

When we think about the possible scale of the future ahead of us, we feel humbled. But we also believe these possibilities present a gigantic opportunity to have a positive impact for those of us who have appeared so early in this story.

3. We have an opportunity to affect how the long-run future goes

When Foote discovered the mechanism of climate change, she couldn’t have foreseen how the future demand for fossil fuels would trigger a consequential global rise in temperatures.

So even if we have good reason to care about how the future unfolds, and we acknowledge that the future could contain immense numbers of individuals whose lives matter morally, we might still wonder: can anyone actually do anything to improve the prospects of the coming generations?

It’d be better for the future if we avoid extinction, manage our resources carefully, foster institutions that promote cooperation rather than violent conflict, and responsibly develop powerful technology.

Many things we do affect the future in some way. If you have a child or contribute to compounding economic growth, the effects of these actions ripple out over time, and to some extent, change the course of history. But these effects are very hard to assess. The question is whether we can predictably have a positive impact over the long term.

We think we can. For example, we believe that it’d be better for the future if we avoid extinction, manage our resources carefully, foster institutions that promote cooperation rather than violent conflict, and responsibly develop powerful technology.

We’re never going to be totally sure our decisions are for the best — but often we have to make decisions under uncertainty, whether we’re thinking about the long-term future or not. And we think there are reasons to be optimistic about our ability to make a positive difference.

The following subsections discuss four primary approaches to improving the long-run future:

Reducing extinction risk

Positive trajectory changes, longtermist research, capacity building.

One plausible tactic for improving the prospects of future generations is to increase the chance that they get to exist at all.

Of course, if there was a nuclear war or an asteroid that ended civilization, most people would agree that it was an unparalleled calamity.

Longtermism suggests, though, that the stakes involved could be even higher than they first seem. Sudden human extinction wouldn’t just end the lives of the billions currently alive — it would cut off the entire potential of our species. As the previous section discussed, this would represent an enormous loss.

And there are real things we can do to reduce these risks, such as:

• Developing broad-spectrum vaccines that protect against a wide range of pandemic pathogens
• Enacting policies that restrict dangerous practices in biomedical research
• Inventing more effective personal protective equipment
• Increasing our knowledge of the internal workings of AI systems, to better understand when and if they could pose a threat
• Technical innovations to ensure that AI systems behave how we want them to
• Increasing oversight of private development of AI technology
• Facilitating cooperation between powerful nations to reduce threats from nuclear war, AI, and pandemics.

We will never know with certainty how effective any given approach has been in reducing the risk of extinction, since you can’t run a randomised controlled trial with the end of the world. But the expected value of these interventions can still be quite high, even with significant uncertainty. 17

One response to the importance of reducing extinction risk is to note that it’s only positive if the future is more likely to be good than bad on balance. That brings us onto the next way to help improve the prospects of future generations.

Preventing humanity’s extinction is perhaps the clearest way to have a long-term impact, but other possibilities may be available. If we’re able to take actions that influence whether our future is full of value or is comparatively bad, we would have the opportunity to make an extremely big difference from a longtermist perspective. We can call these trajectory changes . 18

Climate change, for example, could potentially cause a devastating trajectory shift. Even if we believe it probably won’t lead to humanity’s extinction , extreme climate change could radically reshape civilisation for the worse, possibly curtailing our viable opportunities to thrive over the long term.

There might even be potential trajectories that could be even worse. For example, humanity might get stuck with a value system that undermines general wellbeing and may lead to vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.

How could this happen? One way this kind of value ‘lock-in’ could occur is if a totalitarian regime establishes itself as a world government and uses advanced technology to sustain its rule indefinitely. 19 If such a thing is possible, it could snuff out opposition and re-orient society away from what we have most reason to value.

We might also end up stagnating morally such that, for instance, the horrors of poverty or mass factory farming are never mitigated and are indeed replicated on even larger scales.

It’s hard to say exactly what could be done now to reduce the risks of these terrible outcomes. We’re generally less confident in efforts to influence trajectory changes compared to preventing extinction. If such work is feasible, it would be extremely important.

Trying to strengthen liberal democracy and promote positive values , such as by advocating on behalf of farm animals, could be valuable to this end. But many questions remain open about what kinds of interventions would be most likely to have an enduring impact on these issues over the long run.

This brings us to the third approach to longtermist work: further research.

Asking these types of questions in a systematic way is a relatively recent phenomenon. So we’re confident that we’re pretty seriously wrong about at least some parts of our understanding of these issues. There are probably several suggestions in this article that are completely wrong — the trouble is figuring out which.

So we believe much more research into whether the arguments for longtermism are sound, as well as potential avenues for having an impact on future generations, is called for. This is one reason why we include ‘global priorities research’ among the most pressing problems for people to work on.

The fourth category of longtermist approaches is capacity building — that is, investing in resources that may be valuable to put toward longtermist interventions down the line.

In practice, this can take a range of forms. At 80,000 Hours, we’ve played a part in building the effective altruism community , which is generally aimed at finding and understanding the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them. Longtermism is in part an offshoot of effective altruism, and having this kind of community may be an important resource for addressing the kinds of challenges longtermism raises.

There are also more straightforward ways to build resources, such as investing funds now so they can grow over time, potentially to be spent at a more pivotal time when they’re most needed.

You can also invest in capacity building by supporting institutions, such as government agencies or international bodies, that have the mission of stewarding efforts to improve the prospects of the long-term future.

Summing up the arguments

To sum up: there’s a lot on the line.

The number and size of future generations could be vast. We have reason to care about them all.

Those who come after us will have to live with the choices we make now. If they look back, we hope they’ll think we did right by them.

But the course of the future is uncertain. Humanity’s choices now can shape how events unfold. Our choices today could lead to a prosperous future for our descendants, or the end of intelligent life on Earth — or perhaps the rise of an enduring, oppressive regime.

We feel we can’t just turn away from these possibilities. Because so few of humanity’s resources have been devoted to making the future go well, those of us who have the means should figure out whether and how we can improve the chances of the best outcomes and decrease the chances of the worst.

We can’t — and don’t want to — set our descendants down a predetermined path that we choose for them now; we want to do what we can to ensure they have the chance to make a better world for themselves.

Objections to longtermism

In what follows, we’ll discuss a series of common objections that people make to the argument for longtermism.

Some of them point to important philosophical considerations that are complex but that nonetheless seem to have solid responses. Others raise important reasons to doubt longtermism that we take seriously and that we think are worth investigating further. And some others are misunderstandings or misrepresentations of longtermism that we think should be corrected. (Note: though long, this list doesn’t cover all objections!)

Does longtermism mean we should focus on helping future people rather than people who need help today?

Making moral decisions always involves tradeoffs. We have limited resources, so spending on one issue means we have less to spend on another. And there are many deserving causes we could devote our efforts to. If we focus on helping future generations, we will necessarily not prioritise as highly many of the urgent needs in the present.

But we don’t think this is as troubling an objection to longtermism as it may initially sound, for at least three reasons:

1. Most importantly, many longtermist priorities, especially reducing extinction risk, are also incredibly important for people alive today. For example, we believe preventing an AI-related catastrophe or a cataclysmic pandemic are two of the top priorities, in large part because of their implications for future generations. But these risks could materialise in the coming decades, so if our efforts succeed most people alive today would benefit . Some argue that preventing global catastrophes could actually be the single most effective way to save the lives of people in the present.

2. If we all took moral impartiality more seriously, there would be a lot more resources going to help the worst-off today — not just the far future. Impartiality is the idea that we should care about the interests of individuals equally, regardless of their nationality, gender, race, or other characteristics that are morally irrelevant. This impartiality is part of what motivates longtermism — we think the interests of future individuals are often unjustifiably undervalued.

We think if impartiality were taken more seriously in general, we’d live in a much better world that would commit many more resources than it currently does toward alleviating all kinds of suffering, including for the present generation. For example, we’d love to see more resources go toward fighting diseases, improving mental health, reducing poverty, and protecting the interests of animals.

3. Advocating for any moral priority means time and resources are not going to another cause that may also be quite worthy of attention. Advocates for farmed animals’ or prisoners’ rights are in effect deprioritising the interests of alternative potential beneficiaries, such as the global poor. So this is not just an objection to longtermism — it’s an objection to any kind of prioritisation.

Ultimately, this objection hinges on the question of whether future generations are really worth caring about — which is what the rest of this article is about.

Should we systematically discount future value?

Some people, especially those trained in economics, claim that we shouldn’t treat individual lives in the future equally to lives today. Instead, they argue, we should systematically discount the value of future lives and generations by a fixed percentage.

(We’re not talking here about discounting the future due to uncertainty, which we cover below .)

When economists compare benefits in the future to benefits in the present, they typically reduce the value of the future benefits by some amount called the “discount factor.” A typical rate might be 1% per year, which means that benefits in 100 years are only worth 36% as much as benefits today, and benefits in 1,000 years are worth almost nothing.

This may seem like an appealing way to preserve the basic intuition we began with — that we have strong reasons to care about the wellbeing of future generations — while avoiding the more counterintuitive longtermist claims that arise from considering the potentially astronomical amounts of value that our universe might one day hold. On this view, we would care about future generations, but not as much as the present generation, and mostly only the generations that will come soon after us.

We agree there are good reasons to discount economic benefits. One reason is that if you receive money now, you can invest it, and earn a return each year. This means it’s better to receive money now rather than later. People in the future might also be wealthier, which means that money is less valuable to them.

However, these reasons don’t seem to apply to welfare — people having good lives. You can’t directly ‘invest’ welfare today and get more welfare later, like you can with money. The same seems true for other intrinsic values, such as justice. And longtermism is about reasons to care about the interests of future generations, rather than wealth.

As far as we know, most philosophers who have worked on the issue don’t think we should discount the intrinsic value of future lives — even while they strongly disagree about other questions in population ethics. It’s a simple principle that is easy to accept: one person’s happiness is worth just the same amount no matter when it occurs.

Indeed, if you suppose we can discount lives in the far future, we can easily end up with conclusions that sound absurd. For instance, a 3% discount rate would imply that the suffering of one person today is morally equal to the suffering of 16 trillion people in 1,000 years. This seems like a truly horrific conclusion to accept.

And any discount rate will mean that, if we found some reliable way to save 1 million lives from intense suffering in either 1,000 years or 10,000 years, it would be astronomically more important to choose the sooner option. This, too, seems very hard to accept. 20

If we reject the discounting of the value of future lives, then the many potential generations that could come after us are still worthy of moral concern. And this doesn’t stand in tension with the economic practice of discounting monetary benefits.

If you’d like to see a more technical discussion of these issues, see Discounting for Climate Change by Hilary Graves. There is a more accessible discussion at 1h00m50s in our podcast with Toby Ord and in Chapter 4 of Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen.

How does uncertainty about the future factor in to longtermism?

There are some practical, rather than intrinsic, reasons to discount the value of the future. In particular, our uncertainty about how the future will unfold makes it much harder to influence than the present, and even more near-term actions can be exceedingly difficult to forecast.

And because of the possibility of extinction, we can’t even be confident that the future lives we think are so potentially valuable will come into existence. As we’ve argued, that gives us reason to reduce extinction risks when it’s feasible — but it also gives us reason to be less confident these lives will exist and thus to weight them somewhat less in our deliberations.

In the same way, a doctor performing triage may choose to prioritise caring for a patient who had a good chance of surviving their injuries over one who has much less clear likelihood of survival regardless of the medical care they receive.

This uncertainty — along with the extreme level of difficulty in trying to predict the long-term impacts of our actions — certainly makes it much harder to help future generations, all else equal. And in effect, this point lowers the value of working to benefit future generations.

So even if we can affect how things unfold for future generations, we’re generally going to be very far from certain that we are actually making things better. And arguably, the further away in time the outcomes of our actions are, the less sure we can be that they will come about. Trying to improve the future will never be straightforward.

Still, even given the difficulty and uncertainty, we think the potential value at stake for the future means that many uncertain projects are still well worth the effort.

You might disagree with this conclusion if you believe that human extinction is so likely and practically unavoidable in the future that the chance that our descendants will still be around rapidly declines as we look a few centuries down the line. We don’t think it’s that likely — though we are worried about it.

Journalist Kelsey Piper critiqued MacAskill’s argument for longtermist interventions focused on positive trajectory changes (as opposed to extinction risks) in Asterisk , writing:

What share of people who tried to affect the long-term future succeeded, and what share failed? How many others successfully founded institutions that outlived them — but which developed values that had little to do with their own? … Most well-intentioned, well-conceived plans falter on contact with reality. Every simple problem splinters, on closer examination, into dozens of sub-problems with their own complexities. It has taken exhaustive trial and error and volumes of empirical research to establish even the most basic things about what works and what doesn’t to improve peoples’ lives.

Piper does still endorse working on extinction reduction, which she thinks is a more tractable course of action. Her doubts about the possibility of reliably anticipating our impact on the trajectory of the future, outside of extinction scenarios, are worth taking very seriously.

Aren't we just totally clueless about our effects on the future?

You might have a worry about longtermism that goes deeper than just uncertainty. We act under conditions of uncertainty all the time, and we find ways to manage it.

There is a deeper problem known as cluelessness . While uncertainty is about having incomplete knowledge, cluelessness refers to the state of having essentially no basis of knowledge at all.

Some people believe we’re essentially clueless about the long-term effects of our actions. This is because virtually every action we take may have extremely far-reaching unpredictable consequences. In time travel stories, this is sometimes referred to as the “butterfly effect” — because something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings might influence air currents just enough to cause a monsoon on the other side of the world (at least for illustrative purposes).

If you think your decision of whether to go to the grocery store on Thursday or Friday might determine whether the next Gandhi or Stalin is born, you might conclude that actively trying to make the future go well is a hopeless task.

Like some other important issues discussed here, cluelessness remains an active area of philosophical debate, so we don’t think there’s necessarily a decisive answer to these worries. But there is a plausible argument, advanced philosopher and advisor to 80,000 Hours Hilary Greaves that longtermism is, in fact, the best response to the issue of cluelessness .

This is because cluelessness hangs over the impact of all of our actions. Work trying to improve the lives of current generations, such as direct cash transfers, may predictably benefit a family in the foreseeable future. But the long-term consequences of the transfer are a complete mystery.

Successful longtermist interventions, though, may not have this quality — particularly interventions to prevent human extinction. If we, say, divert an asteroid that would otherwise have caused the extinction of humanity, we are not clueless about the long-term consequences. Humanity will at least have the chance to continue existing into the far future, which it wouldn’t have otherwise had.

There’s still uncertainty , of course, in preventing extinction. The long-term consequences of such an action aren’t fully knowable. But we’re not clueless about them either.

If it’s correct that the problem of cluelessness bites harder for some near-term interventions than longtermist ones, and perhaps least of all for preventing extinction, then this apparent objection doesn’t actually count against longtermism.

For an alternative perspective, though, check out The 80,000 Hours Podcast interview with Alexander Berger .

What if my actions change the identities of individuals who are born in the future? (The non-identity problem)

Because of the nature of human reproduction, the identity of who gets to be born is highly contingent. Any individual is the result of the combination of one sperm and one egg, and a different combination of sperm and egg would’ve created a different person. Delaying the act of conception at all — for example, by getting stuck at a red light on your way home — can easily result in a different sperm fertilising the egg, which means another person with a different combination of genes will be born.

This means — somewhat surprisingly — that pretty much all our actions have the potential to impact the future by changing which individuals get born in the future.

If you care about affecting the future in a positive way, this creates a perplexing problem. Many actions undertaken to improve the future, such as trying to reduce the harmful effects of climate change or developing a new technology to improve people’s lives, may deliver the vast majority of their benefits to people who wouldn’t have existed had the course of action never been taken.

So while it seems obviously good to improve the world in this way, it may be impossible to ever point to specific people in the future and say they were made better off by these actions. You can make the future better overall, but you may not make it better for anyone in particular.

Of course, the reverse is true: you may take some action that makes the future much worse, but all the people who experience the consequences of your actions may never have existed had you chosen a different course of action.

This is known as the ‘non-identity problem.’ Even when you can make the far future better with a particular course of action, you will almost certainly never make any particular individuals in the far future better off than they otherwise would be.

Should this problem cause us to abandon longtermism? We don’t think so.

While the issue is perplexing, accepting it as a refutation of longtermism would prove too much. It would, for example, undermine much of the very plausible case that policymakers should in the past have taken significant steps to limit the effects of climate change (since those policy changes can be expected to, in the long run, lead to different people being born).

