WFUNA Millennium Project - Azerbaijan Future Studies Society

Transcription

2008 STATE OF THE FUTURE
WFUNA Millennium Project
2008
STATE OF THE FUTURE
JEROME C. GLENN, THEODORE J. GORDON,
AND ELIZABETH FLORESCU
While it is not possible to predict the future, the 2008 State of the Future report enables us to
think analytically about crucial global challenges, such as environmental security.
Hans Blix, President, WFUNA, and former Director-General, IAEA
The 2008 State of the Future continues its excellent annual tradition of providing a
comprehensive, insightful, and highly readable review of issues and options facing global
decisionmakers.
Mohan Munasinghe, Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
The Millennium Project and its State of the Future report represent best practice on how
collective intelligence across borders and sectors can be focused on critical global challenges
and opportunities. The enhanced participation of developing nations (especially in Africa) in
such futures outlook is essential to our shared future.
Olive Shisana, CEO, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa
Success for policymakers depends upon having some ability to anticipate the consequences of
their actions. The insights that the State of the Future provides hold great appeal in this regard.
Ali M. Abbasov, Minister of Communications and Information Technologies of
the Republic of Azerbaijan
An important commitment of any government is to look at the future with responsibility. The
2008 State of the Future and the Millennium Project research and foresight work are necessary
in order to aim at ambitious social goals and to commit ourselves to achieve them.
Enrique Peña Nieto, Constitutional Governor of the State of Mexico
The State of the Future challenges all of us working on the global convergence of ICT to
improve knowledge-based governance worldwide.
Goran Radman, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation––South East Europe
The 15 Global Challenges updated annually continue to be the best introduction by far to the key
issues of the early 21st century.
Michael Marien, editor, Future Survey
The State of the Future provides unique political, economic, and social insights into the
progress the world is making through the SOFI (State of the Future Index) and increasingly
clear perspectives into the 15 Global Challenges humanity must learn how to mitigate and
manage as we continue to evolve into our mutual future.
John J. Gottsman, Chair, World Future Society
The 2008 State of the Future is a “must read” if you want to stay in the hub of the wheel of
world future issues.
Kazuo Mizuta, Professor, Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan
Nine of the eleven annual State of the Future reports were selected by Future Survey as among
the year’s best books on the future.
ISBN: 978-0-9818941-0-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 98-646672
© 2008 Millennium Project, WFUNA
4421 Garrison Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20016-4055 U.S.A.
The 2008 State of the Future is not an official document of the UN or the World Federation of
UN Associations. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the World Federation of UN
Associations or the national UN Associations around the world. The content is the result of
research conducted with those listed in the Appendix A of this report.
Print Section—Table of Contents
The 2008 State of the Future is composed of two parts: print and CD. This print book contains
the executive summary of each of the studies conducted in 2007–08. The enclosed CD of about
6,300 pages contains the cumulative work of the Millennium Project since 1996 and details of
the studies included in this print section.
FOREWORD
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY……………………………………………………………………………1
1. GLOBAL CHALLENGES………………………………………………………………………..11
2. STATE OF THE FUTURE INDEX………………………………………………………………...43
3. REAL-TIME DELPHI TECHNIQUE……………………………………………………………..55
4. GOVERNMENT FUTURE STRATEGY UNITS AND SOME
POTENTIALS FOR INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIC COORDINATION………………………59
5. GLOBAL ENERGY COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE……………………………………………...71
6. EMERGING ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY ISSUES…………………………………………….83
APPENDIX
Millennium Project Participants Demographics…………………………….……………...97
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS……………………………………………………………...100
LIST OF FIGURES AND BOXES………………………………………………………………….102
The Table of Contents of the CD section appears on the next page.
CD Section—Table of Contents
See preceding page for Table of Contents of the Print Section
The enclosed CD of about 6,300 pages contains the cumulative work of the Millennium Project
since 1996 and details of the studies included in this print section.
Executive Summary (10 pages)
1. Global Challenges (1,200 pages)
2. State of the Future Index Section
2.1 Global SOFI (285 pages)
2.2 National SOFIs (105 pages)
2.3 Global Challenges Assessment (94 pages)
3. Global Scenarios
3.1 Normative Scenario to the Year 2050 (21 pages)
3.2 Exploratory Scenarios (41 pages)
3.3 Very Long-Range Scenarios—1,000 years (23 pages)
3.4 Counterterrorism—Scenarios, Actions, and Policies (40 pages)
3.5 Science and Technology 2025 Global Scenarios (21 pages)
3.6 Global Energy Scenarios 2020 (103 pages)
3.7 Middle East Peace Scenarios (91 pages)
4. Governance-related Studies
4.1 Government Future Strategy Units and Some Potentials for
International Strategic Coordination (20 pages)
4.2 Global Goals for the Year 2050 (24 pages)
4.3 World Leaders on Global Challenges (42 pages)
5. Science and Technology
5.1 Future S&T Management and Policy Issues (400 pages)
5.2 Nanotechnology: Future Military Environmental Health Considerations (21 pages)
6. Global Energy Collective Intelligence (20 pages)
7. Education and Learning 2030 (59 pages)
8. Measuring and Promoting Sustainable Development
8.1 Measuring Sustainable Development (61 pages)
8.2 Quality and Sustainability of Life Indicators (9 pages)
8.3 Partnership for Sustainable Development (48 pages)
8.4 A Marshall Plan for Haiti (12 pages)
9. Environmental Security
9.1 Emerging Environmental Security Issues (675 pages)
9.2 Environmental Security: Emerging International Definitions, Perceptions, and Policy
Considerations (42 pages)
9.3 Environmental Security: UN Doctrine for Managing Environmental Issues in Military
Actions (113 pages)
9.4 Environmental Crimes in Military Actions and the International Criminal Court (ICC)
—UN Perspectives (31 pages)
9.5 Environmental Security and Potential Military Requirements (44 pages)
10. Future Ethical Issues (69 pages)
11. Factors Required for Successful Implementation of Futures Research
in Decisionmaking (55 pages)
Appendices (2,600 pages)
Appendix A: Millennium Project Participants
Appendix B: State of the Future Index Section
Appendix C: Global Scenarios
Appendix D: Science and Technology
Appendix E: Global Energy Collective Intelligence
Appendix F: Government Future Strategy Units
Appendix G: Education and Learning 2030
Appendix H: Global Ethics
Appendix I: Global Goals for the Year 2050
Appendix J: World Leaders on Global Challenges
Appendix K: Environmental Security Studies
Appendix L: Measuring and Promoting Sustainable Development
Appendix M: Factors Required for Successful Implementation of
Futures Research in Decisionmaking
Appendix N: Real-Time Delphi Process
Appendix O: Annotated Bibliography of About 700 Scenario Sets
Appendix P: Other Annotated Bibliographies:
Ethics-Related Organizations
Global Energy Scenarios and Related Research
Women/Gender Organizations
Appendix R: Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of the State of the Future
and the Millennium Project
Appendix S: Publications of the Millennium Project
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Millennium Project Node Chairs
The Millennium Project interconnects global and local perspectives through its Nodes (groups of
individuals and institutions).
Argentina
Miguel Angel Gutierrez
Latin American Center for Globalization and Prospective
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Australia
Charles Brass
The Futures Foundation
Melbourne, Australia
Azerbaijan
Reyhan Huseynova
Azerbaijan Future Studies Society
Baku, Azerbaijan
Ali M. Abbasov
Minister of Comm. & IT
Baku, Azerbaijan
Brazil
Arnoldo José de Hoyos and Rosa Alegria
São Paulo Catholic University
São Paulo, Brazil
Brussels-Area
Philippe Destatte
The Destree Institute
Namur, Belgium
Canada
David Harries
Canadian Defence Academy
Kingston, ON, Canada
Central Europe
Pavel Novacek
Charles University
Prague, Czech Republic
Ivan Klinec
Institute for Forecasting
Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Chile
Héctor Casanueva
Instituto de Globalización y Prospectiva (IGP)
University Miguel de Cervantes
Santiago de Chile, Chile
China
Zhouying Jin
Academy of Social Sciences
Beijing, China
Egypt
Kamal Zaki Mahmoud Sheer
Egyptian-Arab Futures Research Association
Cairo, Egypt
Finland
Juha Kaskinen
Finland Futures Academy, Futures Research Centre
Turku, Finland
France
Saphia Richou
Prospective-Foresight Network
Paris, France
Germany
Cornelia Daheim
Z_punkt GmbH The Foresight Company
Cologne, Germany
Gulf Region
Ismail Al-Shatti
Office of the Prime Minister
Kuwait, Kuwait
India
Anandhavalli Mahadevan
Mohan K. Tikku
Madurai Kamaraj University Futurist / Journalist
Madurai, India
New Delhi, India
Iran
Mohsen Bahrami
Amir Kabir University of Technology
Tehran, Iran
Israel
Yair Sharan and Aharon Hauptman
Interdisciplinary Center for Technological Analysis and Forecasting
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel
Italy
Enrico Todisco
Sapienza University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Antonio Pacinelli
University G. D’Annunzio
Pescara, Italy
Japan
Shinji Matsumoto
CSP Corporation
Tokyo, Japan
Mexico
Concepción Olavarrieta
Nodo Mexicano. El Proyecto Del Milenio, A.C.
Mexico City, Mexico
Peru
Claudio Herzka
Instituto Peruano de Administración de Empresas
Lima, Peru
Russia
Nadezhda Gaponenk
Russian Institute for
Economy, Policy and Law
Moscow, Russia
Silicon Valley
John J. Gottsman
Clarity Group
Palo Alto CA, USA
Slovenia
Blaz Golob
Bled Forum on Europe
Ljubljana, Slovenia
South Africa
Geci Karuri
Human Sciences Res. Council
Pretoria, South Africa
South Korea
Youngsook Park
UN Future Forum
Seoul, Korea
Renat Perelet
Institute for Systems Analysis
Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, Russia
Turkey
Alper Alsan
Siemens A.S., and All Futurists Association
Istanbul, Turkey
United Arab Emirates
Hind Almualla
Knowledge and Human Development Authority
Dubai, UAE
United Kingdom
Jonathan Carr-West
The Royal Society for the Encouragement of
Arts, Manufactures & Commerce
London, United Kingdom
Venezuela
José Cordeiro
Sociedad Mundial del Futuro Venezuela
Caracas, Venezuela
Experimental Cyber-Node
Frank Catanzaro
Arcturus Research & Design Group
Maui, Hawaii
The Millennium Project of the World Federation of the United Nations Associations was
sponsored in its 2007–08 research program by:
•
Applied Materials
•
Army Environmental Policy Institute, U.S. Army
•
Azerbaijan Ministry of Communications
•
Deloitte & Touche, LLP
•
Foundation for the Future
•
Government of the Republic of Korea (via UN Future Forum)
•
The Hershey Company
•
Rockefeller Foundation
•
UNESCO
•
World Bank (via World Perspectives, Inc)
with in-kind support from:
•
CIM Engineering
•
Smithsonian Institution
•
UNESCO
•
World Future Society
Special thanks to Deloitte & Touche, LLP: 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of their continuous
sponsorship of the Millennium Project.
This is the twelfth report in an annual series intended to provide a context for global thinking and
improved understanding of global issues, opportunities, challenges, and strategies.
The purposes of the Millennium Project are to assist in organizing futures research, improve
thinking about the future, and make that thinking available through a variety of media for
consideration in policymaking, advanced training, public education, and feedback, ideally in
order to accumulate wisdom about potential futures.
The Project is designed to provide an independent global capacity that is interdisciplinary,
interinstitutional, and multicultural for early alert and analysis of long-range issues,
opportunities, challenges, and strategies.
The Project is not intended to be a one-time study of the future but to provide an ongoing
capacity as an intellectually, geographically, and institutionally dispersed think tank.
Feedback on this work is welcome and will help shape the next State of the Future.
Previous State of the Future reports are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Korean,
Persian, and Spanish. See www.millennium-project.org, “Books and Reports.”
Readers of the State of the Future may also be interested in the Futures Research Methodology
Version 2.0 CD, which is a collection of 27 chapters about how to explore the future.
www.stateofthefuture.org
Millennium Project Planning Committee
Alper Alsan, Siemens A.S. and All Futurists Association of Turkey, Istanbul, Turkey
Ismail Al-Shati, Senior Advisor, Office of the Prime Minister, Government of Kuwait, Kuwait
Mohsen Bahrami, Amir Kabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Eleonora Barbieri Masini, Gregorian University, Rome, Italy
Jérôme Bindé, Director, Office of Analysis and Forecasting, UNESCO, Paris, France
Peter Bishop, Futures Studies, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
Charles Brass, Chair, Futures Foundation, Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan Carr-West, The Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, London, UK
Héctor Casanueva, University Miguel de Cervantes, Santiago de Chile, Chile
Frank Catanzaro, Arcturus Research & Design Group, Maui, Hawaii, USA
José Cordeiro, Sociedad Mundial del Futuro Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela
Catherine Cosgrove, Policy Director, Liberal Party of Québec, Montréal, Canada
George Cowan, Founder, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM, USA
Cornelia Daheim, Z_punkt GmbH The Foresight Company, Essen, Germany
Francisco Dallmeier, Biodiversity, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA
Philippe Destatte, Director General, The Destree Institute, Namur, Wallonia, Belgium
Elizabeth Florescu, Director of Research, WFUNA Millennium Project, Calgary AB, Canada
Nadezhda Gaponenko, Russian Institute for Economy, Policy and Law, Moscow, Russia
Jerome C. Glenn, Director, WFUNA Millennium Project, Washington DC, USA
Michel Godet, Conservatoire d’Arts et Métiers, Paris, France
Blaz Golob, Director, South-East Europe Centre for e-Governance, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Theodore J. Gordon, Senior Fellow, WFUNA Millennium Project, Old Lyme CT, USA
John J. Gottsman, President, Clarity Group, Atherton CA, USA
Miguel A. Gutierrez, Director, Latin American Center for Globalization and Prospective,
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hazel Henderson, Futurist, Author, and Consultant, St. Augustine FL, USA
Claudio Herzka, Chair, Instituto Peruano de Administración de Empresas, Lima, Peru
Arnoldo José de Hoyos Guevara, PUC-SP São Paulo Catholic Univ., São Paulo, Brazil
Reyhan Huseynova, President, Azerbaijan Future Studies Society, Baku, Azerbaijan
Zhouying Jin, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China
Geci Karuri, Chief Research Manager, Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa
Juha Kaskinen, Director, Finland Futures Academy, Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku,
Finland
Anandhavalli Mahadevan, Chair, Futures Research Program, Madurai Kamaraj University,
Madurai, India
Kamal Zaki Mahmoud Sheer, Secretary-General, Egyptian-Arab Futures Research Association,
Cairo, Egypt
Shinji Matsumoto, President, CSP Corporation, Tokyo, Japan
Hind Al Mualla, Knowledge and Human Development Authority, Dubai, UAE
Pavel Novacek, Palacky University, Olomouc, and Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Concepción Olavarrieta, President, Nodo Mexicano. El Proyecto Del Milenio, A.C., Mexico City,
Mexico
Youngsook Park, President, UN Future Forum, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Charles Perrottet, Principal, The Futures Strategy Group, Glastonbury CT, USA
Cristina Puentes-Markides, Pan American Health Organization, Washington DC, USA
David Rejeski, Director, Foresight and Governance, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC,
USA
Saphia Richou, President, Prospective-Foresight Network, Paris, France
Stanley Rosen, President, Association for Strategic Planning, Los Angeles CA, USA
Mihaly Simai, Director, World Institute of Economics, Budapest, Hungary
Rusong Wang, Chinese Academy of Natural Sciences, Beijing, China
Pera Wells, Secretary General, World Federation of UN Associations, New York, USA
Paul Werbos, Program Director, National Science Foundation, Arlington VA, USA
Sponsor Representatives
Gary Blumenthal, World Perspectives, Inc, USA
William Coplin, Applied Materials, USA
William Cosgrove, UNESCO World Water Scenarios project, France
Claudia Juech, Rockefeller Foundation, USA
John Fittipaldi, Army Environmental Policy Institute, USA
Walter Kistler and Bob Citron, Foundation for the Future, USA
Eduard Martin, The Hershey Company, USA
Youngsook Park, UN Future Forum, Republic of Korea
Michael Stoneking, Deloitte & Touche LLP, USA
Acknowledgments
The 38 chairs and co-chairs of the 31 Millennium Project Nodes, plus their members who help
select participants, translate questionnaires, initiate projects, and conduct interviews, were
essential for the success of the research conducted in this and previous years.
Theodore Gordon, Jerome Glenn, and Elizabeth Florescu were partners in the research for this
volume, with research and administrative assistance from Hayato Kobayashi and John Young.
Special acknowledgment is given for Theodore Gordon’s quantitative and conceptual leadership
in the further development and assessments of the State of the Future Index in Chapter 2 and the
Real-Time Delphi in Chapter 3; for Jerome Glenn’s leadership on the cumulative research on the
15 Global Challenges in Chapter 1, the government future strategy units in Chapter 4, and the
global collective intelligence in Chapter 5; and for Elizabeth Florescu’s research and
organization of environmental security issues in Chapter 6. Principal members of the
environmental security scanning team who prepared the monthly reports summarized in Chapter
6 were Jerome Glenn, Elizabeth Florescu, John Young, Theodore Gordon, Robert Jarrett, Peter
Rzeszotarski, Gregor Wolbring, and Hayato Kobayashi.
Linda Starke provided editing of the print section. Pera Wells contributed important suggestions,
and John Young provided proofreading assistance for several sections in both the print and CD
sections. Elizabeth Florescu did the production and layout of both the print and CD sections of
this publication, and Octavian Florescu designed the cover.
A special thank you to Susan Jette for her continued work on the annotated scenario bibliography
in the CD; to Peter Yim, Jack Park, Frank Catanzaro, John Young, Jim Disbrow, Evan Faber,
Robert Steele, John Gottsman, and Jeff Conklin for their contributions to the development of
GENIS in Chapter 5; to Peter Yim, President of CIM Engineering, Inc., for hosting the Project’s
Web site and internal email lists; and to Frank Catanzaro for experimental collaborative software
applications. Those who contributed to the Government Future Strategy Units Chapter included
Stephen Aldridge, Rosa Alegria, Alper Alsan, Nathalie Bassaler, Charles Brass, Philip Chapman,
José Cordeiro, Cornelia Daheim, Arnoldo José de Hoyos, Elizabeth Florescu, Miguel Angel
Gutierrez, Barbara Haering, Reyhan Huseynova, Zhouying Jin, Geci Karuri, Juha Kaskinen,
Hayato Kobayashi, Pirjo Kyläkoski, Mats Lindgren, Magdalena Sofia Frech López, Aaron
Maniam, Pavel Novacek, Erzsebet Novaky, Concepción Olavarrieta, Robert Orr, Youngsook
Park, Adrian Pop, Saphia Richou, Fabiana Scapolo, Yair Sharan, Kamal Zaki Mahmoud Sheer,
Mohan K. Tikku, and John Young.
The Interns who helped with the Millennium Project in general and updated and improved the 15
Global Challenges were Déborah Alimi, Lisa Crawford, Evan Faber, Kimia Ghalambor, Kurt
Krausse, Anicka Lewis, David Medina, Eric Nie, Theodora Panousakis, Choung-kyu Ryu, and
Behrang Tirgari. We wish them all well in their future careers.
Contributions to update and improve the descriptions of the 15 Global Challenges were received
from Janna Anderson, Charles Brass, Dennis Bushnell, Catherine Cosgrove, Cornelia Daheim,
Elizabeth Florescu, Nadezhda Gaponenko, Alfred P. Gbomina Jr., Theodore Gordon, John
Gottsman, Miguel Gutierrez, Barbara Haering, Susan Jette, Zhouying Jin, Hayato Kobayashi,
Eleonora Masini, Ivana Milojevic, Tom Murphy, Concepción Olavarrieta, Jack Park, Sylvie LG
Pollard, Stan Rosen, Nicoleta Topoleanu, Gereon Uerz, Paul Werbos, Kathy Wittig, Gregor
Wolbring, Farhan Yazdani, and John Young.
Special thanks to the sponsors of the Global Millennium Prize and the Millennium Award in
Mexico: Hewlett-Packard Mexico, Grupo Nestlé México, Gobierno del Estado de México,
Ibope-Agb, Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Social, Fundación Mexicana para la Salud, and
Pandilla Telmex; to the Ministry of Communications of Azerbaijan for sponsoring the
Millennium Award in Azerbaijan; and to the UN Future Forum from Republic of Korea and the
Slovenian Research Agency for sponsoring the winners’ travel to the awards ceremony.
Foreword
The purpose of futures research is to systematically explore, create, and test both possible and
desirable futures to improve decisions. Decisionmaking is affected by globalization; hence,
global futures research will be needed to inform decisions made by individuals, groups, and
institutions.
Just as the person on top of the mast on old sailing ships used to point out the rocks and safe
channels to the captain below for the smooth running of the ship through uncharted waters, so
too futurists with foresight systems for the world can point out problems and opportunities to
leaders around the world. The Millennium Project is one such system.
Because the issues and solutions of our time are increasingly transnational, transinstitutional, and
trandisciplinary, the Millennium Project was created as a global participatory think tank of
futurists, scholars, scientists, business planners, and policymakers who work for international
organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities.
Futures research has had an uncomfortable relationship with most academic research. As the
latter advances, it tends to narrow its scope of study. In contrast, futures research tends to
broaden its scope of study as it advances, to take into account future possibilities. It is not a
science; the outcome of futures studies depends on the methods used and the skills of the
practitioners. Its methods can be highly quantitative (such as the State of the Future Index in
Chapter 2), a combination of quantitative and qualitative (such as the Real-Time Delphi
described in Chapter 3), or primarily analytical (such as the decisionmaking systems suggested in
Chapters 4 and 5, and the scanning that produced the emerging environmental security issues in
Chapter 6). It helps to provide a framework to better understand the present and to expand
mental horizons (such as the Global Challenges described in Chapter 1).
The 2008 State of the Future provides an additional eye on global change. This is the twelfth
State of the Future report. It contains the 12-year cumulative research and judgments of over
2,500 thoughtful and creative people. About 230 people participated in last year’s studies. The
institutional and geographic demographics of the participants can be found in the Appendix, and
the full lists of participants are available in Appendix A in the CD of this report.
The annual State of the Future is a utility from which people can draw information and ideas to
be adapted to their unique needs. It provides a global strategic landscape that public and private
policymakers may use to improve their own strategic decisionmaking and global understanding.
Business executives can use the research as input to their planning. University professors,
futurists, and other consultants may find this information useful in teaching and research.
Sections of previous reports have been used as university and high school texts.
The 2008 State of the Future comes in two parts: this print edition of a series of distilled versions
of the 2007–08 research and the enclosed CD with complete details of the Millennium Project’s
research this year and over the past several years. Each chapter of the print part version should be
considered as the executive summary of the respective chapter in the CD.
The CD version of the report, which contains over 6,300 pages, is designed to serve as a
reference document. For example, the print Chapter 1 on the 15 Global Challenges allocates two
pages to each Challenge, while the CD devotes more than 1,000 pages to them. On the CD, each
Challenge has a comprehensive overview, more detailed regional views, suggested indicators to
assess progress or lack thereof on addressing the challenge, and a set of actions and views about
those actions suggested from previous Global Lookout Panels. The statements do not represent a
consensus because they are a distillation of a range of views from hundreds of participants rather
than an essay by a single author. We sought and welcomed a diversity of opinions. Hence, some
of the issues raised and recommended actions seem contradictory. In addition, there does not
appear to be a cause-and-effect relationship in some of the statements, and some sound like
political clichés, but these are the views of the participants that may be useful to consider in the
policy process. Nevertheless, it does present a more coherent overview of the global situation
and prognosis than we have found elsewhere.
The CD can also be used to search for the particular items needed in customized work. For
example, all the African sections on each of the 15 Challenges could be assembled into one
paper by cutting and pasting (and possibly adding to the content by searching for results on
Africa in other chapters), providing one report on Global Challenges and Issues for Africa.
The Millennium Project’s diversity of opinions and global view is ensured by the Nodes, groups
of individuals and organizations that interconnect global and local perspectives. They identify
participants, conduct interviews, translate and distribute questionnaires, and conduct research
and conferences. It is through their contributions that the world picture of this report and indeed
all of the Millennium Project’s work emerges.
Through its research, publications, conferences, and Nodes, the Millennium Project helps to
nurture an international collaborative spirit of free inquiry and feedback for increasing collective
intelligence to improve social, technical, and environmental viability for human development.
Feedback on any sections of the book is most welcome at <[email protected]> and may help shape
the next State of the Future.
Jerome C. Glenn
Director
Millennium Project
Theodore J. Gordon
Senior Fellow
Millennium Project
Elizabeth Florescu
Director of Research
Millennium Project
What Is New in This Year’s Report
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Both the short and the long versions of the 15 Global Challenges were updated.
Climate change has received increased emphasis in Challenge 1 on Sustainable
Development.
The State of the Future Index was improved for enhancing its capabilities to identify
promising policies and actions, and it is being used to assess the use of the International
Futures econometric model for automatically computing global and national SOFIs.
SOFIs were computed for the Republic of Korea and for South Africa.
The Real-Time Delphi technique was further developed for increasing its analytical
capabilities, and a user-friendly interface was developed for the questionnaires’ easy setup. The new features were successfully tested in studies for assessing SOFI variables and
for collecting expert views for studies conducted by other organizations (e.g., UNESCO,
WFUNA, and the World Bank).
The Government Future Strategy Units chapter presents brief overviews of 10
government units with suggestions for upgrading their capabilities and international
coordination. Chapter 4 in the CD has the overviews of over 30 countries’ future strategy
systems.
The Global Energy Collective Intelligence chapter provides basic concepts and software
options for a collective intelligence system to support political decisionmaking, research,
and public understanding. The concepts and software can be adapted for other areas such
as climate change, water, and the other challenges described in Chapter 1.
More than 200 items related to environmental security were identified, assessed, and
organized over the past year. A distilled version is presented in Chapter 6 and the full text
of over 1,100 items identified since 2002 is available in CD Chapter 9.1.
The CD includes details and research that support the print version; it also includes the
complete text of previous Millennium Project research:

Global exploratory, normative, and very-long range scenarios, along with an
introduction describing their development.

