Looking back to look ahead to 2025: Economy, climate, and politics

The public space is now privatised. It is not that democracy is dead, but that it has been fundamentally modified

The year 2024 will mark the year when the world changed in more ways than one. Each day some part of the world was hit by extreme weather events; when a new record of heat or cold stress is made and then broken; when communities already living on the margins of survival are devastated to the point of being unable to recover from the frequent disasters. Scientists describe this as the “anthropocene epoch”, which in geological time is defined as the period when human activities have significant impacts on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Everything that we have done for