Or consider a hypothetical case of a society that is deciding what to do with its nuclear waste. Suppose there are two ways of storing it: one way is cheap, but it means that in 200 years time, the waste will overheat and expose 10,000,000 people to sickening radiation that dramatically shortens their lives. The other storage method guarantees it will never hurt anyone, but it is significantly more expensive, and it means currently living people will have to pay marginally higher taxes.

Assuming this tax policy alters behaviour just enough to start changing the identities of the children being born, it’s entirely plausible that, in 200 years time, no one would exist who would’ve existed if the cheap, dangerous policy had been implemented. This means that none of the 10,000,000 people who have their lives cut short can say they would have been better off had their ancestors chosen the safer storage method. 21

Still, it seems intuitively and philosophically unacceptable to believe that a society wouldn’t have very strong reasons to adopt the safe policy over the cheap, dangerous policy. If you agree with this conclusion, then you agree that the non-identity problem does not mean we should abandon longtermism. (You may still object to longtermism on other grounds!)

Nevertheless, this puzzle raises pressing philosophical questions that continue to generate debate, and we think better understanding these issues is an important project.

But should I care that future generations come to exist in the first place, rather than not?

We said that we thought it would be very bad if humanity was extinguished, in part because future individuals who might have otherwise been able to live full and flourishing lives wouldn’t ever get the chance.

But this raises some issues related to the ‘non-identity problem.’ Should we actually care whether future generations come into existence, rather than not?

Some people argue that perhaps we don’t actually have moral reasons to do things that affect whether individuals exist — in which case ensuring that future generations get to exist, or increasing the chance that humanity’s future is long and expansive or would be morally neutral in itself.

This issue is very tricky from a philosophical perspective; indeed, a minor subfield of moral philosophy called population ethics sets out to answer this and related questions.

So we can’t expect to fully address the question here. But we can give a sense of why we think working to ensure humanity survives and that the future is filled with flourishing lives is a high moral priority.

Consider first a scenario in which you, while travelling the galaxy in a spaceship, come across a planet filled with an intelligent species leading happy, moral, fulfilled lives. They haven’t achieved spaceflight, and may never do so, but they appear likely to have a long future ahead of them on their planet.

Would it not seem like a major tragedy if, say, an asteroid were on course to destroy their civilization? Of course, any plausible moral view would advise saving the species for their own sakes. But it also seems like it’s an unalloyed good that, if you divert the asteroid, this flourishing species will be able to continue on for many future generations, flourishing in their corner of the universe.

If we have that view about that hypothetical alien world, we should probably have the same view of our own planet. Humans, of course, aren’t necessarily that happy, moral, and fulfilled for their lives. But the vast majority of us want to keep living — and it seems at least possible that our descendants could have lives many times more flourishing than we have. They might even ensure that all other sentient beings have joyous lives well-worth living. This seems to give us strong reasons to make this potential a reality.

For a different kind of argument along these lines, you can read Joe Carlsmith’s “Against neutrality about creating happy lives.”

Do 'person-affecting views' undermine the case for longtermism?

Some people advocate a ‘person-affecting’ view of ethics. This view is sometimes summed up with the quip: “ethics is about helping make people happy, not making happy people.”

In practice, this means we only have moral obligations to help those who are already alive 22 — not to enable more people to exist with good lives. For people who hold such views, it may be permissible to create a happy person, but doing so is morally neutral.

This view has some plausibility, and we don’t think it can be totally ignored. However, philosophers have uncovered a number of problems with it.

Suppose you have the choice to bring into existence one person with an amazing life, or another person whose life is barely worth living, but still more good than bad. Clearly, it seems better to bring about the amazing life.

But if creating a happy life is neither good nor bad, then we have to conclude that both options are neither good nor bad. This implies the options are equal, and you have no reason to do one or the other, which seems bizarre.

And if we accepted a person-affecting view, it might be hard to make sense of many of our common moral beliefs around issues like climate change. For example, it would imply that policymakers in the 20th century might have had little reason to mitigate the impact of CO 2 emissions on the atmosphere if the negative effects would only affect people who would be born several decades in the future. (This issue is discussed more above .)

This is a complex debate, and rejecting the person-affecting view also has counterintuitive conclusions. In particular, Parfit showed that if you agree that it’s good to create people whose lives are more good than bad, there is a strong argument for the conclusion that we could have a better world filled with a huge number of people whose lives are just barely worth living. He called this the “repugnant conclusion” .

Both sides make important points in this debate. You can see a summary of the arguments in this public lecture by Hilary Greaves (based on this paper ). It’s also discussed in our podcast with Toby Ord .

We’re uncertain about what the right position is, but we’re inclined to reject person-affecting views. Since many people hold something like the person-affecting view, though, we think it deserves some weight, and that means we should act as if we have somewhat greater obligations to help someone who’s already alive compared to someone who doesn’t exist yet. (This is an application of moral uncertainty ).

One note however: even people who otherwise embrace a person-affecting view often think that is morally bad to do something that brings someone into existence who has a life full of suffering and who wishes they’d never been born. If that’s right, you should still think that we have strong moral reasons to care about the far future, because there’s the possibility it could be horrendously bad as well as very good for a large number of individuals. On any plausible view, there’s a forceful case to be made for working to avert astronomical amounts of suffering . So even someone who believes strongly in a person-affecting view of ethics might have reason to embrace a form of longtermism that prioritises averting large-scale suffering in the future.

Trying to weigh this up, we think society should have far greater concern for the future than it does now, and that as with climate change, it often makes sense to prioritise making things go well for future individuals. In the case of climate change, for example, it was likely the case that society should have long ago taken on the non-trivial costs of financing efforts to develop highly reliable clean energy and navigating away from a carbon-intensive economy.

Because of moral uncertainty , though, we care more about the present generation than we would if we naively weighed up the numbers.

Isn't it arrogant to think we'll know what will happen in hundreds, thousands, or millions of years?

Yes, it would be arrogant. But longtermism doesn’t require us to know the future.

Instead, the practical implication of longtermism is that we take steps that are likely to be good over the wide range of possible futures. We think it’s likely better for the future if, as we said above , we avoid extinction, we manage our resources carefully, we foster institutions that promote cooperation rather than violent conflict, and we responsibly develop powerful technology. None of these strategies requires us knowing what the future will look like.

We talk more about the importance of all this uncertainty in the sections above.

Isn't it just obvious that we should prevent extinction?

This isn’t exactly an objection, but one response to longtermism asserts not that the view is badly off track but that it’s superfluous .

This may seem plausible if longtermism primarily inspires us to prioritise reducing extinction risks. As discussed above, doing so could benefit existing people — so why even bother talking about the benefits to future generations?

One reply is: we agree that you don’t need to embrace longtermism to support these causes! And we’re happy if people do good work whether or not they agree with us on the philosophy.

But we still think the argument for longtermism is true, and we think it’s worth talking about.

Firstly, when we actually try to compare the importance of work in certain cause areas — such as global health or mitigating the risk of extinction from nuclear war — whether and how much we weigh the interests of future generations may play a decisive role in our conclusions about prioritisation.

Moreover, some longtermist priorities, such as ensuring that we avoid the lock-in of bad values or developing a promising framework for space governance , may be entirely ignored if we don’t consider the interests of future generations.

Finally, if it’s right that future generations deserve much more moral concern than they currently get, it just seems good for people to know that. Maybe issues will come up in the future that aren’t extinction threats but which could still predictably affect the long-run future – we’d want people to take those issues seriously.

Does longtermism depend on 'total utilitarianism'?

In short, no. Total utilitarianism is the view that we are obligated to maximise the total amount of positive experiences over negative experiences, typically by weighting for intensity and duration.

This is one specific moral view, and many of its proponents and sympathisers advocate for longtermism. But you can easily reject utilitarianism of any kind and still embrace longtermism.

For example, you might believe in ‘side constraints’ — moral rules about what kinds of actions are impermissible, regardless of the consequences. So you might believe that you have strong reasons to promote the wellbeing of individuals in the far future, so long as doing so doesn’t require violating anyone’s moral rights. This would be one kind of non-utilitarian longtermist view.

You might also be a pluralist about value, in contrast to utilitarians who think a singular notion of wellbeing is the sole true value. A non-utilitarian might intrinsically value, for instance, art, beauty, achievement, good character, knowledge, and personal relationships, quite separately from their impact on wellbeing.

(See our definition of social impact for how we incorporate these moral values into our worldview.)

So you might be a longtermist precisely because you believe the future is likely to contain vast amounts of all the many things you value, so it’s really important that we protect this potential.

You could also think we have an obligation to improve the world for future generations because we owe it to humanity to “pass the torch”, rather than squander everything people have done to build up civilisation. This would be another way of understanding moral longtermism that doesn’t rely on total utilitarianism. 23

Finally, you can reject the “total” part of utilitarianism and still believe longtermism. That is, you might believe it’s important to make sure the future goes well in a generally utilitarian sense without thinking that means we’ll need to keep increasing the population size in order to maximise total wellbeing. You can read more about different kinds of views in population ethics here .

As we discussed above , people who don’t think it’s morally good to bring a flourishing population into existence usually think it’s still important to prevent future suffering — in which case you might support a longtermism focused on guarding against the worst outcomes for future generations.

Does longtermism justify taking extremist or unethical actions to help future generations?

We believe, for instance, that you shouldn’t have a harmful career just because you think you can do more good than bad with the money you’ll earn. There are practical, epistemic, and moral reasons that justify this stance.

And as a general matter, we think it’s highly unlikely to be the case that working in a harmful career will be the path that has the best consequences overall.

Some critics of longtermism say the view can be used to justify all kinds of egregious acts in the name of a glorious future. We do not believe this, in part because there are plenty of plausible intrinsic reasons to object to egregious acts on their own, even if you think they’ll have good consequences. As we explained in our article on the definition of ‘social impact’ :

We don’t think social impact is all that matters. Rather, we think people should aim to have a greater social impact within the constraints of not sacrificing other important values – in particular, while building good character, respecting rights and attending to other important personal values. We don’t endorse doing something that seems very wrong from a commonsense perspective in order to have a greater social impact.

Perhaps even more importantly, it’s bizarrely pessimistic to believe that the best way to make the future go well is to do horrible things now. This is very likely false, and there’s little reason anyone should be tempted by this view.

Isn't this all just science fiction?

Some of the claims in this article may sound like science fiction. We’re aware this can be off-putting to some readers, but we think it’s important to be upfront about our thinking.

And the fact that a claim sounds like science fiction is not, on its own, a good reason to dismiss it. Many speculative claims about the future have sounded like science fiction until technological developments made them a reality.

From Eunice Newton Foote’s perspective in the 19th century, the idea that the global climate would actually be transformed based on a principle she discovered in a glass cylinder may have sounded like science fiction. But climate change is now our reality.

Similarly, the idea of the “atomic bomb” had literally been science fiction before Leo Szilard discovered the possibility of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933. Szilard first read about such weapons in H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free . As W. Warren Wager explained in The Virginia Quarterly :

Unlike most scientists then doing research into radioactivity, Szilard perceived at once that a nuclear chain reaction could produce weapons as well as engines. After further research, he took his ideas for a chain reaction to the British War Office and later the Admiralty, assigning his patent to the Admiralty to keep the news from reaching the notice of the scientific community at large. “Knowing what this [a chain reaction] would mean,” he wrote, “—and I knew it because I had read H.G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.”

This doesn’t mean we should accept any idea without criticism. And indeed, you can reject many of the more ‘sci-fi’ claims of some people who are concerned with future generations — such as the possibility of space settlement or the risks from artificial intelligence — and still find longtermism compelling.

Isn't this like Pascal's wager?

One worry about longtermism some people have is that it seems to rely on having a very small chance of achieving a very good outcome.

Some people think this sounds suspiciously like Pascal’s wager , a highly contentious argument for believing in God — or a variant of this idea, “Pascal’s mugging.” The concern is that this type of argument may be used to imply an apparent obligation to do absurd or objectionable things. It’s based on a thought experiment, as we described in a different article :

A random mugger stops you on the street and says, “Give me your wallet or I’ll cast a spell of torture on you and everyone who has ever lived.” You can’t rule out with 100% probability that he won’t — after all, nothing’s 100% for sure. And torturing everyone who’s ever lived is so bad that surely even avoiding a tiny, tiny probability of that is worth the $40 in your wallet? But intuitively, it seems like you shouldn’t give your wallet to someone just because they threaten you with something completely implausible.

This deceptively simple problem raises tricky issues in expected value theory, and it’s not clear how they should be resolved — but it’s typically assumed that we should reject arguments that rely on this type of reasoning.

The argument for longtermism given above may look like a form of this argument because it relies in part on the premise that the number of individuals in the future could be so large. Since it’s a relatively novel, unconventional argument, it may sound suspiciously like the mugger’s (presumably hollow) threat in the thought experiment.

But there are some key differences. To start, the risks to the long-term future may be far from negligible. Toby Ord estimated the chance of an existential catastrophe that effectively curtails the potential of future generations in the next century at 1 in 6. 24

Now, it may be true that any individual’s chance of meaningfully reducing these kinds of threats is much, much smaller. But we accept small chances of doing good all the time — that’s why you might wear a seatbelt in a car, even though in any given drive your chances of being in a serious accident are miniscule. Many people buy life insurance to guarantee that their family members will have financial support in the unlikely scenario that they die young.

And while an individual is unlikely to be solely responsible for driving down the risk of human extinction by any significant amount (in the same way no one individual could stop climate change), it does seem plausible that a large group of people working diligently and carefully might be able to do it. And if the large group of people can achieve this laudable end, then taking part in this collective action isn’t comparable to Pascal’s mugging.

But if we did conclude the chance to reduce the risks humanity faces is truly negligible, then we would want to look much more seriously into other priorities, especially since there are so many other pressing problems . As long as it’s true, though, that there are genuine opportunities to have a significant impact on improving the prospects for the future, then longtermism does not rely on suspect and extreme expected value reasoning.

This is a lot to think about. So what are our bottom lines on how we think we’re most likely to be wrong about longtermism?

Here are a few possibilities we think are worth taking seriously, even though they don’t totally undermine the case from our perspective:

• We don’t think the arguments for such a strong preference are very compelling, but given the high levels of uncertainty in our moral beliefs, we can’t confidently rule it out.
• Reliably affecting the future may be infeasible. It’s possible that further research will ultimately conclude that the opportunities for impacting the far future are essentially non-existent or extremely limited. It’s hard to believe we could ever entirely close the question — researchers who come to this conclusion in the future could themselves be mistaken — but it might dramatically reduce our confidence that pursuing a longtermist agenda is worthwhile and thus leave the project as a pretty marginal endeavour.

Reducing extinction risk may be intractable beyond a certain point. It’s possible that there’s a base level of extinction risk that humans will have to accept at some point and that we can’t reduce any further. And if, for instance, there were an irreducible risk of an extinction catastrophe at 10 percent every century, then the future, in expectation, would be much less significant than we think. This would dramatically reduce the pull of longtermism.

A crucial consideration could change our assessment in ways we can’t predict. This falls into the general category of ‘unknown unknowns,’ which are always important to be on the watch for.

You could also read the following essays criticising longtermism that we have found interesting:

• A review of The Precipice written by Theron Pummer
• A blog post called “ Against Longtermism ” by Eric Schwitzgebel
• A post on the Effective Altruism Forum by Denise Melchin called “ Why I am probably not a longtermist “

If I don’t agree with 80,000 Hours about longtermism, can I still benefit from your advice?

We want to be candid about what we believe and what our priorities are, but we don’t think everyone needs to agree with us.

And we have lots of advice and tools that are broadly useful for people thinking about their careers, regardless of what they think about longtermism.

There are also many places where longtermist projects converge with other approaches to thinking about having a positive impact with your career. For example, working to prevent pandemics seems robustly good whether you prioritise near- or long-term benefits.

What are the best ways to help future generations right now?

While answering this question satisfactorily would require a sweeping research agenda in itself, we do have some general thoughts about what longtermism means for our practical decision making. And we’d be excited to see more attention paid to this question.

Some people may be motivated by these arguments to find opportunities to donate to longermist projects or cause areas. We believe Open Philanthropy — which is a major funder of 80,000 Hours — does important work in this area.

But our primary aim is to help people have impactful careers. Informed by longtermism, we have created a list of what we believe are the most pressing problems to work on in the world. These problems are important, neglected, and tractable .

As of this writing, the top eight problem areas are:

• Risks from artificial intelligence
• Catastrophic pandemics
• Building effective altruism
• Global priorities research
• Nuclear war
• Improving decision making (especially in important institutions)
• Climate change
• Great power conflict

We’ve already given few examples of concrete ways to tackle these issues above .

