Large scale disasters, which exceed the current coping capacity of socio-ecological systems, are on the increase. Recent examples include the 2008 drought in Ethiopia and other African countries, China’s great ice storm of 2008, hurricane Katrina of 2005 in the U.S., the European heatwave of 2003, as well as the recent global financial crisis. During the period from 1984 through 2003, the population influenced by natural disasters exceeded 4 billion people, mostly in developing countries. An important feature of these disasters is the striking inequality between the vulnerability of people most exposed to the different disasters and the privileged position of others. While many factors contribute to any specific disaster, there is little doubt that global environmental change triggered by human activities plays a major role.

Increasing risks are one of the most significant aspects of the human dimensions of global environmental change. The willingness to accept these increasing risks, as long as they do not materialize in the immediate present, is a defining feature of unsustainable development, given that sustainable development can be thought of as a pattern of development ensuring that humankind meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Slowing down and ultimately reversing this tendency towards increasing risks is a significant challenge of our times. However, the ability to take huge risks is a precondition of the technostructure that enables humankind to communicate, travel, and trade all around the globe, and to produce unprecedented welfare by doing so. But clearly this ability has somehow gotten out of hand. As a result, a major question of fairness arises both with regard to the relation between highly industrialized and less developed countries, and to the relation between present and future generations.

It is a complex issue, because future generations are quite likely to be richer in monetary terms and better off in many other respects than present ones. But at the same time, they are quite likely to face even larger risks than we do presently. The lack of fairness in dealing with risk between generations is compounded by the lack of fairness within present generations. Risks to health, welfare, and safety are distributed very unevenly across humankind, and it is hard to justify this distribution by any widely recognized standards. And those parts of humankind that currently face the greatest risks also have less rosy prospects for their offspring. Under these circumstances, there is a long way to go in order to achieve something that deserves the name of sustainable development. The know-how on risk governance that is currently available is certainly helpful to address this situation, but it is hardly sufficient.