Three Middle East Peace scenarios based on a three-round Delphi study.
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Science and Technology scenarios and the two-year supporting study.
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Four Global Energy Scenarios and supporting study.
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An analysis of the statements by world leaders delivered at the UN Millennium
Summit in 2000.
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Environmental security definitions, threats, related treaties; UN military doctrine
on environmental issues; potential military environmental crimes and the
International Criminal Court; changing environmental security military
requirements in 2010–25.
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Two studies to create indexes and maps of the status of sustainable development
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and an international review of the concept of creating a “Partnership for
Sustainable Development.”
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Study of factors required for successful implementation of futures research in
decisionmaking.
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An Annotated Scenarios Bibliography of over 700 scenarios or scenario sets.
Executive Summary
The future continues to get better for most of the world, but a series of tipping points could
drastically alter global prospects.
Half the world is vulnerable to social instability and violence due to rising food and energy
prices, failing states, falling water tables, climate change, decreasing water-food-energy supply
per person, desertification, and increasing migrations due to political, environmental, and
economic conditions.
International Alert in the U.K. lists 102 vulnerable countries. The Center for Naval Analyses in
the U.S. identifies 46 countries (2.7 billion people) at high risk of armed conflict, and an
additional 56 states (1.2 billion people) at risk of political instability. By mid-2008 there were 14
wars (conflicts with 1,000 or more deaths)—one fewer than in 2007. These wars were in Africa
(5), Asia (4), the Americas (2), the Middle East (2), and worldwide anti-extremism (1).
FAO estimates that 37 countries face a crisis over food due to increased demand from rapidly
developing nations, high oil prices, the use of crops for biofuels, high fertilizer costs, global
stocks at 25-year lows, and market speculation. Basic food prices are doubling around the world.
Prices of cereals, for example, including wheat and rice, are up 129% since 2006. With nearly 3
billion people making $2 or less per day, long-term global social conflict seems inevitable
without more serious food policies, useful scientific breakthroughs, and dietary changes.
However, advances in science, technology, education, economics, and management seem
capable of making the world work far better than it does today. Consider the extraordinary waste
of human talent through violence, neglect, poor education, corruption, and other forms of
inhumanity. Consider the enormous waste of investments into entertainment and media focused
on the worst behaviors of humanity, products that make us unhealthy and actions that pit one
group against another. Surely cutting back on such waste could release the resources and talent
needed to make the world work better for all.
What if the world—led by the EU—pressured the U.S. and China to create a global energy R&D
strategy with an Apollo-like goal to turn around greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years? What if
governments declared increasing intelligence as a national educational goal? What if politicians
campaigned on how to answer the 15 Global Challenges in Chapter 1? What if we did not waste
so much time and talent on trivia?
After 12 years of the Millennium Project’s global futures research, it is increasingly clear that the
world has the resources to address our common challenges. Coherence and direction are lacking.
Ours is the first generation with the means for many to know the world as a whole, identify
global improvement systems, and seek to improve such systems. We are the first people to act
via Internet with like-minded individuals around the world. We have the ability to connect the
right ideas to resources and people to help address our global and local challenges. This is a
unique time in history. Mobile phones, the Internet, international trade, language translation, and
jet planes are giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global
strategies to improve the prospects for humanity.
Climate change cannot be turned around without a global strategy. International organized crime
cannot be stopped without a global strategy. Individuals creating designer diseases and causing
massive deaths cannot be stopped without a global strategy. It is time for global strategic systems
to be upgraded to help make important transitions such as from freshwater agriculture to
saltwater agriculture, from gasoline cars to electric cars, from animal production to animal-less
meat production, and from weapons expenditures to increased environment and health
expenditures.
Government strategy units could be connected with their counterparts in UN agencies and
augmented by counterparts in multinational corporations, universities, and NGOs to produce a
global collective intelligence that can create, update, and coordinate global strategies. The
potential loss of national sovereignty that such a system might create is outweighed by the
potential loss of democracy to transnational organized crime, the costs of climate change, death
and economic loss from single individuals deploying bioweapons, and mass migrations due to
falling water tables and other causes. This does not mean world government; it means world
governance—civilizations working better by cooperating with some common rules. Chapter 4
reviews government future strategy units and suggests that it is time to begin to connect such
units in governments and UN systems to share information in order to develop more coherent
policies to address the global challenges.
Many of the world’s decisionmaking processes are inefficient, slow, and ill informed, especially
when given the new demands from increasing complexity, globalization, and the acceleration of
change. Transparent systems, democratization, and interactive media are involving more people
in decisionmaking, which further increases complexity.
Fortunately, the world is moving toward ubiquitous computing with collective intelligence for
just-in-time knowledge to inform decisions. Arguably, creating collective intelligences for
subjects like energy, water, even whole countries, and eventually the world is far too difficult or
maybe impossible, yet it can also be argued that it will be increasingly difficult to improve the
world without collective intelligence. The world food crisis and climate change have focused
international attention on creating global long-term and short-term strategies to address hunger
and global warming. So the time may be ripe to upgrade global policy and decisionmaking
systems.
Some Factors to Consider
World population was 6.677 billion as of July 2008 and growing at 1.16% per year. The
economy grew 4.9% in 2007 to $66 trillion (PPP—the IMF has recalculated the measures of
PPP, purchasing power parity) or to $55 trillion at official exchange rates; hence, world per
capita income increased just under 4%.
China has made extraordinary gains this year. It passed the United States to become the world
leader in Internet users, passed Japan to become the second largest economy and second largest
auto producer in the world, passed the United States to become the second largest trader behind
Germany, and continues to have the largest number of mobile phones in the world. (Note that
China changed the definition of an Internet user from someone who uses the Internet an hour per
week to someone who uses the Internet once per six months.) However, China’s water pollution
and water scarcity, inadequate energy supply, separatist movements, and growing income gaps
present serious impediments to its future development and perhaps stability.
The digital gap continues to close around the world. The Internet is evolving from a passive
information repository (Web 1.0), to a user-generated and participatory system (Web 2.0), and
eventually to a more intelligent partner with collective intelligence and just-in-time knowledge
(Web 3.0), eventually connecting humanity with much of the built environment. About 1.4
billion people (21% of the world) are connected to the Internet, with 37.6% of them in Asia,
27.1% in Europe, and 17.5% in North America. The Internet and mobile phones are merging,
increasing access to the world’s knowledge. There are 3.3 billion mobile phones active around
the world as of 2008. However, the deluge of video applications on the Internet has grown to
60% of all traffic and is growing so rapidly that the Internet will slow and may force many to
eventually skip it entirely and use direct computer-to-computer video file transfers, or it may
force a complete redesign of the Internet’s infrastructure to accommodate this new traffic profile.
The incidence of HIV/AIDS has begun to decline in Africa. World data continue to show that
HIV prevalence has leveled off (peaking in the late 1990s at over 3 million per year) and that
the number of new infections has fallen. (Measurement definitions have changed for HIV/AIDS,
however, explaining some of the lowered numbers during 2007.) But there are still serious
concerns about the infection rates in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The economies of developing countries have grown an average of over 7% annually for the past
five years. At these rates, world poverty will be cut by more than half between 2000 and 2015,
meeting the Millennium Development Goal, except in sub-Saharan Africa. The number of
extreme poor—those living under $1 a day—in the developing world declined by 278 million
between 1990 and 2004 and by a stunning 150 million in the last five years, at the same time that
the developing world’s population increased by 1 billion. Nevertheless, this still leaves nearly 3
billion people living on $2 or less per day—which is twice the entire population of the world in
1900. A strategic plan for a global partnership between rich and poor could use the strength of
free markets and rules based on global ethics to reduce the disparities that otherwise might grow
enough to accelerate economic migrations.
Nearly 40 new diseases have appeared in the last generation; 1,100 epidemic events were
verified by WHO over the past five years; we face 20 drug-resistant diseases today; and old
diseases have reemerged, such as cholera and yellow fever. More than one-third of all child
deaths occur during the first 28 days of life, and most of them are due to preventable causes
related to water quality.
Some 700 million people face water scarcity today. Without major interventions, this number
could grow to 3 billion by 2025. Water tables are falling on all continents, and 40% of humanity
depends on watersheds controlled by two or more countries. The world will need 50% more food
by 2013 and twice as much within 30 years. This means more water, land, and fertilizer—yet for
the past several years we have been consuming more than was being produced, and the factors
increasing food prices seem long-term. New agricultural approaches should be considered, such
as better rain-fed agriculture and irrigation management, genetic engineering for higher-yielding
crops, precision agriculture and aquaculture, drought-tolerant crop varieties, and saltwater
agriculture on coastlines to produce food for humans and animals, biofuels, and pulp for the
paper industry and to absorb CO2 while reducing the drain on freshwater agriculture and land.
The majority of agricultural water and land is used to grow animals. It is scientifically possible to
produce meat without growing animals; an animal rights group has offered $1 million to the first
producers of commercially viable animal meat without growing animals.
Meanwhile, CO2 emissions are increasing even faster—and the world is warming faster—than
the IPCC reported in 2007. Arctic sea ice has declined by about 10% in the past decade, and the
Arctic may be ice-free by 2030. Global warming continues to increase the acidity of the oceans,
creating dead zones and reducing its ability to absorb CO2. World leaders seem ready to create a
global compact to cut greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining economic growth.
The current world population of 6.7 billion is expected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050, peaking
soon afterward at 9.8 billion before falling to 5.5 billion by 2100, according to the UN’s lower
forecast. Scientific breakthroughs over the next 50 years are likely to change these forecasts,
giving people longer and more productive lives than most would believe possible today.
Nevertheless, global population is changing from high mortality and high fertility to low
mortality and low fertility, requiring changes in retirement and medical systems. Richer
populations are aging more rapidly than poorer regions, although poorer regions are also aging.
There are fewer Europeans today than last year; its working-age population is shrinking,
immigrant populations are increasing, and cultural conflicts continue. African and Arab states
have the highest population growth rates at 2.1%. China’s one-child policy will lead to an aging
society in the next generation. The China National Committee on Aging forecasts that between
2030 and 2050 there will be only two workers for every retiree—down from the current ratio of
six workers to one retiree. Japan expects robots to help it deal with a shrinking and aging
population.
Freedom House’s world review found that democracy and freedom declined over the last two
years in one-fifth of the world’s countries. Four times as many countries showed declines in this
measure during 2007 as showed improvements, and press freedom continued a six-year negative
trend across the world, with increased intimidation of journalists and rising control of media in
the hands of a few in business or government.
Total military expenditures are about $1.3 trillion per year. There are an estimated 20,000 active
nuclear weapons in the world, approximately 1,700 tons of highly enriched uranium, and 500
tons of separated plutonium that could produce nuclear weapons. Links between terrorists and
organized crime are worrisome, especially considering that on average there were 150 reports of
unauthorized use of nuclear or radioactive materials to IAEA per year between 2004 and 2007.
Illicit trade is estimated to be over $1 trillion per year. McAfee puts cybercrime at $105 billion.
These figures do not include extortion or organized crime’s part of the $1 trillion in bribes that
the World Bank estimates are paid annually or its part of the estimated $1.5–6.5 trillion annually
in laundered money. Hence the total income could be well over $2 trillion—about twice all the
military budgets in the world. Governments can be understood as a series of decision points, with
some people in those points vulnerable to very large bribes. Decisions could be bought and sold
like heroin, making democracy an illusion. Organized crime continues to grow in the absence of
a comprehensive, integrated global counter-strategy. The United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime says, “The links between drug trafficking and other forms of transnational organized
crime call for a more integrated approach to address this nexus.”
In parallel to all these social and economic pressures, science and technology continue to make
extraordinary advances. Glycerol nucleic acid, the synthetic analog of DNA, was created by selfassembled nanostructures to help make future forms of life; the brain activity from a monkey in
North Carolina made a humanoid robot walk on a treadmill in Japan; brain-computer interfaces
now let people move artificial and robotic limbs, steer wheelchairs, and act in virtual realities
around the world; over a million industrial robots are working today; a cloned human embryo
has been produced from a skin cell, which could one day lead to creating our own replacement
body parts. A baby was born from a frozen egg, fertilized by a frozen sperm, forming an embryo
that was also frozen before being transferred to the mother. Electrochemical separation of carbon
from the air to produce fuel is being explored.
A computer can now perform 1.144 thousand trillion floating point operations per second,
supporting computational science’s new simulations to improve medicine, materials, climate
predictions, and other insights into nature. Scanning electron microscopes can see 0.01
nanometers (the distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron). Photons have been
slowed and accelerated to learn how to create optical computers; synthetic chromosomes have
been created from laboratory chemicals; quantum phenomena and entanglement are being
probed; experiments to teleport individual photons are being conducted; the relationship of dark
energy to gravity is being explored; and a 15-millimeter-diameter, femtosecond laser
“microscalpel” can remove single cells without damaging nearby cells. The acceleration of S&T
innovations, improved communications among scientists, and future synergies among
nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science will
fundamentally change the prospects for civilization.
World energy demand could double in just 20 years. Without major technological changes,
fossil fuels will provide 81% of primary energy demand by 2030. If so, then large-scale carbon
capture, storage, and reuse should become a top priority. The IEA projects oil demand to grow
nearly 40% from 2006 to 2030. Some argue that oil production is peaking and will end in 40–70
years. The dramatic jump in oil, gas, and coal prices is making renewable sources more
competitive.
Vast improvements in efficiencies, conservation, and tele-everything will help, but substitutes for
the current energy sources still have to be constructed, and the economic and population growth
of the next 50 years will still require increasing energy supplies. Since the major energy sources
eventually will run out and threaten future climate stability, massive investments into safe and
sustainable sources such as wind, geothermal, ground solar and space solar, and saltwater-based
biofuels are essential. Increasing nuclear power plants without solving waste problems is an
invitation to nuclear terrorism and could lead to environmental disasters. Building some 850 new
coal-fired power plants without carbon sequestration planned for operation by 2012 by the U.S.,
China, and India will accelerate global warming. Resistance to building coal power plants is
growing; 60 of 151 coal plant proposals in the U.S. were stopped by local or state governments
during 2007. Coal has doubled in price over the past year, and future carbon taxes will make it
less competitive with more sustainable sources.
December 2008 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, which has stimulated more than 60 treaties to protect individual freedom and dignity and
has inspired countless discussions about global ethics and human rights. The evidence is now
overwhelming that increasing government respect for human rights correlates with economic
development and that unethical business practices ultimately lower stock prices, productivity,
and profits. Unethical decisions and corrupt practices are increasingly exposed via news media,
blogs, mobile phone cameras, ethics commissions, and NGOs.
Collective responsibility for global ethics in decisionmaking is embryonic but growing. Global
ethics are also emerging around the world through the evolution of ISO standards and
international treaties that are defining the norms of civilization.
Closing the gap between rhetoric and reality of how women are treated by men around the world
is not yet a top priority. Although many of the norms on gender relations have found official
endorsement in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women and the Beijing Plan of Action, many countries still have laws and cultures that make
women second-class citizens and expose them to violence. Progress on women getting good jobs
in politics and business and equal salaries has been slow. Women in legislatures have increased
from 13.8% in 2000 to 18% in 2008. Women account for over 40% of the world’s workforce but
earn only 25% of the global income.
So is the future getting better or worse? And what areas should get more attention, investment,
and wise decisionmaking to improve the prospects for the world as a whole?
State of the Future Index
The State of the Future Index is a measure of the 10-year outlook for the future based on the
previous 20 years of historical data. It is constructed with key variables and forecasts that, in the
aggregate, depict whether the future promises to be better or worse. A set of 29 variables was
identified by an international panel of experts selected by the Millennium Project Nodes around
the world during a study conducted in 2006–07. Participants were asked to rate the variables,
give worst- and best-scenario estimates, suggest new variables to be included in the SOFI, and
suggest sources that could provide at least 20 years of historical data. Chapter 2 provides the full
list of variables and an explanation of the evolution and uses of SOFI.
Assessing the world’s key indicators over the past 20 years and projecting them for the next 10
gives us the basis for a report card for humanity’s future, showing where we are winning or
losing.
Box 1. Where Is Humanity Winning and Losing
Where we are winning:
Where we are losing:
• Life expectancy
• CO2 emissions
• Infant mortality
• Terrorism
• Literacy
• Corruption
• GDP/capita
• Global warming
• Conflict
• Voting population
• Internet users
• Unemployment
The global SOFI indicates that the future over the next 10 years is still getting better, although
not as rapidly as it did over the past 20 years. The alternative projections are based on the
potential occurrences of events that can alter the trends explained in Chapter 2.
Figure 1. SOFI 2007 with alternative projections by trend impact analysis
SOFIs can also be constructed for countries, cities, industries, or issues. An experiment was
conducted using the International Futures model of the University of Denver to demonstrate that
SOFIs could be computed for almost any country and compared periodically, country to country,
and across time in a given country as a gauge of performance and expectations. A tutorial on
how to construct a SOFI is available at www.mpcollab.org/learning/course/view.php?id=3.
Real-Time Delphi
Chapter 3 presents a relatively new and efficient method for collecting and synthesizing expert
opinions, called the Real-Time Delphi. The original Delphi method involved a series of
questionnaires, each building on the results of the previous questionnaire to identify consensus
among a panel of experts. Multiple rounds of questionnaires can take months to complete. The
RTD is designed to speed up the process while still maintaining the principle of anonymous
group feedback to bring forth the best thinking of the group.
The respondents participate by filling out an online questionnaire––both numerical and
qualitative––that is updated as responses are recorded. The respondents can––and are encouraged
to––revisit the questionnaire as many times as they want within a specific time period. If a leader
wanted to know the best thinking on an issue, top experts could be invited to sign on the RTD
Web site, add their judgments, and edit them on a continuous basis within a deadline in response
to other comments. The distribution of the group’s responses and the reasons they have provided
for their answers can be available immediately to the leader. The process can be synchronous or
asynchronous and, if implemented on an Internet site, can involve a worldwide panel. A tutorial
on how to use a Real-Time Delphi questionnaire was developed and is available at
www.mpcollab.org/learning/course/view.php?id=3.
Government Future Strategy Units and Potential Coordination
In order to make good national decisions, heads of state and government have to consider global
changes that are beyond their control. The acceleration of change makes this increasingly
difficult. As a result, presidents and prime ministers are creating future strategy or foresight units
to contribute to their national policy process. Chapter 4 presents brief overviews of 10 such units
(brief overviews of 30 governments future strategy systems are available in Chapter 4 of the
CD). Typically, the future strategy unit is placed within the office of the prime minister or
president of the country to integrate the futures research from other government sections and
external institutions. These units often manage a network of other executive councils and future
strategy units within ministries to provide inputs to national strategy.
The efficiency of these units might be improved by the use of the Real-Time Delphi to quickly
collect and synthesize best judgments, create national SOFIs, develop collective intelligence for
continuity between administrations, and better link these units with each other and their
counterparts in UN organizations to improve international strategic coordination.
Global Energy Collective Intelligence
The options to create and update national, global, and corporate energy strategies are so complex
and rapidly changing that it is almost impossible for decisionmakers to gather and understand the
information required to make and implement coherent policy. At the same time, the
environmental and social consequences of incoherent policies are so serious that a new global
system for the identification, analysis, assessment of possible consequences, and synthesis of
energy options for decisionmaking is urgently needed.
Chapter 5 presents the basic concepts and software ideas for a global energy collective
intelligence to help politicians, energy experts, and the general public understand the whole
energy picture and get “just-in-time” knowledge about specifics to lead to better questions and
decisions. The proposed Global Energy Network and Information System, or GENIS, would be
composed of two integrated elements:
•
The Global Energy Network, providing communications and collaboration capabilities
for a worldwide community of experts and others working on or concerned with energy
issues
•
The Global Energy Information System, a repository (knowledge base) and associated
interactive access facility for as much of the world’s total knowledge about energy
(actual content, pointers to external systems, and ability to mashup from other databases
into one integrated set of outputs) as can be accumulated.
The two components would work together to support a variety of needs, such as those for
politicians during energy hearings, for policy-makers creating national, bilateral, or multilateral
energy strategies, for businesses and universities supporting R&D, for media fact-checking, and
for the general public.
Environmental Security
The dramatic increase in world attention to climate change is helping more people understand
that the world’s environment is a matter of national and global security. Half the world is
vulnerable to social instability and violence due to numerous pressures. International
environmental governance is improving, and the technological ability to identify environmental
threats and crimes is becoming cost-effective through new sensors and communication systems.
Environmental damages created by people and organizations in the past are less likely to escape
detection and punishment in the future.
The Millennium Project defines environmental security as environmental viability for life
support, with three sub-elements:
• preventing or repairing military damage to the environment
• preventing or responding to environmentally caused conflicts
• protecting the environment due to its inherent moral value
Chapter 6 presents a summary of more than 200 events and emerging environmental security–
related issues organized around this definition that have been identified during the past year.
Over 1,100 items have been identified since this work began in August 2002. The full text of the
items and their sources can be found in the CD Chapter 9.1.
Environmental security analysis should include: the impacts of new kinds of weapons;
asymmetrical conflicts; increasing demands on natural resources; urbanization (which makes
more people dependent on vulnerable public utilities); impacts of environmental degradation and
climate change; continued advances in environmental law, with escalating environmental
litigation; and the globalization that is increasing interdependencies. In view of increased threats
of conflicts triggered by environmental factors, enforcement of international multilateral
agreements should be strengthened and more efforts should be oriented toward the
implementation and respect of the regulations, as well as toward developing a global
environmental consciousness.
It has been considered ridiculous to try and achieve health and security for all people. Equally
ridiculous today is thinking that one day an individual acting alone will not be able to create and
use a weapon of mass destruction or that there will not be serious pandemics as we crowd more
people and animal habitats into urban concentrations while easy transborder travel exists and
biodiversity is diminishing. The idealism of the welfare of one being the welfare of all could
become a pragmatic long-range approach to countering terrorism, keeping airports open, and
preventing destructive mass migrations and other potential threats to human security. Ridiculing
idealism is shortsighted, but idealism without the rigors of pessimism is misleading. We need
very hardheaded idealists who can look into the worse and best of humanity and can create and
implement strategies of success.
There are many answers to many problems, but there is so much extraneous information that it is
difficult to identify and concentrate on what is truly relevant. Since healthy democracies need
relevant information, and since democracy is becoming more global, the public will need
globally relevant information to sustain this trend. We hope the annual State of the Future reports
can help provide such information.
The insights in this twelfth year of the Millennium Project’s work as reported in this year’s State
of the Future can help decisionmakers and educators who fight against hopeless despair, blind
confidence, and ignorant indifference—attitudes that too often have blocked efforts to improve
the prospects for humanity.
15 Global Challenges
The 15 Global Challenges provide a framework to assess the global and local prospects for
humanity. The Challenges are interdependent: an improvement in one makes it easier to address
others; deterioration in one makes it harder to address others. Arguing whether one is more
important than another is like arguing that the human nervous system is more important than the
respiratory system.
Readers are invited to contribute their insights to improve the overview of these 15 global
challenges for next year’s edition. Please use the online forms at www.StateoftheFuture.org
(select “15 Global Challenges”).
1.
Global Challenges
Chapter 1 presents two-page descriptions of 15 Global Challenges that have been identified and
updated through an ongoing Delphi process and environmental scanning since 1996. These
Challenges are transnational in nature and transinstitutional in solution. They cannot be
addressed by any government or institution acting alone. They require collaborative action
among governments, international organizations, corporations, universities, NGOs, and creative
individuals. Although listed in sequence, Challenge 1 on sustainable development and climate
change is no more or less important than Challenge 15 on global ethics. There is greater
consensus about the global situation as expressed in these Challenges and the actions to address
them than is evident in the news media.
More detailed treatments of the Global Challenges are available in the CD’s Chapter 1, totaling
over 1,100 pages. For each Challenge, there is a more comprehensive overview, alternative
views or additional comments from participants on the overview, regional perspectives and
relevant information from recent literature, a set of actions with a range of views from interviews
with decisionmakers to address the challenge, additional actions and views on those actions, and
suggested indicators to measure progress or lack thereof on each Challenge.
Both print and CD versions are the cumulative and distilled range of views from over 2,500
participants. See the Appendix for the demographics of the participants and see the CD’s
Appendix A for the full list of participants. Full details of the questionnaires and interview
protocols that have been used from 1996 to 2008 to generate both the short and more detailed
treatments of these Challenges are available at www.millennium-project.org (select “Lookout
Studies”).
Some of the Figures used to illustrate progress and prospects for the Challenges use the State of
the Future Index calculations explained in Chapter 2 and detailed in the attached CD Chapter 2.
1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global
climate change?
CO2 emissions are increasing faster—and the world is warming faster—than the IPCC estimated.
Atmospheric CO2 is now 387 ppm, with increasing impacts around the world; hence, making
targets like the EU’s for 550 ppm, which could be overshot, may be insufficient to prevent
effects beyond human control. A top NASA climatologist and others now suggest a 350 ppm
target is needed instead. Average annual atmospheric CO2 increases rose from 1.5 ppm 1970–
2000 to 2.1 ppm since 2000. The rate of glacial melting has doubled over the past two years. The
Arctic summer ice pack could be gone in 5–32 years. And 2007 was the second hottest year on
record, next to 2005, leading some to warn that climate change has reached the point of no
return, yet 800–1,000 coal plants are planned with 40-year life spans. Even if emissions can be
stabilized, heat generated by energy consumption could also further the warming.
It is time for a U.S.–China global strategy to address climate change with an Apollo-like 10-year
goal that might support electric cars, saltwater agriculture, carbon sequestration, solar power
satellites (a Japanese national goal), animal protein without animals, enhanced hot-rock
geothermal, urban systems ecology, and a global climate change collective intelligence to keep
track of it all. These would be in addition to the usual suggestions for a carbon tax, carbon cap
and trading, conservation and recycling, reduced deforestation, industrial efficiencies and cogeneration, and switching government subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy. (It is
estimated that industrial countries subsidize fossil fuels with $200 billion a year.) Scientists are
studying how to create sunshades in space, adding iron powder to the oceans to absorb CO2, and
how to suck CO2 from the air. Sir Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize for technology to
clean CO2 from the atmosphere. ISO standards to reduce consumers’ environmental impact are
improving. The nuclear industry is gaining momentum, although the risk of accidents, waste
management, and terrorist usage are not well addressed.
Without a global strategy to address climate change, the environmental movement may turn on
the fossil fuel industries. The legal foundations are being laid to sue for damages caused by
greenhouse gases. Large reinsurance companies estimate the annual economic loss due to
climate change could reach $150–300 billion per year within a decade. Coastal urbanization is
increasing the numbers of people vulnerable to coastal flooding. The value of intact ecosystems
far outweighs the cost of protecting them, but human consumption is 25% larger than nature’s
capacity to regenerate. One in four mammals, one in eight birds, one-third of all amphibians, and
70% of the world’s assessed plants on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy.
The majority of the 50 million tons of e-waste produced annually is dumped in developing
countries. The environmental damage caused by the richer countries on the developing nations is
more than the entire Third World debt of $1.8 trillion. To help developing countries leapfrog
unsustainable practices to more sustainable ones, the Global Environment Facility provided $7.4
billion in grants and $28 billion in cofinancing since 1991 and an additional $3 billion to 2010;
more funds are being established by the World Bank ($5.5 billion), Japan (a five-year $10
billion), and the Asian Development Bank ($1.2 billion). The UN estimates that developing
countries will need $100 billion annually to finance climate change mitigation and $28–67
billion for adaptation by 2030.
Other suggestions include: raising fuel efficiency standards 5% a year relative to GDP, an
environmental footprint tax for using more than 1.8 global hectares per person, a 1% tax on the
$1.5–2 trillion of international financial transactions per day, and mandating improved car
mileage one mile per year. Taxes on international travel, carbon, and urban congestion should be
considered. Such tax income could support an international public/private funding mechanism
for high-impact technologies. Massive public educational efforts via film, television, music,
games, and contests should stress what we can do. The synergy between economic growth and
technological innovation has been the most significant engine of change for the last 200 years,
but unless we improve our economic, environmental, and social behaviors, the next 200 years
will be difficult. Yet without sustainable growth, billions of people will be condemned to poverty
and much of civilization will collapse. Challenge 1 will be addressed seriously when GDP
increases while global greenhouse gas emissions decrease for five years in a row.
REGIONAL CONSIDERATIONS
AFRICA: Africa will be hit hardest by climate change, though it contributes least to the problem.
Southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its maize crop by 2030 due to climate change.
Forest loss accelerates desertification and soil erosion, making the continent even more
vulnerable to climate change. Saltwater agriculture along the coasts of Africa and solar energy in
the Sahara could be massive sources for sustainable growth.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: China’s CO2 emissions were approximately 8% higher than the U.S.’s in
2007. Only 1% of China’s urban residents live in cities with air quality levels recommended by
WHO, and air pollution causes 750,000 premature deaths each year. At current rates, emissions
of nitrogen oxide will increase 2.3 times in China and 1.4 times in East Asia by 2020. China and
India lose 12% and 10% respectively of their GDP due to environmental damage. Four Arab
Gulf states have pledged a total of $750 million to a new fund for cleaner petroleum
technologies. Australia begins carbon trading in 2010.
EUROPE: EU-15 emissions in 2010 are projected to be 7.4% lower than the 1990 level, just short
of the 8% reduction target for 2012. Iceland plans to become carbon-neutral by 2025. London
introduced the world’s largest low-emission zone. Climate change may benefit Russian
agriculture. Over 50% of Europe’s hazardous waste shipments could be illegal.
LATIN AMERICA: Brazil plans zero deforestation by 2020, but current trends in agriculture and
livestock expansion, fire, drought, and logging could eliminate or severely damage nearly 60%
of the Amazon rainforest by 2030, with the release of 55.5–96.9 billion tons of CO2. Farming for
biofuels versus food is debated in Brazil while new oil reserves are discovered. The EU will
provide €100 million for Latin American projects in forest management, governance, and climate
change adaptation. Attacks on land tenure and the breakup of farms into smaller parcels are
generating irreversible ecological damage in most countries.
NORTH AMERICA: U.S. carbon emissions fell 1.3% in 2006 but increased 1.6% in 2007. Local
Canadian and U.S. governments in the Western Climate Initiative are creating cap-and-trade and
other programs to reduce GHG emissions. During the last five years, the U.S. spent $37 billion
on climate-related programs, compared with $3.5 trillion on the military. Al Gore launched a
new $300-million campaign to create bottom-up pressure on legislators to tackle climate change.
Technological efficiencies in nanotech and solar research from this region should help
sustainable development around the world. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office applications with
“green” in them more than doubled from 2006 to 2007.
Figure 2. Global surface temperature anomalies (°C)
Source: NOAA National Climatic Data Center with Millennium Project estimates
2. How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict?
Today some 700 million people face water scarcity (defined as less than 1,000 cubic meters per
person per year), which could grow to 3 billion by 2025 due to climate change, population
growth, and increasing demand for water per capita. Water stress (1,000–1,700 cubic meters per
person per year) could affect half the countries by 2025 and 75% of the world’s population by
2050. Without major interventions, the implications for future migrations and conflicts are
enormous. Water tables are falling on every continent; 40% of humanity depends on
international watersheds; one in 10 of the world’s major rivers fail to reach the sea for part of
each year; agricultural land is becoming brackish; groundwater aquifers are being polluted; and
urbanization is increasing water demands on aging water infrastructures faster than many
systems can supply.
Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers have doubled in the last 40 years. Agriculture accounts
for 70% of human usage of fresh water, which needs even more to feed growing populations. An
increase in meat consumption in developing countries further accelerates the demand for water
per capita. Nature also needs sufficient water to be viable for all life support. Hence, more fresh
water is needed—not just distribution agreements. Breakthroughs in desalination, like
pressurization of seawater to produce vapor jets, filtration via carbon nanotubes, and reverse
osmosis, are needed along with less costly pollution treatment. There are some 15,000
desalination plants, and 75 more major facilities are in various stages of development.
Future demand for fresh water could be reduced by saltwater agriculture on coastlines, producing
meat from stem cells without growing animals, and increasing vegetarianism. Many factors that
influence water supply are beyond the control of water managers; nevertheless, we still need an
integrated global water strategy and management system to focus knowledge, finances, and
political will to address this challenge. It should apply the lessons learned from producing more
food with less water via drip irrigation and precision agriculture, rainwater collection and
irrigation, watershed management, selective introduction of water pricing, and replication of
successful community-scale projects around the world. The plan should also help convert
degraded or abandoned farmlands to forest or grasslands; invest in household sanitation,
reforestation, water storage, and treatment of industrial effluents in multipurpose water schemes;
and construct eco-friendly dams, pipelines, and aqueducts to move water from areas of
abundance to scarcity. Access to clean water and basic sanitation should become human rights.
The UN declared that 2008 is the international year of sanitation. The Water Supply & Sanitation
Collaborative Council launched the Global Sanitation Fund to increase funding to address this
challenge. Meeting the MDG goal on sanitation would cost $38 billion and yield $347 billion
worth of benefits—much of it related to higher productivity and improved health. About 80% of
diseases in the developing world are water-related. Many are due to poor management of human
excreta. Some 1.8 million people die every year due to diarrhea, of whom 90% are children
under the age of five. About 2.6 billion people (40% of the world) lack adequate sanitation.
Unless major political and technological changes occur, future conflicts over tradeoffs among
agricultural, urban, and ecological uses of water are inevitable. Previously, water-sharing
agreements have occurred even among people in conflict and have led to cooperation in other
areas.
Challenge 2 will be addressed seriously when the number of people without clean water and
those suffering from water-borne diseases diminishes by half from their peaks and when the
percentage of water used in agriculture drops for five years in a row.
AFRICA: Up to 250 million Africans could live in water-stressed areas by 2010. Population
growth and climate change could cut water per person in Middle East and North Africa in half by
2050. Africa loses about $28 billion annually due to the lack of safe water and basic sanitation.
Sub-Saharan Africa would have to triple its freshwater access to meet its MDG target on water
by 2015, but few African governments spend more than 0.5% of GDP on water and sanitation.
With one-third of the world’s major international water basins, Africa uses less than 6% of its
renewable water resources. Since the majority of Africa depends on rain-fed agriculture,
upgrading rain-fed systems and improving agricultural productivity will immediately improve
millions of lives. Algeria launched the construction of 12 desalination plants to be built by 2010.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: More than 70% of China’s waterways and 90% of its groundwater are
contaminated; 33% of China’s river and lake water is unfit for even industrial use. The water
situation in China is expected to continue to get worse for the next 7–10 years under the best of
conditions. The World Bank estimates that China loses 5.8% of its GDP due to air and water
pollution. With only 8% of the world’s fresh water, China has to meet the needs of 22% of the
world’s population. The northern areas produce 45% of national GDP but contain less than 20%
of China’s water; projects are under way to transport water from the south to the north. Forced
migration due to water shortages has begun in China, and India should be next. The Yangtze,
Mekong, Salween, Ganges, and Indus are among the 10 most polluted rivers in the world. India
feeds 17% of the world’s people on less than 5% of the world’s water and 3% of its farmland.
India’s urban water demand is expected to double and industrial demand to triple by 2025.
Diarrhea causes some 450,000 deaths annually in India. Saltwater intrusion into Bangladeshi
coastal rivers reaches 100 miles inland. Israel’s Ashkelon plant reduced desalination costs to less
than 50¢ per cubic meter of water.
EUROPE: Cyprus, Bulgaria, Belgium, Spain, Malta, FYR Macedonia, Italy, the UK, and Germany
can be considered water-stressed; 14% of the EU population has been affected by water scarcity.
Over 80% of the original floodplain area along the Danube and its main tributaries has been lost
as a result of dams, pollution, and climate change. The Belgian government recognizes water as a
human right, and its development aid will focus on water. Water utilities in Germany pay
farmers to switch to organic operations because it costs less than removing farm chemicals from
water supplies. Russia could supply fresh water to China and Middle Asia and is seeking new
technologies like nanotech to improve water quality. Over 1 million people drink polluted tap
water in Ireland.
LATIN AMERICA: Glaciers in Peru could disappear in 25 years, risking the country’s water
security. The World Bank set up a $33-million fund for Andean countries for adaptation to rapid
glacier retreat. Although the region has 28% of the world’s water resources, almost 80 million
people do not have access to safe drinking water and 120 million lack sewage treatment. Water
crises will occur in megacities within a generation unless new water supplies are generated,
lessons from both successful and unsuccessful approaches to privatization are applied, and
legislation is updated for more reliable, transparent, and consistent integrated water resources
management. Water and sanitation problems cost the region an estimated $29 billion a year.
NORTH AMERICA: At least 36 states in the U.S. are expected to face water shortages within the
next five years. Each kilowatt-hour of electricity in the U.S. requires about 25 gallons of water
for cooling, making power plants the second largest water consumer in the country after
agriculture. Over the past five years, municipal water rates have increased by an average of 27%
in the U.S. and 58% in Canada. Water could become a class problem; poor people will be the
first victims in free market distribution. Government agricultural water subsidies should be
changed to encourage conservation.
3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance?
The current world population of 6.7 billion is expected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050, peaking
soon afterward at 9.8 billion and then falling to 5.5 billion by 2100, according to the UN lower
forecast. Scientific breakthroughs over the next 50 years are likely to change these forecasts,
giving people longer and more productive lives than most would believe possible today.
Nevertheless, global population is changing from high mortality and high fertility to low
mortality and low fertility. A quarter of the world (excluding Africa) will be over 60 years old in
2050. There will be more people over 60 than under 15 by 2045, according to the UN medium
