State of the World 2009: About This Book

It is New Year’s Day, 2101. Somehow, humanity survived the worst of global warming—the higher temperatures and sea levels and the more intense droughts and storms—and succeeded in stabilizing Earth’s climate. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations peaked a few decades ago and are expected to continue their downward drift throughout the twenty-second century. Global temperatures are slowly returning to their pre-warming levels. The natural world is gradually healing. The social contract largely held. And humanity as a whole is better fed, healthier, and more prosperous today than it was a century ago. What did humanity do in the twenty-first century—and especially in 2009 and the years immediately following—to snatch a threatened world from the jaws of climate change catastrophe?

This is the scenario for success that the State of the World 2009 Project Directors challenged each of the book’s authors to address. The goal was to go beyond the short-term thinking about climate change that prevails today and to explore more deeply its implications for humanity and the planet. To do that, this edition departs in important ways from the 25-year tradition of Worldwatch Institute’s annual book, gathering more than 40 authors—far more than in any previous edition. The talent represented in these pages is rich and diverse. More than a dozen authors are natives of or have firm roots in the developing countries so important to the book’s theme: how to keep climate change at manageable levels and how to adapt to what is coming our way no matter how successful we are in reducing future emissions of greenhouse gases.

The first chapter in State of the World 2009 presents the climate dilemma; the second, the emissions path needed to glide toward a safe landing. The third and fourth describe the needed transitions toward carbon-absorbing forestry and food production and toward a low-carbon and eventually a no-carbon energy future. The fifth lays out the importance of building resilience to climate change. The sixth proposes components of the agreement that nations must reach to begin stabilizing the climate, even while adapting to a warming world. And in another first for State of the World, the middle of the book features a large selection of short pieces called Climate Connections. These take on 22 critical topics on the theme of preventing and addressing climate change. The book ends with a Climate Change Reference Guide and Glossary that aims to be a useful primer for following the developments on climate change that will unfold this year.

State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World provides hope amidst the grim certainty that we are living in the early years of a vast unplanned change in the planet’s climate. All the authors in this book agree that it is anything but too late to save the climate for an enduring human civilization. Yet the subtitle was chosen carefully and after much discussion: We are entering a warming world. Human alterations of the atmosphere and climate will without doubt outlive the readers of this book. But we are privileged to live in a brief window of time when human beings can act decisively to stop the warming before its impacts become impossible to reverse or to tolerate. How we handle the challenge ahead will make for history on an epic time scale.

For more information, visit our State of the World 2009 resources page.