#society

Its nickname, the eighth continent, says it all, and is no exaggeration. Lying between California and Hawaii, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is three times the size of France and is the world's biggest ocean waste repository, with 1.8 billion pieces of floating plastic which kill thousands of marine animals each year.

Towns and villages are no strangers to the digital revolution that is taking place in the world, or at least they should not be because their survival depends on it. Innovative solutions, from Big Data to the Internet of Things (IoT), have reached rural areas to help develop and improve their social, economic and environmental conditions.

The Madrid Climate Summit (COP25) ended on Sunday 15 December — instead of Friday 13 as scheduled, making it the longest of all the COPs — with lacklustre results as far as the negotiations were concerned, despite having had a substantial impact in terms of mobilising civil society as a whole.

In the Europe of 2060, one in three inhabitants will be over 65. A similar trend of increasing life expectancy and reversal of the population pyramid will be followed by the rest of the developed countries on the planet. The forms of consumption will therefore change and older people will become the engine of the so-called silver economy.

Not only is it a serious threat to the planet and to people, climate change is also threatening the global economy. This problem needs public-private sector collaboration to change the way we produce goods to other methods that guarantee and drive the development of sustainable economic growth.

Wearables are the penultimate milestone of the technology revolution, and they open the door to a new personal universe. They track what you eat, monitor your heart rate, warn you when you are getting stressed, and make it easier to communicate with those around you. They are part of your image - we wear them as watches, t-shirts, earrings and bracelets - and they know things about you that you don't.