forecast. Today about 65% of older persons live in developing countries; by 2050 nearly 80%
will. To reduce the economic burden on younger generations and to keep up living standards,
people will work longer and create many forms of tele-work, part-time work, and job rotation.
FAO estimates that 37 countries face a crisis over food. Prices of cereals are up 129% since
2006. The 2008 Rome Conference on Food Security in response to the world food crisis created
global short- and long-term strategies with UN agencies, governments, and NGOs to act as a
system to feed the world. Because food production has to increase 50% by 2013 and double in 30
years, because the demand for animal protein may increase 50% by 2020, because there are
shortages of water, and because many of the other factors that doubled rice and wheat prices are
expected to continue, new agricultural approaches will be needed such as meat production
without growing animals; better rain-fed agriculture and irrigation management; genetic
engineering for higher-yielding crops; precision agriculture and aquaculture; drought-tolerant
crop varieties; and saltwater agriculture on coastlines to produce food for humans and animals,
biofuels, pulp for the paper industry, to absorb CO2, to reduce the drain on freshwater agriculture
and land, and to increase employment. An animal rights group has offered $1 million to the first
producers of commercially viable animal meat without growing animals by 2012. Currently,
agriculture uses 80% of arable land in developing countries, of which 20% is irrigated. Massive
efforts are required to maintain fertile cropland. FAO estimates that $15–20 billion a year is
needed to boost food production to control soaring food prices. Climate change and
monocultures undermine biodiversity, which is critical for agricultural viability.
Just over 50% of humanity lives in urban areas today. Half of them live in cities of less than
500,000 inhabitants. By 2030 over 80% of humanity is expected to live in urban concentrations.
During the same period, the 1 billion people living in slums today could double. About 385
million people are malnourished, and 25% of children worldwide have protein-energy
malnutrition, which reduces cerebral development. Continued economic growth will increase the
demand for meat, requiring more land and water. This will further increase competition between
agricultural resources for food versus energy. However, rural populations are expected to
continually shrink after 2015, freeing additional land for agriculture. About 40% of agricultural
land is moderately degraded and 9% is highly degraded, reducing global crop yield by as much
as 13%. A quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested; 80% cannot withstand increased fishing
pressure. FAO estimates that water for agriculture needs to increase 60% to feed an additional 2
billion people by 2030, even as urban water requirements are increasing. Without sufficient
nutrition, shelter, water, and sanitation produced by more intelligent human-nature symbioses,
increased migrations, conflicts, and disease seem inevitable. ICT continues to more optimally
match needs and resources worldwide in real time, and nanotech will help reduce material use
per unit of output while increasing quality.
Challenge 3 will be addressed seriously when the annual growth in world population drops to
fewer than 30 million, the number of hungry people and the infant mortality rate both decrease
by half from their peaks, and new approaches to aging become economically viable.
AFRICA: About 40% of children under five are chronically malnourished. Africa is the only
region with a median age below 20 today, and in 2050 the share of population aged 60 or above
will still be just slightly above 10%. Ten of the 34 countries with life expectancies of 49 years or
below are in West Africa. Sub-Saharan population is growing at the rate of 2.5% per year
compared with 1.2% in Latin America and Asia. Some 12–13 million Africans are expected to
move from villages to urban areas during 2008. The population of urban slums in Africa could
increase to 350 million by 2020. Much of the urban management class is being seriously
reduced by AIDS, which is also lowering life expectancy. Conflicts continue to prevent
development investments, ruin fertile farmland, create refugees, compound food emergencies,
and prevent better management of natural resources.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: China is growing old before it has grown rich. With the one-child policy (to
continue for at least another decade), the fertility rate in China has fallen to 1.7 from about 5 in
the 1970s. The number of Chinese over 60 is expected to grow from 144 million in 2005 to 430
million by 2040. China could experience labor shortages in two years. The boy-to-girl ratio in
2007 was 118 to 100; China could be short 15 million women in 15 years. China has to feed 22%
of the world’s population with less than 7% of the world’s arable land and could face a food
shortfall of 100 million tons by 2030. India has more than 500 million people under 25, will have
more people than China by 2050, and has more malnourished children than sub-Saharan Africa.
Japan’s workforce is expected to shrink from 66.5 million to 42 million by 2050. Without some
4,000 new immigrants, Japanese population would have decreased in 2007. Japan expects to use
robots to handle the future aging population. Australia’s population is growing due to migration.
By 2025 South Asians may consume 70% more milk and vegetables and 100% more meat, eggs,
and fish than today. Asians earning more than $7,000 annually outnumber the total population of
North America and Europe—laying the foundation for unprecedented consumption. New
concepts of employment may be needed to prevent political instability among the 60% of Arabs
who are now under 25 and face poor prospects for conventional employment.
EUROPE: By 2031 the population is expected to reach 71.1 million, with 22% over the age of 65.
Spain’s fertility rate is 1.1, Italy’s is 1.2. Russia’s falling birth rates may be changing with
government incentives like reproduction days off and $10,000 when the second child turns three;
its birth rate increased 9% during 2007 and death rate decreased by 8%. Europe’s aging and
shrinking population and the dearth of young people will force changes in pension and social
security systems, incentives for more children, and increased immigration, affecting international
relations, culture, and the social fabric.
LATIN AMERICA: The region is aging, but not as rapidly as Europe is. The population is expected
to grow from 550 million today to about 800 million by 2050 and become 85% urban by 2030,
requiring massive urban and agricultural infrastructural investments. Some 16% of children
under five suffer from chronic malnutrition
NORTH AMERICA: Less than 2% of the U.S. provides the largest share of world food exports. In
the past two years, the U.S. allocated more than 20 million tons of grain to ethanol production,
about half of the additional grain supply needed worldwide to have averted the current food
crisis. Global warming should increase Canadian grain exports. Biotech and nanotech are just
beginning to have an impact on medicine; hence dramatic breakthroughs in longevity seem
inevitable in 25–50 years. Reducing “throw-away” consumption in favor of knowledge and
experience could change the population-resource balance. In the U.S., the Incentives for Older
Workers Act was introduced to eliminate barriers for older Americans wishing to work longer
and to encourage employers to recruit and retain them.
4. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?
Elements of global governance such as ISOs, international treaties, multilateral organizations,
and self-organizing bodies on the Internet, along with the evolution of business systems and ICT,
are augmenting governments’ democratic emergence. Although the perception and
implementation of democracy differ globally, it is generally accepted that democracy is a
relationship between a responsible citizenry and a responsive government that encourages
participation in the political process and guarantees basic rights. Since democracies tend not to
fight each other and since humanitarian crises are far more likely under authoritarian regimes
than democratic ones, the trend toward democracy should lead to a more peaceful future. Aging
populations are increasing and their countries tend to maintain democratic gains more than
countries with younger populations do. However, democracy and freedom declined over the last
two years in one-fifth of the world’s countries, according to Freedom House. Four times as many
countries showed declines during 2007 as improved, and press freedom continued a six-year
negative trend across the world, with increased intimidation of journalists and increasing control
of media in the hands of a few in business or government.
The longer-term trend is positive: the number of free countries grew from 43 to 90 over the past
30 years, accounting for 46% of the world’s population. Countries partly free expanded from 48
to 60, while 36% of the world population today lives in 43 countries with authoritarian regimes.
The movement from authoritarian to more democratic regimes is being aided by the growth of
civil society, media access for pro-democratic actors, long-term economic stability, a focus on
citizen participation, transparent judicial systems, e-government with Internet access, increasing
literacy, improved quality of governance assessment systems, international interdependence, and
the development of a global consciousness. Democratic forces will have to work harder to make
sure that the short-term reversals do not stop the longer-term trend of democratization.
International protocols are needed to assist failed states or regions within states, and intervention
procedures are needed when a state constitutes a significant threat to its citizens or others.
Although making development assistance dependent on good governance has helped in some
countries, genuine democracy will be achieved when the people—not external actors—demand
government accountability. The ILO warns that workplace discrimination remains common
around the world and that, in spite of some progress on gender and race, discrimination based on
age, sexual orientation, and disability is increasing.
The Internet allows self-organization around common ideals, independent of conventional
institutional controls and regardless of nationality or languages. Injustices in different parts of the
world become the concern of thousands or millions of people who then pressure local, regional,
or international governing systems to find solutions. This unparalleled social power is
reinventing citizens’ roles in the political process and changing institutions, policymaking, and
governance. However, the development of methods to counter information manipulation, as well
as increased freedom of information transmission, will be important for continued democratic
consolidation. Organized crime, methods to tamper with election results, information warfare,
and the potential of individuals to make and use weapons of mass destruction should be seriously
addressed in order to build a healthy global democracy.
Challenge 4 will be addressed seriously when strategies to address these threats are in place,
when less than 10% of the world lives in nondemocratic countries, when the number of armed
conflicts (those with 1,000 or more deaths per year) diminishes by half, and when voter
participation in most democracies exceeds 60% in most elections.
AFRICA: Democratization has regressed over the past several years, with failed state policies,
rampant corruption, and ethnic tensions in Kenya, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo,
Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Freedom House rated 11 of the 48 countries in the region “free,” while
15 regressed and 6 made improvements. The Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance
adopted by the African Union in 2007 sets democratic standards to be met by African
governments and provides a framework for assessing progress. The Pan African Parliament
might get legislative power in 2009.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka all saw
declines in their Freedom House ratings. China accounts for half of all those living in “not free”
countries and frequently blocks access to Web sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia. Freedom
House rates 16 of Asia’s 39 countries as “free,” 13 as “partly free,” and 10 “not free.” Only 7%
of the region’s population had access to free media in 2007. ASEAN adopted a new Charter to
foster integration and democracy. In the Middle East, Israel remains the only country rated
“free,” while 6 countries are “partly free” and 11 are rated “not free.” The Arab League could
play an important role in improving democracy in this region. Political demonstrations in South
Korea are increasingly conducted in cyberspace, opening potentials for greater participatory
democracy.
EUROPE: The EU is a champion of public participation in policymaking. All 27 EU countries are
rated “free.” Currently 8 million illegal immigrants are estimated to be in the EU. New
regulations were adopted to strengthen and harmonize the legal system of migration and
immigrants’ integration across the Union. Countries hoping to join the EU are working to
develop their democratic institutions and cultures. In some of the former Soviet Union and
Central and Eastern Europe (non-EU) countries, the tendency toward autocracy, corruption, and
lack of progressive institutions hinders the democratization process. Russia has begun
implementing its national plan against corruption.
LATIN AMERICA: Latin America has the highest level of inequality in the world, and organized
crime, corruption, and repression of civil liberties threaten many of its young democracies.
Populist governments promise to improve social justice along with economic growth. The Union
of South American Nations is intended to strengthen regional integration and democracy.
However, censorship, as well as violence and intimidation against media by organized crime
groups, are deteriorating the freedom of the press in the region.
NORTH AMERICA: Although established democracies, Canada and the U.S. are faced with
powerful lobbying, increased corruption, freedom-restrictive regulations, and centralization of
media. Yet having a woman and an African-American in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential
nomination race is a historic moment for the U.S. and for world democracy. There are censorship
concerns over new Canadian legislation that allows the government constraints over film and
television productions deemed “contrary to public policy.” Direct voting on issues via the
Internet should be considered to augment representative democracy.
Figure 3. Global trends of freedom
Source: Freedom in the World 2008, Freedom House
5. How can policymaking be made more sensitive to global long-term
perspectives?
The world food crisis has focused international attention on creating global long-term and shortterm strategies to address hunger. International consequences of the U.S. sub-prime loan crisis
and increasing reports of Arctic ice melts demonstrate the need for improved global long-term
perspectives and global systems for resilience—the capacity to anticipate, respond, and recover
from disasters such as tsunamis, financial crashes, pandemics, conflicts, prolonged electric or
Internet outrages, and massive migrations due to water shortages. Such foresight systems should
also identify new technological possibilities and social innovations as well as problems.
Government presidents or prime ministers should have some form of situation room with a
nationally integrated information system (see Chapter 5) of data, knowledge, and experts
supported by global scanning systems (interoperable with all government departments) and the
ability to identify and assess expert judgments in real time (see Chapter 3). Its staff should also
synthesize futures research from other government departments, calculate a national SOFI (see
Chapter 2), and produce national state of the future reports. Such government future strategy
units (see Chapter 4) could be connected to share best practices, compare research, and verify
assumptions. This network could also connect with similar units in UN agencies (such as WHO)
and with the Office of the UN Secretary-General to help coordinate national and international
strategies and goals. Decisionmakers should be trained in futures research for optimal use of
these systems.
National legislatures could establish standing “Committees for the Future,” as Finland has done.
National foresight studies should be continually updated, improved, and conducted interactively
with other national long-range efforts. Alternative scenarios that show cause-and-effect relations
and expose decision points leading to different consequences from different strategies should be
shared with parliamentarians and the public for feedback. Government budgets should consider
5–10 year allocations attached to rolling 5–10 year scenarios and strategies. Governments with
short-term election cycles should consider longer, more stable terms and funds for staffers of
parliamentarians. If national State of the Future Indexes (see Chapter 2) were constructed and
used in evaluating policymakers’ performance, decisionmakers would be more inclined to pursue
policies that address the longer term. A checklist of ways to better connect futures research to
decisionmaking is available in Chapter 11 of the attached CD.
Communications and advertising companies can create memes to help the public become
sensitive to global long-term perspectives so that more future-oriented educated publics would
elect more future-oriented global-minded politicians. Prizes could be given to recognize the best
examples of global long-term decisionmaking. Participatory policymaking processes augmented
by e-government services can be created that are informed by futures research. Universities
should fund the convergence of disciplines, teach futures research and synthesis as well as
analysis, and produce generalists in addition to specialists. Efforts to increase the number and
quality of courses on futures concepts and methods should be supported, as well as augmenting
standard curricula with futures methodologies converted to teaching techniques that help futureorient instruction.
Although there is an increasing recognition that accelerating change requires longer-term
perspectives, decisionmakers feel little pressure to consider global long-term perspectives.
Nevertheless, attaining long-range goals like landing on the moon or eradicating smallpox that
were considered impossible inspired many people to go beyond selfish, short-term interests to
great achievements. (An international assessment of such future goals is found in Chapter 4.2 on
the CD.) The UN Millennium Development Goals for 2015 have become benchmarks for the
future.
Each of the 15 Global Challenges in this chapter and the eight UN Millennium Development
Goals could be the basis for transinstitutional coalitions composed of self-selected governments,
corporations, NGOs, universities, and international organizations that are willing to commit the
resources and talent to address a specific goal.
Challenge 5 will be addressed seriously when foresight functions are a routine part of most
organizations and governments, when national SOFIs are used in at least 50 countries, when the
consequences of high-risk projects are routinely considered before they are initiated, and when
standing Committees for the Future exist in at least 50 national legislatures.
AFRICA: China is becoming a force in African long-range planning. Daily management of many
African countries makes future, global perspectives difficult; hence, more regional bodies like
the African Union, NEPAD, and African Development Bank are more likely to further futures
work in Africa and should build on 10 years of work of UNDP/ African Futures on incorporating
long-term perspectives into mid- and short-term planning.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: The increasing power of China and eventually India should lead to more
global, long-term decisionmaking as they interact with Europe and North America on global
issues. Australia plans to release its plan on its future role in Asia in late 2008. Japan includes
private sector companies in its long-term strategic planning unit. South Korea is considering
legislation for a permanent Future Strategy unit in the Office of the President.
EUROPE: Global long-term thinking continues to be stimulated by the Lisbon Strategy, increasing
immigrants from developing countries, public finances for social and health services for an aging
population, restructuring energy systems, changing ethnic demographics, and geopolitical shifts
such as the emergence of China. The 7th Framework Programme of the EU expands foresight
support; the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies provides futures studies for EU
decisionmaking; the European Foresight Monitoring Network connects futurists; an annual
European Futurists Conference is held in Switzerland; and the European Regional Foresight
College improves future methods. Foresight was included in the Russian Federal Program 2007–
12.
LATIN AMERICA: The shift toward more socialist politics is motivating alternative futures
thinking, as could the Union of South American Countries. Yet futures approaches are ignored
by the academic and mass media that focus on urgent and confrontational issues over ideologies,
unmet basic needs, growing inequality, and large economic groups that monopolize services. The
Global Millennium Prize was initiated in Mexico for students worldwide who are 15-19 years
old and have the best ideas for addressing the global long-range challenges.
NORTH AMERICA: National elections in the U.S. are creating alternative global perspectives in
American decisionmaking. New interactive and analytical mechanisms could promote foresight,
if citizens expect and demand it. A collection of high-impact cases should be developed in which
foresight leads to demonstrable benefits or when the lack of futures thinking proves costly. (See
CD Chapter 11 for examples.)
6. How can the global convergence of information and communications
technologies work for everyone?
There are now more Internet users in China than in the United States. About 1.4 billion people
(21% of the world) are connected to the Net and 3.3 billion mobile phones are active. The
Internet and mobile phones are merging. The Internet is evolving from a passive information
repository (Web 1.0), to a user-generated and participatory system (Web 2.0), and eventually to a
more intelligent partner with collective intelligence and just-in-time knowledge (Web 3.0),
eventually interconnecting humanity with much of the built environment. The Internet is already
the most powerful force for globalization, democratization, economic growth, and education in
history. If Moore’s Law continues, within 25 years a computer will equal the processing power
of the human brain; 25 years after that, everyone could access processing power beyond that of
all the human brains on Earth.
Although the digital divide continues to close, special efforts are needed to lower cost, increase
reliability, and improve educational and business usage in order to help close the economic
divides. Businesses, governments, foundations, and UN organizations are collaborating to make
“universal” broadband possible. “One Laptop Per Child” costs $178 in large lots to developing
countries and may drop to $75 by 2010; meanwhile Intel’s second generation Classmate PCs and
teacher training programs may eclipse one laptop per child even at the $300 price.
Internet bases with wireless transmission are being constructed in remote villages, cell phones
with Internet are being designed for educational access by the lowest income groups, and new
business models are being created to connect the poorest 2 billion people to the evolving nervous
system of civilization. E-government systems can support justice, democratization, education,
and economic development by delivering services, providing citizen feedback channels, and
initiating public-private partnerships and future possibilities such as an electronic Peace Corps
and tele-nations to connect people overseas with the development processes back home.
Meanwhile, e-mail, phone, instant messaging, and collaborative software link groups of people
for the first time in humanitarian, scientific, and business projects. The Internet is beginning to
connect very low-cost nanotech sensors, cameras, and transceivers in buildings and other objects
for marketing, security, and environmental management. Businesses are building offices in
Second Life and other cyberworlds that compete with conventional reality, and Wikipedia is
becoming a global collective intelligence. Online social networks are new forms of transnational
democracy for emergent collective conscience and action. The greatest entrepreneurial success in
history was the sale of YouTube for $1.65 billion just 21 months after it was founded.
Multimedia growth on the Internet could triple in three years, slowing everything down until
infrastructures are dramatically upgraded. The OECD forecast that Internet addresses that
identify devices connected to the Net will be used up within three years. Increasing numbers of
people are beginning to manage more of their data and software applications on the Web—
eliminating worries about software updates or file backups, but increasing data privacy issues
and more demand on the Internet.
Since cyberspace has become a new medium for civilization, the full range of human behavior
from individual philanthropy to organized crime grows on the Internet. Cybercrime (estimated at
$105 billion) is replacing spam as a thriving international business. A global intellectual arms
race is needed to counter online markets for illegal software and data and illegal or counterfeit
drugs, international cyber attacks, and pornography. Business loss due to a range of cyber crimes
is estimated at 8–10% of revenues. The Web is now the major recruitment and training tool for
violent extremists. Fundamental rethinking will be required to counter future forms of
information warfare that otherwise could lead to the distrust of all forms of information in
cyberspace.
AFRICA: Internet users in Africa increased by 31% in 2007, with penetration rising to 4.7%. New
fiber-optic cables to cut cost and speed access are planned to link Africa to Europe, the Middle
East, and Asia, at a cost of $6.4 billion. Only six African countries have penetration rates greater
than 8%. Africa is increasingly using mobile phones to provide Net access. Nearly 90% of all
telephones in Africa are mobile. Tele-education, tele-medicine, and e-government will become
more important as African professionals die of AIDS in increasing numbers.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Asia has the largest percent of the world’s Internet users (39%) but only 14%
penetration. Chinese is the second most common language on the Internet, even with only 10%
penetration in China. It had 20 million blogs, 1.3 million Web sites, 11,000 ISPs, and 600 million
mobile phones by July 2008. Online business in China increased 66% in 2007 to $295 billion,
but the government continues its strong controls to prevent reception of “harmful” information.
India’s Net users grew 33% during 2007 and its software and services exports are expected to
reach $60 billion by 2010. Japanese is tied with English in blogosphere usage. South Korea
continues to lead the world in broadband penetration.
EUROPE: Europe has 348 million Internet users, with 43.4% penetration, led by Germany with
53.2%, while Russian users increased by 21% over last year. The EC has proposed a new €55million “Safer Internet” program to tackle child pornography, pedophilia, and digital bullying.
French candidates campaigned in Second Life. Russian Net population is estimated at 35 million,
broadband at 4.8 million, and efforts to better connect rural areas and schools have begun. In
response to Estonia’s request for help to counter large-scale cyberwarfare that paralyzed its
networks, affecting government, police, ministries, banks, and media, NATO is establishing a
Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Estonia with cyber security response teams.
LATIN AMERICA: Uruguay is the first country to purchase 100,000 “one laptop per child” laptops;
200,000 more are expected in 2009 to cover all public school children between 6 and 12 years
old. Peru has purchased 270,000, and billionaire Carlos Slim purchased 50,000 for Mexico. Viña
del Mar in Chile became the first city in Latin America with free broadband Internet access.
Cuba is now allowing ordinary citizens to possess cell phones. Only Argentina, Uruguay, and
Chile have greater than 30% penetration in Latin America, while most of the rest are at 20–25%.
Brazil is bringing Internet access to 150 communities in the Amazon region. Fulfilling the
promise of these technologies for international collaboration and development will require more
serious attention to training.
NORTH AMERICA: Broadband carriers are fighting “Net neutrality,” which would prevent them
from charging on the basis of user or content type. The U.S. is not well placed for Web 2.0 and
3.0 since it has fallen to 15th in broadband penetration in the world, and its top broadband speeds
are several times slower than those of Japan and South Korea. MIT has opened a Center for
Collective Intelligence. Natural disaster planning is creating an information infrastructure for
collective intelligence. Depending on definitions, there were 10,000–80,000 cyber attacks on the
U.S. government during 2007. The Web is playing a major role in the 2008 U.S. presidential
election.
Figure 4. Regional Internet population growth
Source: internetworldstats.com
7. How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap
between rich and poor?
A strategic plan for a global partnership between rich and poor should use the strength of free
markets and rules based on global ethics to reduce the disparities. The world economy grew
4.9% in 2007 to $66 trillion (IMF’s new PPP weights) or $55 trillion (official exchange rates).
As population is growing at 1.16% per year, world income per capita increased just under 4%. At
this rate, world poverty will be cut by more than half between 2000 and 2015, except for subSaharan Africa.
Although developing countries grew about 8%, producing more than 40% of the world’s
economy, income disparities are still enormous. The number of people living on $1 or less per
day continues to fall, but the number living on $2 per day has grown to nearly half the world.
ILO reports that families of an estimated 487 million workers live on less than $1 per person per
day, and 1.3 billion (43.5% of all workers) have under $2 per day. Economic inequality within
countries as measured by the Gini coefficient has increased in the vast majority of countries over
the past two decades. About 30% of the developing world is either unemployed or
underemployed.
International trade continues to grow faster than the overall economy. Foreign direct investment
grew to an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2007, an increase of 16% to developing countries and 41%
to transition economies. Although overseas development assistance grew 2.4% in 2007, the 2005
G8 commitments for ODA are behind schedule. Remittances are three times more than ODA and
could be augmented by connecting tele-volunteers overseas with the development process back
home.
The high tech–low wage conditions of China and India will make it very difficult for other
developing countries to compete; hence, developing countries should rethink their export-led
growth strategies. In addition to improved agricultural and industrial productivity investments for
domestic markets, technical assistance to leapfrog into new activities via tele-education and telework should be coupled with microcredit mechanisms for people to seek markets rather than
non-existent jobs. The WTO has agreed to eliminate agriculture export subsidies by 2013, which
cost developing countries $72 billion per year, according to UNDP estimates. This, plus
improved fair trade, increased economic freedom, and successful Doha Round negotiations, is
expected to boost growth in developing countries substantially. Half the $200 billion in carbon
emissions trading income should go to the developing world.
Ethical market economies require a “level playing field” guaranteed by an honest judicial system
and by governments that provide political stability, a chance to participate in local development
decisions, business incentives to comply with social and environmental goals, fair trade, a
healthy investment climate, and access to land, capital, and information. The Index of Economic
Freedom and the Corruption Perceptions Index show that reducing corruption and increasing
freedom correlates with improved economic development. Affordable food and fuel prices will
also help reduce poverty.
Challenge 7 will be addressed seriously when market economy abuses and corruption by
companies and governments are intensively prosecuted and when the development gap—by all
definitions—declines in 8 out of 10 years.
AFRICA: Africa has grown over 5% for the fifth straight year, averaging 5.4% over the past 10
years. Booming commodity markets helped it grow 6.2% in 2007, and trade with China grew to
$73.3 billion in 2007. China’s loans to Africa outgrew the World Bank’s and others, making
China a dominant player in Africa’s growth. Nevertheless, high birth rates, an infrastructure gap,
high indirect costs, corruption, armed conflicts, poor governance, environmental degradation,
climate change, poor health conditions, and lack of education continue to impede Africa’s
development. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development helps focus national and
international cooperation to promote private-sector activity, support infrastructure development,
improve ICT, diversify production and exports, foster environmental stewardship, encourage
small businesses, and fight corruption. Government budgets should be tied to local self-help, as
in Egypt; cultures should become more scientifically and entrepreneurially oriented.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: China became the world’s second largest economy (at PPP) during 2007, and
its annual $1,221 billion in exports passed the U.S. But its increasing water and energy
shortages, widening rural-urban income gaps (the wealthiest 10% of Chinese hold 45% of urban
wealth), migration of 18 million people annually from rural to urban regions, and worsening
environmental conditions put unprecedented strain on resources and stability. Asia produces
about a third of the world’s output, has two-thirds of the world’s poor, and confronts problems
similar to China’s. ASEAN plans to accelerate integration among its members and to establish an
ASEAN Community by 2015. The keys to economic growth in the Middle East are greater
economic freedom, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rule of law, increased
literacy, gender equality, and small business development.
EUROPE: Russia has the fastest-growing economy in Europe at 8.1% in 2007. EU’s 27 member
states increased their investment in non-member states by 53% in 2007 over 2006. The
combination of aging population, shrinking middle class in some countries, and expensive public
services is not sustainable without increasing numbers of immigrants and more teleentrepreneurs among the retired Europeans. EU enlargement continues to expand ethical markets
and harmonize legal systems, yet the rich-poor gaps widen, social services are cut, and work
migrates to lower-wage countries. In southeastern Europe and the former Soviet republics,
despite record FDI of $98 billion and economic growth of 8.5%, unemployment persists at 8.5%,
and rampant corruption and internal tensions continue.
LATIN AMERICA: The region grew 5.6% in 2007 and FDI reached $126 billion, with inflows for
Brazil, Chile, and Mexico doubling, but it has the largest rich-poor gap in the world, and poverty
households headed by women increased to 36%. To reduce the rich-poor gap, distribution of the
means of production and land tenure should change, including larger participation of lowerincome people in all phases of development projects. The new Union of South American Nations
and its Bank of the South intend to strengthen regional integration, fight organized crime and
corruption, and improve social standards.
NORTH AMERICA: The U.S. negative balance of trade continues at historic highs—helping
employment overseas but threatening its economy at home, while its debt is over $9.4 trillion,
promising future inflation. The income gap in the U.S. continues to widen: the richest 1% holds
almost $17 trillion, $2 trillion more than the bottom 90%. In Canada, as a result of strong
economic growth, the income of the poorer segment grew 5.6% in 2006, while that of the richest
remained stable, shrinking the income gap.
Figure 5. Share of people living on less than $1 a day (%)
Source: Global Monitoring Report 2008, World Bank-IMF
8. How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune
microorganisms be reduced?
The global food crisis, climate change, and pandemic influenza are the main threats to human
health listed by WHO. Although 30% of all deaths are caused by infectious diseases, chronic
conditions such as heart disease and stroke kill more people than infectious diseases do for the
first time in history because people are living longer. However, mutations in avian flu or other
communicable diseases could change this. Over the past 40 years, 39 new infectious diseases
have been discovered, more than 1,100 epidemics have been verified in the last five years, and
we face 20 drug-resistant diseases today. Old diseases have reappeared, such as cholera, yellow
fever, plague, dengue fever, meningitis, hemorrhagic fever, and diphtheria. Massive urbanization
and concentrated livestock production could trigger new global pandemics. Climate change is
altering insect and disease patterns. Halfway to 2015, most health-related MDGs (reduce child
mortality; improve maternal health; and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases) are
unlikely to be met. Other problems may come from synthetic bacteria from gene laboratories and
unknown nano-organisms.
To prevent bioterrorism, R&D has increased for improved bio-sensors and general vaccines able
to boost the immune system to contain any deadly infection. Such vaccines could be placed
around the world like fire extinguishers. The 4-million-person shortage of health workers is
growing, people are living longer, and health care costs are increasing—all making telemedicine, self-diagnosis via biochip sensors, and online expert systems increasingly necessary.
In the meantime, the best ways to address infectious diseases are early detection, accurate
reporting, prompt isolation, transparency of information, rapid diagnostics, appropriate
treatment, and growing global awareness.
Meanwhile, the world is preparing for potential genetic variations in the H5N1 avian flu virus
that could be highly contagious among humans, killing tens of millions. A two-dose vaccine has
shown positive effects against H5N1. A new approach to Asian poultry live-market businesses—
the source of such viruses—is needed
Although hepatitis B is the most common infectious disease, with more than 2 billion people
currently or previously infected, and although malaria kills over 1 million a year, HIV/AIDS is
still the largest killer in sub-Saharan Africa and its impact continues to grow in Eastern Europe
and Asia. Estimates of those living with HIV/AIDS have substantially decreased from 34.1–47.1
million in 2006 to 30.6–36.1 million in 2007 due to recent advances in the research methodology
of HIV statistics, natural trends in the epidemic, and prevention programs. The number of new
cases of HIV probably peaked in the late 1990s at over 3 million per year and had fallen to 2.5
million by 2007. Deaths from AIDS dropped from 2.9 million in 2006 to 2.1 million in 2007.
Some 31% of the estimated 9.7 million people in need of receiving antiretroviral therapy
received it by the end of 2007.
Two broad patterns in HIV/AIDS are emerging: generalized epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa
and more local epidemics in the rest of the world concentrated among populations at risk: men
who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their sexual partners. The
costs of antiretroviral drugs were reduced by 20% to developing countries during 2007 by Glaxo.
The Clinton Foundation continues to reduce costs of second-line drugs in some areas to
$100/year and the daily one-pill to $1/day. Self-tests for AIDS cost $15, and the $40 for
confirmatory results continues to decrease. For every person who starts taking antiretroviral
drugs, another 2.5 become infected, down from 5 about two years ago. No significant positive
vaccine results are yet available, but new genetic-based vaccines and microbicides are in trial,
and pre-exposure treatment and radioactive anti-HIV antibodies show promise in animal models.
Male circumcision may reduce infection by 50%.
WHO’s eHealth systems, new regulations to address SARS-like threats, immunization programs,
and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network are global responses to this challenge.
Scientists are working to develop a genetically modified mosquito that would not carry the
malaria parasite. Better trade security will be necessary to prevent increased food- or animalborne disease. Viral incidence in animals is being mapped in Africa, China, and South Asia to
divert epidemics before they reach humans. Future uses of genetic data, software, and
nanotechnology will detect and treat disease at the genetic or molecular level. Meanwhile,
increased investment into water, sanitation, health education, and hand washing is the most costeffective way to reduce communicable disease.
AFRICA: Although the prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS continues to fall in Africa, death
rates are high enough among professionals in many countries to affect development. Patients on
antiretroviral treatment increased from 1% in 2003 to 37% by the end of 2007. Africa is short 1
million health workers. It has only 11% of the world’s population but 25% of its disease burden
with only 3% of world health workers and 1% of world health expenditures. Measles decreased
by 91% between 2000 and 2006 in sub-Saharan Africa.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: About 8.6 million people in the region have HIV, including 2.5–5 million in
India and 1–2 million in China. AIDS programs focus on key populations and antiretroviral
treatment. About 75 million Asian men have commercial sex with 10 million women. Southeast
Asia has the highest rate of TB in the world, with 3 million new cases annually. Promotion of
hand washing of children in Karachi decreased impetigo by 34%, diarrhea by 53%, and
pneumonia by 50%. South Koreans protest at the risk of mad cow disease from imported meat.
A new enterovirus outbreak in China in May 2008 quickly affected over 10,000 people.
EUROPE: The prevalence of HIV in Western and Central Europe has stabilized around 0.3%, as
have new HIV infections at 22,000 per year and AIDS deaths at 12,000 per year. Russia
accounted for 66% of the new HIV infections in Eastern Europe.
LATIN AMERICA: About 1.6 million people have HIV in the region, of which about 100,000 were
new in 2007, while 58,000 died of AIDS last year. The region provides AIDS treatment to 72%
of those in need. Brazil has offered free antiretroviral treatment since 1996, saving billions of
dollars in hospital costs. Latin America has the highest life expectancy among developing
regions, the infant mortality rate reduced from 54 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1991 to 31 in
2005, and 89% of births in the region are now attended by skilled health care personnel.
NORTH AMERICA: Genetics-based and molecular research in North America will affect prevention,
diagnosis, and treatment of a large number of diseases. Over a million people in the U.S. and
62,000 in Canada were HIV-positive at the beginning of 2007. Antiretroviral medications keep
AIDS death rates low. Increased food imports raise vulnerability to infections from overseas.
Figure 6. Physician density (per 10,000 population)
Source: World Health Organization, Core Health Indicators
9. How can the capacity to decide be improved as the nature of work and
institutions change?
Many of the world’s decisionmaking processes are inefficient, slow, and ill informed, especially
when considering the new demands of increasing complexity, globalization, and the acceleration
of change. More-open systems, democratization, and interactive media are involving more
people in decisionmaking, which further increases complexity—making continuous
modifications of decisions more likely than achieving closure. Fortunately, the world is moving
toward ubiquitous computing with collective intelligence for just-in-time knowledge to inform
decisions; unfortunately, decisionmaking culture can be slow to change.
Decision support software that lets people see how issues have alternative positions and how
each is supported or refuted by research has existed for years but is rarely used. Such issuesbased information software can make decisionmaking more clear and transparent (see Figure 23
in Chapter 5). Rapid collection and assessment of many judgments via on-line software can
support timelier decision-making (see Chapter 3). Judgmental information was most often the
view of single individuals or very small groups, but now decisionmaking benefits from the
increasing use of open systems that invite broad and transparent participation of groups of
experts and individuals from around the world.
Vast peer-reviewed data banks are being interconnected so that composites of data from many
sources can present the best facts available for a given decision. Issue-tracking for
decisionmaking is improving with Web 2.0 tools. More user-friendly, powerful, and flexible
simulation and modeling software will eventually find its way into decisionmaking, as have
spreadsheet software and search engines. Advances in cognitive neuroscience and braincomputer interface technologies should improve decision-support systems.
If Moore’s Law continues, within 25 years individual computers will have the processing power
of the human brain; hence, much decisionmaking can be automated, just as the autonomous
nervous system manages basic bodily decisions. Meanwhile, too much time is wasted going
through useless information. The number and intricacy of choices seem to be growing beyond
our abilities to analyze and make decisions. Ubiquitous computing will increase the number of
decisions per day, constantly changing schedules and priorities. Decisionmaking will be
increasingly augmented by the integration of sensors imbedded in products, in buildings, and in
living bodies with a more intelligent Web and institutional and personal collective intelligence
software that helps us receive and respond to feedback for improving decisions.
Self-organization of volunteers around the world via Web sites is increasing transparency and
creating new forms of decisionmaking. Today’s challenges cannot be addressed by governments,
corporations, NGOs, universities, and intergovernmental bodies acting alone; hence,
transinstitutional decisionmaking has to be developed and common platforms created for
transinstitutional strategic decisionmaking and implementation.
Training programs for decisionmakers should bring together research on why irrational decisions
are made, lessons of history, futures research methods, forecasting, cognitive science, prediction
markets, data reliability, utilization of statistics, conventional decision support methods (e.g.,
PERT, cost/benefit, etc.), collective intelligence systems, ethical considerations, goal seeking,
risk, the role of leadership, transparency, accountability, and participatory decisionmaking with
new decision support software, e-government, ways to identify and better an organization’s
improvement system, prioritization processes, and collaborative decisionmaking with different
institutions.
Challenge 9 will be addressed seriously when the State of the Future Index or similar systems are
used regularly in decisionmaking, when national corporate law is modified to recognize
transinstitutional organizations, and when at least 50 countries require elected officials to be
trained in decisionmaking.
AFRICA: Microsoft is collaborating to help e-government systems to improve transparency and
decisionmaking and to reduce corruption. Cape Verde’s e-government includes e-voting, which
tallies votes within minutes of poll closings, which avoids conflicts about results. A recent
mining boom in Africa will not benefit the local population unless the investment is
accompanied with good governance. How can the cultural advantages of extended families be
kept while making political and economic decisions more objective and less corrupt? The New
Partnership for Africa’s Development has begun improving collaborative decisionmaking.
African civil society needs development to pressure for freedom of the press, accountability, and
transparency of government. If the brain drain cannot be reversed, expatriates should be
connected to the development processes back home through Internet systems. Informal
decentralized networks of allied political groups within and across boarders are becoming
tremendously empowered by mobile communication devices and online social networking sites.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Synergies of Asian spirituality and collectivist culture with more linear,