The above list is provisional, and it is likely to change as we learn more. We also list many other pressing problems that we believe are highly important from a longtermist point of view, as well as a few that would be high priorities if we rejected longtermism.

We hope more people will challenge our ideas and help us think more clearly about them. As we have argued, the stakes are incredibly high.

We have a related list of high-impact careers that we believe are appealing options for people who want to work to address these and related problems and to help the long-term future go well.

But we don’t have all the answers. Research in this area could reveal crucial considerations that might overturn longtermism or cast it in a very different light. There are likely pressing cause areas we haven’t thought of yet.

We hope more people will challenge our ideas and help us think more clearly about them. As we have argued, the stakes are incredibly high. So it’s paramount that, as much as is feasible, we get this right.

Want to focus your career on the long-run future?

If you want to work on ensuring the future goes well, such as controlling nuclear weapons or shaping the development of artificial intelligence or biotechnology, you can speak to our team one-on-one.

We’ve helped hundreds of people choose an area to focus, make connections, and then find jobs and funding in these areas. If you’re already in one of these areas, we can help you increase your impact within it.

Speak to us

• Toby Ord discussed these arguments in his book, The Precipice , and he discussed the ideas with us on our podcast .
• Will MacAskill also made the argument in his book, What We Owe the Future , and we interviewed him about it on our podcast .
• Benjamin Todd and Arden Koehler discussed varieties of longtermism in this podcast .
• Hilary Greaves presented the case for longtermism at Oxford University.
• In this podcast, Holden Karnofsky talked about the case that we’re living in the most important century .
• Article: The case for reducing existential risks
• Podcast: Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
• Podcast: Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe

This article is part of our advanced series. See the full series , or keep reading:

Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis

Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact

The case for reducing existential risks

Plus, join our newsletter and we’ll mail you a free book.

Join our newsletter and we’ll send you a free copy of The Precipice — a book by philosopher Toby Ord about how to tackle the greatest threats facing humanity. T&Cs here .

Notes and references

• This discovery was discussed in an article by Clive Thompson in JSTOR Daily . ↩
• She added that “if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.” ↩
• “While some models showed too much warming and a few showed too little, most models examined showed warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between projected and observationally informed estimates of forcing were taken into account. We find no evidence that the climate models evaluated in this paper have systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over their projection period. The projection skill of the 1970s models is particularly impressive given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time, as the world was thought to have been cooling for the past few decades.” ‘Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections.’ ↩
• In his book What We Owe the Future , Will MacAskill (a co-founder and trustee of 80,000 Hours) is even more succinct: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.” (pg. 9) ↩
• “Setting aside climate change, all spending on biosecurity, natural risks and risks from AI and nuclear war is still substantially less than we spend on ice cream. And I’m confident that the spending actually focused on existential risk is less than one-tenth of this.” The Precipice (pg. 313) ↩
• Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons on pages 356-357 ↩
• John Adams, the second president of the United States who laid some of the intellectual foundations for the US Constitution, pointed to the importance of enduring governmental structures in his own writing : “The institutions now made in America will not wholly wear out for thousands of years. It is of the last importance, then, that they should begin right. If they set out wrong, they will never be able to return, unless it be by accident, to the right path.” Quoted in MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. ↩
• See The Biology of Rarity edited by W.E. Kunin, K.J. Gaston ↩
• “The average lifespan of a species varies according to taxonomic group. It is as long as tens of millions of years for ants and trees, and as short as half a million years for mammals. The average span across all groups combined appears to be (very roughly) a million years.” — Professor Edward O. Wilson ↩
• Some might believe it’s just entirely implausible to believe humans could be around for another 500 million years. But consider, as Toby Ord precipice pointed out in The Precipice , that the fossil record indicates that horseshoe crabs have existed essentially unchanged on the planet for at least around 445 million. Of course, horseshoe crabs undoubtedly have features that make them particularly resilient as a species. But humans, too, have undeniably unique characteristics, and it’s arguable that these features could confer comparable or even superior survival advantages. ↩
• See Chapter 8 of Toby Ord’s The Precipice for a detailed discussion of the prospects for space settlement. ↩

If there’s a 5% chance that civilisation lasts for 10 million years, then in expectation, there are over 5,000 future generations. If thousands of people making a concerted effort could, with a 55% probability, reduce the risk of premature extinction by 1 percentage point, then these efforts would in expectation save 28 future generations. If each generation contains 10 billion people, that would be 280 billion additional individuals who get to live flourishing lives. If there’s a chance civilisation lasts longer than 10 million years, or that there are more than 10 billion people in each future generation, then the argument is strengthened even further.

This is just a toy model, and it doesn’t actually capture all the ways we should think about value. But it shows why we should care about future generations, even if we’re not sure they’ll come into existence. ↩

• Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities in 2020 researched the numbers of vertebrate animals in captivity. The report found that there were between 9.5 and 16.2 billion chickens, bred for meat in captivity, on any given day. There are also 1.5 billion cattle, 978 million pigs, and 103 billion farmed fish, among many other types of farmed animals. ↩
• Altogether, this means there are many, many lives at stake in the way the future unfolds. A conservative estimate of the upper bound (assuming just Earth-bound humans) is 10 16 . But estimates using different approaches put the figure as high as 10 35 , or even — very speculatively — 10 58 . These figures and other estimates are discussed in “How many lives does the future hold?” by Toby Newbury. ↩

Toby Ord explained on The 80,000 Hours Podcast why he believes extinction risk from natural causes is relatively low: “[We’ve] been around for about 2,000 centuries: homo sapiens. Longer, if you think about the homo genus. And, suppose the existential risk per century were 1%. Well, what’s the chance that you would get through 2,000 centuries of 1% risk? It turns out to be really low because of how exponentials work, and you have almost no chance of surviving that. So this gives us a kind of argument that the risk from natural causes, assuming it hasn’t been increasing over time, that this risk must be quite low.” ↩

• We’re also very concerned about mitigating climate change , though at this point, we believe it’s much less likely to cause human extinction on its own. ↩

There might be some scenarios in which humanity goes extinct, but many other animal species continue to live for the rest of Earth’s habitable period. Does that mean that avoiding human extinction is much less important than we thought, since we believe non-human lives have value?

Probably not, for at least three reasons:

1. Without the ability to migrate to the stars, Earth-derived life may fall well below its apparent potential. It’s possible another species on Earth would evolve human-level intelligence and capacities, but we shouldn’t bet on it. As far as we can tell, it took around 3.5 billion years since life first emerged on Earth for human intelligence to reach its current state. It’s possible that animals with human-like intelligence would emerge on our planet again more quickly if we went extinct, but we shouldn’t rely on the idea that the planet has enough time left to pull off the same trick twice.

2. Wild animals may face extreme amounts of suffering, and it’s not clear how often their lives are worth living. If it’s true that many wild animal lives are full of pain and suffering, we should hope humans are around in the future – if nothing else to consider mitigating those harms . It could be best from the perspective of wild animals if humans did not go extinct, so that humans could improve the lives of wild animals.

3. We still have a lot of uncertainty about what a valuable future should look like, and it’s important to preserve the one species we know of that is at least somewhat capable of seriously deliberating about what matters and acting on its conclusions. We may yet fail to secure a valuable future, but it’s much more likely that we’ll get there by trying than if we leave it up to random chance or natural processes. If the course of the future were decided by random or natural processes, we might expect it to fall short of almost all its potential. ↩

• Note that while reducing extinction risks and trajectory changes are split up in this explanation, they may, in practice, imply similar courses of action. Work to prevent, say, a catastrophic pandemic that kills all humans could likely also be effective at preventing a pandemic that allows some humans to survive but causes society to irreversibly collapse. ↩
• It seems plausible that reducing the risk of this outcome could be the most important cause to work on . However, it’s not clear to us what steps are available at this time to meaningfully do so. ↩
• It’s possible we’d prefer to act to prevent the suffering in 1,000 years rather than 10,000 years, because we feel less confident we can predict what will happen in 10,000 years. It seems plausible, for instance, that the greater length of time would make it more likely that someone else will find a way to prevent the harm. But if we assume that our uncertainty about the likelihood of the suffering in each case is the same, there seems to be no reason at all to prefer to prevent the sooner suffering rather than the later. ↩
• If the radiation sickness is so bad that it makes their lives worse than nonexistence, they might be able to object to choosing any policy that allowed them to be born. But we can ignore this possibility for the point being made here. ↩
• Some person-affecting views do assert that we have obligations to future individuals if a given individual or set of individuals will exist regardless of our actions. (Because of the extreme contingency in much of animal reproduction, the identity of future individuals is often not fixed.) For more information on this, see the entry on the non-identity problem in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . ↩
• For an example of this view, read Leopold Aschenbrenner’s blog post on “Burkean Longtermism.” ↩
• Some researchers estimate that the chance of extinction is significantly lower; others believe it’s much higher. But it seems hard to be confident the risks are extremely low. Assessing the level of risk we face is plausibly a top longtermist priority. ↩

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generation

The Earth, our home, is facing an urgent challenge: the need to save our environment for the benefit of future generations. It’s a call to action that requires our immediate attention and collective effort. In this essay, we will explore the reasons behind the importance of saving the environment, the consequences of neglect, and the ways we can take meaningful steps to secure a sustainable future.

The Gift of a Healthy Environment

Our environment provides us with clean air to breathe, fresh water to drink, and fertile soil to grow our food. Preserving these resources ensures that future generations can enjoy a high quality of life.

The Impact of Human Activities

Human activities, such as deforestation, pollution, and overconsumption, are harming the environment. These actions threaten the delicate balance of ecosystems and endanger the future of our planet.

Climate Change and Global Warming

One of the most pressing environmental issues is climate change. The burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are causing temperatures to rise, leading to more extreme weather events and rising sea levels.

Biodiversity Loss

The loss of biodiversity is another critical concern. Habitats are being destroyed, leading to the extinction of numerous plant and animal species. Biodiversity is essential for the health and stability of ecosystems.

Consequences for Future Generations

If we fail to act, future generations will inherit a world with polluted air, water scarcity, and the devastating effects of climate change. This is an inheritance we must strive to prevent.

Our Responsibility

As caretakers of the Earth, we have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect our environment. It is our duty to ensure that future generations can thrive on a healthy planet.

The Importance of Conservation

Conservation efforts, such as reforestation, waste reduction, and sustainable practices, play a crucial role in saving the environment. These actions help mitigate the damage we have caused.

Renewable Energy and Sustainable Practices

Transitioning to renewable energy sources, reducing plastic waste, and practicing sustainable agriculture are all steps we can take to lessen our impact on the environment.

Education and Advocacy

Education is a powerful tool for change. By raising awareness and advocating for environmental protection, we can inspire others to take action and make a difference.

Conclusion of Essay on Save Environment for Future Generation

In conclusion, the call to save our environment for future generations is not just a responsibility but a moral imperative. The consequences of neglecting our environment are far-reaching and affect all aspects of life on Earth. It’s our duty to take immediate and sustained action to mitigate these challenges and secure a sustainable future. Through conservation, sustainable practices, education, and advocacy, we can protect our planet and leave a legacy of environmental stewardship for the generations to come. Let us remember that the Earth is not just our home; it belongs to future generations as well. Our actions today will determine the world they inherit, and it is our responsibility to ensure that it is a world worth inheriting.

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Defining ‘Future Generations’: Epistemic Considerations on Conceptualizing a Future-Oriented Domain in Policy And Law-Making

Mikkel Knudsen 1,2* , Toni Ahlqvist 2 , Amos Taylor 2

1 Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, and Law, Åbo Akademi University, Finland 2 Finland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku, Finland

The rights of future generations generates increasing interest among both academics and policymakers. This article identifies two key gaps in the emerging literature. First, based on a systematic literature review, futures researchers’ recent contributions to the subfield are surprisingly subdued compared to those of other research fields. The article calls for renewed engagement from futurists. Second, the literature and policy documents are surprisingly vague on epistemic considerations conceptualising the boundaries of future generations. The articles provide novel insights to this theme through a survey of 65 Finnish and international futures scholars and foresight experts. Considering alternative conceptualizations of future generations may help enable for considering future generations’ interest in policy and law-making.

Future Generations, Policy, Law-Making, Anticipatory Governance

Introduction

The rights of future generations have become a hot topic academically and politically in recent years. Scholars increasingly debate options for political representation of future generations (Gosseries, 2008; Thompson, 2010; Gonzalez-Ricoy & Gosseries, 2016; Mackenzie, 2018; Gonzalez-Ricoy & Rey, 2019; Boston, 2021; Campos, 2021; Caney, 2022). Several nations have also introduced measures to strengthen the recognition of future generations in policymaking, albeit the institutionalization is still at an early stage (Jones et al., 2018; Radavoi & Rayman-Bacchus, 2021; Smith, 2019).

In 2021, the United Nations’ call for renewed global governance, the landmark Our Common Agenda (United Nations, 2021), took the centrality of future generations to a new level. Our Common Agenda mentions ‘future generations’ no less than 36 times. Among other suggestions, the report calls for a Declaration on Future Generations and a UN Special Envoy for Future Generations. Whether UN member states heed the call remains to be seen, but future generations, it would be fair to say, clearly sits at the heart of the current United Nations agenda.

Scholars have highlighted various reasons why future generations are now coming to the forefront. Many note how the challenges of political short-termism are becoming ever more apparent, with climate change as the paradigmatic case (Smith, 2021). Humphreys (2023: 2) quips that the longstanding framing of climate change policy as an obligation owed to future generations “ with roots in twin arcane worlds – of moral philosophy and United Nations (UN) norm building – has gone mainstream” . Another driver is the strand of literature on existential risks (cf. Tonn, 2018; 2021). Furthermore, until recent decades, empirical reality made it seem almost self-evident that each generation, “ on average and in various ways ” (Ware, 2020: 814), would be better off than their predecessor’s generation. The capacity of future generations to handle problems was therefore always greater than present generations’, and the need for concern for future generations’ problems therefore limited. For good reasons, this mindset seems less prevalent today.

As we want to show in our article, futurists used to be more preoccupied with future generations. We believe it is now about time to bring future generations studies back into futures studies. Firstly, it would help align the academic field of FS with the important future-related work happening in adjacent scholarly fields. Even if futures scholars should not be the only ones to discuss the role of future generations, futures scholars should have a role in the discussion too . Secondly, the ‘rights of future generations’ are rapidly becoming a key prism through which national and international political levels assess future implications of present actions and a key framework around which corresponding institutions are built. The concept of future generations or intergenerational equity is “increasingly moving from theoretical debates (…) to practicalities such as how to design institutions better equipped to work as advocates” (Radavoi & Rayman-Bacchus, 2021).

Future generations also feature in various national constitutions around the world. Some like Bolivia and Ecuador include provisions urging positive action on behalf of the state, while the constitution of South Africa explicitly provide future generations with rights (Boston & Stuart 2015). In a landmark 2021 decision, the German Federal Constitutional Court also extended the fundamental rights to climate protection into the future (Winter, 2022). Similarly, the rights in the Finnish constitution to a safe environment is now considered by officials to encompass future generations (Valtioneuvosto, 2023). How to take the rights of future generations into sufficient account in policy- and lawmaking is, therefore, a topic more and more governments and political systems are by law required to tackle. If futures researchers are examining how ideas about futures are inserted into present-day policymaking or legislation, the rights of future generations are therefore also an unmissable phenomenon.

Bringing Futures Studies back in

The topic of future generations has occupied the minds of generations of futures researchers, for whom the concept intuitively appeals. As Jordi Serra del Pino (2007) notes, it should be no surprise that the argument of a moral obligation towards our ‘futurecestors’ (borrowing from Inayatullah, 1997) finds a receptive audience within a community already keen on assessing the future implications of present activity. Who else but futurists should embrace future-oriented ethics and new future-oriented institutions?

Serra del Pino, however, goes on to argue for separating Future Generations Studies (FGS) from Futures Studies (FS) as two epistemologically distinct fields (Serra del Pino, 2007). FGS is a philosophical inquiry that aims to build ethically sound statements about the well-being of future generations. It seeks to generate normative moral conclusions and recipes derived from behavior based on ethical principles. FS, on the contrary, he argues, seeks to reach conclusions that are valid independently of the ethical positions of those implementing them. Futures studies aspire to obtain insight and contextual knowledge, FGS enlightenment, and absolute knowledge. Del Pino therefore concluded, in 2007, that it was time for FGS to leave the nest and fly on, and futures studies would have to let it go. “ Questions of what should be understood as Future Generations, how their needs can be ascertained and how these needs might be articulated within the limits of our present requirements, are too important to be left only to futurists.” (Serra del Pino, 2007).

