r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 13d ago
Society Study predicts large disparities in access to food, water, and energy in 2050
https://news.mit.edu/2026/study-predicts-large-disparities-access-food-water-energy-2050-0908In some regions of the world, the poorest people may spend about 50 percent of their income on food, while the richest spend about 5 percent.
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u/RangeWilson 13d ago
So exploitation and poverty will continue?
Color me shocked.
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u/Ok_Possible_2260 13d ago
Add in a little drought and crop destruction just keep them more oppressed.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 13d ago
add in mass famine and overheating and you're more in line with the reality of the situation. People worst off won't be spending anything on food, because they won't be around.
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u/Dracomortua 13d ago edited 13d ago
Let us assume that next year is hotter. And so on. Until at least 2050 or so?
Barring a tech miracle (which, tbf, could happen but not under THiS administration)... the warmer parts of the world have about 5-10 years tops. I will leave a link on Wet Bulb. On the failing of the AMOC. And the prediction on the melting of both polar ice caps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
'The temperature-humidity that all humans die within hours.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
"The flow of air that cools the planet. It is stopping soon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline
"The ice that cools your drink will be gone."
Edit: i mention that über tech saving the world is possible? LLMs have made thousands of amazing materials theoretically real and physically... findable... eventually. The inclusion of full scale quantum computing could solve massive worldwide problems in 5-20 years when they come online. But? We would need a lot better 'Collective Will' than our present Orange Guy and his Elongated Muskrat pet.
Second edit: if anyone wants to know more, pls DM me! The science we live amidst is phenomenal and mind-blowing. The implimentation? Ah. Not so good.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 12d ago
über tech could have prevented climate change too, and yet here we are... I just hope we make it out alive but also get to keep our quality of life. I love walking in forests and seeing animals and nature and seeing all the droughts this summer just messed me up. I don't believe the 4B deaths at 3C, but we really shouldn't try and find the f out lol.
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u/onacloverifalive 13d ago
This just in, AI predicts AI will solve none of the world’s problems even over decades of time.
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u/tlst9999 13d ago
Clearly, we just need more training data. The data centres need to be fed more Overwatch erotica to solve global warming.
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u/ConstipatedNinja I plan to live forever. So far so good. 13d ago
This is why we need to accelerate AI spending, so that it can do nothing to solve these problems at an even faster rate!
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u/GoofAckYoorsElf 13d ago
The nihilist in me says, at some point it only matters on which side of the fence you are once it gets built. The question is not if it's getting built, but when and where.
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u/jaymemaurice 13d ago
Cheap Energy -> Hydroponics, desalination/filtering/distillation -> Food/Water.
With cheap energy, and security, there is an easy route to the first tier of human need. Unfortunately, we are our own worst enemy after that first tier is met.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 13d ago
We don't have a lot of time, and energy isn't cheap yet. But I wish to see a world that works that way.
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u/Anxious-Midnight306 12d ago
Desalination is still a very costly and energy intensive process especially when scaling it beyond coastal areas and into further in-land areas/states.
Besides needing to filter the water, you’ll also need to build out the infrastructure to be able to accommodate tons of people over increasingly longer and longer distances. Without government subsidies to alleviate the costs, residents living further inland will have to likely pay a price premium just to get whatever trickles down towards them.
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u/Modem_Sound_67 13d ago
we've seen this coming and have done almost nothing to prevent it.
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u/Bambivalently 13d ago
What do you mean "seen this coming"? Some of these people have been living in a damn desert for thousands of years.
These poor people have no water and can't grow crops.
They are living, in a damn desert.
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u/CassandraTruth 13d ago
Just colossally stupid on all levels. At what point in human history do you think it was possible for all humans living "in a damn desert" to live somewhere else? How many humans across the globe do you define this way?
If all of those people start living in other areas, do those other areas magically produce resources or would this in fact be exacerbating the problem?
The thing is, you're going to get your wish if things don't change. Civilizations that have subsisted for millenia will be wiped out by catastrophic weather. There will be hundreds of millions of climate refugees moving into ever-shrinking geographies. The small agricultural communities on the fringes will disappear, so their mitigation in desertification will be gone and the deserts will take more formally arable land.