continuous, and individualistic western decisionmaking systems could produce new
decisionmaking philosophies. South Korea is exploring collective intelligence capabilities.
EUROPE: As of May 2008, there were 2,379 multilateral treaties and agreements affecting
decisionmaking around the world; Europe is a major contributor to these, which is leading to
“reporting fatigue.” Bureaucratic complexity, lack of transparency, and proliferation of decision
heads threatens clear decisionmaking in the EU. Tensions between the EU and its member
governments and among ethnic groups are making decisionmaking difficult. A global
observatory and advanced information technology may facilitate public participation in direct
democracy.
LATIN AMERICA: Data for decisionmaking are weak in the region due to lack of capacity. In
addition to improved efficiency and transparency, the modernization of state decisionmaking
requires the design of new agencies and functions to attend to new aims of the political policies,
with increasing civil control. Latin America has to improve political educational awareness and
the involvement of the people and to reduce corruption.
NORTH AMERICA: The region’s dependence on computer-augmented decisionmaking—from egovernment to tele-business—creates new vulnerabilities to manipulation by organized crime,
corruption, and cyber-terrorism, as discussed in Challenges 6 and 12. Self-organizing groups on
the Internet are becoming de facto decisionmakers in the region, with decisions made at the
lowest level appropriate to the problem.
Figure 7. Number of international organizations
(NGOs and IGOs)
Source: Union of International Associations Year Book
with Millennium Project estimates
10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts,
terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction?
Half the world is vulnerable to social instability and violence due to increasing oil and food
prices, to decreasing water-food-energy supplies per person, to climate change, and to increasing
migrations due to political, environmental, and economic conditions. These can trigger complex
interactions of old ethnic and religious conflicts, civil unrest, terrorism, and crime, making
conventional industrial-age military force less effective. Since many countries affected by
conflict return to war within five years of a cease-fire, more serious efforts are required to
deconstruct the structures of violence and establish structures of peace.
The vast majority of the world is living in peace, conflicts actually decreased over the past
decade, cross-cultural dialogues are flourishing, and intra-state conflicts are increasingly being
settled by international interventions. The probability of a more peaceful world is increasing due
to the growth of democracy, international trade, global news media, the Internet, satellite
surveillance, better access to resources, and the evolution of the UN. However, some recent
setbacks have occurred, with failing states, separatist movements, and decreases in press
freedom.
By mid-2008 there were 14 wars (conflicts with 1,000 or more deaths)—one fewer than in 2007.
These wars were in Africa (5), Asia (4), the Americas (2), the Middle East (2), and worldwide
anti-extremism (1). Beginning in 2008, there were 160,000 peacekeepers from all sources, of
which the UN had 88,000 uniformed personnel and 17,000 civilians in 17 operations. Total
military expenditures are about $1.3 trillion per year. There are an estimated 20,000 active
nuclear weapons in the world, approximately 1,700 tons of highly enriched uranium, and 500
tons of separated plutonium that could produce nuclear weapons.
Future desktop molecular and pharmaceutical manufacturing and organized crime’s access to
nuclear materials give extremists and single individuals the ability to make and use weapons of
mass destruction—from biological weapons to low-level nuclear (“dirty”) bombs. Unauthorized
use of nuclear or radioactive materials reports to IAEA averaged 150 per year between 2004 and
2007.
Much of urban civilization depends on the Internet; hence, cyber weapons can also be considered
a WMD deployable by an individual. In addition to ubiquitous sensors and security systems in
urban environments, we have to apply cognitive science to improve and connect education and
mental health systems to detect and treat individuals who might otherwise grow up to use such
weapons.
Early warning systems of governments and UN agencies could be better connected with NGOs
and the media to help generate the political will to prevent or reduce conflicts. The UN has
established www.un.org/peacemaker containing a wealth of information. Massive public
education programs are needed to promote respect for the diversity, equal rights, common ethical
values, and oneness that underlie human diversity. It is less expensive and more effective to
attack the root causes of unrest than to stop explosions of violence. Peace strategies without love,
compassion, or spiritual outlooks are less likely to work, because intellectual or rational systems
cannot overcome the emotional divisions that prevent unity and harmony. Counter-terrorism
strategies should include many personal conversations with hardliner groups. Sanctions should
target elite criminals rather than innocent populations. Advanced communications could be
parachuted to local citizens so that local realities could be broadcast to the world.
Backcasted peace scenarios should be created through participatory processes to show how peace
is possible (see CD Chapter 3.7). The UN Security Council has received over 150 country
reports on how to keep nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists
and black marketers and how to improve international counterterrorism strategies. Networks of
CDC-like centers to counter impacts of bioterrorism should be supported. Governments should
destroy existing stockpiles of biological weapons, create tracking systems for potential
bioweapons, establish an international audit system for each weapon, and increase the use of
nonlethal weapons to reduce future revenge cycles.
Challenge 10 will be addressed seriously when arms sales and violent crimes decrease by 50%
from their peak.
AFRICA: Wars in Africa cost an estimated $18 billion annually. The UN provides 2,391
peacekeepers in Africa; the African Union provides 72% of the non-UN peacekeeping forces in
the region. The Chairman of the African Union brought Uganda and the Democratic Republic of
Congo to a peace agreement for a border dispute over oil. The Central African Republic has
signed a ceasefire agreement with the last remaining rebel group in conflict. Although decreasing
over the past 10 years, coups, unrest, and ethnic conflicts continue to plague the continent, while
Al Qaeda continues to influence Muslims from Mauritania to Somalia. Millions of AIDS orphans
may fuel a new generation of violence.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Nuclear proliferation concerns increase with potential instability in Pakistan
and North Korea and uncertainty with Iran and Syria. China’s military budget increased 18%
during 2008. The Chinese anti-satellite test explosion created tens of thousands of new pieces of
space debris in low-earth orbit through which satellites, the Space Station, and space shuttles
travel. China faces unrest in both Tibet and the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, with the Tibetans
and Uighurs calling for greater political and religious freedom. Taiwan’s newly elected president
supports closer ties with the mainland. China’s lack of transparency and “no strings attached”
loan policies have provoked criticism from the World Bank and IMF. India is exploring a
seamless web of security-related linkages for Asia.
EUROPE: Russian budget reports indicate an effort to restore the country’s standing as a major
military power. The large numbers of migrant laborers entering the EU and Russia will require
new approaches to integrate them better into society if increased conflicts are to be prevented. As
the failed EU constitution effort is replaced by the Treaty of Lisbon, France pushes for a
Mediterranean Union. Stresses continue around the borders of Russia, from Estonia to
Azerbaijan.
LATIN AMERICA: Although one of the most peaceful regions in the world, interstate struggles with
Latin American drug cartels continue. Tensions among Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia
increased. The fact that there are few land-owning opportunities for the poor continues to cause
social unrest.
NORTH AMERICA: The recent U.S. moves toward less aggressive military policies and more
multilateral approaches to world security problems are expected to accelerate with the next
administration. Intelligence technology and military power have never provided security in
asymmetrical warfare without genuine cross-cultural understandings and better multilateral
cooperation. The knowledge of how to bring about mass destruction through emerging
mechanisms such as genetic engineering, nano-technology, and artificial intelligence could have
more potential to destroy civilization than nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Figure 8. Global trends in armed conflict, 1946-2007
Source: Global Conflict Trends, Center for Systemic Peace, 2008
www.systemicpeace.org
11. How can the changing status of women help improve the human condition?
Closing the gap between rhetoric and reality of how women are treated by men around the world
is not yet a top priority. Although many of the norms on gender relations have found official
endorsement in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women and the Beijing Plan of Action, many countries still have laws and cultures that make
women second-class citizens and expose them to violence. Progress on women getting good jobs
in politics and business and equal salaries has been slow. Women in legislatures have increased
from 13.8% in 2000 to 18% in 2008. Women account for over 40% of the world’s work-force
but earn only 25% of the income. It is well documented that countries with smaller gender gaps
tend to have better economies, healthier children, and superior welfare in general. The
Scandinavian countries top both gender parity ratings and general quality of life indicators.
Improving the political, economic, and educational status of women is one of the most costeffective ways to address the other challenges in this chapter. Even peacebuilders in the field
agree that women find common ground for peaceful resolutions more easily than men.
Women are cutting through cultural hierarchies via Internet access to information about health,
finance, S&T, and education programs. Even Web sites like iknowpolitics.org help improve
women’s political skills. Girls’ secondary school enrollments are now about 90% of boys’
enrollments. If current trends continue, however, UNICEF estimates that by 2015 over 50
countries will not achieve universal primary education and more than 90 countries will not reach
gender parity in primary and secondary education.
The largest war on earth today as measured by death and casualties is men attacking women,
especially during armed conflicts. Establishing truth and reconciliation commissions on violence
against women in armed conflict would help end this. WHO reports that after diseases and
hunger, violence against women is the greatest cause of death among women; one in five women
will be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Elementary and secondary school
systems should consider teaching martial arts and other forms of self-defense in physical
education classes for girls.
Since there are more women than men in universities in many countries that limit women’s
professional work, the “female brain drain” could become an issue in countries as diverse as
Saudi Arabia and Japan.
According to Plan International, childhood malnutrition has stunted development of an estimated
450 million women; unsafe abortions and birth complications are the leading causes of death for
girls 15 to 19 in developing countries studied; and over 100 million girls, some as young as 12,
are expected to marry over the next decade even though international treaties outlaw early
marriages. About 80% of the 600,000–800,000 individuals trafficked each year are female, in the
“largest slave trade in history.”
Women should use their role in the family to more assertively nurture mutual respect between
men and women. A global gender gap integrated index should be created to show trends of the
whole picture as well as trends disaggregated by age, education, political and economic
participation, and health. Mechanisms are needed to monitor violence against females and
recommend interventions. Legal rights of women (such as access to credit, land, technology,
training, health care, child care, and judicial systems accessible to victims of sexual violence) are
also needed, including educating men to fully respect women and working with the media to
change harmful gender stereotypes that influence the choice of education, training or
employment, participation in domestic and family duties, and representation in decisionmaking.
Challenge 11 will be addressed seriously when there is gender parity in school enrollment,
literacy, and access to capital, when discriminatory laws are gone, and when there are essentially
equal numbers of men and women in parliaments and cabinets.
AFRICA: The percent of women in sub-Saharan African parliaments is 17.5%. One in 22 women
in sub-Saharan Africa is likely to die as a consequence of pregnancy, compared with 1 in 7,300
in industrial countries. The dropout rate for adolescent girls in Africa is very high, as are
systematic rape during armed conflicts and female genital mutilation. Major cultural changes
will have to be made to systematically change the prospects for the average woman in Africa.
Uganda eliminated school fees to help close the educational gender gap.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Some 17.3% of Asian national legislators are women and 15.4% in Oceania.
At least 60 million girls are “missing” in Asia due to the abortion of female fetuses, female
infanticide, and deliberate neglect and starvation of baby girls. China funds pension plans for
parents with daughters to counter male-only child preferences. Intimate partner violence in
Thailand is the leading cause of death for females between the ages of 15 and 24. Millions of
young girls have been sold as sex slaves in Asia. Most Muslim-majority countries scored among
the lowest in the Global Gender Gap Index. Women in Australia hold 7% of top corporate
positions and are paid half as much as their male equivalents.
EUROPE: While women represent 59% of university graduates in Europe, their employment rate
is only 57.2%, they earn on average 15% less than men for every hour worked, and they
represent 32% of managers, 10% of board members, and only 3% of CEOs of large companies.
Work/life balance is still deficient, and women want improved support that allows them to
continue their professional careers, yet they worry about reduced quality time for family life.
About 500,000 women from Central and Eastern Europe are working in the sex trade in Western
Europe. The European Nordic countries top the Gender Gap Index, and the EU pledged to fight
discrimination and domestic violence against women and to promote women’s participation in
political life. Norway requires that the boards of all companies registered at its stock market
consist of at least 40% of each sex.
LATIN AMERICA: Although women’s participation in Latin American parliaments increased to
22%, women are still threatened by poverty, rising food and fuel prices, inequity, unemployment,
lack of access to health services, and violence due to “machismo” attitudes, institutional
weaknesses, and a patriarchal culture. Nevertheless, education is improving, with women 15–24
years old in urban areas reaching 9.7 years of education and women in rural areas reaching 7
years. Governments should change laws about rape, sexual harassment, and equal pay for
women.
NORTH AMERICA: Women account for 16.8% of legislative bodies in the U.S. and 21.3% in
Canada. Women executives in the top 500 companies represent 13.6% in the U.S. and 12% in
Canada. Nevertheless, at least 86.4% of the U.S. companies had boards with at least one woman
member, versus 48.2% in Canada. In Quebec, Canada, state corporate boards by law will have to
be 50% female by 2012.
Figure 9. Women in national parliaments (percentage)
Source: Inter-Parliamentary Union
12. How can transnational organized crime networks be stopped from becoming
more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises?
Transnational organized crime continues to grow in the absence of a comprehensive, integrated
global counter-strategy. Havocscope.com estimates world illicit trade to be over $1 trillion per
year, with counterfeiting and piracy at $533 billion, the global drug trade at $322 billion, trade in
environmental goods at $57 billion, human trafficking at $44 billion, consumer products at $60
billion, and weapons trade at $10 billion. McAfee adds cybercrime at $105 billion. These figures
do not include extortion or organized crime’s part of the $1 trillion in bribes that the World Bank
estimates is paid annually or its part of the estimated $1.5–6.5 trillion in laundered money. Hence
the total income could be well over $2 trillion—about twice all the military budgets in the world.
Governments can be understood as a series of decision points, with some people in those points
vulnerable to very large bribes. Decisions could be bought and sold like heroin, making
democracy an illusion.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime is giving priority to human trafficking, corruption, and
reducing demand for drugs. There are more than 27 million people held in slavery today (the vast
majority in Asia), far more than during the peak of the African slave trade. UNICEF estimates
that 1.2 million children are trafficked every year. The online market in illegally obtained data
and tools for committing data theft and other cybercrimes continue to grow. Computer transfers
of $2 trillion per day make tempting targets for international cyber criminals. Prescription drug
abuse exceeds the use of conventional illegal drugs in many areas, and counterfeiting of these
compounds brings additional revenue to TOC.
OECD’s Financial Action Task Force has made 40 recommendations to counter money
laundering, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has called for national integrated strategies
and created the Global Program against Money Laundering. Nevertheless, TOC continues to
grow and has not surfaced on the world agenda in the way that poverty, water, and global
warming have. It is time for an international campaign by all sectors of society to develop a
global consensus for action against TOC, which has grown to the point where it is increasingly
interfering with the ability of governments to act. The head of the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime has called on all states to develop a coherent strategy to counter TOC as a whole, but
efforts still focus on pieces of the problem. INTERPOL’s 186 member countries can now
directly access the organization’s central database management system (I-link), speeding
investigations and cooperation.
Two Conventions help bring some coherence to addressing TOC: the UN Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime, which came into force in 2003, and the Council of Europe’s
Convention on Laundering, which came into force in May 2008. Possibly an addition to one of
these conventions or the International Criminal Court could establish a financial prosecution
system as a new body to complement the related organizations addressing various parts of TOC.
In cooperation with these organizations, the new system would identify and establish priorities
on top criminals (defined by the amount of money laundered) to be prosecuted one at a time. It
would prepare legal cases, identify suspects’ assets that can be frozen, establish the current
location of the suspect, assess the local authorities’ ability to make an arrest, and send the case to
one of a number of preselected courts. Such courts, like UN peacekeeping forces, could be
identified before being called into action and trained, and then be ready for instant duty. When
all these conditions are met, then all the orders would be executed at the same time to apprehend
the criminal, freeze access to the assets, open the court case, and then proceed to the next TOC
leader on the priority list. Prosecution would be outside the accused’s country. Although
extradition is accepted by the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, a new
protocol would be necessary for courts to be deputized like military forces for UN peacekeeping,
via a lottery system among volunteer countries. After initial government funding, the system
would receive its financial support from frozen assets of convicted criminals rather than
depending on government contributions for continued operations.
Challenge 12 will be seriously addressed when money laundering and crime income sources
drop by 75% from their peak.
AFRICA: Links between African rebel factions, organized crime, and terrorism may be increasing.
The number of AIDS orphans is expected to grow to 20 million by 2010; with few legal means to
make a living, they constitute a gigantic pool of new talent for the future of organized crime.
Piracy along the coasts of Nigeria and Somalia is increasing and believed to finance terrorist
groups. Guinea-Bissau is now a major drug trafficking transit point in West Africa. Corruption
has become a serious limit to growth in many countries.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: ASEANAPOL (ASEAN’s Chiefs of Police) and INTERPOL are working on
greater cooperation and have linked their databases, allowing ASEANAPOL databases to be run
against information collected by INTERPOL. The Asian Organized Crime Project launched by
INTERPOL is targeting Asian organized crime groups worldwide as complex adaptive networks.
Asia has the largest number of slaves in the world. Singapore announced that decreasing
organized crime is now a top priority. The U.S. military is carrying out a $2.6-billion program
for upgrading the Afghan police force.
EUROPE: The groundbreaking Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in
Human Beings came into force in April 2008 as the first European treaty in this field. EU funds
for Bulgaria may be withheld until it makes more progress fighting organized crime. As the
Sicilian mafia is hit by high-level arrests, UNODC says the Albanian mafia is the most serious
criminal organization in Europe, controlling heroin all over the continent; the Calabrian
‘Ndrangheta is also expanding its activities. The EU has strengthened controls on money
transfers across its borders to address trafficking and money laundering, especially in Eastern
Europe. Norway has led the development of an international task force on illicit financial flows
and their impact on development.
LATIN AMERICA: Top Mexican government and police officials continue to be assassinated, 5% of
the Mexican GDP is laundered, its drug cartels are moving into Peru (where coca output is up
about 40%), and the level of violence in the country is increasing, as President Calderón’s war on
crime continues. UNODC says crime is the single largest issue impeding Central American
stability. FARC computers revealed links with organized crime in all major regions of the world.
The U.S.-supported Plan Colombia, lasting six years and costing almost $5 billion, has left
cocaine availability, price, and quality unchanged. A serious public health problem has arisen in
Argentina and Brazil from the smoking of paco, a cheap, adulterated, and toxic form of cocaine
residue.
NORTH AMERICA: The U.S. Department of Justice issued The Law Enforcement Strategy to
Combat International Organized Crime, which establishes an investigation and prosecution
framework that emphasizes priority areas of action against international organized crime.
Organized crime and its relationship to terrorism should be treated as a national security threat.
Countries must be held accountable for corporations that are involved in criminal activities in
their own and other countries. A single European/U.S. operation seized over 360,000 counterfeit
integrated circuits bearing over 40 different trademarks. Some 200,000 people are considered to
live in slavery in the United States.
13. How can growing energy demand be met safely and efficiently?
World energy demand could double in just 20 years. Without major technological changes, fossil
fuels will provide 81% of primary energy demand by 2030. If so, then large-scale carbon
capture, storage, and reuse should become a top priority. The IEA projects oil demand to grow
nearly 40% from 2006 to 2030 and estimates that investments of $22 trillion would be required
to meet demand. Some argue that oil production is peaking and will end in 40–70 years. The
dramatic jump in oil, gas, and coal prices is making renewable sources more competitive;
renewable energy investments reached $100 billon in 2007 and cumulatively could be $7 trillion
by 2030. Over 65 countries have national renewable energy goals. Currently only 3.4% of world
electricity is generated by renewable sources; 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity and
2.4 billion still rely on traditional biomass for cooking and heating, while billions of gallons of
petroleum are wasted in traffic jams around the world.
Given the exponential growth of cars in China and India, decarbonizing transport fuels should be
a global priority. Prices for electric car batteries and capacitors are low enough to make fully
electric cars competitive, and cars have successfully run on compressed air. Massive saltwater
irrigation of coasts can grow halophyte plants and algae to produce 190,000 liters of biofuels per
hectare per year instead of letting less-efficient freshwater biofuel production (now 4% of global
gasoline consumption) have catastrophic effects on food supply and prices. Space solar power
satellites could manage base-load electricity on a global basis, improving efficiencies and
transmitting energy to electric grids, providing sustainable abundant electricity for the world.
Drilling to hot rock (two to five kilometers down) could make geothermal energy available
where conventional geothermal has not been possible. A total of 438 nuclear reactors are
operating today; 38 are under construction and more than 300 are either on order or being
proposed. For nuclear energy to eliminate the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, about
2,000 nuclear power plants (average 1 gigawatt) would have to be built at $5–15 billion per plant
over 15 years—and possibly an additional 8,000 plants beyond that to 2050. There is not enough
U235 to supply them, so thorium breeder reactors would have to be built, which raises
proliferation concerns. Another Chernobyl-type accident or nuclear hijacking could halt
expansion of nuclear power.
Innovations are accelerating, such as concentrator photovoltaics that dramatically reduce costs;
waste heat from power plants, human bodies, and microchips to produce electricity; genomics to
create hydrogen-producing photosynthesis; solar energy to produce hydrogen; microbial fuel
cells to generate electricity; and compact florescent light bulbs and light-emitting diodes to
significantly conserve energy, as would nanotubes that conduct electricity. Solar farms can focus
sunlight atop towers with Stirling engines and other generators. Estimates for the potential of
wind energy continue to increase, but maintenance problems grow. Plastic nanotech
photovoltaics printed on buildings and other surfaces could cut costs and increase efficiency. The
transition to a hydrogen infrastructure may be too expensive and too late to affect climate
change, while plug-in hybrids, flex-fuel, electric, and compressed air vehicles could provide
alternatives to petroleum-only vehicles sooner. The world’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid is
coming out later this year from China, and its largest car maker, Chery, plans that half of its cars
will be hybrids by 2010, while 40% of its cars will be for export. Unused nighttime power
production could supply electric and plug-in hybrid cars. National unique all-electric car
programs are being implemented in Denmark and Israel, with discussions being held in 30 other
countries.
A global collective intelligence described in Chapter 5 could provide the overviews and details
necessary to create more coherent energy policy and better informed consumer choices.
Meanwhile, approximately 1,000 coal plants, with production lives of 40 years, are in some stage
of planning or construction around the world without CO2 capture. Environmental movements
may try to close down such plants, just as they stopped growth in nuclear energy 30 years ago.
The world needs coherent energy policies.
Challenge 13 will be addressed seriously when the total energy production from environmentally
benign processes surpasses other sources for five years in a row, and when atmospheric CO2
additions drop for at least five years.
AFRICA: The continent’s electric production could double via the proposed $80-billion dam on
the Congo River, with some exports to Europe. Algeria plans to export 6,000 megawatts of solargenerated power to Europe by 2020. By 2050, 10–25% of Europe’s electricity needs could be
met by North African solar thermal plants. With support from development partners, African
leaders agreed to invest $10 billion annually between 2009 and 2014 in renewable energy.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Japan plans to develop a working space solar power system in orbit by 2030;
such systems could meet the world’s electricity requirements indefinitely without nuclear or
GHG emissions. It also plans to have 5 million fuel cell cars by 2020. China and India account
for 45% of the increase in world energy demand in IAEA’s 2030 reference scenario. Car sales in
China may exceed 10 million during 2008 and could pass the U.S. sales by 2025. India’s $3,000
car may accelerate car ownership in developing countries. China is the world’s second largest oil
consumer, plans to quadruple its nuclear capacity by 2020 (while 66% of its energy comes from
coal today), and is expected to become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaics in 2008.
The UAE plans to invest $15 billion in new energy sources and announced a $22-billion plan to
build the first zero-carbon city. The Philippines gets 27% of its electricity from geothermal
sources. Australia plans to outlaw incandescent light bulbs by 2010 in favor of compact
fluorescent bulbs and to share its wind and geothermal energy technologies in Asia.
EUROPE: Europe plans to build 50 new coal plants in five years, expects 21–28% of its electricity
from wind by 2030 (up from 3.7% today, which powers 60 million homes), but is increasingly
dependent on Russian energy. Germany produces half the world’s solar electricity and could
nearly double its solar energy industry by 2010. Sweden cut its carbon emissions by 9% between
1990 and 2006 while its economy grew 44% in fixed prices. Russia plans to have 25% of its
energy from nuclear sources by 2020.
LATIN AMERICA: Costa Rica plans to become carbon-neutral by 2021. Brazil produces ethanol for
60 cents per gallon, meeting 40% of its automotive needs, and has discovered over 10 billion
barrels of oil offshore. Venezuela’s heavy oil reserves could use today’s technologies, giving it
larger reserves than Saudi Arabia.
NORTH AMERICA: General Motors will mass-market an electric car in 2010. “Off-peak” electricity
production and transmission capacity could fuel 84% of the 220 million U.S. vehicles if they
were plug-in hybrid electrics. Recycling waste heat from nuclear power plants to home air
conditioners and even body heat to recharge batteries could reduce CO2 by 10–20% in the U.S.
Project Green Freedom is developing electrochemical separation of carbon from the air to
produce methanol and gasoline. Over 100 of the 151 coal-fired power plants proposed in the U.S.
were either refused licenses or abandoned in 2007 or continue to be contested in the courts. Wind
projects accounted for 35 percent of all new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. in
2007. Quebec and British Columbia have introduced carbon taxes. Canada is not expected to
meet its Kyoto treaty obligations mainly due to Alberta’s development of oil tar sands, which
also jeopardizes forests. Two-thirds of the U.S. refining capacity expansion is being tailored for
“dirty oil” from tar sands.
14. How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to
improve the human condition?
The acceleration of S&T innovations, improved communications among scientists, and future
synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science
will fundamentally change the prospects for civilization. A computer can now perform 1.144
thousand trillion floating point operations per second, supporting computational science’s new
simulations to improve medicine, materials, climate predictions, and other insights into nature.
Scanning electron microscopes can see 0.01 nanometers (the distance between a hydrogen
nucleus and its electron). Photons have been slowed and accelerated to learn how to create
optical computers; synthetic chromosomes have been created from laboratory chemicals;
quantum phenomena and entanglement are being probed; experiments to teleport individual
photons are being conducted; and dark energy is explored to counter gravity. Industrial nations
increased their R&D investment from 1.5% of GDP in 1980 to more than 2.2% today; 157,283
patents were granted in 2007. Millions of people volunteer their computers’ excess capacity to
help find cures for cancer. Heads of government science information portals are beginning to
collaborate to better inform the world public.
New diseases like SARS can now have their DNA sequenced in several weeks, speeding cures
for new infectious diseases. Individuals can have their DNA analyzed today for $1,000. The
price is expected to drop to $100 and require only one day, making full DNA analysis a practical
diagnostic tool and opening the possibility of truly customized medicine. Human skin cells have
been stimulated to act like embryonic stem cells without using embryos or eggs; pancreatic tissue
created from embryonic stem cells has generated insulin; the Isx-9 molecule was created to
stimulate brain stem cells to become mature neurons that can be re-implanted to improve brain
functioning and longevity; future stem cell application could revitalize any part of the body. The
genome of a bacterium of one species has been moved to a cell of a different variety, which
became indistinguishable from one of the donor type. Genetic research seems destined to cure
inherited disease potentials. Genetically modified viruses can coat themselves with electrically
conducting metals to form nano-wires that self-assemble into battery components, and microbial
fuel cells have been demonstrated.
MRI brain imaging shows primitive pictures of real-time thought processes, and changes among
specific neurons can be traced as new memories are stored. Nanoparticles and fibers stimulate
neural growth, and mini-biocomputers help treat specific individual cells. Robotic microtweezers gently pick up and move single cells. Faint magnetic signals from a single electron
buried inside a solid sample have been detected. Organic transistors with a single-molecule
channel length are now visible.
Over 600 nanotechnology-related products improve quality and make new capacities possible,
from releasing medicine in the body to forming thin-film photovoltaics, promising to reduce
cost, resources, and pollution per unit of output. However, environmental health impact studies
may find dangers and initiate regulations for nanotech production and use. A science roadmap
has been produced for atomically precise nanoscale building blocks, components, and devices.
Nanobots the size of blood cells may one day enter the body to diagnose and provide therapies
and internal VR imagery.
Genetic code is being written to create new life forms; artificial organs may be constructed in a
manner similar to 3-D printing; surgical robots are now MRI-compatible; external light can be
concentrated on internal targets for photodynamic therapy and to power implanted devices.
However, the risks from acceleration and globalization of S&T are enormous (see CD Chapter
3.5 for global 2025 S&T scenarios) and give rise to future ethical issues (See CD Chapter 5,
Science and Technology Management Issues). We need a global collective intelligence system to
track S&T advances, forecast consequences, and document a range of views so that politicians
and the public can understand the potential consequences of new S&T. Currently the
InterAcademy Panel, a worldwide network of 90 science academies, is increasing access to S&T
information and cooperation around the world, and furthering basic science as necessary to
replenish the pool of knowledge from which applied science draws its insights to improve the
human condition.
Challenge 14 will be addressed seriously when the funding of R&D for societal needs reaches
parity with funding for weapons and other purposes, and when an international science and
technology organization is established that routinely connects world S&T knowledge for use in
R&D priority setting and legislation.
AFRICA: The Science with Africa initiative with the African Union, UN Economic Commission
for Africa, and others is creating synergies among African and first world science organizations.
Africa has 83 engineers for every 1 million people, compared with 1,000 per million in the more
developed world.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: China has the second largest R&D system in the world next to the U.S. Japan
has the highest R&D budget per GDP in the world at 3.2%, and South Korea’s R&D is growing
rapidly. The U.S. and China are increasing S&T cooperation in energy and environment. There
are more IT engineers in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley. In cooperation with Asian science
organizations, Japan is leading the Strategic Program for Building an Asian Science and
Technology Community.
EUROPE: The EU plans to increase R&D expenditures to 3% of GDP by 2010 and to attract an
additional 700,000 researchers. Russia has lost over 500,000 scientists over the last 15 years, but
a reverse trend is beginning, salaries have increased, innovation is encouraged, and high-tech is
being supported. Switzerland has the largest number of Nobel prizes, patents, and science
citations per person in the world.
LATIN AMERICA: The region averages 0.4% of GDP for S&T development but hopes to increase
that to 3% by 2010 and should improve its public-private R&D long-term cooperation, regional
research networks, national strategic R&D planning, basic research, S&T literacy of benefits and
risks, and incentives for private investment in local R&D.
NORTH AMERICA: The U.S. continues to lead world R&D investments with more than $360
billion from all sources during 2007, and it is making an annual investment of $1.5 billion in
nanotechnology R&D. These investments have shifted from the government supporting 60% in
1965 to the private sector supporting over 65% since 2006. Each week the U.S. Patent Office
makes about 3,500 new patents freely available online. MIT offers free online S&T courses.
Falling numbers of students in S&T, religious fundamentalist politics, and the imposition of
other political points of view are threats to the continued excellence of U.S. science. Prizes can
speed the distribution of technology that benefits humanity, such as the Tech Awards from the
Tech Museum in San Jose, California, or Richard Branson’s new prize for a plan to remove a
billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, as can tech sports like MIT’s robot competitions.
15. How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into
global decisions?
December 2008 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, which has stimulated more than 60 treaties to protect individual freedom and dignity and
has inspired countless discussions about global ethics and human rights. The evidence is now
overwhelming that increasing government respect for human rights correlates with economic
development and that unethical business practices ultimately lower stock prices, productivity,
and profits. Unethical decisions and corrupt practices are increasingly exposed via news media,
blogs, mobile phone cameras, ethics commissions, and NGOs. Collective responsibility for
global ethics in decisionmaking is embryonic but growing. Global ethics are also emerging
around the world through the evolution of ISO standards and international treaties that are
defining the norms of civilization. However, trivial news and entertainment floods our minds
with unethical behavior, and each year over $1 trillion is paid in bribes, while organized crime
takes in over $2 trillion. Although many socioeconomic statistics show global improvement,
gaps continue to worsen within many countries.
The speed at which the fabric of life has begun to change seems beyond the ability of most
people and institutions to comprehend, leading to ethical uncertainties. Do we have the right to
clone ourselves, or rewrite genetic codes to create thousands of new life forms, or genetically
change ourselves and future generations into new species? Is it right for humans to merge with
technology, as one way to prevent technological hegemony over humanity? Is a genetics race to
build a superior people possible? Experts speculate that the world is heading for a
“singularity”—a time in which technological change is so fast and significant that we today are
incapable of conceiving what life might be like beyond the year 2025. Meanwhile, is it ethical to
allow one population to pay another for their right to pollute? Since the poorest create the least
greenhouse gas emissions but will suffer the most from climate change, should not those who
produced the most GHGs pay for adapting to climate change? Should information about how to
make a roadside bomb or an epidemic-causing virus be posted on the Internet? What is the
appropriate balance between security and personal freedom?
Globalization and advanced technology allow fewer people to do more damage and in less time,
so that possibly even one day a single individual may be able to make and deploy a weapon of
mass destruction. Hence the healthy development of anyone should be the concern of everyone.
Such observations are not new, but the consequences of failure to realize their importance may
be much more serious in the future than in the past. New technologies also allow more people to
do more good than ever before, such as single individuals organizing worldwide actions around
specific ethical issues via the Internet.
Public morality based on religious metaphysics is challenged daily by growing secularism,
leaving many unsure about the moral basis for decisionmaking. Unfortunately, religions and
ideologies that claim moral superiority give rise to “we-they” splits, yet spiritual education
should grow in balance with the new powers given humanity by technological progress. The
moral will to act in collaboration across national, institutional, religious, and ideological
boundaries that is necessary to address our global challenges requires global ethics. More of the
very rich could form global partnerships for development with the poorest 2 billion—as Bill
Gates and Warren Buffet are doing in health, Richard Branson is doing in climate change, and
Ted Turner is doing with UN systems.
The Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption have begun implementing the treaty, and
the World Bank is helping to strengthen national anticorruption units. Over 4,000 businesses in
120 countries have joined the UN’s Global Compact to use global ethics in decisionmaking. The
International Criminal Court has successfully tried political leaders. Memes could be promoted,
like “make decisions that are good for me, you, and the world.” We need to promote parental
guidance to establish a sense of values, encourage respect for legitimate authority, support the
identification and success of the influence of role models, implement cost-effective strategies for
global education for a more enlightened world, and make behavior match the values people say
they believe in.
Challenge 15 will be addressed seriously when corruption decreases by 50% from the World
Bank estimates of 2006, when ethical business standards are internationally practiced and
regularly audited, when essentially all students receive education in ethics and responsible
citizenship, and when there is a general acknowledgment that global ethics transcends religion
and nationality.
AFRICA: How much more suffering do the people in Sudan and Zimbabwe have to endure before
moral outrage changes the situation? The South African special unit (the Scorpions) that has
been fighting organized crime and corruption since 1999 may be eliminated. In eight African
countries surveyed by Transparency International, 20% of those interviewed who had contact
with the judicial system reported having paid a bribe. Kenya’s Egerton University hosts the
UNESCO Regional Bioethics Centre. The Business Ethics Network of Africa has grown and
hosted the 2008 International Society of Business, Economics, and Ethics in South Africa.
ASIA AND OCEANIA: Should Myanmar’s refusal to accept international aid for its people following
the cyclone in 2008 cause the international community to define when human rights or needs
outweigh sovereignty of governments? A January 2008 report on Iraq found that “$8.8 billion
had been disbursed from Iraqi oil revenue by U.S. administrators to Iraqi ministries without
proper accounting.” The need to make so many decisions so quickly during Asian urbanization
apparently leaves little time to consider the ethical implications. Some do not believe there are
common global ethics and maintain that the pursuit to create them is a western notion.
EUROPE: UNESCO in Paris has opened a Global Ethics Observatory as a system of databases
focused on ethics related to science and technology worldwide. The EU has criminalized
xenophobia and racism. The European integration process is helping establish ethical standards,
yet increased non-European immigration raises new ethical challenges. Russia has created anticorruption committees in parliament and the government, chaired by the President, and has
begun implementing a national anti-corruption plan.
LATIN AMERICA: The Guatemala Declaration for a Region Free of Corruption signed by Central
American governments has made progress with public access to information. University courses
in business ethics are beginning to be taught in Latin America. The Inter-American Initiative of
Social Capital, Ethics and Development of the Inter-American Development Bank works to
strengthen ethical values in the region.
NORTH AMERICA: Increasing income divides and the number of medically uninsured are being
discussed as issues of ethics in the political arena. Decisionmaking software could prompt users
through the ethical considerations of their decisions, based on universal values of respect,
honesty, compassion, fairness, and responsibility, according to research from the Institute for
Global Ethics. New campaign finance approaches are needed to improve ethics in political
decisionmaking, along with better real-time transparency to prevent corruption.
Figure 10
Global Challenges and SOFI process
2.
The State of the Future Index is a measure of the 10-year outlook for the future based on
historical data for the last 20 years. It is constructed with key variables and forecasts that, in the
aggregate, depict whether the future promises to be better or worse. The SOFI is intended to
show the directions and intensity of change and to identify the factors responsible. It provides a
mechanism for studying the relationships among the items in a system—how making a single
change ripples throughout a system, in other words, creating some positive and intended
consequences as well as unintended results.
The unique combination of features of SOFI includes:
the subject: SOFI is a quantitative forecast of general future outlook
 the elements/variables: determined by groups of experts
 probabilistic nature: the forecasts of the constituent variables and the SOFI are displayed
 as a fan of possibilities rather than single values
 set of “standards”: allowing nation-to-nation comparisons.
The index has been constructed for the global level as well as for countries.
Combining many variables into a single index number can lead to loss of detail. Creating an
index requires judgments not only in selecting the variables to include but also in weighting
them. An index of global conditions can mask variations among regions, nations, or groups. The
apparent precision of an index can easily be mistaken for accuracy. For these reasons, many
people interested in tracking social or economic conditions prefer to keep the variables that they
consider important separate and distinct. Great attention is given to the variables that make up
the index, seeking accurate data sources and tracking changes when they occur.
The State of the Future Index was first presented in the Millennium Project’s 2001 State of the
Future. Since then, the SOFI chapter in State of the Future reports has focused on improvements
in the data sources and the method itself. This chapter presents an overview of the SOFI study
conducted in 2007–08. Details on all years of SOFIs and the analysis and supporting data are
included in the CD Chapter 2.
Box 2. SOFI variables
Variables included in the 2007 SOFI

