Tag: Australia

Pension Funding Gap Set to Overtake Global GDP

The World Economic Forum has calculated that pension systems across the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia will have a joint shortfall of $224 trillion by 2050. If you add China and India to the equation, the combined gap nearly doubles to $400 trillion. That’s five times the size of the current global economic output. Such a shortfall places severe risks on the incomes and quality of life of future generations while setting the industrialized world up for one of the most widespread pension crises in history.

The Global Pension Crisis

June_06_2017-Chart2-01

 

Source: Mercer (2017)

Funding this shortfall will not be easy with global debt levels rising to more than 325% of GDP in 2017, reaching an eye-watering $217 trillion.…

Heat Waves, Ice, Storms, Floods and Algae Bloom in 2015

Last year saw several records in the Earth’s climate system broken.

The American Meteorological Society alongside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and over 450 leading scientists from around the world all confirm that 2015 was the warmest year on record for land and sea temperatures. Last year, average temperatures rose by 1ºC higher than Preindustrial times. At the widely publicized United Nations COP21 meetings in Paris, 1.5ºC above preindustrial averages was pegged as the upper limit for climate change. We are getting so close to this limit that some scientists are already talking about a possible overshoot, which would have disastrous effects on our climate, biomes and all aspects of human activity, especially in securing the global food supply.…