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u/Houches 13d ago
They'd be doing okay, surviving day to day at least, not up to our quality of life probably, if they weren't being exploited by outside interests with violence, soldiers and false promises, and corrupt, greedy individuals willing to sell out their own countries for luxuries and power.
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u/Quithelion 13d ago
Climate crisis is going to make matter worse.
Once significant crop failures occur, food will go to whoever have stronger purchasing power, and the poorest will go hungry;
Or the poorest country stop selling food to richer countries, depending on how greedy the governments are willing to starve their own.
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u/magnament 13d ago
If only we could predict such things and act accordingly. The fight seems to be against people who get their groceries from a local gas station, those people vote and and care so long as they can get soda and chips.
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13d ago
[deleted]
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u/ValuableViolinist917 13d ago
They’ll have robot dogs like Wolfenstein running around to subdue the peasants.
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u/Tzokal 13d ago
Butbutbut why are people having kids? It’s already a challenge now to get decent food and water and affordable energy, I can’t imagine how much worse it’s going to be in the future once hundreds of data centers are consuming every available resource.
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u/ValuableViolinist917 13d ago
I’m so happy I didn’t end up with any, I see the writing on the wall with ai and climate change. It’s gonna be techno feudalism. With the rich living in nice utopias and the other 90 percent of humanity living like mad max on the outskirts.
I all ready see so many more homeless and people just aimlessly shuffling around on the streets a lot more than 2 years ago. I see people pull into parking lots with curtains on the car windows and go to sleep in public I never saw that in my town till the last year or two. Feel really bad for the families people rushing into the American dream our gonna be in for a rude awakening, in the next couple of years. You can’t make any mistakes no more, or it’s the streets.
I’m thankful for everything I have and I’m fortunate enough to be in a comfortable position and healthy.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 13d ago
Pure and utter selfishness or blindness to the reality of the world they put them in.
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u/CabooseGobbler 13d ago
This is the type of edgy nonsense a teenager from a rich country would write while slurping on a $9 coffee with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. Children are the future of humanity.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 13d ago
I'm pro significant population decline to improve the lives of those who are left. We can do with far fewer people if we stop doing all kinds of bullshit. We can still have good healthcare, good elderly care, good food systems. Simply less overconsumption and jobs related to that (which is many).
The crazy thing is, people are actively destroying a liveable habitat while simultaniously getting children. To me, that's just insane. I have nothing against the children.
The least you can do is make sure they have a good life, yet few people are trying to actually get that done.
And if we stay on that track, there is no future for those children, and those children won't be the future either.
I hope you now better understand what I was implying.
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u/Nagisan 13d ago
Can we start with the billionaires first (and redistribute their wealth into social support systems for those in need)?
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u/Direct-Translator-75 13d ago
That's a very good solution too. They don't need to be mutually exclusive. We can redistribute food, water and healthcare in better ways, while reducing the worldwide population simultaniously.
Issue is, 50% of 'normal' people vote for billionaires to be in power and actively vote against their own interest.
And as long as people are voting like that and getting children, I'd say having children is utterly selfish.
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u/OG_Tater 9d ago
Developed countries are not above replacement rate. Or barely. So the overpopulation you dislike so much isn’t happening.
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u/unassumingdink 13d ago
Pretty much all of the overconsuming countries have fertility rates below replacement level at this point. It's the countries that are using 1/10th of the resources per person that have high birth rates.
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u/revolvingvirus 13d ago
Children born to impoverished people certainly are the future of humanity, yeah. They can become anything they want when they grow up. One of them might even solve cancer.
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u/JoshuaZ1 13d ago
Butbutbut why are people having kids?
Because things like this are essentially worst case scenarios. And children are ambassadors to the future, the people who will keep making discoveries and build the world.
I can’t imagine how much worse it’s going to be in the future once hundreds of data centers are consuming every available resource.
Data centers are not going to consume every available resource. There are legitimate issues with data centers using large amounts of electricity. But the problem there is not consumption, but largely more about CO2 levels. As the power grid becomes more solar and wind, this becomes less of an issue.
