Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive

By Professor Jared Diamond
University of California

What happened to the people who built the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, the long-abandoned statues of Easter Island and the crumbling Maya pyramids of the Yucatan? New evidence suggests that the environmental crises which saw these civilisations collapse were in fact self-induced.

Aventis and Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond will discuss how some societies managed to avoid ecological catastrophe whilst others succumbed. Ignoring signals from the environment and squandering our resources could lead to the collapse of modern societies, raising the important question: how can our world best avoid destroying itself?