Welcome to Amazon Park

Summary

Power concentration:
_{Power is increasingly concentrated in governments, organisations and affluent strata of the population}

Natural habitat conservation:
_{Saving forests as natural habitats by imposing a voluntary second-hand market to buy and sell declared land by climate conservation focused organisations}

Elevation of disposable income for large population proportion:
_{Unification of African countries to prevent local resources (cobalt, gold etc.) from exploitation; instead, countries increased derived value from resources and foster economic development domestically}

Gender and race equality development:
_{Gender and race as separation elements saw a significant reduction by new legislation}

Education equality:
_{Quality education reserved for government relatives and affluent strata of population}

Scenario Story

What structure should the resource allocation and wealth distribution take in order to guarantee fairness?

Who would have thought that in the year of 2022 the era of “the power of the few” accelerated even further until 2030? Yet, with different implications in several categories.

In terms of governance and policies, governments became much more powerful and were able to overrule business decisions of large corporations. This shifted the decisive power in the market environment to governments especially in Asia and Africa. This was in particular initiated by the Covid pandemic in which governments rediscovered their execution power. However, this had different implications around the world. In Latin America, green parties sprouted and officials from those parties could secure more and more seats, increasing their power, in several elections. The most remarkable event was the election of a woman of the green party to serve as president of Brazil in October 2026. Yet, it has to be mentioned that the new authorities were militant forces, defending the nature with warfare. Europe and US showed a slightly increased governmental intervention to limit freedom of business operations, but nothing radically.

Regarding the environment, an exceptional act was the convention of China and the EU in 2023 to form a climate conservation conglomerate (led by China) in order to buy the two biggest rainforests in the world (the Amazon and the Congo rainforest) to protect the “lunges of the world” as a mean for carbon sequestration. Such acts became possible shortly after the COP 29 in 2024, when all countries declared that ecosystem critical natural habitats can legally be bought and sold by climate responsibly organisations. However, this erased all previous ambitions of international development organisations to give back or increase land rights of indigenous populations to foster equality improvements. Further, unfortunately no additional natural habitats could be secured and protected under the new declaration until 2030. Worthwhile to mention, exploitation of valuable resources for the ongoing electrification, in particular lithium and cobalt for the battery production, continued with a much bigger involvement of government officials.

Further, market dynamics in underserved markets experienced a significant change. A momentous event was the Africa Summit in 2025, when authorities of all African member states declared that they want to simplify inter-continental trading even further and unify regulations in order to act as one trading conglomerate. The economic and governing model of China became apparent and influenced African country officials. One element was that, supported by the governments, more and more young Africans were sent abroad to receive better education (US, Europe and Asia) with the obligations to come back afterwards and apply the knowledge in key organisations at home. Moreover, most governments learned how to value and protect their natural resources in order to foster domestic economic development. By doing so, African countries increased financial funds to elevate a large part of their population above the extreme poverty line. Yet, only low-skilled work was increased without exceptional outlooks for the development of the African population.

Also unanticipated was the development within the “Innovation space”, which encountered a significantly slowdown compared to 2022. This was mainly due to the increased power of governments and the interventions into market dynamics. Moreover, public institutions kept on being a slow-paced area. Yet, one area underwent a significant leapfrog - the surveillance systems. Those became more and more prevalent to stifle both climate harmful actions and equality-requesting civil movements. Moreover, governments significantly sponsored climate change mitigation technologies over the last decade, i.e. geoengineering, with first breakthroughs to limit climate impacts in areas of governmental officials and their relatives.

Unimaginable in 2021 but reality in 2030 is that religion does not play a meaningful role anymore. In fact, traditional and historic standpoints in terms of gender-equality were eradicated. In particular, in elite circles gender and race was no longer a dividing force with positive impacts on leadership positions, salaries, language among others. In order to foster equality between people also in social groups below the elite level, resolute governments in Africa and Asia imposed legislation which made separation between illegal.

Unfortunately, also driven by the elites, the distance between poor and rich kept in place. The barriers to receive quality education became fierce and the best schools were reserved for government relatives and other rich people. Internet as a mean for free education was made more accessible across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the installation and accessibility fell short behind initial plans of the United Nations back in 2020.

All in all, globally extreme poverty was reduced as well as gender and race as means of separation were eased or even eradicated. But power was more concentrated on the government level with negative impacts on the distance between rich and poor.

Additional Sources

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-29/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-land-grabs-surge-under-bolsonaro-in-brazil

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202012/1211211.shtml

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/women-in-china-contribute-more-to-gdp-than-in-the-us-viewing-them-as-leftover-is-problematic/

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/china-brazil-amazon-environment-pork/606601/

https://rainforestjournalismfund.org/stories/brazilian-amazon-china-buyer-trader-lender-builder-potentially-devastating-effect

https://www.scielo.br/j/cint/a/yP3DvjQP85VvKtTjzbzRnFS/?format=pdf&lang=en

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59088498

https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-who-can-still-save-the-worlds-green-lung/a-59153451

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/07/02/is-china-buying-the-world-peter-nola/

https://www.canalrural.com.br/noticias/venda-terras-brasil-china-eua-europa/

https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/