In a match with cameroon, kick off isjust a in a match with cameroon, kick off is just a few minutes away. Now on the day. A hot muggy feeling night in the south,. Through the day on bbc news, in a discussion on the monday, we have the rain lingering challenges of avoiding short across parts of scotland. Drier terrorism in modern society and how further south but with scattered to prioritise the world for future showers. Not everywhere will see a showers. Not everywhere will see a generations. Shower but if you do get one it could be pretty heavy with some thunder and lightning mixed in. Pretty one for most of us, 18 and 23 degrees for most of us. The u nsettled degrees for most of us. The hello, and welcome to bbc futures long termism unsettled weather consent that how to think in deep time bbc continues into tuesday but we will future at hay festival, see some warmer and drier weather where we are taking a longer view mid week onwards. On the of the 21st and encouraging more long term thinking and also encourage some of our politicians and policymakers to do the same. With me today we have some excellent panellists. Roman krznaric, a public philosopher and author who is writing a book about long term thinking and the challenges facing democracy. Sophie howe, the future generations commissioner for wales who is trying to encourage our politicians and policymakers to try and take that view of the impact of their decisions for future generations and all their descendants. And martin rees, one of the uks most eminent scientists, a member of the house of lords and author of a new book, on the future prospects of humanity, which takes the reader on a thrilling journey through the coming century and beyond. A very warm welcome to all of you. Before we hear from our panellists, we will hear a short word from bbc future who are going to tell us a bit more about why we should be taking this longer view of civilisation. Our societies today are shaped by short termism. In the relentless twitter filled world of 2019, the present moment our societies today are shaped by short termism. In the relentless twitter filled world of 2019, the present moment commands all our attention. We are saturated with knowledge, and standards of living of mostly never been higher but today, it is difficult to look beyond the next news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with ever shorter periods now shaping our world. In politics, the dominant timeframe is a term of office. In fashion and culture, its a a season. For corporations, its a quarter. On the internet, it is minutes and on the financial markets, mere milliseconds. Meanwhile the planet is warming, antibiotic resistance looms and inequality rises. There is no more timely example than our slow response to Climate Change. This year, schoolchildren from around the world have been campaigning for a longer term perspective and their right to inherit a safer, cleaner planet than the one given to their elders. As the young climate activist Greta Thunberg told politicians recently, tackling Climate Change involves ditching short term ways and using cathedral thinking. We may lay the foundation without knowing how to build the ceiling, she said. But for many of us in adulthood, how many of us can say we are thinking about the well being of future generations and those not yet born . How often do we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they go rippling to the decades and centuries ahead. We need a deeper perspective on time. If our civilisation is to flourish for thousands or even millions of years, then we must learn how to extend our frame of reference beyond the present moment. Its time to look at the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. Here we are at the hay festivaljust a few days after children from around the world took part in more school strikes protesting against our inability to act on Climate Change. Even primary age kids are getting in on the act. At my kids school in bristol, the school organised their own protests so kids didnt have to take that time off school and it was really well attended and this is just a clear example of the Younger Generation calling out to the older generation and saying, please help us act to protect our futures, but yet on Climate Change and many other issues, it seems we are really not very good at taking that longer view. Roman, you would go a step further. You have argued that we are essentially colonising the future and robbing future generations in the process. Thats right. I think we all know that we live in an age of pathological short termism, politicians cannot see beyond the next week, when nations bicker around conference tables, focusing on near term interest while the planet burns. We are constantly tweeting, pressing that buy now button. But its exactly as you say, we have colonised the future, we treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we dump our ecological degradation, risk, nuclearwaste and public debt and its a little bit like the way when britain colonised australia, they drew on this legal doctrine known as terra nullius, empty land, so they took it as if there were no Indigenous People there. Of course there were. We have shifted from terra nullius to tempus nullius, where there is no future and we rape and pillage the future and we dont think about future generations. I used to be a political scientist and was teaching comparative theory and politics and it never once occurred to me that we disenfranchise future generations in the same way we disenfranchised slaves and women in the past, we give them no political power, no political voice and thats exactly what Greta Thunberg and your kids and my kids have been protesting about in these climate strikes, so we are at the moment right now where we need to engage in an intergenerational Liberation Movement and liberate those future generations. Sophie, as future generations commissionerfor wales, you are really