Looking back 15 years later, the call seems to have been answered. Much of what is happening regarding future generations now happens almost fully outside the realm of futures studies. It is bubbling up under the auspices of moral and environmental philosophy, political science, or even legal studies. Futurists could once claim that literature on future generations and future-oriented institutions was largely unknown e.g. in conventional political science (for this claim, see e.g. Dator, 2019: 471), but this is no longer quite as true.

Epistemic considerations of conceptualizing future generations

Once the discussion has progressed to ‘practicalities’ an important practical question is raised. When discussing the rights of future generations, what exactly is constituted by that term? Explicating the epistemic considerations of what is implied by the term ‘future generations’ is, as we see it, an important precondition for strengthening the institutional framework around them. With increased practical application comes also the need for a more refined definition. If we want policies to take sufficient regard for future generations’ rights or to provide a formal representation of future generations within present political processes, it would be beneficial to be able to explain, what is entailed or encompassed by this group. The challenge can be seen as trying to find a moderate definition that recognizes obligations to future people without imposing extreme demands (Mulgan, 2018).

Ultimately, this article does not provide a clear or succinct definition of future generations. Rather, it seeks to initiate debate and further research by providing an insight into various epistemic considerations.

When talking about rights of future generations, defining ‘future generations’ is, of course, only one side of the coin. A deeper examination would also require a definition of the concept of rights . Entangling the term is worthy of a study in itself, although this is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say here that it is too simplistic to talk about rights as a monolithic concept today, nor is there any reason to believe that the interpretation of rights will not change in the future.

Aims and structure of the article

This article thus has two main aims. First, it seeks to provide a systematic overview of previous futures literature on future generations. To the best of our knowledge, no such literature review exists prior to this article. Secondly, the article discusses the difficult topic of defining future generations in the context of law- and policymaking. It provides novel material to this discussion through a survey of 65 respondents handpicked based on their expertise in foresight and future generations in lawmaking (Airos et al., 2022). With the empirical data, we are able to provide insights on how experts operating (mostly) in the futures field conceive future generations within the context discussed here. We believe this will be a valuable starting point for (re)engaging the futures field in the future generations discussion.

The article consists of six main parts. First, following this brief introduction, the article provides an explication of grounds for why present generations should care more about future generations. Then, the article provides an overview of the literature on future generations published in futures journals. From here, the text moves to the problem of defining the concept future generations. Subsequently, the rest of the article elaborates on this problem by providing empirical questionnaire data showing respondents’ interpretation of the definitional issue. Finally, the article is concluded with a discussion.

Why we should care for future generations now

The argument for a moral obligation

The central tenet within the recent movement is that political (in)action today affects future generations. Many political and societal topics exemplify the challenge of intergenerational equity. Some reflect intentional decisions like the building of a nuclear plant, others like the paradigmatic case of climate change reflect a collective drift, or are simply just unintentional consequences (Warren, 2022). Since future generations bear the burden of our decisions, people of today are seen to have a moral obligation to act in accordance with the interests of future generations.

The supposed moral obligation can be summed up in a modification of the golden rule (Thompson, 2010): Do unto future generations, as you would have past generations do unto you . To use a now popular framing, be as good an ancestor (cf. Krznaric, 2020) to future generations as you would like your ancestors to have been to you. Caney (2014: 323) puts his argument for the moral equality of future generations with present generations equally straightforward, stating simply “ that we have no reason to attribute fundamental moral importance to someone’s location in time” . A society guided by a Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ – the idea that one should select the principles for the basic structure of society, as if one had no advance information about one’s gender, social status, ethnicity, or indeed place in time – must therefore include intergenerational equity.

The argument for a democratic obligation

Mulgan (2006: 1) eloquently puts the moral obligation to ‘future people’ thus:

“Our actions have little impact on those who are dead, a considerable impact on those currently alive, and potentially enormous impact on those who live in the future. Perhaps the most significant impact is that our decisions affect who those future people will be, and if there will be future people at all. If we measure the moral significance of an action by the number of people it affects and the impact it has on them, then our obligations to future generations deserve to be the central topic of moral philosophy.”

The boundary problem of how to decide who legitimately make up ‘the people’ constitute an essential part of democratic theory (Dahl, 1990; Goodin, 2007). One answer is the all affected principle , i.e., that all those significantly affected by a decision should have their say in the decision-making process for it to be truly democratic. As the quotation of Mulgan above notes, future people are perhaps the most significantly affected by today’s decisions, and therefore future generations’ interests should be at the core of democratic decision-making processes (Karnein, 2016; Vermassen et al., 2022). While this sound enticing in theory, the philosophical considerations are somewhat more complicated (see e.g. Jensen, 2015), and the practical implications even more so.

The argument for better decision-making for present generations

There is also an argument that caring more about future generations could lead to better decision-making increasing the welfare and quality of life of present generations. Futurists are likely to be receptive to this argument, believing ipso facto that increased future-orientation is helpful now. As Bell (1993: 32) puts it, the “ present generation’s caring and sacrificing for future generations benefits not only future generations but also itself” . Bell puts the onus on character building, extending the notion that showing concern for others benefits one’s own character to entire generations. In a similar vein, Slaughter (1994) argues that not caring about future generations diminishes us.

However, caring for future generations could also have other benefits. If political short-termism, democratic myopia, and presentist biases are fundamental problems with current policy-processes (cf. Boston, 2021), changing these would likely yield benefits also in the short term.

The case against future generations

It is, of course, impossible to be against future generations in the actual sense of the word: future generations is a concept that can only be dealt as an emergent potentiality and as a rich variety of alternatives. However, there are some arguments against the incessant framing of future generations that merit some considerations.

A major challenge for awarding rights to future generations relates to the boundary problem. As this article shows, there is no clear, shared articulation of the temporal reach of the concept. As futurists know, societal discourse contain ambiguity as to where the present stops and the future starts (cf. Humphreys, 2023). Perhaps even more important in this context, it is similarly challenging to argue when the future ‘ends’.

As a reviewer for a previous draft of this article correctly highlighted, the term generations is by itself ambiguous. This is also a challenge for the discussion of intergenerational justice, which often draws comparisons between providing generations and recipient generations, while sometimes mixing up the notions of generations (Vanhuysse & Tremmel, 2018). Generations can mean both birth cohorts , i.e. people born within a narrow range of years, or age groups combining people within the same narrow age bracket at a given moment. Using the latter interpretation, ‘future generations’ might include future representations of our present selves. The distinction also has important implications for discussions on intergenerational justice. Uneven treatment across different age groups is not necessarily unjust, but unequal treatment perpetuated across different birth cohorts over entire life cycles create intergenerational inequity (Vanhuysse & Tremmel, 2018). Since the definitional distinction can lead to fundamentally different inferred conclusions, colloquial use of the generational term without clarification might be problematic.

There is also ambiguity about the spatial implications of the concept future generations (Humphreys, 2023). Philosophically, it is often invoked to apply universally for all future generations elsewhere; however, it is difficult to see such an interpretation e.g. of the rights of future generations in the Finnish constitution. The spatial implications could be taken even further to underline the immense complexity of the concept: by acknowledging the multitude of spatial contexts and spatially sensitive, localised forms of ‘knowing the world’ in history and in present, how can we claim to have ‘the lens’ through which to view the potential multitude of future generations? The answer to this dilemma is, simultaneously, simple and complex: there is no singular lens through which to view future generations. From spatial perspective, the concept of future generations is not global and generic, but local and contextual, built through a multitude of spatial contexts and ‘local knowledges’ (see Geertz, 2000). In principle, this spatial argument can be utilised both against and for the use of future generations concept: We can assert that there is no sense in trying to activate a concept this complex. We can also argue, vice versa, that because of its complexity, the concept should be meticulously exercised, as it can help provide, at least, partial illumination and structure in the midst of otherwise ungraspable complexity.

The suggestion of a moral obligation to future generations is also not quite as self-evident as readers here might think. Persons not sharing a common period of life can hardly acquire obligations from each other from a relationship of mutual benefit (reciprocity), nor through explicit or implicit agreement (Hubin, 1976). It is difficult to see how future generations could come to have a claim toward present generations, just as it is hard to see how we could have claims against our previous generations. Justifying obligations to future generations runs into problems if seen through a contractarian or contractualist social contract framework (Groves, 2014: 45).

Putting the spotlight on far-future generations might also reduce attentiveness to addressing immediate concerns. This is one of the critical points put forward against longtermism (Torres, 2021). One way to put it is this: If a resource-strapped Finnish government is also constitutionally bound to safeguard the rights of future generations of Finnish citizens, it may need to (or choose to) limit the resources for e.g. development aid or welfare policies today. There is, cf. longtermism, even an argument for using future generations to prioritize growth (thus securing optimal economic conditions for future generations) over alternative pathways that otherwise might be considered more sustainable.

We also see a risk that the concept of future generations can be used to cement the extended present. “ The extended present is a future that is not a future at all in the sense that it is simply an extension, and overlaying, of the present on to the future.” (Sardar, 2021). If future generations are merely seen as extensions of the present ‘us’, they might effectively serve first and foremost as legitimizing enablers of the status quo. If so, the framework of future generations closes up the future rather than opening it up. “The future in extended present is mostly a colonized future.” (Ibid.). This could be doubly problematic if the extended ‘us’ is not an actual inclusive representation, but instead, for example, “largely devoid of women and non-Westerners as well as feminist issues or issues of particular relevance for women ” (Maze, 2019) as has been shown to often be the case with futures images. One should probably be apprehensive before appointing such exclusive representations of extended ‘present us’ with difficult-to-change legal rights.

Finally, there is (cf. Serra del Pino) an epistemological argument for not conflating issues related to future generations with issues related to futures studies. These are two distinct fields of study, with distinct foci, and with distinct epistemological approaches.

Taken together, we will argue that the arguments above show that increased nuance and consideration is needed when the term ‘future generations’ is used, whether it concerns academic usage (in futures studies or elsewhere) or more distinctly political usage of the term. We see these arguments not as an antidote to our focus but rather as corroboration of our calls for taking epistemological considerations seriously and for renewed scholarly attention to the topic among futures researchers.

Future generations in futures studies: A literature review

This section examines previous literature on futures generations within academic futures journals. In addition to this material, a range of other scholarly literature exists by, or partly, by futurists. Allen Tough (Tough, 1997b) has constructed a curriculum for a (future) university course on future generations. Jim Dator (2008; 2019: 470f) has supplied interesting bibliographies on the topic. These lists provide interesting starting points, although one could hope for newer or updated bibliographies for the futures field soon.

A literature search for the term ‘future generations’ was carried out (September 2022) in the three academic databases Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar directed toward seven specific journals in the field (Journal of Futures Studies, Futures, Foresight, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, European Journal of Futures Research, World Futures Review, and On the Horizon). Primarily due to various functionalities of the given databases, the search in Scopus contained all matches within the title, abstract, or keywords, the search in Web of Science contained matches within the title, while the search in Google Scholar was for article titles only. Without limiting the search to titles (“allintitle:”future generations”), Google Scholar yielded more than 5,000 results which would be too extensive to manually sort through.

While there was naturally a large overlap between the results, each database provided unique results, wherefore the triangulation proved itself meaningful. Between all three databases, 78 results were found in total. The vast majority of the articles are published in the journal Futures . The results are shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Articles on “future generations” in Futures Studies journals

Looking through the published literature, there was a notable spike in interest during the second half of the 1990s, followed by an apparent decline in interest, before a recent revival of material on “future generations” within the futures field. This is also illustrated by Figure 1 below.

Fig 1: Articles on “future generations” in Futures Studies journals

Another notable thing is the shift in perspective. During the 1990s, several key articles discussed future generations conceptually, and with a view to ethics and the question of moral obligations (Light, 1997; Slaughter, 1994, 1996, 1997; Tough, 1993a, 1993b, 1996, 1997a). As Son (2015: 129) would later note, “ Futures studies must consider moral commitment because its existential rationale is associated with future generations helping their needs.”

Much of the field can be traced back to two groups in Malta and Kyoto, originally operating independently of each other, which separately pursued the need to create an awareness of the ethical questions related to future generations and the social structures that would allow the needs to be taken into account (Dator, 2019; Kim & Dator, 1994). Dator (2019: 231) highlights the influence of these thoughts in shaping the 1997 UNESCO “Declaration on the Responsibilities of Present Generations Towards Future Generations”, which supposedly would spread the discussion worldwide. Ironically, though, the ‘victory’ achieved through the formal international adoption of the declaration seems to have been followed by a decline of interest in the topic.

During the recent uptick of interest, most articles have a more practical focus. The research questions in the futures journals relate less to our conceptual relationship with future generations, but rather to how future generations can be formally embedded in the democratic institutions of the present (see e.g. (Boston, 2021; Jones et al., 2018; Kamijo et al., 2020; Kuroda et al., 2021; Nakagawa & Saijo, 2020; Radavoi & Rayman-Bacchus, 2021; Seo, 2017). Bruce Tonn (see e.g. Tonn, 2018) is a notable exception bridging the preceding futures literature on moral obligations with recent more institutions-oriented literature. The link between future generations and sustainable development can be found imprinted throughout the full period (e.g. (Dahle, 1998).

It is commonly pointed out in the literature that considerations about future generations are a remarkably recent invention in modern Anglo-Saxon human and social sciences scholarly discussions. Justice over time did not exist much as a topic before the 1970s, certainly not before the 1960s (Bell, 1993). Dator (2019: 230) argues that one reason for the absence of the concept in traditional ethical or moral discourse is that, until relatively recently, present generations could do relatively little by their actions or inactions to make the lives of future generations significantly better or worse than their own. However, it is also commonly pointed out that many traditional cultures have taken a broader view of time, ancestors, and ‘futurecestors’. Slaughter (1994), for example, highlights how the Iroquois appointed special chiefs as guardians of future generations. Kramer (2011) refers to Buddhist thought, and how the idea of reincarnation gives direct reason to concerns about the planet and future generations. One strength of future generations research is thus its ability to find links with other civilizational projects (Inayatullah, 1997).

If people today are obliged to act in accordance with the interests of future generations, a key question concerns what those interests are. The epistemic uncertainty related to identifying the interests of future generations is, naturally, a key barrier for conceptualizing their representation within current processes (see e.g. Gosseries, 2015).

In a series of enlightening essays, Allen Tough tackles this by asking what future generations would need from us (Tough, 1993b), and what future generations might say to us (Tough, 1997b). The seven recommendations or needs of future generations are somewhat uncontroversial and related to (1) Peace and security, (2) Environment, (3) Catastrophes, (4) Governance, (5) Knowledge, (6) Children, (7) Learning. If present generations could deliver better on these issues, the challenge of not knowing the exact interests of future generations – and the realization that future generations are unlikely to act as a monolith – has rather limited implications in practice.

The problem of defining ‘future generations’

If future generations becomes a new future-oriented domain in policy and lawmaking, it is invariably relevant to consider how future generations can be conceptualized. If future generations must be represented in policymaking, it leads not only to the epistemic uncertainty problem of identifying their interest, but also to the boundary problem of defining who future generations are . Enshrining enduring rights to future generations accentuates a similar discussion.

Defining future generations in futures studies

The question of defining future generations has received surprisingly little consideration in previous futures literature published in peer-reviewed journals. One notable exception is (Hubacek & Mauerhofer, 2008), who discusses economic, legal, and institutional aspects related to future generations.

From a legal perspective, they see one as one of the key questions dealing with future generations, where do they begin, and where do present generations end? They open the definitional issue up for both of the concept’s terms:

• Future: When does the future begin?
• Generations: How is this term defined, and is it limited to human beings? (Human/non-human and/or living/non-living beings)

They do not attempt to provide precise answers to the questions beyond stating that to “overcome this dilemma, a working definition relevant to resource consumption has to be chosen, bearing in mind other conceptions of future generations exist” (Hubacek & Mauerhofer, 2008).