Population lacking access to improved water sources (percent of population)

Literacy rate, adult total (percent of people aged 15 and above)

Levels of corruption (15 largest countries)

School enrollment, secondary (percent gross)

Poverty headcount ratio at $1 a day (PPP) (percent of population)
(low- and middle-income countries)

Countries having or thought to have plans for nuclear weapons (number)

Carbon dioxide emissions (global, kt)

Unemployment, total (percent of total labor force)

GDP per unit of energy use (constant 2000 PPP $ per kg of oil equivalent)

Number of major armed conflicts (number of deaths >1,000)

Population growth (annual percent)

R&D expenditures (percent of national budget)

People killed or injured in terrorist attacks (number)

Energy produced from non-fission, non-fossil sources
(percent of total primary energy supply)

Food availability (cal/cap)

Population in countries that are free (percent of total global population)

Global surface temperature anomalies

GDP per capita (constant 2000 $)

People voting in elections (percent population of voting age)

Physicians (per 1,000 population) (surrogate for health care workers)

Internet users (per 1,000 population)

Infant mortality (deaths per 1,000 births)

Forestland (percent of all land area)

Life expectancy at birth (years)

Women in parliaments (percent of all members)

Number of refugees (per 100,000 total population)

Total debt service (percent of GNI) (low- and middle-income countries)

Prevalence of HIV (percent of population)