at the sharp end of trying to encourage people to take a longer view, and especially politicians. Id love to hear more about how your role came to be and what it involves. Wales is the only country in the world which has legislation which protects the interests of future generations through our well being of future generations act which was passed into law by our National Assembly in 2015 so it does a number of things but i suppose the overarching premise is that all of our policymakers in wales, it applies to all of our public services, our health board, local authorities and National Bodies and really significantly the Welsh Government themselves have to demonstrate how they are taking decisions which meet todays needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. You dont have any powers to force people to act. I cant force anyone to do anything or force government to stop doing something. But i have whats called review powers, name and shame. You have an institution responsible for advocating on behalf of future generations, which is an institution established by government and by our National Assembly, they do have to set up and take notice. Would i like more powers . Yes, i would, who wouldnt . An interesting case study, the first future generations commissioner in the world was in israel, he had powers to actually veto legislation as it was going through parliament. Interestingly, he became so challenging to the government that they abolished him and his position after his first term so some difficult inks to navigate out. Martin, as a member of the house of lords, you have the ability to influence politicians to some extent. Not very much. Youve also been writing a book about the long term future of our society, and some things from Climate Change to overpopulation to artificial intelligence. How do you feel we can shake politicians out of this short term way of thinking . I think its great that we have these campaigning schoolkids, thats great because that raises awareness and it would be shameful if we left a depleted world for future generations, especially when we mind how much we owe to the heritage of generations past but of course there is a problem, politicians focus on the parochial and local and focus on getting re elected, and i know people have been advisors to government and they dont have direct impact, the politicians agenda, so the only way this can happen is if the public are made aware of this, thats why these protests by young people are important because politicians do respond to what is in their inboxes and whats in the press. What we have to do is make sure they can take these long term decisions without losing votes. Let me give you two examples of this. Four years ago, there was a paper encyclical, the first time a pope said we had an obligation to the environment long term and that had a huge effect, especially in latin america, africa, east asia where the popa has a billion followers, making it easier to get consensus at the paris climate conference. That was great. He got a standing ovation at the un for this. More recently, mr michael gove, would not have been exercised about non reusable drinking straws, legislating that, had it not been for the blue planet programmes fronted by our secular pope, david attenborough, who energised the public. Doesnt that show a problem . The Plastic Straws issue is interesting. In response to public outcry and so on, its a token sound bite, weve banned Plastic Straws but actually what we need to be looking at is a circular economy, reducing our use of plastic, notjust finding me sort of small interventions. I completely agree with that but we need the radical changes in the economic field but also the political field. I sort of see your position almost like a first step, the veritable radical changes in democracy because one of the conundrums of this long term issue is do we really need enlightened despots and dictators, many people have talked about that. I dont think theres there is any tradition of benign dictators, its radically transforming democracy. There is the future Design Movement when they bring together citizens assemblies and they get half the citizens in a city to think about how they deal with the problems today, and the other half is given these ceremonial kimonos, these robes, and they are told they are citizens from 2060 and they then make policies for the city and it turns out the citizens from 2060 make policies which are much more radical, much more progressive and this movement now is campaigning to be successful in getting local governments with a final view to having a ministry of future. I think we need Citizen Assembly models like theyve had in ireland, for example, to represent the views of future generations. Do you think its necessary to have some degree of short term pain for long term gain or is there a way of having the best of both worlds . I think there are ways of having the best of both worlds. In the Climate Change arena, if we accelerate research and development into clean energy and speed it up so it can be adopted more quickly, that is again for the world but if i could express a paradox, i spoke last week in ely cathedral, and what strikes me then is that the people who built ely cathedral, they thought the world would end in 1,000 years. Their horizon was very limited in space as well but they built a cathedral that wouldnt be finished in their lifetime and it seems paradoxical that we would have these much broader horizons in time and space but are more short term, but there is a reason. People in the middle ages may have thought the world would end in 1,000 years but they thought the lives of their children and grandchildren would be the same as theirs. Thats why they thought their grandchildren would appreciate the cathedral when it was finished. Now, of course, we have no idea what our lives, our future lives, will be like for our children and grandchildren. If you look further