Global Issues

Reference works that try to hold the whole tangle of global problems in one place.

Sites

Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential (Website) — the Union of International Associations' fifty-year project to catalogue the world's problems — 50,054 of them — and map how each one reinforces and sustains the others.

• World Problems (Database) — 50,054 entries, from “slavery” and “human torture” to “scientific misconduct,” most with a loops view showing the problem cycles they sit inside.
• Global Strategies (Database) — the counterpart volume: the strategies proposed against those problems, cross-linked back to them.
• Human Values and Human Development (Database) — the values invoked on both sides of a problem, and the modes of development set against them.
• Metaphors & Patterns and Integrative Concepts (Database) — the strangest corner of the project: the figures of speech and unifying concepts we reach for when the problems get too big to state plainly.