About two thousand years ago

About two thousand years ago, the earliest bronze-age farmers in Myanmar grouped together, built their first urban settlements, and began to connect with the wider world, importing Buddhism and new ideas about government, art, and science, ideas that transformed their societies. A thousand years later, at Bagan, kings and courts worked hard to be part of a dynamic region, synthesizing knowledge and styles from around the country and overseas, creating a sublime city and one of the most impressive little kingdoms of medieval times.

Whenever Myanmar has reached out and been open to the world, Myanmar has prospered intellectually as well as materially. Whenever Myanmar turned inwards, from fear or lack of confidence, the country has faced impoverishment and foreign conquest.

Myanmar is now in an emergency. The people of Myanmar must radically re-think the lives they want and their position in the world to come. The failure of politics is a failure of the imagination. Myanmar needs a completely new story, a new vision of the future. One that can bring everyone together to address collectively the real challenges to come.

Half of Myanmar’s population is under 30. The vast majority will live until 2050 or beyond. The world by then will be an entirely different place.

The biggest threat we face by far is climate change. We are entering into a time of extreme weather, more frequent cyclones like Nargis in 2008, scorching heat that will make parts of Myanmar uninhabitable, increased snow melt in the Himalayas that will cause flooding on an unprecedented scale, and rising sea levels that will inundate coastlines and eventually Yangon as well. We live in a part of the world that will be hit incredibly hard by climate change. The disruptions to agriculture and food security will be enormous. People will simply not be able to live as they are, where they are.