Homicides, intentional (per 100,000 population)
The Global SOFI
The indicators included in the SOFI are listed in Box 2. This set of variables was identified by an
international panel of experts during the study conducted in 2006–07 using a Real-Time Delphi
(see Chapter 3 for details of the method). Participants were asked to rate the variables, give
worst- and best-scenario estimates, suggest new variables to be included in the SOFI, and
suggest sources that could provide at least 20 years of historical data.
The 29 variables were selected based on the scores they received and the availability of data. For
practical and comparison reasons, national and global usefulness was considered in determining
the variables and the measure units. Online historical data sources for essentially all the variables
were obtained, although some manipulation was required, and the data were fit with time series
equations to both interpolate missing data points and to obtain forecasts for the next 10 years.
A trend impact analysis was also performed to examine the effect of events that the respondents
to the RT Delphi felt might be important to the outcome of the SOFI. In all, more than 90 future
events were considered. Using these events and estimates of probability of occurrence and
impacts made by staff, TIA forecasts of individual variables and the SOFI itself were prepared.
The TIA analysis had the consequence of improving the forecasted SOFI so that the historical
trends extended for the next decade. Figure 11 shows the SOFI using TIA.
The 2007 SOFI curve shows that the relatively rapid growth since the mid-1980s will slow over
the next 10 years. Note that this SOFI was calculated before the present price rise of staple
commodities, and the western countries’ economic slowdown is not yet factored in.
Assessing the world’s key indicators over the past 20 years and projecting them for the next 10
provides a basis for a report card on humanity’s future, showing where we are winning or losing.
The indicators that show improvements are:
•
Life expectancy
•
Infant mortality
•
Literacy
•
GDP per capita
•
Conflict reduction
•
Internet users
The indicators hindering SOFI ascending and thus showing the need for better policies and
strategies are:
•
Carbon dioxide emissions
•
Terrorism
•
Corruption
•
Global warming
•
Voting population
•
Unemployment
Figure 11. SOFI 2007 with trend impact analysis
Box 3. SOFI 2007–08 study
The main activities relative to SOFI in 2007–2008 include:
•
Assessing the use of the International Futures econometric model for automatically
computing global and national SOFIs
•
Enhancing the capabilities of using SOFI to identify promising policies and actions
•
Developing an online tutorial for building a SOFI
•
Perfecting the variables assessment process by using the Real-Time Delphi
•
Building national SOFIs for South Korea and South Africa
Using SOFI to Identify Promising Policies and Actions
In previous SOFI studies, policies have been identified to improve SOFI by searching for
internal linkages or external developments that could boost the SOFI. While this work was ad
hoc, it was often informative. For example, the 2007 SOFI shows considerable sensitivity to
forecasts of HIV/AIDS and terrorism.
Over the past year, more systematic techniques were developed to identify promising policies
and actions based on data contained within the SOFI analysis. The following techniques were
studied: targeting, sensitivity analysis, figure of merit, and regression analysis.
Targeting: By identifying the variables that seem likely to move in favorable or unfavorable
directions in the future, SOFI helps policymakers consider the targets for and consequences of
their planned actions.
Sensitivity analysis: A systematic approach was developed to identify developments that could
swing the SOFI and thus serve as the basis for future policy actions. This could allow policies to
be designed that would increase the probability of the development(s) identified as improving the
future. However, identifying the policy-sensitive developments is not obvious. The sensitivity of
SOFI results from the probability of a development, its impacts across multiple and differing
variables, and the timing of its impacts on those variables.
The process involves making several SOFI runs by changing the probabilities of developments to
identify each development’s ability to increase or diminish the future outlook. By applying this
process to the developments included in the 2007 global SOFI, subsets of developments that
seemed to have the ability to increase or diminish the SOFI were identified. All other things
being equal, decisionmakers should concentrate on improving the probability of the following
SOFI-boosting developments:
•
implementation of effective means for limiting production and proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction
•
several countries adopt the goal of improving national collective intelligence
•
low cost anti-aging therapies increase life expectancy 20%
•
debt forgiveness by the industrial world (debt reduced by 50% overall)
•
advent of another “teachers without borders” movement (50,000 new teachers in the field).
And they should reduce the probability of the following SOFI-lowering developments:
•
advent of a pandemic of the scale of HIV/AIDS
•
increased decision failures of governments due to inability to manage complex systems
•
CO2 increase by 20% due to economic development in China and India
•
use of nuclear weapons by terrorists
•
global economic depression resulting in drop of GDP per capita by 15%.
A similar analysis can also be performed at the level of the variables. For example, considering
“unemployment” (see Figure 12), the question for the policymaker interested in lowering
unemployment is to identify specific effective actions. A review of the TIA reveals that the
developments that would lower unemployment are:
•
a very good, fast $150 laptop computer becomes available everywhere
•
advent of a “teachers without borders” movement (50,000 new teachers in the field)
•
economic expansion of at least 5% from new fields such as applied nanotechnology
•
global partnerships for development between rich entrepreneurs and those in areas where
people live on less that $2 per day
•
increasing globalization drives GDP/cap growth rate 5%
•
many countries establish pro-employment policies such as building of public
infrastructure, national parks, and so on
•
many countries stiffen limitations on number of refugees they will accept
•
tele-citizens—more than 10,000 people from poorer nations who live in richer nations
help develop their countries of origin via international telecommuting.
Unemployment might be increased, on the other hand, if:
•
automation and robotics increase productivity 25% in many countries and create
“jobless” economic growth
•
economic growth rates in China and India fall to half of current levels
•
a global economic depression results in drop of GDP per capita by 15%
•
decision failures of governments increase due to inability to manage complex systems
•
low cost anti-aging therapies increase life expectancy 20%
•
major terrorist attacks lead to widespread economic depression
•
national policies that encourage exportation of jobs result in higher unemployment in
some countries.
Of course, there might be problems in interpreting such future developments, since the
probabilities are based on the expert panels’ judgments, and assumptions about impacts and their
time histories are made in TIA and represent staff judgments. If these judgments are questioned,
planners may choose to change probability, impact, or timing and re-run the series to test the
consequences of their own future vision.
Figure 12. Unemployment with trend impact analysis
Analysis using a figure of merit: A figure of merit can be defined that would be highest for
developments that produce the greatest positive improvement and the least negative decrement in
the SOFI in the shortest time at the least cost. An equation that embodied these principles was
developed and applied to all developments included in the 2007 global SOFI.
The impacts of developments on the variables fall into several categories and each must be
included in the calculation of the figure of merit. It is important to keep the positive and negative
figures of merit separate, since a development that has a high positive figure of merit may not be
worth pursuing if it carries a great deal of negative baggage. When assigning a cost measure,
ranging from 1 (very cheap) to 10 (very expensive), both financial and political costs should be
considered. After assessing the strategies that focus on reducing the probabilities of the
developments that are generally undesirable, the top cost-benefit actions can be singled out.
Some controversial developments might appear in both positive and negative lists, in which case
a more profound analysis is needed to depict the policies and their weights and consequences.
There are several examples of the use of this technique in Chapter 2 on the CD.
Regression analysis is a “classic” approach that might be used to find strategies for improving
SOFI or individual variables. For example, an equation based on historical data can be found that
relates “poverty” (the dependent variable) to “unemployment” and “population growth” (the
independent variables). Figure 13 shows graphically the correlation. Then using forecasts of the
independent variables, a forecast of the dependent variable can be made. The warning with this
approach is that sometimes regression analyses that seem statistically sound in fact represent
spurious relationships.
Further work is necessary in the future to increase the use of SOFI in helping to identify policy
opportunities. For example, the estimates of costs might be included in the next global RealTime Delphi designed to collect expert judgments, and calculation of the figure of merit might be
automated and imbedded in the calculation.
Figure 13. Correlation between poverty, unemployment, and population growth
(income less than $1 per day) (low- and mid-income countries)
Automated Calculation of Global and National SOFIs
The Millennium Project and the University of Denver have been experimenting with automated
calculation of global and national comparison SOFIs using the International Futures model. The
IFs is a “structure-based and agent-class driven model” that links economic, demographic, and
social measures of essentially all countries in the world, showing how increasing one
development in a country affects other measures in that country, other countries, regions, and the
world as a whole.
IFs includes historical data and computes projections for 182 countries, and it is generally used
to project the long-term future (to 2100), although the Millennium Project use was limited to
projections to about 2020. If this cooperative “proof of concept” study shows promise, the model
could ultimately be used to compute SOFIs for all of the countries represented in the model. If
the capability to compute SOFI is added to the publicly available online model and the databases
are updated periodically, then SOFIs could be computed by anyone and for any countries or
regions. This opens the opportunity to produce an annual or biennial publication that tracks and
ranks the State of the Future Index for countries, similar to the UNDP Human Development
Index.
While there are still a few differences between the model and the recommended national
comparison SOFI procedures and data, the results are encouraging. Chapter 2 in the attached CD
details the present status and issues remaining to be resolved. Following are a few examples so
far.
Figure 14 shows that when the IFs data were used in the Millennium Project computational
template, the results were quite similar. Comparing the global SOFI computed by the IFs and by
the Millennium Project template, each using its own data set, pro-duced the results shown in
Figure 15. The forecasted curves appear similar in general shape and growth rate. High
agreement between the IFs forecast data and the Millennium Project national comparison SOFI
was also obtained for the SOFI of the Republic of Korea, as shown in Figure 16.
Figure 14. SOFI using IFs data in the
Millennium Project template
Figure 15. SOFI comparison with IFs data and
Millennium Project data
Figure 16. South Korea SOFI using IFs data and
Millennium Project data
The new SOFI facility in the IFs model was used to produce SOFIs and “systemic SOFIs” for 37
countries. The systemic SOFI represents a country’s level of achievement. For example, suppose
SOFI had only three variables and all variables had reached their best attainable levels
(represented by 100). If all were weighted equally at a value of, say, 8, then the value of the
systemic SOFI would be 2400. SOFI, on the other hand, is the ratio of the systemic SOFI in a
given year to the value of the systemic SOFI in a reference year; where systemic SOFI represents
level of achievement, SOFI indicates movement toward or away from what is viewed as the best
attainable.
Taking the sample of 37 countries and using IFs to compute the systemic SOFI and SOFI itself
yields a complex space as shown in Box 4.
A few conclusions and recommendations emerging from this proof of concept experiment with
the IFs model include:
•
When fully operational, the system could produce annual national and global indexes
documenting the possible future outlooks.
•
The model facilitates understanding of the SOFI results by presenting the data in new
ways—for example, maps of systemic SOFI versus SOFI, showing another variable such
as GDP/capita in a third dimension, all perhaps as a function of time (like “Gap
Minder”).
•
The IFs model could benefit from the addition of some other variables (considered in the
SOFI).
•
The existing database of historical information should be expanded so that historical as
well as forecasted SOFIs can be presented.
Box 4. Systemic SOFI and 2008 SOFI
Argentina
Australia
Belgium
Brazil
Canada
Colombia
Czech Republic
Finland
High
France
Systemic
Germany
SOFI
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Russia
South Korea
Spain
United Kingdom
United States
Low
Systemic
SOFI
Cape Verde
Cuba
Egypt
Haiti
Low SOFI
Indonesia
Israel
Kuwait
Turkey
Venezuela
Azerbaijan
Bangladesh
China
Ethiopia
Malawi
India
Iran
Nigeria
Pakistan
South Africa
High SOFI
SOFI for the Republic of Korea
The Republic of Korea’s national SOFI was built using the outcomes of a Real-Time Delphi
study conducted with experts from the country, which gathered information on the variables to
be included in the SOFI, their relative importance, the best and worst expectations for these
variables in 10 years, future developments that could affect these variables, their estimated
probabilities, and their domains of impact. The variables included in the SOFI are presented in
Box 5.
Twenty-two future developments were proposed and assessed, and TIA was used to assess the
impacts of these future developments. Figure 17 shows the resulting SOFI.
The full analysis of the South Korean SOFI with policy implications is available in Chapter 2 on
the CD. Some highlights include the drop in the 1998–2000 period reflecting the “Asian Crisis”
and the possible negative short-term effects of reunification with North Korea.
Box 5. SOFI variables for the Republic of Korea
The variables used for the SOFI for the Republic of Korea:
1. Export volume (unit: 1000$)
2. Days lost per year due to labor strikes (days per 1,000 workers)
3. Gross national income per capita ($)
4. Improved water source (percent of population with access)
5. Carbon dioxide emissions (metric tons per capita)
6. Fertility rate (children per woman over her lifetime)
7. Percent unemployment
8. Corruption (percent of survey reporting no bribery) (CPI/score)
9. South Korean income disparity between rich and poor (Gini)
10. Patents per year (number)
11. R&D expenditures by government and private sector (percent of GDP)
12. Energy consumption per GDP (metric tons oil equivalent/million $)
13. Seats held by women in Parliament (percent)
14. Dependence on foreign energy sources (percent of energy consumed)
Considering both the forecasts of the variables and the consequences of the developments, it was
possible to formulate two scenarios for South Korea for the next decade:
•
a normative scenario (“the bright national future”), based on constant economic growth
and reduced energy dependency, and
•
a “less bright” scenario based on variables with adverse or uncertain trends––mainly
external factors––that would cause economic and social disruptions.
The policy recommendations for the country included:
•
The “bright national future” should be taken as an image of an attainable South Korea
and be used in setting national goals.
•
A national annual monitoring system should be established to track the 14 variables
identified by this study (and possibly additional variables) to assess progress.
•
The data from the monitoring system should be used to produce annual South Korean
SOFIs.
•
The list of key future events of this study (and possibly additional developments) should
be used to test existing and planned national policies to determine their resiliency and
ability to withstand external shocks and to take advantage of positive developments.
Figure 17. SOFI of the Republic of Korea
Tutorial for Building a State of the Future Index
Responding to requests from many scholars and policymakers, a tutorial was created on how to
build a State of the Future Index. (See Figure 18.)
The tutorial, “An Introduction to Creating a Country SOFI,” consists of:
•
an introductory slide presentation for SOFI, narrated by Ted Gordon,
•
SOFI forum and discussion area,
•
the SOFI standards, and
•
a country template in Excel.
The tutorial is available at www.mpcollab.org/learning/course/view.php?id=3
The slide show details all the steps for building a country SOFI:
•
choosing the variables
•
obtaining the historical data
•
extrapolating the data
•
non-dimensionalizing the variables
•
weighting the variables
•
best and worst values
•
surprise-free SOFI computation
•
inputs to the TIA
•
running a TIA
•
final SOFI calculation.
Figure 18. Screen-shots of the SOFI presentation
Figure 19. Screen-shot of a Real-Time Delphi questionnaire
3.
Real-Time Delphi
The Real-Time Delphi is a relatively new and efficient method for collecting and synthesizing
expert opinions. The original Delphi technique has been used often across a broad spectrum of
topics since it was developed by the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s. It is a principal
method of futures research and has found application in planning, decisionmaking, and policy
research. One drawback is that traditional Delphi studies require multiple rounds of
questionnaires that can take weeks or months to complete.
The big advantage of the RTD is that it is practically a “roundless” Delphi. There is no need for
an explicit second round. The respondents participate by filling out an online questionnaire that
presents questions related to the issues that are at the heart of the study, and the results––both
numerical and qualitative––are updated as responses are recorded. The respondents can––and are
encouraged to––revisit the questionnaire as many times as they want. Each time, they are shown
their own responses as well as the updated answers of the others, and they can revise and change
their own inputs.
The Delphi requirements of anonymity and feedback are met and the process, once under way,
yields the distribution of the group’s responses and reasons they have provided for their answers.
The process can be synchronous or asynchronous and, if implemented on an Internet site, can
involve a worldwide panel.
The main sections of an RTD questionnaire are a short description of the study in general,
instructions and explanations on how to participate, the table with questions themselves, an
invitation to submit suggestions, and at the end the summary of the updated results ordered by a
priority decided by the questionnaire’s administrator.
In considering their own answers to each question, the respondents may refer to the reasons
others have given by opening the “reasons” window available at each issue.
The group average or median and the reasons sections are updated immediately after responses
are recorded. One option that is available in RTD is the ability to alert those who have quite
different views on an item; if a respondent’s answer to any question is beyond a prespecified
distance from the group average or median, an indication may be used to alert the respondent.
Figure 19 is a screen-shot as an example of a questionnaire. Each cell of the questionnaire table
features all (or links to) the following:
•
a space for the respondent’s numerical estimate for that question
•
the average (or median) response of the group (shown after the participant entered a response)
•
the distribution of responses
•
the number of respondents to each item
•
references concerning the item
•
an invitation to the respondent to give justifications for own answer
•
the reasons given by participants for their responses (opens another window showing the texts).
In addition to facilitating participation through its design and layout, the RTD also features
automated design possibilities. Several significant design and analysis functions are available to
the Delphi’s administrator. The system has been adapted to use a “generic” format that can be
easily modified for each application. The Delphi administrator can define the number and type of
columns and questions to appear, the attributes of the answers (e.g., numeric or alpha, percentage
or integer, etc.), the upper and lower limits for numeric answers, whether to show averages,
whether to alert if a response differs from the groups’ average, whether to edit the detailed
instructions and the study’s goals, and other design and analysis-related functions.
When a new study is initiated, the administrator is assigned a study code to gain access to the
design software. The administrator can define the unique attributes of the questionnaire format as
well as the questions themselves. The new questionnaire is immediately created, using the
generic skeleton and assembling the unique components from the new data tables.
The generic questionnaire is common to all studies, as are the positions of the unique elements,
such as the place where the questions are to appear––but not the questions themselves, the
position of the multiple choice answers––but not the answers themselves, and the position of the
completion date––but not the date itself. This generic form contains language, information, and
computations that are common to all future applications and designates the points of appearance
of the items that vary among applications.
Improvements that have been made in the analysis tools available to the administrator include:
•
a “Top Summary” of participation that includes the number of distinct participants with
unique e-mail addresses, names, regions, and employment, and the total number of
numerical questions answered
•
a complete list of all participants, including postal and e-mail addresses
•
a summary chart of responses in which the administrator is provided with the average
answers and the number of responses for all numeric questions
•
the distribution of responses (a set of charts showing the spread of numeric responses as
well as maximum, median, average, minimum and standard deviation for all questions)
•
reasons given for numeric answers
•
suggestions offered by respondents
•
closing comments offered by respondents
•
numeric answers by geographic region.
The administrator can publish a cutoff time and encourage participants to visit the site often
before that time. There will be no “stuffing of the ballot box,” since there is only one form per
respondent, complete with prior answers, that is brought back at revisits.
The process has proved to be quite efficient in all applications made to date. More details on the
technique itself and on some applications are available in Appendix N on the CD.
Responding to requests from users, a tutorial on how to develop a Real-Time Delphi
questionnaire was developed and placed online. It consists of an introduction to the Real-Time
Delphi methodology (narrated by Ted Gordon) and a discussion area for Real-Time Delphi
questions. The tutorial is available at www.mpcollab.org/learning/course/view.php?id=3.
Since it was introduced two years ago, a broad range of applications of the Real-Time Delphi
have been made or are in process:
•
Choosing a configuration for an automobile component, a decision model
•
Selecting and assessing the variables for the Global State of the Future Index
•
Selecting and assessing the variables for a national focus SOFI study for the Republic
•
of Korea
•
Selecting and assessing the variables for a national focus SOFI for South Africa
•
Future education and learning possibilities study
•
Future energy developments study
•
Millennia 2015: Developments important to the future of women (in preparation)
•
Judgments on acceptability of a Delphi process (UNESCO)
•
Identifying and assessing scenario drivers (UNESCO)
•
Setting priorities for topics in the next global water report (UNESCO)
•
Assessing priorities of Millennium Project Study Topics 2006–07
•
•
•
Electrical energy developments in Peru (in preparation)
•
Global human rights (WFUNA)
•
Review of the Global Environmental Facility‘s resource allocation framework:
performance (World Bank/World Perspectives, Inc.)
•
Review of the GEF’s resource allocation framework: biodiversity (World Bank/World
Perspectives, Inc.)
•
Review of the GEF’s resource allocation framework: climate change (World Bank/
World Perspectives, Inc.)
Almost 1,000 people have participated in Real-Time Delphi studies conducted by the
Millennium Project so far. Figure 20 shows the geographic and sectoral demographics of the
participants. The heaviest geographic concentration has been from European university
participants, followed by North American consultants, North American university participants,
and Pacific Asians who classified their employment as “other.”
Figure 20. Demographics of RTD participants since 2006
Since the proclamation of the UN Charter and shortly afterwards, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, a global community has been gradually forming which recognizes the need for
people everywhere to accept shared responsibilities, benefits and basic values. Now, in the 21st
century, there is an ever increasing sense that people all over the world are becoming more
interdependent but at the same time more insecure. Trends in economics, travel and information
technology bring us closer together, while the looming threats of climate change, pandemic
diseases and terrorist attacks make us aware of the dangers we face. In charting the way
forward, many political leaders are now calling for the development of a more effectively
integrated global community and more coherent systems for collectively managing global
challenges.
Pera Wells
Secretary-General, World Federation of UN Associations
4.
Government Future Strategy Units
and Some Potentials for International
Strategic Coordination
Humanity has grown to global proportions—with jet planes, the Internet, world television, UN
systems, ISO standards, international trade, the Olympics, and the International Space Station—
but at the same time is struggling to develop strategic coherence to address the global challenges.
Heads of state and government have to make national decisions taking into account global
changes that are beyond their control. The acceleration of change makes this increasingly
difficult. As a result, presidents and prime ministers are creating future strategy or foresight units
to contribute to their national policy process. The next step could be to better link these units
with each other and their counterparts in UN organizations to improve international strategic
coordination.
The Millennium Project has prepared brief overviews of 28 such future strategic units:
Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, European Union,
France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Romania,
Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United
Nations, United States, and Venezuela. These are all available in Chapter 4 of the CD. Ten of
them are described in this chapter.
Since the nature, structure, and objectives of government future strategy or foresight units
change as the leaders of countries change and even as senior staff members change, many of the
particulars presented here will be revised. But the range of models may remain fairly constant,
allowing for the evaluation of different approaches, sharing lessons learned, and providing a
stimulus for governments to begin to explore how they might improve their own units.
Some Observations about Government Future Strategy Units
The most common approach is to place the future strategy unit within the office of the prime
minister or president of the country to integrate the futures research from other government
sections and external institutions. These units often manage a network of other executive
councils and future strategy units within ministries to provide inputs to national strategy. They
also fund—directly or indirectly—special studies conducted both within the government and
externally. Some, like France and Japan, produce annual future strategy reports.
Japan’s unit is chaired by the Prime Minister and is unique in that its members are from both
government and private business. Governments in South Africa and Turkey rely on their policy
planning offices for integration. The Mexican President is focusing all futures strategy research
on their 2030 VISION project, and it remains to be seen if this turns into a regular capability or a
short-lived study. Similarly, the President of Brazil has combined two strategic research
institutions into one that is to create the long-range plan for the two-hundredth anniversary of
Brazil. Foresight Forums are conducted within the Office of the Prime Minister of Finland to
shape national long-range strategy, while their parliamentary Committee for the Future provides
futures research for other parliamentary committees.
In Germany and Israel, the parliamentary organizations house the future strategy units, while the
Prime Minister of the Czech Republic outsources that function to a trusted university institute.
India relies on its Ministry of Science and Technology to formulate its long-term strategic
directions. Sweden’s futures strategy organization began within the Prime Minister’s Office and
then evolved outside of the government with a board of directors appointed by the government
and with a core budget provided by the government. Some government units are created by
decree, others by legislation and/or executive order.
Thus there are many variations on how nations carry out their long-range strategic
responsibilities, but some general observations can be made. Much of the work and functional
reporting is personality-dependent. Units change structurally from one political administration to
the next. They are reorganized and recombined with other related units, making continuity of this
function from one government to the next very difficult.
Units that are located within the office of the heads of state or governments tend to have a
shorter-term political strategic focus than those located outside the president or prime minister’s
office, such as in a Ministry of Science and Technology or the Parliament, which look more at
the general futures strategy for the country as a whole.
Examples of nine countries and one intergovernmental body are listed alphabetically below.
They vary in detail, but the Millennium Project hopes to improve these descriptions and pursue
methods for connecting them with the Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and
the President of the General Assembly, with further support to improve global strategic foresight.
Argentina
There is no central integrating unit of futures research or foresight studies; however, the new
President has created a Secretary of Studies and Prospective (foresight) within the new Ministry
of Science, Technology, and Innovation for Productivity. The Argentine government has a long
tradition in futures work, beginning in 1944 with the National Council of Post Guerra within the
Office of Vice President Perón, which was responsible for two five-year plans. Then in 1976 the
Ministry of Planning was created, and in 1989 the Secretariat of Strategic Planning began
operations.
In addition to the unit just created by the new President, there are several strategy units in the
government:
•
Planning and Foresight Unit within the President of Directorate of the Nuclear
Regulatory Authority, a General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Nation
•
Office for Prospective on the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, National Atomic Energy
Commission (Coordinator Francisco Carlos King)
•
National Directorate of Prospective, Undersecretary of Electricity, Ministry of Energy,
Ministry of Economy and Production (Director Ing. Juan Gerardo Meira)
•
Observatory for Prospective National Energy Technology (Roberto Luis Saravia Mathon)
•
Juncture and Foresight Unit, National Institute of Agricultural Technology (Coordinator
Lic. Ruben Dario Patrouilleau).
China
The National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and
Technology future strategy units provide key national strategic information for the State Council
of China.
The National Development and Reform Commission reports to the State Council and has a
Department of Policy Studies that drafts policies, releases information, and organizes studies on
key national and international issues. The Five-Year Plans (now called Guidelines, since the
eleventh five-year program set in 2006) are developed by NDRC for the Chinese Communist
Party through the plenary sessions of the Central Committee and National Congresses. The
NDRC:
•
Formulates and implements strategies for national economic and social development,
long-term plans, annual plans, and industrial policies and price policies
•
Monitors and adjusts the performance of the national economy to maintain the balance of
economic aggregates and to optimize major economic structures
•
Examines and approves major construction projects
•
Guides and promotes economic system restructuring
•
Carries out strategic readjustment and upgrades industrial structure, coordinates the
development of agriculture and rural economy, and guides the development of industry
•
Formulates plans for the development of the energy sector and manages the national oil
reserve
•
Promotes the sustainable development strategy and the social development and
coordinated development of the regional economies, and implements the Western Region
Development Program
•
Submits the plan for national economic and social development to the National People’s
Congress on behalf of the State Council in accordance with the Constitution.
The NDRC has 26 functional departments, bureaus, or offices with an authorized staff size of
890 civil servants. (Dr. Kai Ma, General Secretary, National Development and Reform
Commission, www.en.ndrc.gov.cn.)
The other part of the government that contributes futures strategic intelligence for the State
Council is the Ministry of Science and Technology (Minister Wan Gang, www.most.gov.cn),
which:
•
Conducts research and sets forth the macrostrategies for science and technology
development, as well as guidelines, policies, and regulations
•
Organizes the formulation of the national medium- and long-term development plan and
annual progress plans for civil science and technology, such as the National High-tech
R&D Program (863 Program), National Key Technologies R&D Program, National Basic
Research Program of China, R&D Infrastructure and Facility Development, Environment
Building for S&T Industries, and Mega-projects of Science Research for the Five-year
Plans
•
Strengthens development and industrialization of new technologies and applied
technologies
•
Conducts research on the rational allocation of human resources in science and
technology and formulates the guidelines and policies of China’s international
cooperation and exchange in science and technology
•
Conducts research and proposes laws and regulations for science and technology
•
Undertakes other tasks assigned by the State Council.
Egypt
The Center for Future Studies was established within the Cabinet’s Information Decision
Support Center in 2004 to serve as the leading Egyptian futures research think tank. Its main
objectives are to formulate a future vision for Egyptian society that incorporates all strata of
society, build public opinion concerned with the future, and achieve integration among all
futures studies centers in Egypt.
The Center publishes a wide range of reports, such as Future Impacts of Climate Change in
Egypt in January 2007 and The Future Vision for Egypt in the Year 2025, published in 2005. It
also convenes meetings on the future of Egypt. Current projects include “A Future Vision for
Egypt” and “The Future of Water in Egypt.”
Egypt is a member of the Forum for the Future Initiative that held two summits, one in Morocco
in December 2004 and another in Bahrain in November 2005. The 36-nation Forum for the
Future aims at promoting political, economic and social reforms in the Middle East region. See
www.maec.gov.ma/future/fr/index.htm. (Dr. Magued Osman, Chairman, Information Decision
Support Center; Dr. Mohamed Mansour, Manager Center for Future Studies,
www.future.idsc.gov.eg.)
European Union
The European Union supports a broad set of futures research activities but lacks an overall
strategic futures unit. At France’s initiative, the EU will establish a futures council of 9–12
political and business leaders to study Europe’s future challenges such as migration, terrorism,
climate change, international relations for the EU, and other social and economic issues.
The Bureau of European Policy Advisers provides advice to the President of the European
Commission and Commission Services on issues relevant to the President’s agenda and the
future of policies in the Union. It reports directly to the President and leads inter-service groups
on specific policy issues and participates in horizontal work within the Commission. BEPA
complements other Commission Services by focusing on the early strategic stages of the policy
cycle, thereby contributing to shaping policy options in the medium and longer term. BEPA