We have identified no other discussion of how to define future generations within the 78 identified articles. Some futurists have tackled the topic elsewhere, e.g. within several of the chapters of the book Co-Creating a Public Philosophy for Future Generations (Kim & Dator, 1999). Acknowledging that by future generations “a number of philosophers and futurists mean those generations who will live in the next twenty-five to thirty years” (Tomov, 1999: 72), most authors in the book take a more maximalist approach. Garrett (1999: 32) explains that future generations “must be understood to include people we will never meet and to whom we have no connection, people whose welfare we consider not because of close familial bonds but because we recognize the intrinsic value of continued life on Earth.” Wendy Schultz (1999: 183) expands the scope even further “to the potential descendants of all humans, of all flora and fauna, of all geological formations, as well as the spiritual energy (either embodied or free-floating) developing on the planet.”

While these are remarkable contributions, the book chapter definitions all reflect individual preferences of what future generations should mean more so than intersubjective definitions or the result of careful analysis of how it is applied.

Defining future generations in sustainable development

The importance of future generations is one of the founding principles of sustainable development. Indeed, the very definition of sustainable development adopted by the 1987 Brundtland Commission explicitly contains a reference to future generations. Airos et al. (2022) survey five central international documents from the Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan for the Human Environment (1972) to Agenda 2030 (2015) with its Sustainable Development Goals. Through the documents, it is pointed out nine times, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of today must act in accordance with the interests of future generations. However, none of the documents defines future generations, although they are referred to a total of 42 times. Based on the key international documents, one will therefore find that future generations are used to define sustainable development, but those future generations are themselves not defined at all.

Defining future generations elsewhere

Texts in other fields have provided some definitions of future generations. For example, Hubin (1976: 70) defines future generations as ‘generations which do not overlap our own’ . (De-Shalit 1995: 141) similarly defines future generations as ‘ the people who by definition will live after the contemporary people are dead’.

While these definitions are rather simple and intuitive, they are still quite vague in practice. It seems likely that there are people (children) alive today, who will live to the year 2150. If the clause of no overlap is taken literally, we will have no future generations within the next 100-year time span. Conversely, there is no endpoint to the definition suggesting that we today have obligations reaching thousands, if not millions of years ahead.

The nuclear energy community is one field where deep-time thinking (cf. Ialenti, 2020) has long been forced to the surface due to necessity, for example when discussing the management of high-level radioactive waste. Still, the notion of future generations is not clearly defined within the community (Kermisch, 2016). The Belgian regulation, for example, separates between short-term (up to 100 years, the word short-term having different connotations regarding nuclear waste compared to most everyday usages) and long-term (after 100 years).

Relating to the issue of high-level radioactive waste, Celine Kermisch (Kermisch, 2016) suggests distinguishing between ‘close future generations’ and ‘remote future generations’. In this context, the distinction separates generations who will still have a memory of the waste and its location (close future generations), and remote future generations who have lost its memory. As final waste sites for nuclear waste could be functional for at least 10,000 years, planning for generations without a clear memory is necessary.

While the clarification of close and remote future generations is situational to the nuclear context, we believe the distinction could be applied in many other contexts too.

Futures scholars and foresight experts definitions of future generations

This section contains the result of a survey fielded to futures scholars and foresight experts to generate insights on how to improve long-term orientation in policy- and lawmaking (see Airos et al. 2022). The survey included elements on both foresight practices and improved considerations of future generations’ interests. While the survey material is richer, we focus in this article on the first question of the survey, which concerned conceptualizing future generations.

Method: Surveying foresight experts and futures scholars

The questionnaire was fielded in March/April 2022 for a handpicked list of experts that formed a futures panel. The panel of recipients was selected by the authors to bring insights on how foresight and future generations could be taken into account in lawmaking. The sampling strategy was therefore based on identifying those who had previously published and or/worked with policy foresight or with the rights of future generations.

Since the questionnaire was conducted as part of a project for the Finnish government (Airos et al., 2022), the list of recipients intentionally contained a disproportionate amount of Finnish respondents. The survey was set up in the web portal Webropol, where respondents could choose to answer the survey in either Finnish or English. An invitation to the survey was sent for 222 people of which 65 responded (a response rate of 29%). 50 respondents answered in English, 15 in Finnish.

The introductory question of the survey asked respondents to provide their conceptualization of future generations. The presumption was that respondents’ ideas about who future generations are would also shape their opinions on how future generations could be taken into account.

The precise question, respondents faced was ‘ What does the notion of future generations entail in the context of law-making?’

Respondents were then offered a selection from four preselected options, as well as an opportunity to provide a different option:

• Children and youth already living today
• People living within the next few decades
• People living within the next few centuries
• Future people whose lives will be significantly affected by our decisions
• Something else; what?

Those selecting option e) were prompted to provide an answer within an open text field. All respondents were tasked with elaborating their response (open text) with the simple prompt ‘Why?’

It is important to note that the survey clearly contextualized the definition of future generations here pertaining to the domain of law-making. This may have brought out other responses from futures scholars than they would have provided in the other contexts. It is also important to note that the selection choices were not mutually exclusive.

Since the invited respondents were selected by the authors but based on their perceived ability to contribute (i.e. not randomly), the analysis cannot be said to be representative for the futures/foresight field. It is also unlikely that all possible ranges of (especially qualitative) responses are captured in the subset. We do believe, though, that the results are indicative of thinking present within the field.

Results of the expert survey

The responses to the survey revealed the difficulties of providing a meaningful one-size-fits-all definition of future generations. It also revealed a remarkable variety in the responses. This suggests that when the topic of enshrining the rights of future generations into law or securing future generations’ representation in policymaking, the discussion participants may not be discussing the same things . While the responses here pertains to this specific context, the conclusion may have validity for other contexts too, where future generations are discussed.

This is perhaps the most important finding of the survey. The survey was not designed to provide an exact answer to what the concept of future generations entails; however, the results suggest that raising the issue is beneficial. If various parties have very dissimilar conceptualizations, the debate around and within this future-oriented domain could easily be distorted.

In Figure 2 below, we present the responses of the entire group of experts (combing the Finnish and international respondents) for the question at hand. The majority of respondents (57%) opted for the definition “ Future people whose lives will be significantly affected by our decisions ”. Next comes the options “ People living within the next few centuries “, “ People living within the next few decades ” and “ Something else “. Five percent of respondents estimate that future generations (note: In the context of law-making) refer to children and young people already living today.

Fig 2: Share of survey responses to the question “What does the notion of future generations entail in the context of law-making?” (N=65)

The answers were justified in different ways in the “why” field. We highlight the following as examples (answers provided in Finnish translated by the authors):

“In the context of decision-making and legislation, future generations can mean those generations that decision-making does not affect at this moment. Depending on the issue, decision-making can have effects for decades or even centuries.”

“Different policies create impacts on various timeframes. There is a balance to be struck between generations. (…) ‘Future generations’ is open ended – limiting impact to our children’s future lives or to decades away, or even centuries, is not necessarily useful. Some policies create lasting impact, such as urban development, forestry etc., so creating a space for those future generations to be contemplated in such decision making will create some sort of balance.”

”Because all the other options are either unfocused or too restrictive”

“Future generations can be defined individually subjectively, but when viewed objectively, the concept covers all future generations from the present moment forward.”

“… from the point of view of legislation, in my opinion, future generations refers to people whose lives are affected by legislative decisions, but who are unable to influence them due to their young age or not having been born.”

“More essential than the time span is the understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. In terms of time span, I would rather emphasize longer (50–200) than shorter.”

“I think a distinction should be made between what the notion of FGs means in law-making, and what it should mean. It is my estimation that most law-makers usually refer to current generations of young people (already living) or one generation down the line (so those living within the next decades). They definitely do not think about the next centuries. Including all those significantly affected would be ideal, but not feasible because laws that are good for the next two generations might be detrimental to those generations that follow.”

“The term ‘futures generations’ is an empty, normatively neutral vessel for whatever contents (values, norms, expectations, hopes, fears) a group wishes to put there.”

As seen, many responses suggested situational definitions, e.g., that the definition and the responsibility would match particular” actions/latency/effects”. One open response defined future generations clearly as” My (born or unborn) grandchildren and their children”, e.g., the third and fourth generation after the respondent. One respondent suggests a relevant temporal space as” more than the next few decades, but less than the next few centuries.”

The results make it clear that respondents operate with very different time horizons, while nominally discussing the same question. While neither definition is preferred by a majority, some foresight experts conceive future generations in law-making contexts as a comparably short-term issue (young generations already alive), while others have much longer implied time horizons (the next few centuries). It is notable that the response most selected was also the one, which was the vaguest.

Some respondents argued explicitly against the idea of providing temporal-bound definitions (“ I also think it’s non-sensical to draw a temporal boundary for who counts as ’future generations ’”) because the future is by definition open-ended. Others argued for rather short time horizons due to limits of cognition, either amongst themselves or as presumed amongst lawmakers. For example, one respondent noted that “ That is a time horizon that I can grasp” , while another wrote “ It’s too abstract for policymakers to consider the wellbeing of someone they have no personal relationship with. It’s much more effective to refer to their (grand)children.”

It appears to be a clear strategy identifiable among some participants that ‘future definitions’ need a relatable working definition to be operationalizable. Pragmatism may be preferred over theoretical consistency to induce the effect wished for within the policymaking process.

One English language answer differed from all the rest (Finnish and English) by mentioning ”Future civilizations, including sentient and non-sentient life forms” . All other responses seemed to implicitly or explicitly take for granted that ‘future generations’ would refer to human beings, although this definition may not be self-evident. The idea that the definition should extend beyond human beings was also brought up by respondents explaining their choice of definition (albeit, remarkably, only amongst international respondents).

As we were finalizing this article, the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen raised up the topic of intergenerational solidarity in her 2022 State of the Union Address (European Commission, 2022). Solidarity between generations, she proposed, should even be enshrined in the EU treaties. This is another good example of how intergenerational equity now takes center-stage of political discussion. However, in the preceding sections of her speech, von der Leyen explicitly referred to “ our children’s future” and “ the next generation” .

This article sought to highlight the contemporary relevance of future generations’ studies and provide a call for futures studies to reestablish itself within the discussion. Von der Leyen’s remarks underline the interest in institutional and legal aspects of intergenerational fairness that no longer belongs to the sole realm of academics, but also increasingly shared by decision-makers. The other primary aim of the article is to ascertain epistemic considerations of how to conceptualize future generations. Again, von der Leyen’s remarks are instructive, as the narrow temporal scope of intergenerational solidarity marks a stark contrast to conceptualizations of future generations e.g. as those living when all contemporary people are dead (De-Shalit, 1995) or the maximalist framing including all geological formations and spiritual energy (Schultz, 1999).

Examinations of the surprisingly sparse previous literature on definitions of future generations, supplemented by the empirical survey material presented, leads us to conclude that conceptualizations of future generations must include contextual timeframes and, if conceptually possible, even contextual spatial settings. Even within the domain of law and policy, it is relevant to distinguish between timeframes. The concept of future generations entail different aspects in relation to tax policy compared to nuclear power policy. However, especially since there is not one all-encompassing and applicable definition of future generations, explicating the dilemmas and tensions implicit in the widely used term is important. Unless we are able to acknowledge and resolve the challenges, it will be difficult to take the call for accounting for future generations in democratic policymaking beyond the level of mere rhetoric. We invite futures studies scholars to play their important part within this new research field.

Celine Kermisch’ distinctions, inspired by nuclear waste research, between close future generations and remote future generations could be a fruitful starting point for this additional research. As raised within the survey responses, conceptual developments delineating future generations as consisting only of humans or as a broader concept are also welcomed. For example, there are good grounds for suggesting that democratic notions of the all affected-principle should be extended to nonhuman animals (e.g. Magana, 2022). Many initiatives enshrining rights to future generations are intricately linked with sustainable development and with initiatives enshrining rights to Nature itself (UNDP, 2022: 7-10).

If future generations thinking has previously been recognized by futurists for its ability to find links with other civilizational projects (Inayatullah, 1997), it could now help pave the way beyond anthropocentrism and towards novel ‘anthropocene futures’, including understanding of the deep interconnections between ‘human systems’ and ‘natural systems’. We believe futures scholars are uniquely equipped to broadening the view of possible futures and furthering post-anthropocentric conceptualizations of future generations. Already, Schultz (1999) and Hubacek & Mauerhofer (2008) suggested that future generations could include more than human beings (non-human living beings, even non-living beings). Futurists should consider what methods and framing, existing or potential, that could be utilized to support this endeavor.

To sum up, we will argue that working with future generations require at least the following epistemic considerations:

• Does the usage sufficiently distinguish between Futures Studies and Future Generations Studies? These concepts may overlap, but they are not synonyms, and clarity between the usages is needed.
• Does the term generations imply a birth cohort or a specific age group, i.e. does it refer to a group of beings at a distinct time in their lives or across their entire life cycles?
• What is the temporal reach, i.e. when does the present end, when does the future begin, and how far does the future reach?
• What are the spatial considerations of the concept? Future generations are often invoked to represent future generations everywhere , but this may not be – and probably cannot be – the case in all spatial contexts.
• Does the concept refer only to future human generation, or does it extend to all living beings, or even to non-living beings?

Arguably, the answer in all these cases is contextual. There is no clear and one-size-fits-all definition of future generations, nor should there be. However, disentangling the often very different inferred meanings using the ‘checklist’ above could help move the shared discussion forward.

Finally, arguing for the rights of open-ended future generations can entail a preference for permanence over change and adaptation. It is therefore also important to be on guard for usages that effectively legitimizes the status quo of the extended present. Striking the right balance between longtermism and dynamism is another, for now under-acknowledged, aspect of institutionalizing future generations, for which foresight and futures scholars may provide valuable insights.

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from two funding sources. The first is the research funding from Finnish government´s analysis, assessment and research activities (FORGE project). The second source is research funding from the Academy of Finland (GYROSCOPE project, decision number 353056).

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What is the role of teachers in preparing future generations?

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Claudia costin claudia costin visiting professor of practice in education - harvard graduate school of education, former secretary of education - municipality of rio de janeiro.

August 3, 2017

• 10 min read

The following essay comes from “ Meaningful education in times of uncertainty ,” a collection of essays from the Center for Universal Education and top thought leaders in the fields of learning, innovation, and technology.

This is a very ambitious goal. In many parts of the developing world, too many are left behind by not having access to school or learning the basics. Of the 121 million out-of-school children and adolescents in low- and middle-income countries, one-sixth of children did not complete primary school and one-third of adolescents did not complete lower secondary. Thirty percent of countries still do not have gender parity in primary and 50 percent do not have it in secondary.

Worst of all, 250 million children cannot read, write, or do basic arithmetic, although many of them have been in school for some years. “Schooling Ain’t Learning” states the subtitle of the excellent book from Lant Pritchett, “ The Rebirth of Education ,” which analyzes the challenges the developing world faces to ensure improvements in literacy and numeracy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has described it as the Global Learning Crisis.

To make matters worse, the demand for skills is migrating to non-routine cognitive and interpersonal skills, since many jobs are being lost to automation . Curricula in schools do not normally consider this change and education systems do not have the tools to address these more sophisticated skills.

Globalization has made these changes present in almost every country, adding to existing inequalities and contributing to the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In many low-income, and even middle-income countries, certified teachers (i.e. teachers who have received the formal education required by the country’s regulations) lack knowledge in some subjects such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry, lack adequate quantities of textbooks, and connectivity (and sometimes even electricity) is rare in school buildings. Yet, even in these cases, the demand for higher-level thinking skills is present in the labor market, imposing a double-challenge over an already overburdened school system.

In this context, what should be the role of the teacher? It would be easy to respond that if the basics do not exist, we should not expect anything more than the basics, thus allowing the next generation of students to be unskilled and unprepared for the future ahead.

In this short essay, I try to state the opposite: It is possible, with the appropriate support, to expect teachers to help students to be active citizens and professionals in these times of uncertainty.

The path to scale 21st century education in countries with struggling education ecosystems

These countries cannot make their school systems progress step-by-step, first covering the last mile in access, then promoting the outdated model of quality education for all, and finally ensuring that the system incorporates the development of a new set of skills. They will have to leapfrog and learn from countries that have previously improved their education systems.

For this to be feasible, some initial deficiencies will need to be addressed, such as a precarious pre-service and in-service education and inefficient teachers’ hiring processes. Pre-service education in the developing world tends to overemphasize the theory, at the expense of the practice of education. A curriculum reform in the tertiary institutions that prepare future teachers would be more than welcome. Only through a solid reflection on a teacher’s everyday practice could we advance towards a model where they could be seen less as a mere class provider and more as a mediator in the process of skills development—literacy and numeracy, higher order cognitive skills, or social and emotional skills. These skills are better developed through interactions, not speeches or copying from a blackboard, as most teachers do. Facilitating a class where consistent participation is expected is extremely difficult for novice teachers that were themselves taught through pedagogies that don’t demand students’ engagement.

