What are the greatest problems that we face? What are their causes?

We live in different spaces and have diverse experiences which influence our understanding of our surroundings. We are unlikely to agree on which global issues are of paramount importance. While some of these problems may appear distinct on the surface, many have shared underlying factors, suggesting that focusing on root causes might be more productive than addressing individual issues in isolation.

I have searched this question on-line and encountered several organisations with interesting problem lists. World Economic Forum has a list of the top ten risks that we face in 2024. Development Aid has a list has a list of their own. Time had a list for 2024 that was more USA centric. The United Nations has a list they aspire to work on. 8,000 Hours (a career advice organisation focused on social impact) have their list of problems which they prioritise because they are unusually large in scale, unduly neglected, and solvable. This resulted in a list of 38 problems, 8 of which seemed to recur (orange and pink ones in the chart).

Some of these could be combined into one category. Extreme weather and Critical change to Earth’s systems could both be categorised as “Climate Change”. Water accessibility and Hunger and access to food could both be in the Natural resource shortages category.

I then did a separate search in 2025 using Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Claude, which quoted the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 and the Ipsos survey for sources and resulted in a list of 5 problems, all but one (Human Rights) featured in the 8 earlier ones.

Interestingly human population density (8.2 billion in 2025) or population growth did not appear in any of these. I decided to add this as a problem since it appears to be a root cause or linked to several problems, namely – involuntary migration, interstate armed conflict, poverty, pollution, biodiversity loss, natural resource shortages, water accessibility, global health, and hunger and access to food.

This resulted in a new list of 8 problems (6 from the earlier 8, one added using Claude and 1 added unilaterally by me). I will focus my attention those 8 featured in this last list.

Problems can be divided into two categories: those caused by oneself, or in this case by human actions (which I call anobis) and those that occur in nature independently of us (termed abalia). When humans are the source of a problem – like wars, poverty, or social inequality – we generally have greater potential to solve it, since we are responsible for the conditions that led to it. This principle is reflected in the challenges highlighted by 8,000 Hours – their listed problems are predominantly human-caused and therefore potentially solvable through human intervention. In contrast, problems that arise independently of humans, like certain natural phenomena, have varying degrees of solvability – some we can address despite not causing them, perhaps through science and technology, while others may remain beyond our control.

This What? category should lead to questions on how we understand these problems and how we may solve them (in the How? category), and why at times we fail to do so.

The What? category will most likely also involve quite a bit about human behaviour, which may also come under the Who? category.

Another What? category question I will consider is What is the point (of our existence? of anything)?