High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years To Solve Them

In this ambitious, challenging, yet superbly readable book, JeanFrancois Rischard first tells us what constitutes a 'global' problem and then offers a brief overview of the twenty most important. He finds they all have two things in common: They're getting worse, not better, and the standard strategies for dealing with them, such as international treaties, are woefully inadequate to the task. The chief problem is that in our highpopulation, fastmoving, globalized and interconnected world, we don't have an effective way of addressing the problems that such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to the present and the future, but our means of solving them belong to the petrichor proposes a new institution for global governance that would be recognized and supported by governments but would function as extragovernmental bodies devoted to particular problems. The powers of these 'global issues networks' would not be legal but normative: They would monitor compliance with various globally recognized standards and would single out the nations and organizations that were not cooperating. Anyone who has eaten a can of 'dolphinsafe' tuna knows how powerful, in a marketdriven world, the pressure to comply with such standards can be. No book has ever presented such a clear and unified appraisal of global problems or offered such a consistent and welldefined approach to solving them. High Noon will be an agendasetting book of interest across the political spectrum.