Last year, the OECD delivered an interesting report on the strategies mathematics teachers from participating countries in PISA 2012 used to deliver their instruction. 4 The report grouped the strategies into three categories: active learning, where the emphasis is on promoting student engagement in their own learning, with support of ICT and lots of teamwork; cognitive activation, where students are challenged into a process that develops higher order thinking skills, especially problem solving and critical thinking; and teacher-directed instruction, that relies on the teacher ability to deliver good classes. According to the report, the strategies are not mutually exclusive, which demand the instructor a constant change in roles, to adjust to the kind of instruction being implemented.

Pre-service education and hiring processes in the developing world should prepare professionals that are ready to manage these more sophisticated roles as they deal with their daily teaching of classes.

In addition to this important transformation, professional development should incorporate the notion that, in addition to being a mediator, a teacher is part of a team and teaching is not an isolated work. Teachers need to learn to collaborate, co-create, plan classes, and monitor their work together. This could be in the school they are working or within a school system. Good initiatives of pairing struggling schools with better performing ones in the same area—thus dealing with the same student population—have shown promising results globally.

The real challenge is that before the profession becomes more attractive, and the pre-service education more effective, these countries need to deal with a current cohort of teachers that often lack the skills and repertoire to face this complex reality. In these cases, a blend of more scripted teaching strategies with space for experimentation and support for innovation have shown to be effective. Studies have shown that unskilled teachers benefit greatly from additional support such as pre-formatted class plans, digital classes, and more detailed textbooks.

Despite this, learning—through collaboration or professional development courses—how to deliver classes that are more engaging and allow for the student’s space to develop higher order thinking skills, is feasible even under these difficult circumstances. It just demands more structured professional development and better-prepared instructors to address these teachers’ needs.

This demands mentoring and class observations, together with structured materials to support initial efforts from the novice teacher to prepare meaningful class-plans and deliver them. It also requires some additional time if the classes are—as in some developing countries—too short or based on a curriculum overloaded with unnecessary content.

Building Global Citizens at Uncertain Times

The demands put on schools are not restricted to preparing students for the increasing demands of the labor market. A child needs to grow to be an informed member of the society in which they live and to have the knowledge and capabilities to participate. In addition to acquiring basic cognitive and social and emotional skills, a solid Global Citizenship curriculum should be introduced in the school system even in the developing world. Understanding how his or her own country is organized, and how it connects to a globalized world, will be of great value for the student.

To foster the skills needed to become a global citizen, we should develop these skills in a structured way in the teachers’ workforce. This means in-service education through collaboration and group-discussions on empathy, cultural appreciation, ethnic and gender identities, and general knowledge of current world affairs and challenges. A teacher that believes she is part of humanity and not just of a region or a country tends to foster the same perception in her students.

Ultimately, if we want students to become citizens, we need to give them a voice. Very often, in school systems, we treat teenagers as children and don’t trust them to be responsible for their own student lives and choices. This means we must trust them to take part in important decisions about the school curriculum and we must discuss their behavior issues with them directly—not their parents. This would also require allowing some space for them to make mistakes and learning to correct them effectively. A global citizen, it must be understood, is first a citizen in his own school, community, and country. If we truly want to prepare them to become informed and active members in their countries, it is important to give them some space to exercise choices and activism at an early stage.

In Rio de Janeiro, where I was municipal secretary of education, we introduced a mandatory assignment at the beginning of 7th grade, for the adolescents to state in a structured way the life project—that meant putting their dreams into words and learning to plan their future lives. They did it at the beginning of the school year, in an activity conducted with the support of 9th graders that were trained specifically for the task. Only after the whole class arrived at an acceptable proposition for each kid did the teachers enter the classroom, at which point each student could choose a mentor teacher to continue discussing their projects. The results were impressive for both students and instructors.

Using Technology to Leapfrog

Although it might seem utopic, education in low- and middle-income countries can benefit from modern technology even when the basics are lacking, if a more contextualized approach to including such tools in the classroom is taken, as a support to teachers not as an additional subject.

In China, for example, the Ministry of Education offers schools options to use digital classes. In Rio de Janeiro, when I was secretary, we took a similar approach: offering all teachers the use of digital classes prepared by trained instructors. The use of the platform has shown positive impacts on learning. Yet to take full advantage of this tool, connectivity needs to exist. In the absence of this, pen-drives or offline options were provided. Using technology for remedial education was and is still done, even when connectivity is not available.

Other possibilities are the broadcasting of classes to support instruction where specific teachers are not available. An interesting example of this innovative practice was highlighted in the Millions Learning report from the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. The school system in the state of Amazonas in Brazil had the challenge of providing physics and chemistry classes in the Amazon jungle for high school students. The solution was to enlist a teacher to broadcast classes and provide schools with a generalist teacher to ensure class participation and student engagement.

The use of technology in these examples show the possible advantages of bringing resources and a knowledge base that is not yet available in every classroom. On the other hand, the fact that in the education ecosystem it exists somewhere and may be mobilized is of great help and doesn’t give teachers the sense of disempowerment, since it is prepared by teachers from within the Amazonas system or by members of the community and not by a distant company located in another country.

Conclusions

The SDG-4 demands an organized effort to ensure that every child and adolescent in the world has the means to complete quality primary and secondary school, as well as develop skills to live a healthy and productive life. Unfortunately, as uncertainty grows, this task seems almost impossible—even in high-income countries—as more complex skills are demanded by employers and globalization requiring individuals who understand the challenges the planet is facing and that can operate in different geographies.

What should be the role of teachers, in such an environment, especially in low- and middle-income countries? This is the question I have tried to answer here, providing some clues of what could be done to ensure that the United Nation’s goal can actually produce a more educated global society, and that a better world might emerge.

Global Economy and Development

Center for Universal Education

August 2, 2024

Modupe (Mo) Olateju, Grace Cannon, Kelsey Rappe

July 29, 2024

Sweta Shah, Donald Wertlieb, Charlotte Vuyiswa McClain-Nhlapo, Ruchi Kulbir Singh, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

July 24, 2024

A Message to My Next Generation

You will shine and you will achieve whatever you want if you keep working hard and dreaming more.

Don't let anybody destroy your peace of mind. You are on the right path to pursue your dreams. You have to be ready to do whatever you are interested in.  You are the hero of your family, society, community and your country.

Try to be proactive, self starter, quick learner and self motivator and don't have the fear of taking risk.

If you want to touch the sky, you have to accept that you may fall down so many times.

Regardless of how much people and your community interfere, be like stone in front of them and convince them with your ego and words.

Furthermore, be an inspiration to their children and add your name on the top of the real heroes for freedom of thoughts and humanity.

Keep motivating yourself, try thousands of ways and come up with the best version of yourself. Don't be disappointed when none of them work. You are not the only one who suffers, there are thousands more who suffer even more than you but they didn't quit, they started struggling even harder.

Dear my next generation, keep educating yourself and focus on your studies and find learning opportunities, don't follow peoples' negative thoughts and beliefs nor the culture instead inspire others to follow you and be a role model to your society, fellow classmates and colleagues.

TRY TO SPREAD HUMANITY AND UNITY AMONG OTHERS.

Don't lose hope, be as smart and as patient that nothing stops you from what you wish to achieve.

YOU ARE UNIQUE IN THE WAY YOU ARE.

You are lucky more than you think, just believe in yourself everything will come to you in the right time.

KEEP STRUGGLING AND SHINING! 

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Earth — Earth Should Be Taken Care of for Future Generations

Earth Should Be Taken Care of for Future Generations

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Published: Oct 31, 2018

Words: 1332 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

The Fragility of Mother Earth

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Teaching Future Generations Essays

Cultural storytelling to teaching future generations about topics like climate change and health and wellness, popular essay topics.

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The Climate Crisis

Climate change is a grave threat to children’s survival.

Right now, in the U.S. and around the world, children's lives are under threat due to climate change . Nearly 710 million children are currently living in countries at the highest risk of suffering the impact of the climate crisis . However, every child will inherit a planet with more frequent extreme weather events than ever before.  

Extreme events, including wildfires , floods and hurricanes , have become a frightening new normal. Hotter temperatures, air pollution and violent storms are leading to immediate, life-threatening dangers for children, including difficulty breathing,  malnutrition and higher risk of infectious diseases. 

Save the Children is a global leader working in the U.S. and around the world to help children and their communities adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.  Your donation today supports this life-saving work. Make a one-time donation to the Children's Emergency Fund or join Team Tomorrow to connect with the causes you care about - like the climate crisis - through your monthly donation.

What Are the Effects of Climate Change on Future Generations?

While climate change affects everyone, those who have contributed the least to the crisis—children, those in poverty, and future generations—are the most affected.

Extreme temperatures leave many families living in poverty with less food, less clean water, lower incomes and worsening health. 

Children’s immune systems are still developing, leaving their rapidly growing bodies more sensitive to disease and pollution.  

Extreme events can destroy homes, schools, child care centers and infrastructure critical to children’s well-being.

Droughts and flooding can destroy crops and cut access to clean water.  

The UN warns that many families will have to choose between starvation and migration.   

Statistics About Climate Change and Children

The climate crisis magnifies inequality , poverty , displacement and may increase the likelihood of conflict .

• 90% of diseases resulting from the climate crisis are likely to affect children under the age of five.
• By 2050, a further 24 million children are projected to be undernourished as a result of the climate crisis.
• By 2040, it is estimated that one in four children will be living in areas with extreme water shortages .
• Almost 160 million children are exposed to increasingly severe and  prolonged droughts .
• The education of around 38 million children is disrupted each year by the climate crisis.
• The climate crisis is forcing families to migrate. By 2050, there could be 143 million more migrants due to the climate crisis.

Our Work to Help Communities Adapt to the Impacts of the Climate Crisis

Because the climate crisis affects all aspects of children’s lives, so does Save the Children’s work.  

Save the Children’s work ranges from food security programs for families suffering severe drought in the Horn of Africa, to providing emergency relief supplies for those recovering from the West Coast wildfires.

From green jobs that secure livelihoods , to disease reduction, to advocacy and more, Save the Children’s experts consider the short- and long-term impacts of the climate crisis and how our programs can support the present and future of children in the U.S. and around the world.

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In 2019 Save the Children Australia became the first non-environmental NGO to be accredited by the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In 2022, the organization signed a deal with GCF and the governments of Vanuatu and Australia to deliver the Pacific region’s largest ever investment in community-based climate change adaptation in Vanuatu.

Learn More About the Impact of the Climate Crisis

Addressing the Climate Crisis

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Climate Crisis: Hunger in the Horn of Africa

For millions of children affected by the drought-driven hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa, time is running out.

Worsening Drought Threatens Somalia’s Children

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Essay Curve

Essay on Save Environment For Future Generations

Essay on Save Environment For Future Generations: In today’s rapidly changing world, the need to protect our environment for future generations has never been more urgent. The choices we make now will have a lasting impact on the health and well-being of our planet and all its inhabitants. In this essay, we will explore the importance of saving the environment for future generations, the current threats facing our planet, and practical steps we can take to ensure a sustainable future for all. Let’s work together to preserve our environment for the generations to come.

Table of Contents

Save Environment For Future Generations Essay Writing Tips

1. Start by introducing the importance of saving the environment for future generations. Explain how our actions today can have a long-lasting impact on the planet and the well-being of future generations.

2. Provide statistics and facts about the current state of the environment, such as the increasing levels of pollution, deforestation, and climate change. This will help to emphasize the urgency of taking action to protect the environment.

3. Discuss the various ways in which we can contribute to saving the environment, such as reducing our carbon footprint, conserving water and energy, recycling and reusing materials, and supporting sustainable practices.

4. Highlight the benefits of saving the environment, such as cleaner air and water, healthier ecosystems, and a more sustainable future for all living beings. Emphasize how these benefits will positively impact future generations.

5. Address the challenges and obstacles that may arise in the process of saving the environment, such as lack of awareness, resistance to change, and economic considerations. Offer solutions and strategies for overcoming these challenges.

6. Share examples of successful environmental conservation efforts and initiatives that have made a positive impact on the planet. This will inspire readers to take action and get involved in similar projects.

7. Encourage readers to take action in their own lives by making small changes that can collectively make a big difference. Provide practical tips and suggestions for how individuals can contribute to saving the environment on a daily basis.

8. Discuss the role of governments, businesses, and organizations in promoting environmental sustainability and implementing policies that protect the planet for future generations. Advocate for stronger environmental regulations and initiatives at all levels.

9. Conclude the essay by reiterating the importance of saving the environment for future generations and emphasizing the collective responsibility we all share in preserving the planet for future generations. Encourage readers to join the movement towards a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly future.

10. End with a call to action, urging readers to take immediate steps to save the environment and ensure a better world for future generations. Emphasize the power of individual actions and the impact they can have on the health and well-being of the planet.

Essay on Save Environment For Future Generations in 10 Lines – Examples

1. Conserving natural resources like water, air, and soil is crucial for the well-being of future generations. 2. Protecting biodiversity by preserving habitats and ecosystems ensures a healthy environment for our descendants. 3. Reducing pollution and waste production can help mitigate the negative impacts of human activities on the environment. 4. Promoting sustainable practices in agriculture, industry, and transportation is essential for long-term environmental health. 5. Educating people about the importance of environmental conservation can lead to positive changes in behavior. 6. Investing in renewable energy sources like solar and wind power can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 7. Implementing policies that prioritize environmental protection can create a more sustainable future for generations to come. 8. Encouraging individuals to reduce their carbon footprint through energy conservation and recycling can make a difference. 9. Supporting initiatives that aim to combat climate change and preserve natural resources is crucial for the future of our planet. 10. By working together to save the environment, we can ensure a better world for future generations to thrive in.

Sample Essay on Save Environment For Future Generations in 100-180 Words

It is crucial for us to save the environment for future generations as it directly impacts their quality of life. The environment provides us with clean air, water, and food, which are essential for our survival. However, due to human activities such as deforestation, pollution, and overconsumption, the environment is being degraded at an alarming rate.

If we do not take immediate action to protect the environment, future generations will suffer from the consequences of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and scarcity of natural resources. It is our responsibility to preserve the environment for our children and grandchildren so that they can enjoy a healthy and sustainable planet.

We can take simple steps in our daily lives to save the environment, such as reducing waste, conserving energy, and supporting sustainable practices. By making conscious choices and advocating for environmental protection, we can ensure a better future for generations to come. Let us all work together to save the environment for the well-being of our children and the planet.

Short Essay on Save Environment For Future Generations in 200-500 Words

The environment is a precious gift that we have been given, and it is our responsibility to protect it for future generations. Our actions today will have a lasting impact on the world that our children and grandchildren will inherit. It is crucial that we take steps to preserve and protect the environment so that future generations can enjoy the same beauty and resources that we have today.

One of the most pressing environmental issues facing our planet is climate change. The burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have led to an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which is causing the Earth’s temperature to rise. This has resulted in more frequent and severe weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves. If we do not take action to reduce our carbon footprint, future generations will be left to deal with the devastating consequences of a warming planet.

Another major environmental concern is the loss of biodiversity. Human activities such as habitat destruction, pollution, and overfishing have led to a decline in the number of species on Earth. This loss of biodiversity not only threatens the survival of individual species, but also disrupts the delicate balance of ecosystems. Future generations may never have the opportunity to see certain animals or plants in the wild if we do not take steps to protect and preserve their habitats.

In order to save the environment for future generations, we must make changes in our daily lives to reduce our impact on the planet. This can include using energy-efficient appliances, reducing our use of single-use plastics, and supporting sustainable agriculture practices. By making small changes in our behavior, we can collectively make a big difference in the health of the environment.

It is also important for governments and businesses to take action to protect the environment. Policies and regulations can help to limit pollution, protect natural habitats, and promote sustainable practices. Businesses can also play a role by investing in renewable energy sources, reducing waste, and implementing environmentally friendly practices in their operations.

Education is another key component in saving the environment for future generations. By teaching children and adults about the importance of protecting the environment, we can instill a sense of responsibility and stewardship for the planet. By raising awareness and promoting environmental literacy, we can empower individuals to take action to protect the environment for future generations.

In conclusion, it is essential that we take action now to save the environment for future generations. By making changes in our daily lives, supporting policies and regulations that protect the environment, and educating others about the importance of conservation, we can ensure that our children and grandchildren will inherit a healthy and thriving planet. It is up to all of us to work together to preserve the environment for future generations to enjoy.

