Some famous news story about Africa hits major headlines causing a summit like Kyoto but on poverty, disease and ignorance. Instead of a 1 billion people lacking clean water in 2012 it's dropped to like 10 million or something. The AIDs epidemic is cut off with 1/3 college/uni students from the Western World travelling to Africa/other povertised countries for volunteering. (What this does is it makes most people realise how bad it is)
The advent of digital media reinforces this, and some sort of government says they will raise taxes across the board by 0.01% and donate it all to providing education, aid, and shit under a new UN department, more countries donate to this, and rich celebrities all do charity shit to boost their PR, as well as companies.
Because news is a lot more interconnected and global genocide in countries is not allowed to be ignore by the public, the Gulf War never gets off due to mass peace protests.
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Super unlikely probably.
Pretty much the Western World isn't really relevant, they're living it large as it is, they don't need better lives.