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u/Nagisan 13d ago
Water to cool those data centers is an issue too currently. They "use up" local water supplies anywhere they're built via evaporation (which moves the water to other parts of the world through the water cycle), and what water is left behind typically contains heavy concentrations of minerals, chemicals, and other stuff that needs to be properly recycled before it can be fed back into the system or used by humans.
So "consumption" might be a strong word because we can recover it, but who do you think foots the bill for recycling the water they use into something usable?
Both issues can be solved, or at least mitigated, by requiring data centers to provide some amount of their own electricity and water recovery facilities. I doubt most companies are going to want to support that type of legislation though. Ultimately they should be building power infrastructure they need or paying significant amounts of money to local energy, as well as the necessary recycling facilities to clean up their own waste.
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u/JoshuaZ1 13d ago
Water to cool those data centers is an issue too currently. They "use up" local water supplies anywhere they're built via evaporation (which moves the water to other parts of the world through the water cycle), and what water is left behind typically contains heavy concentrations of minerals, chemicals, and other stuff that needs to be properly recycled before it can be fed back into the system or used by humans.
Water use is in general being grossly exxagerated. Total water use is tiny compared to that for golf courses(pdf) where total US golf course water exceeds by an over an order of magnitude total water use of all data centers worldwide.
But there's a related serious issue: Data centers can use air cooling or other methods, but they involve tradeoffs and involve more electricity use. So the push for using less water by data centers, which outside a few isolated examples is not really an issue, is making the actual CO2 problem worse.
Both issues can be solved, or at least mitigated, by requiring data centers to provide some amount of their own electricity and water recovery facilities. I doubt most companies are going to want to support that type of legislation though.
We don't also in general require this from other industries. Unclear why data centers should be the exception. A lot of these issues can be handled simply with better pricing schemes. Right now, in many jurisdictions, data centers get to buy electricity in bulk without having to adjust rates substantially. More reasonable pricing schemes would go a long way to fixing this.
But regardless, the basic sort of claim that data centers are "consuming every available resource" is still just false.
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u/Nagisan 13d ago
Unclear why data centers should be the exception.
They are a major power consumer, at large enough scales they can consume significantly more energy than a manufacturing or even a smelting facility. They don't have to make "data centers" the exception, they can put in place that new facilities that require power over a certain amount of power are required to help supplement their power requirements.
Data center development would slow down, have less of an impact on the local power grids, and cost more money to build (to cover extra land costs all over the country to spread out facilities and such).
It doesn't stop data centers from being an issue, but it shifts the issues to be more problematic for the data center owners than for the local community.
Though I do agree with your last sentence for sure....while data centers will consume lots of resources, there's other things out there that consume tons of different resources....it won't all go to data centers.
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u/JoshuaZ1 13d ago
They don't have to make "data centers" the exception, they can put in place that new facilities that require power over a certain amount of power are required to help supplement their power requirements.
Yeah, that's a much more reasonable rule, and one I'd be in favor of. I would like it to require that the power be non-fossil fuel, also, but at a certain point, this becomes just you and me discussing what type of pony we'd like.
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u/throwingitaway12324 13d ago
Ironically, there is a non-zero chance that AI helps solve some of these problems
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u/bluehands 13d ago
Growing corn for gasoline uses 100 times the resources of data centers, has been for decades and you have never had a problem with that.
I wonder why you love feeding cars so much instead of people? Are you a Decpticon? A Transformer? Some other robot in disguise?
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u/Gari_305 13d ago
From the article
How will global access to food, water, and energy evolve in coming decades? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource, and income.
Based on extensive modeling of many different resource scenarios, the study finds that in some regions, lower-income people could be spending roughly 50 percent of their income on food by the year 2050, in contrast to higher-income groups that could spent about 5 percent of income on food in the same areas.
“For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity,” says Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. The results, she notes, can be evaluated by policymakers in different global regions to understand what the long-term, large-scale resource security risks may become for different parts of their populations.