Essay on Save Environment For Future Generations in 1000-1500 Words

The environment is a precious gift that we have been given by nature. It provides us with clean air to breathe, fresh water to drink, and fertile soil to grow our food. However, in recent years, human activities have taken a toll on the environment, leading to pollution, deforestation, and climate change. It is our responsibility to protect and preserve the environment for future generations.

One of the biggest threats to the environment is pollution. Pollution comes in many forms, including air pollution from factories and vehicles, water pollution from industrial waste and agricultural runoff, and soil pollution from pesticides and chemicals. These pollutants not only harm the environment but also pose a serious threat to human health. Air pollution, for example, can lead to respiratory problems, while water pollution can cause diseases like cholera and dysentery.

To combat pollution, we must take steps to reduce our carbon footprint and minimize our impact on the environment. This can be done by using renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power, instead of fossil fuels. We can also reduce our use of plastic and other disposable products, which contribute to pollution in our oceans and landfills. By making small changes in our daily lives, we can help protect the environment for future generations.

Deforestation is another major threat to the environment. Trees play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of ecosystems and regulating the climate. However, deforestation for agriculture, logging, and urban development has led to the loss of millions of acres of forest every year. This not only destroys habitats for wildlife but also contributes to climate change by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

To combat deforestation, we must work to protect and preserve our forests. This can be done through sustainable logging practices, reforestation efforts, and the creation of protected areas for wildlife. By preserving our forests, we can help mitigate climate change and ensure a healthy environment for future generations.

Climate change is perhaps the biggest environmental challenge we face today. The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial activities have led to a rise in global temperatures, resulting in more frequent and severe weather events, rising sea levels, and melting ice caps. These changes not only threaten the environment but also have serious implications for human health, food security, and economic stability.

To address climate change, we must take immediate action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a low-carbon economy. This can be done through investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable transportation. We must also work to protect and restore ecosystems that act as carbon sinks, such as forests and wetlands. By taking bold and decisive action on climate change, we can help ensure a livable planet for future generations.

In conclusion, it is our responsibility to protect and preserve the environment for future generations. By taking action to reduce pollution, combat deforestation, and address climate change, we can help ensure a healthy and sustainable planet for our children and grandchildren. It is up to each and every one of us to make a difference and leave a positive legacy for future generations. Let us work together to save the environment for the sake of our planet and all its inhabitants.

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Essay On Save Environment For Future Generations

In today's fast-paced world, where technological advancements and modern conveniences dominate our daily lives, it's crucial to take a step back and consider the impact of our actions on the environment. The topic of "Save Environment for Future Generations" is of paramount importance as we navigate a world confronted by environmental challenges.

The environment encompasses everything around us, from the air we breathe to the water we drink and the land we inhabit. However, rapid industrialization, deforestation, pollution, and other human activities have taken a toll on the delicate balance of our ecosystems. As a result, we are witnessing the adverse effects of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation that pose a threat to the well-being of our planet and, subsequently, to future generations.

Saving the environment is not just a responsibility but a necessity. Our actions today determine the quality of life our children and grandchildren will have tomorrow. The importance of preserving natural resources, reducing carbon footprints, and adopting sustainable practices cannot be overstated. It's a collective effort that requires individuals, communities, and nations to work together for a common cause — the well-being of our planet.

This essay will delve into various aspects of environmental conservation, exploring the significance of recycling, renewable energy, afforestation, and responsible waste management. Additionally, it will discuss the role of education and awareness in fostering a sense of environmental stewardship among individuals. By understanding the importance of saving the environment, we can make informed choices and contribute to building a sustainable future for generations to come.

In essence, the essay "Save Environment for Future Generations" aims to shed light on the urgent need for environmental conservation and inspire individuals to take positive actions that will safeguard the planet for the well-being of our children, grandchildren, and the many generations that will follow.

Why is the Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations Important For Your Exams? 

The essay "Save Environment for Future Generations" is crucial for exams because it addresses a vital issue that affects everyone, everywhere. In exams, you are often asked to express your thoughts, ideas, and understanding of important topics, and the environment is one of the most significant subjects today.

Firstly, saving the environment is not just about trees and animals; it's about our well-being. The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat all come from the environment. If we harm it, we are ultimately harming ourselves. Exams often evaluate your ability to grasp such interconnected concepts and present them coherently.

Secondly, understanding the importance of environmental conservation demonstrates your awareness of global challenges. Exams don't just test your knowledge of textbooks; they assess your ability to apply that knowledge to real-world issues. The essay allows you to showcase your comprehension of the broader implications of environmental degradation on a global scale.

Moreover, exams often assess your critical thinking skills, and the essay topic encourages you to think about the future. By examining the impact of our actions on future generations, you demonstrate the ability to analyze consequences and consider long-term effects — a skill highly valued in academic settings.

Furthermore, the essay touches on subjects like sustainability and responsible citizenship, which are relevant in various academic disciplines. Whether you're studying science, social sciences, or humanities, the essay provides an opportunity to explore how different fields intersect and contribute to a common goal of a healthier, more sustainable planet.

In essence, the essay on saving the environment is important for exams because it goes beyond rote memorization. It requires you to think critically, connect concepts, and express your ideas coherently, all while addressing a topic of global significance that impacts the well-being of present and future generations. This makes it a valuable exercise in academic and real-world relevance.

Long and Short Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations

Essay on save environment for future generations 1 (100 words) .

Our planet's environment is vital for our well-being, and safeguarding it is crucial for the generations to come. To achieve this, we can cut back on non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, diminish waste, and dispose of trash responsibly to curb pollution. Planting trees and backing conservation initiatives further contribute to environmental protection. We must nurture the environment, ensuring its sustainability for the future. Simple adjustments in our daily routines can have a significant impact on preserving the planet for our successors. Let's embrace this responsibility and make a positive change for a healthier Earth for the generations that follow.

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations 2 (150 words)

Regrettably, humans haven't been the best caretakers of our planet. To safeguard the Earth for our children and future generations, we must collectively adopt cleaner living habits. The primary source of environmental harm is our consumption habits—what, how much, and how often we consume.

From gas and food to clothing and electronics, our role as consumers is significant. The key is not to stop consuming but to be mindful of how our choices impact the ecosystem. Luckily, becoming environmentally friendly doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. Simple changes in our daily lives, even if seemingly small, can collectively make a substantial difference.

Reducing consumption is a powerful environmental strategy. While the three "R's" (reduce, reuse, and recycle) are well-known, there's a crucial and often overlooked "R": refuse. Additionally, the "rot" (composting) is an essential yet less emphasized aspect of waste management.

Disposable items, especially single-use plastics, contribute significantly to environmental degradation. The impact on soil, oceans, and marine life is devastating. Considering the life cycle of products and opting for local, package-free alternatives can significantly reduce our environmental footprint.

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations 3 (200 words)

The environment, comprising the natural world affected by human activity, encompasses vital elements like soil, air, water, and a diverse array of animals. Human progress, marked by urbanization and industrialization, brought forth concrete structures and roads, fostering advancements in medicine, industry, and sociology.

Despite this progress, our reliance on the environment persists for essentials like food, water, and fuel. The environment significantly influences the survival and development of living organisms, including us. It's a delicate balance that we must maintain.

Natural resources, essential for our well-being, fall into two categories: renewable and non-renewable. Water, forests, and crops are renewable resources that can be naturally replenished. However, non-renewable resources like oil and minerals are finite and deplete rapidly, especially due to population growth and excessive consumerism among the affluent.

This rapid depletion has led to the extinction of various species and the disruption of ecosystems. It's high time we reconsider our approach, recognizing the urgency to conserve and use natural resources wisely. Population growth and consumer habits play significant roles in the depletion of these resources, emphasizing the need for sustainable practices to ensure a healthier and balanced environment for present and future generations. It's a collective responsibility to halt the wastage of natural resources and promote their mindful utilization.

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations 4 (250 words) 

In our modern era, the pressing concern for humanity is the need to save the environment and transform our Earth into a cleaner, greener planet. Over time, human activities have inflicted significant damage on our surroundings, subjecting them to pollution, resource exploitation, and various other harmful impacts. Now, it becomes our responsibility to implement crucial measures to preserve the environment for the well-being of future generations.

Industrialization has emerged as a major contributor to pollution, depleting non-renewable resources like coal, minerals, and oils in the pursuit of fuel. To address this, a shift towards eco-friendly energy sources such as solar power, hydropower, and wind energy is imperative. Public awareness campaigns, featuring 'save environment' posters and stickers, along with discussions on news channels, contribute to spreading awareness about the urgency of environmental conservation.

In schools, students often engage with the topic of 'saving the environment' through essays and drawings, fostering an understanding of global warming and its perilous consequences. Remarkably, even small individual actions can collectively contribute to the global 'save environment' goal. Simple steps like reducing plastic usage, conserving electricity, embracing solar power, and planting more trees can be undertaken by every person, including children. These actions not only contribute to environmental preservation but also enhance the quality of life for both animal and plant species, preventing their extinction. It's a collective effort, and each person, regardless of age, has a role to play in ensuring a sustainable and thriving future for our planet.

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations 5 (300 words)

In our ever-changing modern world, the urgent matter at hand is to cease exploiting the environment and work together to save it before it's too late. The responsibility falls not just on individuals but also on the government to ensure a clean and green planet. Human activities have taken a toll on the environment, resulting in issues like pollution, global warming, and ozone depletion. Recognizing the impending catastrophe, it becomes crucial to take remedial actions to prevent further harm and create a healthy and safe space for future generations.

Contrary to the belief that it's too late, there's still time to protect the environment and secure the future for upcoming generations. The key lies in initiating timely and effective actions. The first step involves embracing sustainable living, an approach that entails using present resources without exploiting them and ensuring their preservation for the future. This includes responsibly using natural and non-renewable resources to avoid depletion.

Afforestation emerges as another essential measure to save the environment. Protecting existing trees and planting more contributes significantly to preserving our surroundings. Additionally, reducing activities that contribute to pollution is crucial. Initiatives like the odd-even program in New Delhi, banning firecrackers and loud music after 10 pm, and promoting carpooling play vital roles in curbing pollution levels.

Individual contributions matter greatly in creating a healthy living environment. Every person can make a difference by adopting sustainable practices and consistently devising new remedial measures. To live and thrive in a healthy place, a collective effort is required. By committing to save the environment, we can collectively create a beautiful and sustainable world for current and future generations.

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations 5 (400 words)

Introduction:

The environment is like the Earth's life support system, and it's our responsibility to safeguard it for the well-being of future generations. Taking action to protect the environment is not just a choice; it's a necessity to ensure its sustainability.

Steps to be taken to save the environment

Saving the environment involves various steps that individuals and communities can take. One vital approach is to reduce our reliance on non-renewable resources, like fossil fuels. Simple changes, such as using energy-efficient appliances or opting for public transportation, walking, or biking instead of driving, not only cut down our carbon footprint but also save money on energy.

Proper waste management is another crucial aspect of environmental protection. Recycling, composting, and responsible disposal of hazardous materials can prevent pollution and preserve natural habitats. By minimizing the waste we generate, we contribute to conserving resources and maintaining environmental health.

Planting trees and supporting conservation initiatives play a key role in protecting the environment. Trees act as nature's air purifiers, absorbing carbon dioxide and providing habitat for wildlife. They also help prevent soil erosion. Contributing to conservation organizations and participating in tree-planting efforts contribute to preserving the natural world for generations to come.

Advocacy at a larger scale is equally essential. Supporting policies and organizations dedicated to environmental protection, like the creation of national parks or initiatives to clean up pollution, can make a substantial impact. By actively endorsing such endeavors, we contribute to the broader goal of environmental preservation.

Education is a powerful tool in environmental conservation. Increasing awareness about environmental issues and their consequences inspires others to join the cause. Learning about these issues, participating in events, and sharing information fosters a collective understanding of the importance of environmental protection.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, safeguarding the environment is an urgent and shared responsibility. Through small adjustments in our daily activities, from reducing reliance on non-renewable resources to supporting conservation efforts, we can collectively make a significant impact. Advocating for policies, supporting organizations, and spreading awareness further amplify our ability to protect the environment. It's not just about today; it's about ensuring a sustainable and healthy planet for the generations that follow.

Essay on Save Environment for Future Generations 6 (500 words) 

The environment, our natural home, encompasses the air, water, soil, animals, and human beings that sustain life. However, our collective actions have led to a blind spot, a disregard for the intricate dependence we have on our surroundings. The pursuit of progress has often resulted in mindless industrialization and urbanization, unwittingly causing harm to the very environment that sustains us. Understanding and actively saving our environment is crucial for our well-being and the well-being of future generations.

Reasons for Environmental Degradation:

Urbanization:

The foremost reason for environmental degradation is urbanization. In our quest for sophistication, we cut down trees, lay roads, and construct buildings without considering the consequences. This process not only destroys natural habitats but also isolates us within artificial structures called cities.

Consumerism:

The advent of the Industrial Revolution accelerated manufacturing processes, giving rise to mass production and consumerism. The culture of 'Use and Throw' products emerged, leading to the rapid depletion of resources as we became a society driven by consumption.

Almost every natural resource is now polluted. Industries release harmful gases into the air, contributing to air pollution. Automobiles emit smoke that further degrades air quality. Burning plastics has led to the depletion of the ozone layer. Industries discharge chemicals and oils into rivers, polluting water bodies. Common household products like bath soaps and detergents, along with excessive use of chemical fertilizers, contribute to soil pollution.

How to Save the Environment:

Saving the environment rests in the hands of each individual. Simple lifestyle changes can make a significant impact:

Recycling materials is a key step in saving the environment. Metal scraps can be recycled to produce new items. Plastic recycling and the repurposing of paper and cardboard reduce the strain on natural resources.

Reducing the use of materials like paper, wood, and fossil fuels is crucial. Carpooling, cycling, and adopting energy-efficient technologies help minimize the consumption of non-renewable resources.

The reuse of products is an effective strategy. Plastic covers, containers, and tires can be repurposed to minimize production and waste. Every product has the potential for reuse with a thoughtful approach.

Planting Trees:

Planting more trees contributes to a greener environment. Embracing traditional agricultural practices is also a step towards sustainable living.

Saving the environment is synonymous with saving ourselves. This realization must penetrate our hearts, motivating responsible actions. Every small change in our daily lives, from recycling to reducing, reusing, and planting trees, contributes to the collective effort to preserve our environment. It is a responsibility we owe to ourselves and the generations that will follow, ensuring a sustainable and thriving future for all.

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IELTS Essay: The Next Generation

by Dave | Real Past Tests | 3 Comments

This is an IELTS writing task 2 sample answer essay on the topic of whether or not the current generation should protect the environment for the next generation.

For all my exclusive IELTS PDFs, learn more about my Patreon here .

Some think the current generation should take steps to protect the environment for the next generation.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Many environmentalists feel that people today have a responsibility to ensure the Earth is left in good condition for future generations. In my opinion, though this duty is unfair, it is nonetheless a burden that must be taken up.

Those who argue against this sentiment can justly assign blame elsewhere. The main contributors to climate change and the current cataclysmic warnings were the large industrial powers on the 20th century. Automobiles and air travel became common in the last 100 years and are two leading drivers of the fossil fuel consumption many scientists link to global warming. Surging populations and advances in medicine have also contributed greatly to the over-production and mass consumption that defines the 21st century. It is objectively unfair that people today, and primarily the younger generation only now entering the workforce, should have to suffer for the thoughtlessness of wanton industrialisation.

Regardless, it is the responsibility of the present generation to take heed of these potentially dire warnings. People in the past were either intentionally or unintentionally unaware of the repercussions of their actions but individuals today cannot make such excuses. For example, the rapidly deteriorating polar ice caps are directly impacting the natural habitats of animals around the world and some climate scientists believe that an uptick in natural disasters is also related to this and other man-made changes to the ecosystem. Past generations who set the world on this path cannot come back and remedy their mistakes and future generations will resent the current one if steps are not taken towards drastic reforms.

In conclusion, though people today bear little responsibility for climate change, they must commit to reversing its effects. Leaving this problem for the children of the future will put them in a potentially unwinnable situation.

1. Many environmentalists feel that people today have a responsibility to ensure the Earth is left in good condition for future generations. 2. In my opinion, though this duty is unfair, it is nonetheless a burden that must be taken up.

• Paraphrase the overall essay topic.
• Write a clear opinion. Read more about writing a band 7+ introduction here .

