Globalization, Technology and the Environment

One world, connected

In 1900 a letter from Toronto to Shanghai took weeks. Today a video call takes a second. The world's population has grown about five times, most people now live in cities, and goods, money, people, ideas and diseases move around the planet faster than ever. Globalization is the name for this growing interconnection. It has brought new wealth and new problems, and it is one of the main themes of the curriculum's E1 expectations: social trends (E1.1), and science and technology (E1.2).

Building a global economy

• Bretton Woods (1944): Allied countries created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to stabilize currencies and fund reconstruction and development. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947) cut tariffs step by step; it became the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.
• Regional integration: six Western European countries formed the Coal and Steel Community (1951) and the European Economic Community (1957), which grew into the European Union (1993). Canada, the U.S. and Mexico signed NAFTA (1994), replaced by CUSMA in 2020.
• New industrial powers: Japan rebuilt after 1945; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (the "Asian Tigers") industrialized for export. From 1978, Deng Xiaoping opened China to markets and foreign investment; China joined the WTO in 2001 and became the world's largest manufacturer. Hundreds of millions of people in China rose out of extreme poverty. India opened its economy in 1991.
• Container shipping (from 1956) made moving goods by sea far cheaper, so products could be made wherever costs were lowest.
• Crises: global connections also spread shocks, such as the oil shocks of the 1970s, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 2008 global financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market.

Social trends (E1.1)

• Population growth: better food supplies, clean water, vaccines and antibiotics cut death rates, especially for children. Birth rates fell later, so population grew fast. Since the 1970s, birth rates have fallen in most of the world.
• Urbanization: in 1900, most people lived in the countryside. By about 2007, more than half the world's people lived in cities. Megacities such as Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, São Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo and Lagos grew enormously.
• Migration: people moved from countryside to cities, and between countries: guest workers to Western Europe, South Asians to the Persian Gulf, Latin Americans to the U.S., and immigrants from every continent to Canada. Refugee movements grew with wars.
• Labour: unions won the eight-hour day, pensions and safety laws in many countries; later, manufacturing moved to lower-wage countries, and service and gig work grew.
• Environmental activism became a mass movement after the 1960s.

Science and technology (E1.2)

• Health: insulin was first used to treat diabetes in Toronto in 1922, by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip and John Macleod. Penicillin (discovered by Alexander Fleming, 1928) was mass-produced in the 1940s. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine (1955) cut polio cases sharply, and a global vaccination campaign led to the eradication of smallpox, which the WHO declared in 1980. Life expectancy roughly doubled worldwide over the century.
• Food: the Green Revolution of the 1960s, with new high-yield wheat and rice varieties developed by scientists such as Norman Borlaug, greatly increased harvests in Mexico, India and elsewhere, though it also increased the use of fertilizer, pesticides and water.
• Information: radio and television spread in the first half of the century. Electronic computers grew out of wartime research. ARPANET (1969) linked U.S. research computers; Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 and it opened to the public in 1991. Smartphones (from 2007) and social media put the internet in billions of pockets. Since the 2010s, artificial intelligence has spread quickly.
• Privacy and power: the same technologies allow governments and companies to collect vast amounts of personal data, raising new questions about surveillance and rights.
• Pandemics: HIV/AIDS, identified in 1981, has killed tens of millions of people. COVID-19 spread worldwide in 2020: the WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30, 2020, called it a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and ended the emergency on May 5, 2023. More than 7 million deaths were reported, and the WHO's estimates of total excess deaths are far higher. Vaccines were developed in under a year.

The environment

Industrial growth came with pollution and the burning of coal, oil and gas. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (1962) warned about pesticides and helped launch the modern environmental movement. The first Earth Day was held in 1970.

• The Montreal Protocol (1987), signed in Montreal, phased out chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer. It is often called the most successful environmental treaty: the ozone layer is slowly recovering.
• The Brundtland Report (1987) defined sustainable development as meeting present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet theirs.
• Climate change became the central environmental issue. The Kyoto Protocol (1997) set limits for some wealthy countries. In the Paris Agreement (2015), nearly every country agreed to try to hold warming well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
• The World Meteorological Organization reported that 2024 was the first calendar year in which the global average temperature was more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
• Young people organized worldwide school strikes for climate after 2018. Indigenous communities, including many in Canada, have led campaigns to protect land and water.