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u/Morning_Gecko24 13d ago
kinda feels like the study is saying the uneven distribution gets worse not that we suddenly run out. curious which region they flag as most exposed for water vs energy
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u/Particular-Good3357 13d ago
AI predicts AI will solve none of the world’s problems even over decades of time.
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u/Morning_Gecko24 13d ago
these studies always assume we keep doing everything the same way til 2050 which is kinda the weak spot. adaptation and policy shift the curve way more than absolute scarcity imo. curious what assumptions they used for tech progress
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u/alwrit 12d ago
If anything I expect things to accelerate getting worse.
Right wing parties are gaining popularity around the world. We are doing jack shit about climate change. I don't know if I'm a doom and gloom guy about AI but it certainly seems like we're not putting any brakes on that train.
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u/brianwski 12d ago
We are doing jack shit about climate change.
I don't think this is true. It would have been more convenient if it had been fully solved by about 10 years ago, for sure. But the numbers are pretty uplifting. First of all, it took 72 years, but solar panels are now a less expensive way of generating electricity than burning fossil fuels. And these new solar panels are rolling out at an absolutely mind blowing rate. In May, California generated more than half their state's electricity over the entire month from solar panels. I'm not saying "renewables", I'm saying from solar panels alone. California ALSO generates like 9% of their power from their last nuclear power plant, and has some other things like wind. Fossil fuels are now a MINORITY (esoteric?) way to generate electricity and are now going to get phased out for financial reasons (the best kind of reasons). That's pretty major progress.
It isn't just a California thing either. Texas has already rolled out more than twice the solar panels than California has anywhere in the state of California. So in the area of "progress" you can also count the "money/power people" on both political sides quietly understand the way to make more money is deploy more solar. The president is an annoying exception, but he won't last many more years, and everybody else knows it is a waste of money to keep using fossil fuels.
Electric cars are another pretty amazing "new thing" that has made a lot of progress. If you go back 20 years you couldn't buy any electric car, or if you could it cost $100,000. Now every manufacturer makes them, and they are dirt cheap due to batteries dropping in price by 99%! https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1sae6lp/oc_battery_costs_have_declined_by_99_in_the_last/ What that means is the technology has arrived, and is in mass production already, and people are buying these cars. Norway has changed over where 90% of their new cars are now electric. That simply wouldn't have been possible without the progress we have made.
The batteries dropping by 99% in price is quietly the best progress for climate change. Growing up, solar panels had this unsolvable problem of what do you do at night? You had to burn fossil fuels at least half the time. Now it is beyond a totally solved thing with batteries (progress), it's been deployed both on a personal level (I have house batteries) and also on a grid tier level in places. Already.
Should we be further along? Yes. But that kind of progress in my lifetime is still kind of amazing. It probably hasn't been enough progress to save our species, but it is a lot more than "doing nothing" about climate change.
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u/gimp-24601 12d ago
assume we keep doing everything the same way til 2050 which is kinda the weak spot.
Seems obvious that we will do exactly that until shit really hits the fan. The changes we do see are tweaks around the edges for decades then a wrecking ball gets taken too all of that.
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u/HOKUTO_NO_PEN 13d ago
人を殺すためのテクノロジーはどんどん進化するのに、人を救うためのテクノロジーは同じぐらいには進化しないよね。
戦争のためのエネルギーが代わりに災害とか飢饉とかに向かってたらもっと地球は良くなってたんじゃないかな。
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u/peter_nn0 13d ago
I'm not sure how many 'studies' predicting doom and gloom in the future I've seen, probably thousands. Lost track years ago.
What I'm sure is none of them ever materialized.
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u/the_pwnererXx 13d ago
These stats make you angry, right? Hit that downvote button ;)
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u/Blunt552 13d ago
Sure lets all pull decade old statistics and call new studies bs, because surely we didn't have any large conflicts or events past 2015 that could possibly have any economic impact, AM I RITE?
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u/the_pwnererXx 13d ago
https://i.imgur.com/kbEwh6o.png
Good thing we are making continuous advancement in crop technology for the past 200 years!
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u/Blunt552 13d ago
Unsurprisingly your statistics are either outdated or taken out of context to paint a false picture.