1. Those who argue against this sentiment can justly assign blame elsewhere. 2. The main contributors to climate change and the current cataclysmic warnings were the large industrial powers on the 20th century. 3. Automobiles and air travel became common in the last 100 years and are two leading drivers of the fossil fuel consumption many scientists link to global warming. 4. Surging populations and advances in medicine have also contributed greatly to the over-production and mass consumption that defines the 21st century. 5. It is objectively unfair that people today, and primarily the younger generation only now entering the workforce, should have to suffer for the thoughtlessness of wanton industrialisation.

• Write a topic sentence with a clear main idea at the end.
• Explain your main idea.
• Develop it with specific examples.
• Add in more specifics.
• Conclude by relating it back to your main idea.

1. Regardless, it is the responsibility of the present generation to take heed of these potentially dire warnings. 2. People in the past were either intentionally or unintentionally unaware of the repercussions of their actions but individuals today cannot make such excuses. 3. For example, the rapidly deteriorating polar ice caps are directly impacting the natural habitats of animals around the world and some climate scientists believe that an uptick in natural disasters is also related to this and other man-made changes to the ecosystem. 4. Past generations who set the world on this path cannot come back and remedy their mistakes and future generations will resent the current one if steps are not taken towards drastic reforms.

• Write another topic sentence with a clear main idea at the end.
• Develop your main idea.
• Use real examples.
• If your sentences are long, it is ok to have just 4 in one paragraph.

1. In conclusion, though people today bear little responsibility for climate change, they must commit to reversing its effects. 2. Leaving this problem for the children of the future will put them in a potentially unwinnable situation.

• Repeat your opinion and summarise both your main ideas.
• Add a final thought. Read more about conclusions here .

What do the words in bold below mean?

Many environmentalists feel that people today have a responsibility to ensure the Earth is left in good condition for future generations . In my opinion, though this duty is unfair , it is nonetheless a burden that must be taken up .

Those who argue against this sentiment can justly assign blame elsewhere . The main contributors to climate change and the current cataclysmic warnings were the large industrial powers on the 20th century . Automobiles and air travel became common in the last 100 years and are two leading drivers of the fossil fuel consumption many scientists link to global warming. Surging populations and advances in medicine have also contributed greatly to the over-production and mass consumption that defines the 21st century. It is objectively unfair that people today, and primarily the younger generation only now entering the workforce , should have to suffer for the thoughtlessness of wanton industrialisation .

Regardless , it is the responsibility of the present generation to take heed of these potentially dire warnings . People in the past were either intentionally or unintentionally unaware of the repercussions of their actions but individuals today cannot make such excuses . For example, the rapidly deteriorating polar ice caps are directly impacting the natural habitats of animals around the world and some climate scientists believe that an uptick in natural disasters is also related to this and other man-made changes to the ecosystem . Past generations who set the world on this path cannot come back and remedy their mistakes and future generations will resent the current one if steps are not taken towards drastic reforms .

In conclusion, though people today bear little responsibility for climate change, they must commit to reversing its effects . Leaving this problem for the children of the future will put them in a potentially unwinnable situation .

environmentalists people who care about the environment

responsibility duty

ensure make sure

left in good condition remain in good quality

future generations people who come later

duty responsibility

unfair unjust

nonetheless regardless

burden duty

taken up take responsibility for

argue against object to

sentiment feeling

justly assign blame elsewhere correctly find fault with others

main contributors biggest causes

climate change global warming

current cataclysmic warnings dire predictions about the future

large industrial powers big companies, nations

20th century 1900 – 2000

two leading drivers main forces behind

fossil fuel consumption burning oil

link connections

surging populations increasing number of people

advances in medicine new medical procedures and technology

contributed greatly add a lot to

over-production making too much

mass consumption using too much

defines constitutes

objectively unfair definitely not right

primarily mainly

entering the workforce getting jobs

suffer hurt from

thoughtlessness not thinking about

wanton industrialisation thoughtless expansion of industry

regardless nonetheless

present generation people alive today

take heed consider

potentially dire warnings possible really bad predictions

intentionally meaning to do it

unintentionally unaware not knowing what they were doing

repercussions effects

excuses reasons

rapidly deteriorating polar ice caps icebergs melting quickly

directly impacting having a clear effect on

natural habitats where animals live

uptick increase

natural disasters hurricans, earthquakes, fires, etc.

man-made cause by humans

ecosystem habit

set the world on this path main cause

remedy their mistakes fix what they did

resent be angry about

current one right now

steps are not taken no measures enacted

drastic reforms sweeping changes

bear little responsibility not their duty

commit be serious about

reversing its effects fixing

leaving this problem ignoring the issue

children of the future future generations

potentially unwinnable situation possibly no solution to it

Pronunciation

ɪnˌvaɪərənˈmɛntəlɪsts   rɪsˌpɒnsəˈbɪlɪti   ɪnˈʃʊə   lɛft ɪn gʊd kənˈdɪʃən   ˈfjuːʧə ˌʤɛnəˈreɪʃənz ˈdjuːti   ʌnˈfeə ˌnʌnðəˈlɛs   ˈbɜːdn   ˈteɪkən ʌp ˈɑːgjuː əˈgɛnst   ˈsɛntɪmənt   ˈʤʌstli əˈsaɪn bleɪm ˈɛlsˈweə meɪn kənˈtrɪbjʊtəz   ˈklaɪmɪt ʧeɪnʤ   ˈkʌrənt ˌkætəˈklɪzmɪk ˈwɔːnɪŋz   lɑːʤ ɪnˈdʌstrɪəl ˈpaʊəz   ˈtwɛntɪəθ ˈsɛnʧʊri tuː ˈliːdɪŋ ˈdraɪvəz   ˈfɒsl fjʊəl kənˈsʌm(p)ʃən   lɪŋk   ˈsɜːʤɪŋ ˌpɒpjʊˈleɪʃənz   ədˈvɑːnsɪz ɪn ˈmɛdsɪn   kənˈtrɪbju(ː)tɪd ˈgreɪtli   ˌəʊvəprəˈdʌkʃən   mæs kənˈsʌm(p)ʃən   dɪˈfaɪnz   əbˈʤɛktɪvli ʌnˈfeə   ˈpraɪmərɪli   ˈɛntərɪŋ ðə ˈwɜːkˌfɔːs ˈsʌfə   ˈθɔːtlɪsnəs   ˈwɒntən ɪnˌdʌstrɪəlaɪˈzeɪʃən rɪˈgɑːdlɪs ˈprɛznt ˌʤɛnəˈreɪʃən   teɪk hiːd   pəʊˈtɛnʃəli ˈdaɪə ˈwɔːnɪŋz ɪnˈtɛnʃənli   ˌʌnɪnˈtɛnʃənli ˌʌnəˈweə   ˌriːpɜːˈkʌʃənz   ɪksˈkjuːsɪz ˈræpɪdli dɪˈtɪərɪəreɪtɪŋ ˈpəʊlər aɪs ˈkæps   dɪˈrɛktli ɪmˈpæktɪŋ   ˈnæʧrəl ˈhæbɪtæts   ʌp tɪk   ˈnæʧrəl dɪˈzɑːstəz   ˈmænˈmeɪd   ˈiːkəʊˌsɪstəm sɛt ðə wɜːld ɒn ðɪs pɑːθ   ˈrɛmɪdi ðeə mɪsˈteɪks   rɪˈzɛnt   ˈkʌrənt wʌn   stɛps ɑː nɒt ˈteɪkən   ˈdræstɪk ˌriːˈfɔːmz beə ˈlɪtl rɪsˌpɒnsəˈbɪlɪti   kəˈmɪt   rɪˈvɜːsɪŋ ɪts ɪˈfɛkts ˈliːvɪŋ ðɪs ˈprɒbləm   ˈʧɪldrən ɒv ðə ˈfjuːʧə   pəʊˈtɛnʃəli ˌʌnˈwɪnəbl ˌsɪtjʊˈeɪʃən

Vocabulary Practice

Remember and fill in the blanks:

Many e________________________s feel that people today have a r________________y to e__________e the Earth is l_____________________n for f______________________s . In my opinion, though this d________y is u________r , it is n______________s a b__________n that must be t___________p .

Those who a_____________t this s______________t can j_______________________e . The m_____________________s to c__________________e and the c_________________________s were the l________________________s on the 2______________________y . Automobiles and air travel became common in the last 100 years and are t_____________________s of the f________________________n many scientists l______k to global warming. S________________________s and a_____________________e have also c_____________________y to the o______________________n and m_______________________n that d___________s the 21st century. It is o____________________r that people today, and p________________y the younger generation only now e_______________________e , should have to s___________r for the t________________s of w______________________n .

R_______________s , it is the responsibility of the p_________________n to t______________d of these p__________________________s . People in the past were either i___________________y or u____________________e of the r__________________s of their actions but individuals today cannot make such e_____________s . For example, the r_________________________________s are d___________________g the n_____________________s of animals around the world and some climate scientists believe that an u___________k in n______________________s is also related to this and other m______________e changes to the e__________________m . Past generations who s_________________________h cannot come back and r_________________________s and future generations will r_____________t the c_______________e if s__________________________n towards d___________________s .

In conclusion, though people today b_______________________y for climate change, they must c______________t to r_______________________s . L________________________m for the c_______________________e will put them in a p______________________________n .

Listening Practice

Keep your studies interesting by watching videos related to the topics:

Reading Practice

Read more about this topic below in The New York Times climate section:

https://www.nytimes.com/section/climate

Speaking Practice

Practice with the following questions from the real IELTS speaking exam :

Talk about a person you know who is doing something to help the environment.

Writing Practice

Practice with the following related question from the exam then check with my sample answer:

The manufacturing and use of cars damages the environment but their popularity is increasing.

Why is this?

How could this be controlled?

IELTS Essay: Cars Damaging the Environment

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Hi dear Dave, Could you please give me a brief evaluation for my sample essay:

Environmental issues have always been a world-wide topic of concern. Remedial measures should be taken in this regard to conserve the nature and to make a better living prospect for the international community.

Such is the current pace of the exploitation of our natural surroundings, that it is likely to be more overwhelmingly exacerbated by the next decades. This ever-rising destruction mostly flows from the fast-paced development of technology and thus industries, which may well result in disastrous consequences, risking the human life. That is to say, not only might this lead to the future world being an uninhabitable place, but it may well also bring the whole human generation to the verge of extinction, showing that the prompt remedies are highly needed, without being delayed for even a second.

In addition to the above-mentioned necessity, it seems that maintaining the present situation of the ecosystem could be achieved by a reasonable amount of investment fund while reverting the spoiled condition to its initial state would be a costly and also arduous, if not far-fetched, task. The problematic matter of removing the pollution from the marine areas, to which a great deal of time and budget is required to be devoted, could be the very epitome of this setback. This, thus, proves the fact that the relevant, ongoing strides should be made, not making the issue so complicated in the future.

To conclude, it is better to take major steps towards the protection of the environment at the current time, not procrastinating it and risking the future of the earth, and not excessively putting money and effort into rehabilitation of the human-induced exploitations.

Sure, Nariman.

For a more detailed evaluation you can sign up here: Course.HowtodoIELTS.com/Band-Scores-Corrections

Briefly, careful with a lot of your collocations which are incorrect and make it hard to read sometimes. Also, try to write some short and simple sentences to break up the flow and gave greater grammatical accuracy.

Hope that helps!

Hey Dave , my name is Clerin. I am from India can you please tell me  why many students like me are stuck at band 6.5 in writing ….and i need a 7 to crack ielts . What should i do i only have a limited amount of time?

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The Great Wealth Transfer is set to be a $90 trillion disappointment—especially for millennials

It turns out that all young adults might be inheriting nothing more than their parents’ tendency to fall asleep while watching TV or walk five feet ahead of their children on a family vacation. Quirks are easy, but getting money passed down seems to be a different and much trickier story.

Murmurs of a “Great Wealth Transfer” have been around for some time now, as many Americans anticipate an inheritance from their older relatives. The silent generation and baby boomers account for a greater share of the nation’s wealth than their younger counterparts, leaving the more financially insecure generations waiting for a $90 trillion windfall. 

That much money changing hands could create an unprecedented change in household wealth and the nation as a whole. But like many dreams, not everything is as it seems . For one, younger adults might be expecting a bigger check than boomers can cash. The Great Wealth Transfer might be more of a ripple than a wave, finds Northwestern Mutual in ITS Harris Poll survey of more than 4,500 U.S. adults.

The insurance company found a “considerable gap” between what Gen Z and millennials think is coming, and what their relatives actually report is in store. While 32% of millennials and 38% of Gen Zers expect an inheritance, only 22% of Gen Xers and boomers report planning on giving one. 

Part of what’s happening is that people have a greater life expectancy, chipping away at their nest egg and, at times, outliving it. “The elder generation is living longer. By the time they are bequeathing assets at their death, they are in their eighties, nineties, or beyond. At that point, their children could be well into their own retirement season of life,” Justin Neal, CEO, partner and private wealth advisor at Sozo Private Wealth & Insurance Services, Northwestern Mutual, told Fortune . 

At that point, the “subsequent generation may be in reasonably stable financial situations and at an age where the inheritance will have less substantial impact than following generations who are still wrestling with education costs, down payments on homes, and career instability,” he added.

But as it stands, many are banking on an inheritance to dig them out of dire straits or set them up for financial comfort down the road. Half of respondents, across all generations, regard their potential windfall as “highly critical” or “critical” to their “long-term financial security.” 

The ever-shifting predictions about the Great Wealth Transfer are not just a story of older generations living longer, it’s also about rich people accounting for their money in different ways. Now it’s not just about passing finances on after one passes. “Many families want to use their wealth and influence to improve the life experiences of their children prior to passing away,” said Neal.

It’s a tax issue too. “Many families of means have children who are also fairly wealthy, either due to personal efforts or gifts received during their lifetimes,” explained Neal, going on to say that he coaches these wealth creators to not increase the tax burden by “point[ing] their wealth to heirs who already have strong balance sheets.”  

Funnily enough, younger generations are really looking to set their children (or potential kids) up with a gift. Of those expecting to leave an inheritance, 81% of millennials and 75% of Gen Zers say leaving something behind is their “single most important” or “very important” financial aspiration. That’s compared to 65% of Gen Xers and 46% of boomers. 

Millennials have high hopes , for a minute

Millennials might be the most disappointed by the foot dropping on the Great Wealth Transfer. That’s because they’re especially dependent on the gift, at 59% saying the inheritance is “highly critical” and “critical” to their security. And Gen Z expects it to impact their retirement the most. This generation expects the gift would cover the largest bulk of their retirement funds, at 10%.

A separate report of proprietary data from more than 52,500 people by estate-planning company Trust & Will found a third of millennials don’t know if their parents have estate plans in place. And 13% reportedly are aware their parents don’t have a trust or will. The generation known for its lack of luck had a long and recession-marred road to building wealth, and are still finding certain milestones like owning a house to be a larger hurdle than expected.

Of course, if the Great Wealth Transfer does end up being as monumental as some reports say, then some privileged millennials stand to have a drastic Cinderella story in store. The wealth transfer is poised to make millennials “the richest generation in history,” according to Knight Frank’s 2024 Wealth Report . But taking into account changing life expectancies and other life factors, that dream might not fully be realized.

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Discernment of latchkey generation towards mobile commerce services – A Garrett ranking analysis

• Jayanthi, M.
• Shobhana, N.
• Alamelu, R.

The exchange of products and services using wireless handheld devices like cellular phones and personal digital assistants is known as "m-commerce," or "mobile commerce. M-commerce, often referred to as next-generation e-commerce, allows consumers to access the Internet without having to locate a location to plug in. the main aim of the study is to analyse the generation X or latchkey generation's (born between 1965-1980) perceptions towards Mobile Commerce and to suggest suitable recommendations to M-commerce service providers to enhance the usage among them. A primary survey was carried out by distributing a questionnaire to 250 participants using a simple random sampling method. A 94% response rate from 235 respondents was received to compile the primary data. The gathered data were examined using statistical tools such as percentage analysis, Garrett ranking and ANOVA single factor. Garrett ranking technique reveals that security control was given the first rank in the factors that make users hesitant on using M-commerce services followed by safety of the user as the second rank, limited knowledge about the technology as the third rank and not getting technical support when needed as the fourth rank. The results of ANOVA show that the customers can utilise the service with ease, and they are not enough confident in using M-commerce services. They are unaware of the perceived costs and risks associated with using the service. It is found that middle-aged and older adults are attempting to familiarise themselves with M-Commerce in the future because it is projected that M-Commerce will become the forthcoming main phase in the growth of technology.

• GENERAL PHYSICS