interacts with outside professionals in academia and research institutes to ensure that the
President and, through that office, the Commission are informed by the best analysis available. It
has an approximately 30-person professional staff. Recent publications include Regulating
Conflicts of Interest for Holders of Public Office in the European Union, Russia’s Next
Transition, Investing in Youth, and EU Competitiveness. (Bureau of European Policy Advisers,
www.ec.europa.eu/dgs/policy_advisers/mission_statement/index_en.htm.)
The European Parliamentary Technology Assessment was established in 1990 as a network of
European organizations that conduct technology assessment for their parliaments. It strengthens
government TA organizations and conducts common trans-European TA studies on topics such
as bioethics and biotechnology, public health, environment and energy, information and
communications technologies, and R&D policy. It is managed by a council consisting of
members of parliament or representatives of the advisory boards for the respective EPTA
organizations, and its presidency rotates each year. (European Parliamentary Technology
Assessment, www.eptanetwork.org/EPTA.)
The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission’s Joint
Research Centre provides technology-related foresight studies for the EU policymaking process.
In addition to responding to requests from the Directorates of the European Commission, it also
provides research for the European Parliament. The 180-member IPTS staff conducts research on
sustainable development, energy and transport, research and innovation, the information society,
agriculture and rural development, and life sciences.
(Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, www.jrc.es.)
France
On May 18, 2007, Eric Besson was appointed Secretary of State of Foresight and Evaluation of
Public Policy within the Office of the Prime Minister. This unit is assisted by the Strategic
Analysis Center. The Center was created by decree on March 6, 2006. It collaborates with a
network of expert and advisory councils that work for the Prime Minister, such as the Conseil
d’Orientation pour l’Emploi (Employment Advisory Council); the Conseil d’Analyse de la
Société (Society Analysis Council); the Conseil de l’Emploi, des Revenus et de la Cohésion
Sociale (Employment, Revenue and Social Cohesion Council); the Conseil d’Analyse
Économique (Economic Analysis Council); the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (High Council for
Integration); and the Conseil d’Orientation des Retraites (Retirement Advisory Council). By
acting as a liaison between both national and community levels with the Secretary General for
European Affairs, it facilitates the integration of French and European policy.
The Centre d’Analyse Stratégique (Strategic Analysis Centre) has functionally replaced the
Commissariat Général du Plan and plays an important role within the main interministerial
authorities in the economic and social domains. It conducts research at the request of the Prime
Minister and produces annual reports. It also funds teams to produce foresight studies such as
alternative election systems, French energy prospects 2020–50, trends to 2015, and retrospective
analysis of the 2005 riots. The 2007 study teams explored topics such as labor risk in the context
of global change, education, and technology, as well as other social issues in France and within
the framework of the Lisbon strategy. The 2007 program is available at
www.strategie.gouv.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=3.
(Eric Besson, Director, Secretary of State of Foresight and Evaluation of Public Policy; Vincent
Champain, Chief of the Cabinet; Philippe Mills, Director, Centre d’Analyse Stratégique,
www.strategie.gouv.fr.)
Other government foresight units in France include:
•
Direction evaluation, prospective, and performance (Ministry of National Education)
•
Prospective subdirectorate, development and environment (Ministry of Ecology and
Sustainable Development)
•
Office of prospective and strategy (Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development)
•
Center of prospective, science, and technology (Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable
Development)
•
Office of economic prospective of transport (Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable
Development)
•
Subdirectorate evaluation, prospective, studies, and orientation (Ministry of Agriculture
and Fishing)
•
Office of economic and prospective analyses (Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing)
•
Subdirectorate of analyses, prospective, and facts of company (Ministry of the Interior,
Overseas and Local Authorities)
•
Division of studies and prospective (Ministry of the Interior, Overseas and Local
Authorities)
•
Office means, evaluation, and prospective (Ministry of the Interior, Overseas and Local
Authorities)
Germany
The Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (Parliament) was established in
1990. The Web site lists an 11-member staff, most of whom are under contract with the
institutions that operate the TAB.
The purposes of the TAB are to:
•
analyze the potentials of new scientific and technological developments and identify and
explore the associated social, economic, and ecological opportunities
•
examine the legal, economic, and social framework conditions for implementing
scientific and technological developments
•
provide a comprehensive analysis of the potential impact of future utilization of new
scientific and technological developments and indicate the possibilities for strategic
exploitation of the potential uses of technologies and avoiding or reducing the associated
risks.
TAB reports are available at www.tab.fzk.de/en/publikation.htm. Some examples include
Biobanks for Human Medical Research and Application; Prospects for Low CO2 and Emission
Traffic – An Overview of Fuels and Drive Systems; Potential and Prospects for Application of
Bionics; eLearning in Research, Teaching and Further Education in Germany; Green Genetic
Engineering – Transgenic Plants of the 2nd and 3rd Generation. (Professor Dr. Armin
Grundwald, Director, Office of Technology Assessment, German Bundestag,
www.tab.fzk.de/home_en.htm.)
Research organizations such as the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovations Research
ISI, German Association of Engineers’ Future Technologies Consulting (VDI-TZ), and Z_punkt
GmbH the Foresight Company contribute to the German long-term strategic planning processes.
Foresight is being diffused into the government ministries’ research funding and thereby is
becoming more widespread in research.
Japan
The most influential strategy unit in Japan is the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy. The
Council is a consultative group within the Cabinet Office to support the Prime Minister and is
chaired by the Prime Minister. The 11 members include the Prime Minister, Chief Cabinet
Secretary, four Ministers, the Governor of the Bank of Japan, and four private-sector experts,
including the Chairman of Keidanren.
The main output of the Council is the annual report Direction and Strategy for Japanese
Economy, which outlines basic principles of Japan’s economic and fiscal policy for the next five
years. The analytical work is done by staffers in relevant ministries. This research is coordinated
by the secretariat of the Council located in the Cabinet Office. The final report is reviewed and
endorsed by the Council. The work is not constrained by the budget or number of staff in the
Cabinet Office. Ideally, this institutional setup allows strategic issues to be picked up and
succinctly summarized by the professional staff most knowledgeable on the topic and keeps the
scope of the work flexible and broad (that is, when some issues become more important for
Japan, more resources will be available to analyze them). The work is an accumulation of
policies and strategies of many ministries. To finalize the report and have all ministries approve
the contents might require significant time for coordination and result in compromise, which
might prevent a truly important issue from being sufficiently highlighted. Without strong
leadership by the Prime Minister, the power balance of the Council members could have stronger
influence on the contents of the report than the real importance of the issues merits.
The Cabinet Office also houses three Councils: Council for Science and Technology Policy,
Central Disaster Management Council, and Council for Gender Equality. All Councils are
chaired by the Prime Minister and function in a manner similar to the Council for Economic and
Fiscal Policy. There is, at this moment, no unit or person who coordinates the work of these
Councils and produces one single report on strategic issues for Japan. The Cabinet Office and the
Councils were set up in 2001.
Japan also has the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (www.nistep.go.jp)
within the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. NISTEP was
founded in 1988 as an affiliated research institute under the Science and Technology Agency. It
conducts research to improve S&T policy and comprehensive, long-term perspectives. NISTEP
also provides private companies with research results to assist them in formulating strategies for
research and development.
Singapore
The Strategic Policy Office is located in the Public Service Division of the Office of the Prime
Minister. It analyzes the potential impact of future trends on Singapore to help build a
progressive and forward-looking public service and to develop strategic planning capabilities
across the public service to shape government policy to deal with an increasingly complex
environment. The SPO is organized into the Futures Unit and the Strategy Unit.
The Futures Unit runs national-level scenario planning exercises every two to three years. It also
leads or facilitates smaller-scale scenario studies on more focused topics. On the capacitybuilding front, the Futures Unit provides training and consultancy services to public sector
agencies that want to use scenario planning for long-term policy and strategy development.
The Strategy Unit has responsibility for developing and managing the government’s strategic
planning cycle and for coordinating and driving strategic policy issues of an inter-agency nature.
It facilitates collaboration through cross-agency studies and drives the integrated government
initiatives serving the national strategic objectives. One of the current key initiatives is called
World Singapore.
The SPO has 16 staff members and an annual budget of approximately Singapore $3.5 million
(US$2.4 million). Recent projects include a set of new media scenarios of Singapore by 2017,
national scenarios of Singapore by 2020, and scenario planning consultancies for the Energy
Market Authority, the Ministry of Manpower, and the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority.
In 1993 the Cabinet approved the use of scenario planning as a tool for government’s long-term
policy and strategy development, with the requirement that in the future all new policy proposals
with long-term implications are to be tested for robustness, as appropriate, against the scenarios.
In 1995, the Scenario Planning Office was established in the Prime Minister’s Office Cabinet to
undertake the national scenario planning exercise. The Scenario Planning Office was renamed
the Strategic Policy Office with effect from 1 November 2003 to assist ministries in analyzing
long-term, inter-agency strategic issues and formulating appropriate policy recommendations.
(Donald Low, Director, Strategic Policy Office, Public Service Division, Prime Minister’s
Office, www.psd.gov.sg.)
South Africa
Planning Policy Coordination and Advisory Services is in the Office of the President. The unit
began as a project called Memories of the Future that produced the government’s 2014 scenarios.
In 2004 it was established as a Planning Unit responsible for medium- and long-range planning.
It has a staff of six. Some of the reports it has produced include the Medium-Term Strategic
Framework, National Spatial Development Perspective, Scenarios 2014 (currently working on
Scenarios 2025), and Ten Year Review (currently working on the 15-year review of government
performance). (Mr. Hassen Mohamed, Chief Policy Analyst, Planning Policy Coordination and
Advisory Services, Office of the President.)
United Kingdom
The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit was established in 2002 to bring together the Performance
and Innovation Unit and the Prime Minister’s Forward Strategy Unit. The Unit is based in the
Cabinet Office and reports to the Prime Minister through the Minister for the Cabinet Office. It:
•
provides the Prime Minister with in-depth strategy advice and policy analysis on priority
issues
•
supports government departments in developing effective strategies and policies
(including helping them to build their strategic capability)
•
identifies and disseminates emerging issues and policy challenges through occasional
strategic audits and regular seminars.
It has around 45 staff (at the end of 2007) and works closely both with the Prime Minister’s
senior advisers in No. 10 and the Cabinet Office and with government departments to bring an
analytically rigorous, evidence-based, holistic, and, where appropriate, cross-cutting approach to
strategy and policy work. There is no area of domestic policy in which it couldn’t be asked to
work, and in the past it has also worked on international/foreign policy issues.
The Unit is staffed by a mix of permanent civil servants and others on fixed term contracts or
secondments. The permanent civil servants generally come on loan from government
departments. Others come from the private sector, academia, think tanks, NGOs, and overseas.
Sometimes the Unit (temporarily) colocates its staff and teams in the departments it is working
with.
Current projects include work with the Department for Children, Schools and Families; the
Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills; the Department of Health; the Home Office;
the Ministry of Justice; and the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.
Further details and past published work
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/strategy.
can be found on the Unit’s Web site at
(Stephen Aldridge, Director, and Lisa Leibo, Executive Assistant, Prime Minister’s Strategy
Unit.)
There are also the Foresight Programme and the Horizon Scanning Centre, which are based in
the Government Office for Science within the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills
to provide visions of the future, identify potential risks and opportunities in relation to science
and technology, and help policymakers develop strategies. The program was launched in 1993.
Foresight panels have been organized on the aging population; crime prevention; manufacturing
2020; the built environment and transport; chemicals; defense, aerospace, and systems; and
energy and the natural environment. Current studies include mental capital and well-being,
sustainable energy management and the built environment, and tackling obesities: future choices.
(Government Office for Science, Department of Innovation, University and Skills,
www.foresight.gov.uk.)
Upgrading Government Future Strategy Units
Doug Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse and many forms of collaborative software and
interfaces) has suggested that one way to upgrade any organization is to identify its improvement
system and then improve that system with better online management tools. If part of a
government future strategic development system is conducting meetings of leading experts on
various future topics, then one way to improve that with an online management tool is the RealTime Delphi described in Chapter 3.
If another part of the improvement system is a global scanning system (there are various names
for this, including early warning systems, environmental scanning, futures intelligence systems)
to find patterns, issues, and opportunities, then creating collective intelligence systems similar to
the one for global energy described in Chapter 5 could also upgrade capabilities. Such software
should be interoperable with each ministry’s information systems and strategy units.
The use of indicators to show progress and regress of a country should also be considered part of
the improvement system. A set of indicators might be improved by creating a national State of
the Future Index, as explained in Chapter 2. Such a national SOFI could be used to see what
policies and events make the index could go up or down over the next 10 years. Sharing this with
the public as part of an e-government system could improve transparency and public
participation. Most government future strategy units use only two or three methods at most, such
as environmental scanning, Delphi, and scenarios. However, there are many more methods that
should also be considered to improve national futures research capacity. (The Futures Research
Methodology version 2.0 is available under “Books and Reports” at www.millenniumproject.org. The Millennium Project plans to update the 27 chapters and add 10 new ones as a
version 3.0 to be available in early 2009.) A checklist to help connect futures research to
decisionmaking is available in Chapter 11 of the attached CD.
Some government units are responsible for producing an annual report on the future prospects of
their country. The 15 Global Challenges in Chapter 1 can provide a framework for assessing the
global strategic landscape and exploring national implications for policy. These global
challenges can be used as a checklist to test completeness of the coverage of important issues,
find inconsistencies among current policies, and hence improve internal policy consistency and
coherence for the nation.
Potentials for International Strategic Coordination—Beginning with
Climate Change
The President of the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for
Policy Coordination and Strategic Planning, and the UN Assistant Secretary-General for
Information Technologies have all expressed interest in the creation of an intranet to connect
government future strategy units with each other and with their counterparts within UN
organizations. Such a network could facilitate sharing insights that could improve global
strategic research and planning.
There are increasing calls for global strategies to address climate change, poverty, water, energy,
organized crime, communicable disease, globalization, science and technology, disarmament,
and peace. The infrastructure to create and manage such global strategies seems inadequate
today. Some of that infrastructure exists within specific subject areas, like the World Health
Organization for health, and for specific regions, like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
and other multilateral organizations like OECD for the richer countries. The G-8 tries to pull it
all together, but it is limited in scope and participation.
Many look to the Office of the Secretary-General of the UN for the creation and coordination of
global strategies. Some suggest climate change should be the first such systematic strategic
development and coordination. Some steps could include:
•
Connect government and UN agency future strategy units via Web/intranet with the
Offices of the Secretary-General and President of the General Assembly
•
Create an interoperable global futures scanning system for the Secretary-General’s Office
and the major UN organizations
•
Design a global situation room for the Secretary-General that might initially
•
focus on global climate change
•
Develop a UN integrated or collective intelligence system for climate change to provide
for “just-in-time knowledge” to support decisionmaking and management
•
Use the Real-Time Delphi to rapidly collect best judgments worldwide to support
decisionmaking that is integrated into the collective intelligence and global futures
scanning system
•
Integrate the UN Secretary-General’s situation room with the UN-Government strategic
intranet and the climate change collective intelligence system.
5.
Global Energy
Collective Intelligence
The options to create and update national, global, and corporate energy strategies are so complex
and rapidly changing that it is almost impossible for decisionmakers to gather and understand the
information required to make and implement coherent policy. At the same time, the
environmental and social consequences of incoherent policies are so serious that a new global
system for the identification, analysis, assessment of possible consequences, and synthesis of
energy options for decisionmaking is urgently needed.
So the question arises: Can a global energy collective intelligence be created to help politicians,
energy experts, and the general public understand the whole energy picture and get “just-in-time”
knowledge about specifics to lead to better questions and decisions? With support from Walter
Kistler, President, Foundation for the Future, the Millennium Project explored such a possibility
through literature searches, interviews, and online discussions with energy and software experts.
The result of that work was the initial design presented in The Global Energy Network and
Information System Phase I report presented in Appendix E on the CD. Phase II is proposed to
involve the production of prototypes and Phase III, the creation of the full system. A distilled
version of Phase I is presented in this chapter.
The Global Energy Network and Information System, or GENIS, would be composed of two
integrated elements:
•
The Global Energy Network, or GEN, providing communications and collaboration
capabilities for a worldwide community of experts and others working on or concerned
with energy issues
•
The Global Energy Information System, or GEIS, a repository (knowledge base) and
associated interactive access facility for as much of the world’s total knowledge about
energy (actual content, pointers to external systems, and ability to mashup from other
databases into one integrated set of outputs) as can be accumulated.
The two components would work together to support a variety of needs, such as for politicians
during energy hearings, for policymakers creating national, bilateral, or multilateral energy
strategies, for businesses and universities supporting R&D, for media fact-checking, and for the
general public.
Global Energy Network
A large and diverse set of leading energy experts from around the world would be invited to
become members of GEN. The initial members during Phase II would be the participants in the
Foundation for the Future’s energy conference, plus the additional experts participating in Phase
I and those contributing to create GEIS in Phase II. GEN would seek recommendations for new
members from such sources as national academies of sciences and engineering around the world.
In addition, while creating GEIS, citation analysis and interviews will find additional members
for GEN. An estimated 250 energy and energy-relevant experts across disciplines would be the
goal for Phase II prototypes, with thousands expected during Phase III.
Peer networking around the world would help keep such experts abreast of the cutting edge of
knowledge and hence improve their professional value and augment their own information
systems and research. With a very small support staff, GEN would create and maintain the GEIS
knowledge base and participate as “on-call” resources for consultations.
There would also be a public GEN, or PGEN, for anyone who wanted to participate in the
development of GENIS. Their contributions would be available (labeled as public contributions)
within GEIS and available to GEN for potential inclusion in professionally peer-reviewed
information.
Many computer-augmented collaborative systems exist, and others will be invented prior to the
establishment of the whole system of GENIS1 in Phase III. There are at least four modes of
operation for GEN:
•
Discussion of the most important global energy issues and associated decisions
•
Collaboration to produce distilled information and ratings for priority listings in GEIS
•
Identifying the degree of expert consensus, and where there is none, identifying the range
of views and pending issues
•
Linking on-call experts to support the political hearing example described below, or other
“just-in-time knowledge requirements” in which material is being assembled and
presented in real time that would have to be fast enough to prevent a roomful of highlevel people from having to wait impatiently.
The first three would also be separate activities within the PGEN, with the addition that, as some
public members’ contributions are recognized, they could become members of GEN.
Until better semantic technologies are developed for multilinguistic usage, language groups
within GEN during Phase III would have to identify and develop different language areas of
GEIS, oversee translation, and provide live translation for real-time work. There would be a
Chinese GEN, a Spanish GEN, etc. to address language issues for GENIS.
1
A 2001 paper by Keiichi Nakata on “Enabling Public Discourse” (available at: www.ii.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
sid/sid2001/papers/preprints/jsai2001wsnakatapaper.pdf) presents a proposed design for a collaboration system with
very much the same goals as GEN and also coincidentally aimed at public discussion of environmental issues. And
kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/csca (also from 2001) is a Resource Site on Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation.
The Japanese-proposed system had the added feature of an attached suite of simulation and analysis programs.
Global Energy Information System
The central concept of the GEIS design is that a very broad set of energy information would be
continuously updated and organized into a single, coherent collection of knowledge, with an
interface reflecting the semantics of the field, viewed as a whole, and oriented toward making the
knowledge easily accessible to experts and non-experts. This also includes the range of judgments
where agreement is not verified, and the justifications and research for the differing views.
It should be emphasized that the descriptions here are intended only to give an idea of the kind of
interface that is envisioned. The actual capability will be designed only after careful investigation
and experimentation.
Front Page: The front page could be a graphic representation of a taxonomy or map of the
global energy elements. The front pages of the global energy database of the U.S. Department of
Energy’s Energy Information Administration and OECD’s International Energy Agency are
shown in Appendix E on the CD. The front page might be a map of the global energy situation
and future prospects arranged by energy usage, sources, storage, transmission, forecasts,
technology potentials, human behavior, major issues, and programs and models.
Another approach to the front page could be a three-dimensional table or cube (see Figure 21.)
The first axis could be sources such as oil, coal, nuclear, biofuels, solar, geothermal, wind, and
so on. The second axis could be uses or demand for the world, region, country, and categories
such as transportation, buildings, and industry. The third axis could be issues such as storage,
human behavior, transmission, climate change, other environmental impacts, forecasts, and so on.
Figure 21. Possible representation of global energy elements
Elements of the Main Page: Each element of the main page would have its own front page with
subsets, and subsets of those, and so on. Ideally, these subsets could have their own overview
that could be an expert and non-expert wiki, an argument structure or issues map, and possibly
ontologies as a graphical interface (a solar ontology, transportation ontology, etc.). Next to the
display of each item would be a column with options such as:
•
Overview (GEN wiki, article, and/or argument structure)
•
Links to specific problems and opportunities
•
Data and forecasts
•
Computer simulations, models, programs if available2
•
Expert Ratings in wiki (via GEN using Real-Time Delphi)
•
Unresolved Issues wiki––Range of Expert views (via GEN using Real-Time Delphi)
•
Open non-peer-reviewed wiki (via PGEN)
Figure 22 provides an example of an information unit with these attributes in the column to the
right.
Members of GEN and PGEN plus a small staff would contribute to these attributes for each unit
of information, as possible. In the full GENIS in Phase III, expert committees of 10 people or so
from GEN would review specific areas of information, giving numeric ratings (using the RealTime Delphi software of the Millennium Project) as to authoritative quality and importance of
the topic or information, along with comments. These can be put next to the information unit to
show the status of expert consensus and commentary. In addition, a map of different views could
be displayed. The ratings for the unit of information would appear when a person clicks on the
side column’s item “expert ratings.” Other attributes, such as related simulations, forecasts, etc.,
can also appear next to the information in the right column.
Figure 22. Example of a unit of information, with column of choices about the information
2
Eventually, individuals could propose policies that could be tested at least to first level to see initial impacts. To
use such models or simulations, a participant would have to provide information about the policy under test, such as
timing, cost, source of supply, and so on together with ranges of uncertainty. With the participant’s permission, their
inputs and ranges could be discussed by GEN or PGEN discussion areas or added to a Real-Time Delphi so that
judgments could be collected and organized.
When there is no expert consensus (as defined by the numerical spread of ratings from the RealTime Delphi of a GEN panel or by a display of different positions in argument software, as
illustrated in Figure 23, the range of views on the unresolved issues would be added under the
attribute “Unresolved issues” or possibly as the “Issue overview.” The general public could add
to the open non-reviewed sections, much like the Wikipedia or a public version of a wiki
argument.
One application developed nearly 20 years ago (CM/1) would present and organize overviews of
the interrelationships of issues (or questions), the range of positions on each issue, arguments for
and against each position, and references for the arguments. Figure 23 provides a simple diagram
of the user interface for such a system that could be updated by GEN and GENIS staff to keep
track of the evolving picture of many energy issues.
Figure 23. Argument-structured information overview of an issue
Source: Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, www.johnson-lenz.com based on early
work on CM/1 by Jeff Conklin of CogNexus Institute
Using such a structure prevents repetitions such as can occur in blogs, structures the overview for
decisionmakers better than a page or two of wiki text, and exposes assumptions and relationships
more clearly than conventional databases do. Hence, where possible, overviews would be
updated in structured argument software as well as overviews in wiki or text articles.
The GEIS knowledge base (KB) would contain as much energy knowledge as can be
accumulated, either explicitly or in the form of pointers to external sources. Collaboration with
national academies of sciences, national science teachers associations around the world, and
other such organizations should be explored to review content, to create mashups to fill gaps in
the GEIS, and to contribute to specific language GENs.
In additional to conventional approaches to federated searches and mashups, services like Deep
Web Technologies (see www.deepwebtech.com) could be used to create a federated search
portal so that single point searches of all of their data that are not visible via the usual search
engines can be found. A topic map portal can also provide a federated search capability without
the necessity of subscribing to the services of others.3
Key information from such sources as the International Energy Agency of OECD, the Energy
Information Administration of the US Department of Energy, Google,
www.worldwidescience.org4 with its federated searches, and so on would be found, organized,
and made available in this dynamic knowledge repository. This would contain not only articles
but also organized data. It would contain or have pointers to:
•
Qualitative data about all the classes of entities (experts, research institutions,
communities, and other energy-related resources)
•
Quantitative data, such as statistics by country, energy source, etc.
•
The ability to mashup information from external data bases into consolidated output
•
Special areas of the listed information, such as current issues and unresolved questions,
containing “all” the information about that issue or question from a full range of
perspectives—each issue or question will be a network of related and interacting
knowledge structures; this body of knowledge can be displayed in a “dashboard”
reflecting the current state of that knowledge and expert views on the issue’s various
aspects (definitions, trends, current status, etc.) (see the section entitled “How a Complex
Issue Could be Tracked”)
•
How users can set up “new items” alerts
These components would be linked, as possible, to “Wikipedia-type” articles by both GEN and
PGEN, in addition to the constantly changing more technical or specialized main content, and to
areas for additional comments.
GEIS would also have an Application Programming Interface to run or link to computer
simulation models and other related programs. Such programs might help a country, industry, or
individual determine their carbon footprint or forecast energy supply and demand. Other
applications could help non-experts make an informed decision, taking them through a
programmed learning module. Many new energy-environmental analysis programs are appearing
on the Web and would be linked to GEIS.
The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence would bring to GEIS “families of interconnected
models that could serve to organize discussion, pointing to where the most important
uncertainties are, and helping to determine the combined impact of many different assumptions
3
Jack Park of SRI, working with Topic Maps, adds: “In essence, we are talking about a socially crafted search
engine that automatically maintains order in its records, very much like Mahalo (mahalo.com), which offers a fairly
decent indication of what is possible.”
4
Gives references from 17 databases. British Library articles have to be purchased, hence this is not fully useful for
real-time work, but it can be used to build the information system pending copyright issues.
from many separate conversations.” Such simulation choices would be available on the righthand column of information units as shown in Figure 22.
Those who prefer not to use key word searches could click on the area of interest on the front
page and then by quickly clicking through a hierarchical trail find the desired information. For
example, after clicking on Energy Sources (both current and potential) and solar, the user would
then see a two-dimensional matrix of buttons for solar options vs. their attributes such as
definitions, current usage, forecasts, advantages, disadvantages, pending issues, and so on and
could then further click through to get a specific item. (See Figure 24.)
Figure 24. Recursive linked interface
Where possible, graphic presentations will be used to show structure and flow within networks
of energy-related elements.5
Another option of the user interface development to explore during Phase II is the possibility of a
split screen approach: one view would show the KB map with the logical “neighborhood” of the
information and the other view would contain the requested output. The user could click either
on the map to move elsewhere (near or far) or on an output element to move to a more or less
detailed view of that data, including the possibility of a user-defined or default dashboard
display.
The conventional keyword search function would also be provided so the expert user wouldn’t
have to click through the whole system to find what is being sought but could instead go right to
the selected term(s). The easy usability of the system will grow with each user’s increasing
familiarity with the structure of GEIS.
It should be noted that GEIS would contain “locations” for not only elemental entities and topics
but also for problems or issues, so that, for example, “disposal of waste from nuclear plants”
could have a node. An advantage of the interactive map approach is that this node can appear in
the display “near” any number of different other points, such as nuclear power, dirty bombs,
waste heat disposed of in fresh water near the nuclear plants, and freshwater depletions from use
in cooling towers. Any location in the knowledge space could be the home of a wiki on that
subject. As shown previously on the solar cell example, information units can also have buttons
for users to add data, information, and comments and to protest and explain why.
A nice feature to explore, but not required for the system, is a trace-back function that would
show the user where the unit of information could have been found along different inquiry paths.
For example, a list of such paths could be shown on, say, the upper left-hand corner of the unit
that, when clicked on, would allow the user to see other connections to that information.
Bringing GEIS and GEN Together to Produce GENIS
This section contains some examples to illustrate how the two systems could be merged.
How a Politician Might use GENIS During a Hearing on Energy
A legislator’s staff member makes an appointment via the Congressional Research Service to
have the Global Energy Network on call with a specific skill set during a Congressional hearing
on energy.
Selected members of GEN then create a mashup of the required information, such as wind
energy construction and Google maps, government contracts and current energy legislation,
current research, unresolved issues, definitions, current DOE research, and so on. The option to
5
5 Where possible, pictures of the field of study would be included, where the picture/graphic might be considered
the face of a cube, and the layers behind the face would mine specific topics behind each node. (Two examples of