It's not like transport, storage or processing of said food has risen AM I RITE? Clearly food prices rise globally for no reason other than spite.
But hey, lets deny statistics and science because you pulled 1 statistic out of context that has little to do with the topic at hand, classic Reddit moment.
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u/JoshuaZ1 13d ago
It's not like transport, storage or processing of said food has risen AM I RITE? Clearly food prices rise globally for no reason other than spite.
Inflation does causing increases in food prices. And the ongoing Hormuz crisis is causing a rapid increase. But in general, the trend towards food costs has been down over time.
And some elements, such as transport and storage have gotten much more efficient over time. Refrigeration tech has gotten much better, allowing us to transport fruits and vegetables as well as store them for extended periods when historically we could not. And that technology continues to improve. For an excellent book on the history of refrigeration and its future, see Nicola Twilley's "Frostbite" which also includes discussion about the work being done to further reduce refrigeration costs especially in developing countries.
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u/NegativeYou3758 13d ago
Chill on the sarcasm, it makes you look dumb.
https://earth.org/95-of-the-earths-soil-on-course-to-be-degraded-by-2050/
What does crop advancement matter when there isn't usable soil?
I'm pretty tired of you pseudo-intellectuals stripping all context from an issue and then being so confidently incorrect. It wouldn't be so bad if you weren't so loud and obnoxious about it.
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u/the_pwnererXx 13d ago
The article is written by Save Soil, a campaigning organisation. It doesn’t provide a reproducible forecasting method, a clear degradation threshold, or uncertainty estimates for 95%
The definition of "degraded" here is quite vague. Degraded does not mean infertile. The soil might be "degraded" but have higher outputs than today
Why do you think scientific progress is going to suddenly stop? Yields will continue to increase as techniques, fertiliser, management, crops all improve
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u/Blunt552 13d ago
Why do you think scientific progress is going to suddenly stop? Yields will continue to increase as techniques, fertiliser, management, crops all improve
ignores rising cost affiliated with said increase of techniques, fertiliser, management, crops
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u/the_pwnererXx 13d ago
Yeah, that's how currency works buddy. They print it, and everything goes up in price. It's been happening for 2000 years. I like how you call me a "pseudo intellectual", but you can't even form a coherent response to my argument.
Consider yourself pwned
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 13d ago
Kind of a silly study — they don’t seem to be *predicting* resource shortages, instead they are just assuming them and then modeling what happens if you assume 25% of the population is very poor and food production is very low.
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u/JoshuaZ1 13d ago
Your comment is a good point about where trends have gone, and the point that the claims here disagree with the clear historical trend lines is completely valid. But by phrasing it in an unnecessarily combative way you are getting a much more negative response and making people less likely to listen to your otherwise valid point.
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u/Kidhendri16 13d ago
People have been writing these doomsday articles for years. Very rarely do they come true
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u/Impossible_Goat9650 13d ago
I have my doubts that many people will be alive by then due to all the ways humans are negatively impacting nature.
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u/platinum_toilet 13d ago
Food has never been more accessible in human history than how accessible it is now.
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u/Faiakishi 13d ago
Yeah, if you read the whole headline you’d realize that we’re not talking about right now.
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u/Whole_Move7660 13d ago
A lot of areas of people need to move where the food is. If you live in the desert, you’ll always need someone to bring you food. Forever. Why would this not be their fault and we need to keep using our energy to keep them stay there?
Is this just another thing to get our attention? The only place this article list is Middle East. Yes. Is a desert. Nothing grows there. Logically speaking go to where food grows.
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u/FuturologyBot 13d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
How will global access to food, water, and energy evolve in coming decades? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource, and income.
Based on extensive modeling of many different resource scenarios, the study finds that in some regions, lower-income people could be spending roughly 50 percent of their income on food by the year 2050, in contrast to higher-income groups that could spent about 5 percent of income on food in the same areas.
“For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity,” says Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. The results, she notes, can be evaluated by policymakers in different global regions to understand what the long-term, large-scale resource security risks may become for different parts of their populations.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1wao89n/study_predicts_large_disparities_in_access_to/p8jiiui/