ahead. Genetic modification and all these things will change human cathedrals. They can invest in the long term. This cathedral idea. People say we need to have this vision of creating things and making investments but we will never see the benefits. There is a real value in that. Its not cathedral thinking but it is still thinking. Sewer thinking. Many people might know that in 1858, sewage, was one of the great political challenges in this country. It was called the great stink. It followed decades of people in london dying of cholera. The thames was polluted with sewerage. What happened in the summer of 1858 was that the stench the smell came into the newly rebuilt Parliament Building and politicians literally couldnt breathe. It was so bad. After ignoring the issue of sewerage, this kickstarted them to invest massively in the Sewerage System sojoseph bazalgette spent so much time building the Sewerage System. Why does Greta Thunberg say, your house is on fire. Its part of sewer thinking that we need to build a sense of emergency or we wont do anything. Roman, you have been making a case for rethinking representative democracy. Do you feel democracy needs to change . I feel democracy is dying, and the kind of form we have today should die. Representative democracy was only invented a couple of centuries ago, at a time when we were in the ecological era known as the holocene, when we had a stable climate, but now were in the anthropocene, when we have changed the climate. Our Political Institutions were not designed to deal with these global problems. If you were to invent a Political Organisation to create global agreement on Climate Change, you would never invent nation states. Thats mad. You need things like these citizens assemblies, or future citizens juries, things like that. I think we need to think about, how do we give voice to young people . One of the ways its happened in the United States is that there are campaigns, legal campaigns, to give rights, constitutional rights, to future people. A bit difficult in this country where there is no written constitution, but in the European Union and other places it is possible to enshrine the rights of future people. It sounds mad how do you give rights to people who dont even exist . Yet we can do it. Its just a legal mechanism, and there are battles going on to do this right now. Exactly what our legislation is designed to do, and i suppose, perhaps not enough, but to give me some power to try to enforce that. Representative democracy comes back to the people that we are representing, doesnt it . So actually, as a public, we fundamentally need, i think, to change the way that we think. We are currently spending about 50 of our entire budget going into the National Health service, which i love as much as everyone else, but actually its a National Illness Service. We need to take money from the National Illness Service and put it into a National Wellbeing service to keep people well in the first place. Those sorts of decisions are not that popular. So theres a need for, you know, a big popular discussion about how we start thinking, planning, and doing things for the future. Something at the local and city level, but we need something at a global level, surely, as well, for climate and energy, just like we have a world health organisation. Otherwise it will be only these huge commercial conglomerates which have a global reach. We have got to have some international, publicly supported organisations to compete with them and control them. I completely agree with that, and i also agree with my 10 year old daughter, who said to me the other day, she said im not given a vote in the european elections. She said, so, why dont i ask granny if she will vote for who i want . And lets just swap votes . And i thought, thats such a really good idea. Applause. I would love to see a movement where anyone under the age of 16 is given a vote by someone over the age of 60. I think, even if theyre not actually given their votes, just having a discussion between the Younger Generation and the older generation about where they would like things to move might be interesting. Ok, so weve talked about the coming century, but lets zoom out further. Martin, looking even further ahead, thousands of years or even millions of years into the future, where do you see civilisation heading . Will we even be here at all . Well, i think the important point is that this century is special. Its a century when, for the first time, we can change human beings themselves. With genetic modification and cyber technology, et cetera. Whereas in the past, evolution of human beings and their characters happened on a slow, darwinian timescale. Now its going to happen much quicker. I do think this is a real game changer, because we can read the literature written 2000 years ago by classical authors and see their artefacts and admire them. Human nature was the same then as now. But i think theres no reason to think that any intelligences a few centuries from now will have any emotional resonances with us. They may be quite different entities, because the change in the future is going to be a sort of secular intelligent design, rather than just evolution. And so human beings themselves, here on earth and perhaps by then far beyond the earth, are going to change much faster. And even though the timeline ahead is even longer than the time that has elapsed up until now on the earth, 4. 5 billion years, things are going to change faster. And thats why its completely impossible to predict things 1,000 years ahead, still lessi million ori billion years ahead, because the changes going to be faster than ever. We seem to be having some quite apocalyptic rain, if anybody is wondering what the noise is. Ok, id like to ask all of you, how optimistic are you about the future . You can give it a mark out of 10, if you like. Martin . Im a technical optimist but a political pessimist, in that i think we already have the technology to make a better world for the 7. 