Transnational challenges: tests of resilience and international cooperation COVID-19 will not be the only global crisis of the 2020s. The world faces transnational challenges which overlap, reinforce each other and require a global response. This will include, for example: climate change and biodiversity loss driving poverty, instability and migration; states continuing to use organised crime groups as proxies in systemic competition; and technology both facilitating and helping to detect terrorism, SOC and illicit finance. Climate change. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry increased from five billion tonnes to more than 36 billion between 1950 and 2019. Significant action to decarbonise the global economy is needed by 2030 to prevent climate change from accelerating rapidly and possibly irreversibly: under current policies the world is heading for around 3.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century, with real risks of even higher warming. Economic recovery from COVID-19 offers a chance to accelerate the transition to net zero. At the same time, the impact of existing climate change will cause increasing damage: more frequent and intense events such as extreme heat, storms and rain, leading to increased flooding, landslides and other impacts such as wildfires. This can amplify displacement and migration – increasing food and water insecurity – and damage ecosystems. The effects will be felt most acutely in sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia and the Middle East, with a disproportionate impact on areas that are already fragile and on the people who live in them. Biodiversity loss. Global biodiversity is already in unprecedented decline: 75% of the world’s land surface and 66% of the ocean has been significantly altered and degraded by human activity and an estimated one million species are threatened with extinction. To 2030, unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, population growth and technological developments will cause further biodiversity loss, as a result of land and sea use change, overexploitation, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species. This will have particularly severe consequences for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Global health. Infectious disease outbreaks are likely to be more frequent to 2030. Many will be zoonoses – diseases caused by viruses, bacteria or parasites that spread from animals to humans – as population growth drives the intensification of agriculture and as the loss of habitats increases interaction between humans and animals. Another novel pandemic remains a realistic possibility. On current trends, global deaths related to antimicrobial resistance will rise from 700,000 to 10 million per year by 2050. Migratory flows. Migration will remain a permanent feature of the global landscape. Demographic change, climate change, biodiversity loss, conflict and instability and poverty – exacerbated by the effects of COVID-19 – will drive increased population movements, with Europe the destination for mass migration from the Middle East and Africa in particular. But interstate and intrastate migration is likely to have more stressful effects in other parts of the world. III. The national security and international environment to 2030 31