Worldwide Trends Today

From a changing climate to rising disapproval of our justice system to a world where suffering of all kinds is the norm, the world is changing. Not that our world hasn’t always been full of suffering, but currently, the world seems to be changing faster than ever before.

According to the World Economic Forum, the top trends of 2015 included rising pollution in developing countries, rising geostrategic competition, increasing occurrence of severe weather events, and growing discontent with the social and political climate the world is in.

Warming Climate

2015 was the warmest year on record since record keeping began in 1880, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

With the recent climate conference in France, officially called “COP21,” climate change has again been brought to the forefront of an international debate.

Along with a changing climate, the oceans are nearing a biological collapse. To reduce trash in the oceans, surfer Pete Ceglinski invented the “Seabin,” which can remove floating debris, oil, fuel and detergents from the water, even in hard-to-reach places. The Seabin is designed to be installed on a floating dock – whether in a marina, an inland waterway, a residential lake, a harbor, a port, a yacht club, or on a private pontoon – and is plumbed into a shore-based water pump. This technological advance will clean up trash near populated coastal areas without harming sea life.

Police Violence

Our environment isn’t the only thing heating up: The tempers of people all across the country are heating up in the wake of many stories of police violence.

According to The Washington Post, 987 people were killed by police in 2015 in the United States. Many raise the question of whether or not police violence is really becoming a larger issue, or if it’s simply being reported more.

Also according to The Washington Post, which has amassed a database of police killings around the country, 258 of the 987 killed showed clear signs of mental illness. Ninety-five were unarmed.

Clearly, the most highly reported police killings are those of unarmed minorities. However, The Washington Post’s data show that police shot almost 350 more white people. It is crucial to note that no one knows exactly how many people police kill every year.

“The FBI’s justifiable homicides and the estimates from [arrest-related deaths] both have significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability that are primarily due to agency participation and measurement issues,” according to Michael Planty of the U.S. Justice Department. This means that information provided to the FBI and Justice Department by police departments is oftentimes flawed or incomplete due to errors or omissions made at the local level.

Trends in data dating back to the early 2000’s seem to show that the number of reported police shootings is growing steadily, peaking in 2015.

“People are no longer afraid of speaking their minds and their opinions, but they still can’t handle to hear the truth,” says an anonymous student at Santa Fe High.

Top Socio-Political Trends

The vast majority of people seem to be unhappy with the way the world is led and how the people are being controlled. The World Economic Forum ranked “Intensifying nationalism” as the eighth largest trend in 2015, carrying well into 2016. The “lack of leadership” came in third and the “weakening of a representative democracy” came in fifth.

A survey on global agendas by the World Economic Forum showed that 86 percent of people were discontented with the lack of leadership the world is facing today. Analysts say this is likely due to the lack of attention that major world crises have received by the international community in recent years, such as the fact that a class 5 cyclone devastated Vanuatu and 90% of the buildings in the nations capital which no one seemed to care about.

“I think the world is changing in a negative way because people are fighting whether it’s over religion or politics and people aren’t willing to compromise and attempt to do good things,” says Kayla Vigil, senior at SFHS.

Similarly, the question of whether or not a representative democracy is a functioning idea has been raised many times. With the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global study that measures trust in various institutions, trust in business has risen to 58 percent while trust in government has sunk to 44 percent. The World Economic Forum attributes this decline of faith in government to a new generation of youth who are just now beginning to get involved in politics and economics.

According to the Pew Research Center, 64 percent of those born in 1997 believe the government is “inefficient and wasteful,” while only 48 percent think the government overall is run “for the good of the people.”

According to the World Economic Forum, people believe that countries in general, especially European countries such as Scotland, are becoming more and more nationalistic, meaning that countries are becoming more and more isolated and not willing to interact, trade or compromise with other nations because of a sense of insecurity and the idea that “we are best.” Of all the continents, according to Survey on the Global Agenda, Europe will be most affected by growing nationalism while North America came in second to last with only 7 percent of the votes—probably because most Americans are pretty patriotic as it is.

“The world is changing in a negative way because more problems among people and nations are more relevant such as terrorism and war,” says Michael Gonzales, senior at SFHS.

In terms of geopolitical strategy, many startling facts point to a rapidly changing world economy. People are now thinking that China will replace the United States by 2050 as the world’s leading economy.

However, a top University of California Santa Barbara economics analyst, Benjamin Cohen, contrasted that assumption by saying, “In many cases, Chinese power is much more limited than people had anticipated.”

What does all of this information mean?

The world changed a lot in 2015. As many of these trends are projected to continue and intensify well beyond 2016, what lies ahead may be vastly different from our world today.

When asked, “What do you think all the change happening in the world means?” an anonymous SFHS student had this to say: “I think change is good. With change comes the most triumph. I think it’s really important for young people like us to get involved and encourage the older generation to stand up and use our voices. Change is inevitable, and so we should all be ready for it when it comes.”

All in all, the world is changing. Many people think of the future as a bleak and dismal post-apocalyptic world, and while many of those visions may come true, we all have the power to change the direction we’re heading.