5 billion People Living on it now, and the gap between the way things are and the way they could be is an ethical indictment of us, collectively. So i am pessimistic that we will use technology optimally, but thats not a reason for not trying. Weve got to try and hope that we can avoid the downsides of new technology, and avoid despoiling the environment and make sure that we leave a heritage for future generations, just as important as the heritage, sewers, and all of that left to us by the victorians. Well, if you spend a lot of time with children, young people, who are our future generations, there are obviously people we cant spend time with because theyre not born yet, but if you do that, as i do, i have five future generations of my own, i feel fairly optimistic that actually, they have got the right answers and the right mindset and a lot of the right solutions, to be solving some of the big challenges ahead. But i would agree with you, in terms of the current political climate, i feel fairly pessimistic, about these sort of day to day decisions. But then i think, internationally, there is a Real Movement forming around this. And when you see Jacinda Arderns government in new zealand having this big focus on the wellbeing budget, notjust these Narrow Economic measures. Youve got the welsh future generations act, parts of which have been picked up by countries across the world, the canadian government have just amended their legislation to put in this bit about future generations. There is a Movement Building in the netherlands to do something similar. Gibraltar, a tiny area, but going to have legislation. And there is some of the long term thinking that is coming without legislation, but coming from other countries across the world. I think there is a movement, a movement growing. Butjust having the kind of governance around it, its not enough. It has to flow through to the day to day decisions that Decision Makers are making all the time. Roman, how about you . One word makes me optimistic, and its this word death. Human beings die. We all die, but we all want to leave a legacy, which is the other important word, apart from death. We want to find ways of being remembered well by future generations. We have a choice about the kind of legacies we want to leave. We can leave an egoistic legacy and get a wing of the National Gallery named after us, which is what the sort of russian oligarchs want in terms of legacy. We can have a familial legacy which we all feel when you have children and you want to leave things to your own progeny. But i think we can also make a step from there to a kind of sense of a transcendent legacy, that we want to be remembered well by all future generations, and i think theres something very beautiful in the new zealand maori concept, which is called whakapapa, their term for intergenerationalism. This idea we are all in a great chain of being, connected to people in the past and animals and plants in the past, and to the future. Right now the light happens to be shining on us, on this short moment. But if we have a sense of a longer now, a bigger sense of time going into the past and the future, then we can feel the living and the dead and the future all here in the room with us, and that concept of legacy, i think, is our ultimate hope. Well, im afraid that is all we have time for today. Thank you very much to our panellists, martin rees, sophie howe and roman krznaric. And thank you to our audience. I hope everybody is thinking more long term. Voiceover for more stories about long term thinking and a deeper view of civilisation, head to bbc. Com future. Hello, temperatures have been rising over the past few days but with that doting heat and humidity, we are likely to see heavy showers and thunderstorms developing over the next couple of days. This afternoon there was quite a lot of cloud in there was quite a lot of cloud in the skies, there was a little bit of brightness on offer. The increase in cloud is all down to the fact we have pressure out of the south west, bringing rain to the south west of england already, parts of wales, northern ireland, that with a front will have an effect increasingly into the afternoon. Some weight without moving gradually in from the south west, parts of southern and Eastern England should stay dry into the evening but warm and muggy too. Is that rain pushes not, we could see 20 50 millimetres across parts of england. Thunderstorms are mixed in with the spells of heavy rain too. Monday morning will have rain pushing into another in parts of scotland, could be persistent for the east of scotland by monday morning. There could be lots of surface water lying on the rude first thing. That rain continues into monday, heavy at times. For the rest of the uk, showers are building, they will be hit or miss, where you do catch them it could be heavy and potentially thundery as well. It will feel hot and humid, particularly in the south west. 3 monday evening, that rain continues again for eastern parts of scotland. Then our attention turns to the southis then our attention turns to the south is the next batch of heavy rain and fun that he showers moves in channel across many southern and eastern parts of england. They could be critically heavy and bring localised flash flooding problems as well. It will also be hot, humid, and sticky overnight into tuesday. Through the day, that rain pushes slowly towards the north east but lingering across parts of scotland. To the south, that drier brighter speu to the south, that drier brighter spell of weather, currently hot and humid side 26 or so. High teens to low 20s across scotland and northern ireland. High pressure then takes charge later in the week, drier conditions developing, when onwards, we are still drawing in a south, salvage the effluent. Temperatures in the west up to 32 celsius. This is bbc news. 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