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==Openings==

Around 2025, these initiatives started to bear fruits. In a visibly coordinated manner, researchers in India, China and Chile produced interesting breakthroughs in renewable energies as well as high-yield, low-input genetically modified crops and livestock. India immediately announced its intention to lead a "3rd Green Revolution" and to share it with other emerging countries. Western corporations tried to contest the discoveries, claiming that they infringed on the thousands of patents that they had filed over the previous decades. But the move was well prepared in legal and diplomatic terms. Further, it was difficult to argue that this was not what Kyoto IIb was all about, at least officially!

Meanwhile, the first generation of "enhanced" soldiers, policemen, firemen and top executives of 2025-2025 started showing odd pathological symptoms. Biotech and health-oriented nanotech in the North became even more state-controlled and subject to prior testing, and some information was allowed to circulate more freely. However, not all countries were ready for this development: the authorization of private-purpose human gene editing by the US, Japan and Korea in 2027 met with fear and awe in the rest of the world.

The geospheres of influence were expanding, becoming  more intertwined, and therefore, somewhat looser in some ways. The US rediscovered its link with South America. The EU â€“ now depleted in its ranks by the exit of some of its eastern member-states, but much more politically unified â€“ recovered its links with Africa, while Japan renewed its ties with Southeast Asia despite grumblings from a weakened - but still commanding - China.

Faced with the prospect of becoming irrelevant, after having been the global overseeer and the last resort for cooperation in a conflict-ridden world, the UN decided to reinvent itself. It created an official Corporate Chamber and another for regions and cities. States protested, but they were quickly shut down by the firms and the metropolitan centers that were the states' true ganglion.  Even the hacktivists who had kept the Internet more or less open during these years were given official UN recognition as members of the "Civil Society". The goals and capacity of this new UN were still unclear; but it certainly reflected what the world had become in a more faithful way.


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By 2030, the world economy was closer to sustainability than it had been for a century. It was also slowly moving away from a situation of permanent conflict and major existential risks. But there were still dangers. Sustainability had been achieved first by maintaining billions of people in poverty, and then only, and only partially, by technical and organizational progress. Larger than ever economic and political alliances were vying for power, with economic and military means that were more potent than those of any individual country except the USA. Corporations had become an almost autonomous power, even able to muster military force. Biotech had generated the means to produce cheap and very lethal weapons. The younger generations in the North and (even more) in the South were growing restless at the sight of a world ruled by a powerful caste of older and older people.

The world had succeeded in wrestling itself away from global environmental collapse. It now had to build itself as a place of well-being.