"The main challenge is mental," admits Jorgen Randers, who has been feeling for 40 years what readers of the latest gloomy climate forecasts might now be experiencing.

The Norwegian business professor is co-author of the seminal work The Limits to Growth, which sounded the alarm on the planet's future in 1972.

He's now written 2052, A Global Forecast for the Next 40 Years, partly his final effort to "kick society into action" but also as an antidote to his grief over the "lost global opportunity" and "unnecessary suffering" which awaits us on the path to a world "less beautiful and less harmonious than it could have been".

Rather than have you despair, he offers some practical personal advice on how to adapt to a future compromised by ongoing poverty, population pressure and climate change.

1. Learn to love apartment living

The future will be "urban, dense and crowded" and most people will live in an urban tower in a megacity. So "don't develop a taste for life in suburbia". Remind yourself how high-density living relieves you of the lawns that must be mowed, the rooves and gutters that must be fixed, and the long, boring commutes to the city.