this family of graphics are found at www.visualknowledge.com/wikikey/A24181S6651504 and
www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/diagram1.html.)
use the Real-Time Delphi could also help bring the state of the art to light on any option and
could be used to establish priorities on the importance, urgency, or order in a list of information
units.
The science member of the politician’s staff runs GENIS during the hearing, producing the
tailored dashboard (see Figure 25) for the politician, while using instant messaging with the
politician and communicating with the GEN members on call.
The legislator’s science staffer communicates with GEN to anticipate and respond to the needs of
the legislator while listening to the hearing. GEN members on call could also have streaming
audio to listen to the hearing. GEN produces information in the dashboard cells of the staffer.
The staffer edits and sends the dashboard to the legislator’s computer screen. An example of a
one-page dashboard display with nine areas is illustrated in Figure 26.
The staff refreshes the legislator’s dashboards as needed during the hearing, while being in
instant messaging contact with both the on-call GEN members and the legislator.
There can be many variations in applications of GENIS and the composition of dashboards
customized by the users. For example, a GEN member’s dashboard could have the GEIS output
in each cell. The GEN member would enter a term or terms in a single entry space. Say the
member enters the phrase Space Solar Power; then instead of producing the normal long Googlelike list, the search would automatically split into seven or so separate searches. Each search
would add a different term such as definition, current status, legislation, and so on (definition of
space solar power, current status of space solar power, etc.). The results of the parallel searches
would then be displayed in separate lists in the appropriate cell of the GEN member’s dashboard.
Figure 25. Politician and staff member, GENIS flow diagram
Figure 26. Energy dashboard example for a question during a legislative hearing
The GEN member quickly selects an item or two, edits them, and sends the second version of the
dashboard to the politician’s science staffer. The staffer then further edits for the politician
similar to the example above, and it is then displayed on the computer screen of the legislator
during the hearing. The politician then asks questions as he or she sees fit to those testifying in
the hearing room, such as, “Would collaboration between NASA and Nagoya University help to
narrow the design options?”
GEN could perform this work under an Indefinite Quantities Contract–like agreement from the
Congressional Research Service. To prepare for being on call, the GEN managers might conduct
computer mashups of experts, organizations, research projects, and skill sets. If their
requirements were more general and needed to cost less, then a general mix of GEN experts
could be reached at any given time. If, for example, someone wanted views from 10 experts on
some general energy questions, and 2% of GEN members were online at any given time around
the world, then there would have to be 500 members of GEN to make this kind of option
available.
There are many variations on this approach. For example, during an energy hearing, a
Department of Energy official states that nuclear energy is an important option to produce
electricity without CO2 emissions and can be used to support hydrogen production, water
desalination, and so on. Knowing that this will come up in the hearing, a congressional staffer
obtains information on how many plants would have to be built over how many years to
substantially reduce CO2 emissions. The staffer compiles key advantages and disadvantages and
shares this with GEN for feedback. On the day of the hearing, the staffer enters the key elements
as the legislator needs to see them on the legislator’s energy dashboard. GEN members on call
could also be watching or listening to the hearing online, sending information to the staffer in
anticipation of what the legislator might need to know next. Hence the staffer could use GENIS
to anticipate needs as well as respond to testimony.
Use in Decisionmaking with Online Real-Time Delphi
An organization needing to make an energy decision could contract with GENIS to use the RealTime Delphi software of the Millennium Project (see Chapter 3) to collect judgments from a
panel of the organization and GEN, using GEIS as necessary. The online questionnaire could
have criteria for the decision, a list of decision options, scales to rate the options, and space for
participants to anonymously enter the reasons for their ratings. All this can be available in real
time. In classical Delphi, the judgments collected in one round of a questionnaire are fed back to
the participants in subsequent rounds. By contrast, Real-Time Delphi is roundless, and the
answers generated are fed back to participants in real time. This allows an organization to say
that a decision will be reached by a specific deadline, avoiding countless face-to-face meetings
without resolution. This approach is an added feature to help GENIS support decisionmaking.
How a Complex Issue Could Be Tracked
A user of GEIS could create a specific space of saved categories and update them regularly to
find out the current status of, say, energy and greenhouse gas emissions issues. This passwordprotected user’s private space could have a decision tree program. The user would have different
decision trees for different possibilities that would be updated, including tradeoffs, legislation,
and other factors that are relevant to each element in the decision trees. Another option could be
the use of the argumentation software in Figure 23.
Complementing this could be a set of current data with projections of 10 and 25 years that would
be continually updated in areas such as:
•
Energy needs by world, continent, and countries
•
Power supply by each of the current major sources by world, continent, and country
•
GHG emissions based on power supplied by each of the current major sources, displayed
by world, continent, and country
•
Alternative energy sources to meet the production needs by world, continent, and country
•
Potential science and technology breakthroughs required to deliver adequate power to
replace current environmentally damaging sources (what breakthroughs and probable
year for the breakthrough)
•
Potential methods to mitigate GHGs by cost estimate of research, infrastructure
construction, and unit cost to consumers of power for all methods identified
Such structures for issues management could be made available to others. The GEN or PGEN
member would draw on GEIS data and participate in discussion groups to update their
information tracking. As patterns become significant, then they could be shared for consideration
to be added to GEIS. It must be emphasized that GENIS itself will be ideologically neutral. It
will provide only the infrastructure; others can use it to come to their own conclusions. It is not a
normative system, but one that could be used by others to create normative positions.
Public Variation––Individual Collective Intelligence System
The user would go to the GENIS Web site, decide what cells he or she wants for their personal
dashboard, and then begin entering terms or using maps of energy ontologies and taxonomic
maps to click through systematically to find the needed information. As references are selected,
and then within the selected references, key text, graphs, or other media are selected, the user can
store and display the results on the dashboard or other custom display system, such as the issue
argument map shown in Figure 23. Participating in PGEN discussion groups allows for feedback
on this information so that an individual can return many times to his or her “space,” deleting or
editing some items or adding new ones. This could create an accumulative collective intelligence
customized for and by that user. Such storage could be shared with others and added to the
GEIS.
Next Steps—Prototypes for GENIS
The Millennium Project is assembling a team to create prototypes for Phase II. Those with
models of collective intelligence who have expressed interest in collaborating in Phase II designs
for the prototypes include SRI International’s Topic Maps (Jack Park), MIT’s Center for
Collective Intelligence (Tom Malone), Millennium Project’s Cyber Node Early Warning System
(Frank Catanzaro), Bootstrap’s improve the improvement system (Doug Engelbart), Open
University’s Knowledge Media Institute in the United Kingdom (Simon Buckingham Shum),
CogNexus Institute’s Dialogue Mapping and Issue Mapping (Jeff Conklin), DOE’s Energy
Information Administration (James Disbrow), and CIM3’s Collaborative Work Environment &
Collaborative Ontology Development System infrastructure (Peter Yim).
There is a wealth of ideas being generated by these and other leaders in collective intelligence;
and hence it is reasonable to assume that some elements of Phase II prototypes could turn out
even better than those described in this chapter. Nevertheless, it is the consensus of those who
have participated in this study that creating Phase II as described here will be a major step in the
evolution of collective intelligence. Support is being sought to build these prototypes.
The basic design of GENIS can be applied to support a broad range of applications from a
potential global situation room on climate change (as described in Chapter 4) to a collective
intelligence for other subject areas or even for a country as a whole.
Taking ecological considerations into account is crucial if we are to avoid longer-term
environmental problems that can undermine security and development, and lead to further
cycles of conflict and displacement.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the
Environment in War and Armed Conflict, November 6, 2007
The world has moved from a global threat once called the Cold War to what now should be
considered the Warming War.
Afelee Pita, Tuvalu Ambassador to the UN
Photos courtesy of: UN, NASA, and ESA
6.
Emerging
Environmental Security Issues
The dramatic increase in world attention to climate change is helping more people understand
that the world’s environment is a matter of national and global security. As mentioned in Chapter 1,
Challenge 10, half the world is vulnerable to social instability and violence due to numerous
pressures: rising oil and food prices; decreasing water-food-energy supply per person; climate
change; and increasing migrations stemming from political, environmental, and economic
conditions.
Environment is an increasingly important component in forecasting future conflicts. Scientists,
policy analysts, and military planners are collaborating to prevent or reduce security threats.
Environmental diplomacy is increasingly being used to support conflict prevention efforts and to
build international confidence. International environmental governance is improving, and the
technological ability to identify environmental threats and crimes is becoming cost-effective
through new sensors and communication systems. Environmental damages that people and
organizations got away with in the past are less likely to escape detection and punishment in the
future.
The Millennium Project defines environmental security as environmental viability for life
support, with three sub-elements:
•
preventing or repairing military damage to the environment,
•
preventing or responding to environmentally caused conflicts, and
•
protecting the environment due to its inherent moral value.
This chapter presents a summary of recent events and emerging environmental security–related
issues organized around this definition. More details and other Millennium Project studies
related to environmental security are included in Chapter 9 on the CD and are available at
www.millennium-project.org (under “Books and Reports,” select “Special Studies”).
Over the past several years, with support from the U.S. Army Environmental Policy
Institute, the Millennium Project has been scanning a variety of sources to produce monthly
reports on emerging environmental issues with potential security or treaty implications. More
than 200 items have been identified during the past year and over 1,100 items since this work
began in August 2002. The full text of the items and their sources can be found in the CD
Chapter 9.1, “Emerging Environmental Security Issues,” and monthly updated reports on the
Millennium Project’s Web site, www.millennium-project.org
(under “What’s New,” select “International Environmental Security Issues”).
General Patterns and Insights
The need for strategic planning to address climate change and environmental degradation tops
the agenda of the United Nations, many national governments, official forums, corporations,
NGOs, and academic institutions.
The trend toward adopting the precautionary principle versus reactive actions is increasing.
Scientists recommend that nations integrate climate change into their security policy to prepare
for worst-case scenarios.
The time between the design of a multilateral environmental agreement and its coming into force
as well as the time it takes to reach a high ratification level is shortening. International attention
is shifting from designing new MEAs to improving the effectiveness of existing agreements.
The increasing ratification of MEAs, the growing numbers of environmental watchdogs, as well
as increasing public awareness are improving environmental management globally. The number,
precision, and breadth of analytical tools to measure environmental change are improving
rapidly.
Efforts are increasing to strengthen international environmental governance by improving
institutional structures and interlinkages among treaties, enhancing monitoring systems, and
developing international guidelines and frameworks for environmentally sound management.
The decision by the regime in Myanmar (Burma) in May 2008 to block international assistance
to 2.5 million cyclone victims raises the question of when human rights and environmental
security overrule sovereignty. In the 1990s, UN peacekeeping forces protected the delivery of
food in Somalia without regard to sovereignty. Since similar situations are likely in the future,
many are increasingly aware that a framework and international agreement is needed to guide
decisions on when international intervention is warranted.
More cooperation is occurring among a variety of institutions for better, more synergistic
environmental policy and activities, which expands the scope of environmental considerations
among a broader set of actors and the public.
Militaries are increasingly called upon to assist in environmentally related issues, such as natural
disasters or conflicts triggered by or affecting the environment, MEA enforcement, and reduction
of their own environmental impacts.
Nontraditional security issues––including environment, migration, and social development––
increasingly dominate traditional security planning. Since they cannot be addressed by any
nation alone, military strategies and geopolitics are being reshaped around complex issues and
within international cooperation frameworks.
When international negotiations under the UN fail, nations form coalitions to carry out
negotiations and procedures for an international accord. A successful example is the Oslo
Process for the Cluster Bombs Convention, which started in 2007 after the 2006 UN negotiations
failed. The process led to an agreement formally adopted in May 2008. Similarly, when MEA
negotiations prove difficult or government reaction inadequate, idea-centered initiatives emerge
and adopt local regulations.
As the world’s population grows and biodiversity diminishes, the threat of conflict over
resources increases. Environmental problems worsen faster than response policies are currently
being adopted. Increased focus for adaptation and mitigation is needed in the multilateral arena
(such as the G8, UN Security Council, and UN specialized bodies) to strengthen international
regulations, improve capacity building from detection to adaptation, address migration issues,
and adapt cooperation among countries to the new realities induced by climate change.
Rising sea levels and melting ice caps will redraw physical boundaries, potentially forcing the
evacuation of island nations like Tuvalu in the South Pacific and causing tensions over new
shipping routes, such as the Northwest Passage. The panoply of issues triggered by Arctic ice
thawing reflects the amplifying debate between environmental aspects and political and military
interests.
MEAs often conflict with national economic or political interests, generating issues of
noncompliance with international treaties, lack of cooperation with international organs, and
deadlock in many international treaty–related negotiations. Matters of disagreement are mostly
related to strategies for greenhouse gas emission cuts, nuclear nonproliferation, addressing
security aspects of environmental implications, and outer-space security issues.
Environmental issues are a “conflict threat multiplier.” Most conflicts are occurring in the least
environmentally sustainable regions, and unless environmental and conflict factors are
simultaneously addressed, neither are likely to be resolved successfully.
Without more serious mitigation and adaptation measures, mass migration and conflicts seem
inevitable due to climate change, falling water tables, and other contributing environmental
factors. Nevertheless, there is no adequate international system or framework to cope with
environmental refugees, estimated to reach 250 million by 2050.
The accelerating rate of technological change has fundamentally changed the spectrum of threats
to the environment and human health, such as e-waste, possible risks of using nanotechnology
and biotechnology, use of chemicals, and the spread and safety of nuclear, chemical, and
biotechnology labs.
Work is under way to develop a global system for countering pandemics from either natural or
terrorist causes.
Developing countries are rapidly adopting environmentally sound policies and increasingly
restricting richer countries’ export of polluting industries to poorer regions. Nevertheless,
stronger international and transinstitutional coalitions and frameworks are needed to counter
global environmental crime, such as illegal trade in hazardous wastes, smuggling proscribed
hazardous materials, and exploiting and trafficking protected natural resources.
Earth observation data provided by satellite systems are becoming an essential tool for designing
sustainable development policies and early warning mechanisms. Although space technology
enhances Earth surveillance, provides early warnings of natural disasters, improves compliance
mechanisms, and increases understanding of space and Earth phenomena, local on-the-ground
coordination and applications are still deficient.
The costs are falling for nanotech environmental sensors, which can be connected to global
information systems via satellite, potentially making environmentally damaging actions known
instantaneously and worldwide.
ICT and robotics, new detection and cleanup techniques, and more environmentally friendly
warfare contribute to reducing the military environmental footprint.
Preventing or Repairing Military Damage to the Environment
The UN reports that about half of all conflicts over the past 20 years were “re-conflicts”––those
that recurred within five years of peace accords. Many had environmental backgrounds. There is
consesnsus that failed states are the most vulnerable to climate change and possible conflicts due
to environment-related issues. (Figure 27 shows nations’ vulnerability ratings.)
Environmental degradation and hazardous ordnance leftovers in post-conflict areas threaten the
livelihoods and health of current and future generations and may constitute an impediment for
lasting peace. There should be a “green chapter” in the Geneva Conventions for safeguarding the
rights of the environment.
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, a report by a group of high-ranking U.S.
military officers and national security experts, warns that “climate change could seriously
exacerbate already marginal living standards… causing widespread political instability and the
likelihood of failed states.... The chaos that results can be an incu-bator of civil strife, genocide,
and the growth of terrorism.”
The military is increasingly called to take part in post-conflict reconstruction efforts and
environmental restoration to build stability, as well as in mitigation of environmental effects to
avoid conflict. The report entitled A Climate of Conflict by Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda
published by International Alert in London warns that unless adequate and timely adaptation
policies are implemented, more than half of the world’s nations are at risk. It identifies
46 countries––home to 2.7 billion people––at high risk of armed conflict, while another
56 states––with a total population of 1.2 billion––are at risk of political instability.
Conflict and environmental degradation exacerbate each other. Middle East countries are among
the least environmentally sustainable, and conflict has caused massive damages to ecosystems
from Iraq to Lebanon and North Africa. Refugees, human rights groups, and legal experts have
urged the International Criminal Court to consider human-made environmental crimes along
with terror and mass killings in the prosecution of Sudanese officials and Arab Janjaweed. They
argue that the crisis was aggravated by the ecological destruction used by the government as a
weapon to force people to move. The number of refugees in camps reached 2.2 million and the
risk of unrest is increasing as resources are getting exhausted. The deployment and work of the
joint UN-African Union force of 26,000 peacekeepers is jeopardized by lack of water. In 2007,
an estimated 26 million people were internally displaced by armed conflicts and violence
worldwide.
Many post-conflict health and environmental impact assessments are ongoing, as are liability
disputes. The Portfolio of Mine Action Projects 2007 found that 26 out of 29 war-ravaged
countries or territories surveyed are beleaguered with the lurking remnants of cluster bombs and
other explosives. Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War of the Convention on Certain
Conventional Weapons came into force in November 2006. The Convention on Cluster
Munitions was formally adopted in May 2008, legally binding the use, production, transfer, and
stockpiling of cluster munitions and committing countries to clear areas contaminated by cluster
munitions and to assist victims and affected communities.
Concerns over the environmental and health effects of the use of depleted uranium munitions are
resurfacing and increasing worldwide. The European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on
the EU to lead negotiations “through the UN or through a ‘coalition of the willing’” for a global
treaty to ban depleted uranium weapons.
Over the past 10 years, only 30% of known chemical weapons stocks have been destroyed. The
remaining 70% are supposed to be totally destroyed by 2012 to meet the Chemical Weapons
Convention. Japan is not on schedule to meet its obligations toward China in the recovery and
destruction of hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons abandoned at the end of World War II
and will most probably not meet the April 2012 deadline. Some experts argue that “nonlethal”
materials such as “incapacitating agents” are toxic chemicals that would violate the CWC if used
on the battlefield. Clarification of what chemicals will be allowed under the treaty’s exceptions is
needed.
Advances in biosciences not met by adequate security systems increase the risks of their
potential misuse, the threat of biological weapons, and the likelihood of SIMAD, for Single
Individuals Massively Destructive. The Biological Weapons Convention might need to be
revised in view of the new synthetic biology developments, and verification and monitoring
regimes would need to be developed to ensure compliance. Over 150 nations have fulfilled their
reporting responsibilities to the Security Council regarding efforts to combat the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction by non-State actors.
New technologies are offering improved detection, cleanup, monitoring, and surveillance
possibilities. WHO is developing a global epidemic simulator based on the model of climate
monitoring systems. Small robotic helicopters operated by radio control could be used for
reconnaissance and surveillance. High-sensitivity portable chemical and biological devices offer
high accuracy detection, monitoring, and cleanup possibilities with rapid response time.
However, future autonomous robotic weapon systems (without human decision-making control)
are increasing vulnerability and concern over possible catastrophes.
In order to prevent the misuse of science, it is important to strengthen the scientific expertise of
security organizations and to create an independent science and technology advisory committee
for intelligence agencies, as well as to promote within the international scientific community a
common culture of awareness and responsibility.
Figure 27. Failed States Index 2008
Source: Fund for Peace
Preventing or Responding to Environmentally Caused Conflicts
Increasingly scarce resources, climate change, biofuels, and growing population and higher
living standards are all contributing to the long-term rise of food prices. In 2007, dairy prices
rose nearly 80% and grain 42%. If this trend continues, the number of people facing famine or
malnutrition is expected to grow from at least 850 million today to 1 billion, increasing
instability. Food riots have already occurred in some 30 countries, including recently conflicttorn nations such as Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Somalia. Meantime, a few agricultural
biotechnology companies are trying to concentrate corporate power and gain monopoly over a
large part of global food, in some cases undermining agricultural productivity and jeopardizing
national food security. With nearly 3 billion people making $2 or less per day, long-term global
social conflict seems inevitable without more serious food policies, scientific breakthroughs, and
dietary changes. A new UN Task Force on the Global Food Crisis was designated to prepare a
comprehensive plan of action to tackle the rise in food prices.
The UN, OSCE, and NATO are paying increasing attention to environmental security. The UN
Security Council debated the relationship of security and the environment for the first time in
history in April 2007 and more recently acknowledged that the UN should move from a culture
of “reaction” to one of conflict “prevention” and should develop potential tension detection
mechanisms. The OSCE adopted a Ministerial Declaration on Environment and Security, and the
NATO Security Science Forum on Environmental Security addressed the security implications
of environmental issues, forecasting, and cooperation with other international organizations.
The number of weather-related disasters worldwide now averages 400–500 a year compared with
125 in the early 1980s. The number of people affected by natural disasters in 2007 reached 200
million. The UN notes that seven times more livelihoods have been devastated by natural
disasters than by war worldwide, and this is likely going to be worsening due to climate change.
The intensity of Atlantic storms has nearly doubled over the last 30 years, and computer models
show a direct link between climate change and the strength of storms. Some officials say that
climate change should be addressed like World War III.
UNEP warns that changing temperatures, rapid rates of species extinction, and unsustainable
depletion of the world’s scarce resources are the most important threats to human survival. The
Climate Change and International Security paper to the European Council notes that the “impact
of climate change on international security is not a problem of the future but already of today and
one which will stay with us” and underlines that the European Security Strategy and related
proposals “should take account of the security dimension of climate change.”
The WMO reports that the decade of 1998–2007 was the warmest on record, with the global
mean surface temperature for 2007 estimated at 0.41°C (0.74°F) above the 1961–1990 annual
average of 14°C (57.20°F). Extreme temperatures in 2007 included unusually cold winters in
South America and heat waves in Europe. Some scientists believe that weird weather patterns
might become the norm and that the world is more than 50% likely to experience serious climate
change, for we are unlikely to keep greenhouse gas levels low enough to avoid the critical 2ºC
(3.6ºF) temperature rise.
Climate modelers at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research show that by
2015 the average global temperature will be 0.5°C above the average value for the last 30 years
and that between 2009 and 2015, half the years will be warmer then the current warmest year on
record. The IPCC projects that in 2090–2099 relative to 1980–1999, temperature rise could range
between 0.3°C and 6.4°C.
The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. The region might be ice-free in summer
in the next 10–20 years, although some scientists say that there is a 50% chance for that to
happen in 2008. In 2007, the Arctic sea ice shrank to 22% less than the record since satellite
measurements began nearly 30 years ago, looking similar to some forecasts for 2030 to 2050.
The thawing of Arctic sea ice opens up the Northwest Passage as an international shipping route,
with access to rich resources––including oil––triggering international disputes over sovereignty
and ecological implications. The debate is intensifying as several countries are building their
political and legal cases to claim jurisdiction over different (and sometimes overlapping) areas.
The Ilulissat Declaration signed in May 2008 by Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the
U.S. is a commitment for applying the UN Law of the Sea “to the orderly settlement of any
possible overlapping claims,” stipulating that there is “no need to develop a new comprehensive
international legal regime to govern the Arctic Ocean.” Critics say that this opens the possibility
for a polar “carve up” by the five countries.
Although the Antarctic should be protected by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and related agreements,
Britain’s Foreign Office plans to claim 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of
seabed off the coast of the British Antarctic Territory. Similar claims for seabed areas might also
be submitted by Chile and Argentina, which might overlap some of the British territorial claims.
Greenpeace and WWF warned that Britain’s possible oil, gas, and mineral exploration in the
region would represent an environmental disaster for the fragile ecosystem.
Glaciers––representing the only freshwater source for millions of people around the globe––are
melting and thinning at an accelerating rate over the past decade. The most vulnerable are
Earth’s subtropic zones––home to 70% of the world’s population––including parts of the Middle
East, southern Africa, the U.S., South America, and the Mediterranean. The IPCC estimates that
rising temperatures could melt most of Latin America’s glaciers by 2022, affecting the livelihood
of people in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. In some regions, demand for water might exceed supply
as soon as 2009. Himalayan glaciers are the main source for Asia’s nine largest rivers. UNEP
estimates that by 2025, some 1.8 billion people will live in countries with absolute water
scarcity. The Human Rights Council is considering adopting water as a human right and is
assessing the relationship between climate change and human rights.
Ice caps and glaciers contribute 60% of the ice melting that is one cause of increasing sea levels;
28% of this comes from Greenland and 12% from Antarctica. Estimates of sea level rise by 2100
due to global warming vary from the 9–88 centimeters projected by the IPCC to as much as 140
centimeters. Satellite measurements show that since 1993 global averaged sea level has been
rising at about 3 millimeters per year, considerably more than the twentieth century average of
about 1.7 millimeters per year. By 2025 coastal population is expected to reach 6 billion.
The small island-state of Tuvalu could disappear in 30–50 years. Indonesia said it has lost 26
islands to climate change. Bangkok, with a population of more than 10 million, might be
submerged within the next 15–20 years. It is one of 13 of the world’s 20 largest cities at risk of
being swamped as sea levels rise in coming decades. Increased salinity and flooding could
displace over 70 million people in Bangladesh, 22 million in Vietnam, and 6 million in Egypt.
China’s Pearl River Delta, the country’s most economically dynamic region, is expected to be
the worst hit by rising sea levels by 2050. Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom called
for recognition of “environmental protection as a fundamental human right” and announced that
the Maldives will initiate a debate on the issue with the Human Rights Council.
Disasters could be exacerbated by other consequences of glaciers melting, such as dilution in
salinity of the sea around Antarctica, which could have significant effects on the world’s climate
and ocean currents, and melting ice caps that may trigger more volcanic eruptions.
Most of the countries with the highest birth rates are those already affected by the world’s worst
wars. Growing pressure of people on land and resources is likely to exacerbate conflict in those
areas. Desertification affects more than 250 million people, and 1 billion more are at risk. In
Africa, the worst rains in 30 years caused flooding affecting an estimated 1.5 million people in
22 countries, including Ethiopia, Niger, and Sudan. Semiarid areas of sub-Saharan Africa with
some of the highest concentrations of poverty in the world face potential productivity losses of
25% by 2060.
By 2050, some 250 million people could be permanently displaced by climate change–related
phenomena. UNHCR remarks that after several years of decline, the number of refugees began
rising again. Without a legal framework to address environmental refugees’ situation, their rights
will not be addressed and conflicts will be difficult to avoid. The Global Humanitarian Forum,
launched in October 2007, is being set up by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to
address in a preventive and proactive way global refugee movements and humanitarian crises
triggered mainly by climate change. It will act as a catalyst among the different interest groups
involved in international disaster relief and prevention: governments, aid agencies, the military,
the business world, and academics.
The World Health Organization warns of the increasing risk of disease outbreaks, epidemics,
industrial accidents, natural disasters, and other health emergencies, which could become threats
to global public health security. The International Health Regulations, which came into force in
2007, are helping countries collaborate to identify and contain risks from outbreaks and other
health hazards. WHO points out pandemic influenza as the most feared threat to health security.
Increased research is needed to identify areas of highest vulnerability and instability and to
consider climate change in foreign aid programs. Military and police will have to change from
reactive to proactive strategies in order to prevent and manage security issues triggered by
climate change. Unrest could range from protests against polluting companies and government
inaction to new forms of ecoterrorism.
The Bali Action Plan provides a roadmap of adaptation and mitigation measures. However, the
funding of programs and technology transfer is falling short. While it is difficult to have the
world commit $30 billion a year to prevent conflicts over food, the subsidies to fossil fuel
industries amount to over $200 billion per year, $1.2 trillion is spent on the military, and $1.5
trillion is spent on oil. (See Figure 28.)
Figure 28. Expenditures and estimated costs of various programs
(yearly, billion $, various years, 2003–2007)
Protecting the Environment Due to Its Inherent Moral Value
Plant and animal species are being lost at a rate between 100 and 1,000 times natural extinction
rates. WWF and the Global Footprint Network report that humanity’s impact on the planet has
more than tripled since 1961 and that Earth’s resources are being used faster than they can be
replaced by nature. If present trends continue, by 2050 humanity will demand twice as much as
the planet can supply. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that 60% of Earth’s vital
ecosystem services are being degraded or used unsustainably.
There are more than 700 MEAs. The focus of international negotiations is switching from
designing new treaties to reinforcing existing ones and strengthening international environmental
governance. Evaluation mechanisms of the effectiveness of these agreements are improving.
Nevertheless, noncompliance with international treaties and lack of cooperation with
international organs, as well as deadlock in many international treaty–related negotiations,
continue to be an international concern.
The 2007 UNEP Governing Council adopted decisions on issues related to strengthening
international environmental governance (including the draft Environment Watch Strategy Vision
2020 and coordination and synergies among multilateral environmental agreements) and
improving the assessment of the world environmental situation and mitigation actions. There are
efforts for better integration of the existing MEAs that cover related issues, such as the Basel
Convention on Waste and the Stockholm Convention on POPs for developing a framework for
environmentally sound waste disposal.
The EC’s three-year program to modernize EU legislation––as part of its commitment to
simplify the EU system of rules––started with the environment-related sector, since it is the most
heavily regulated. The EU is also adopting the protection of the environment through criminal
law. The European Environmental Liability Directive came into force, establishing a
comprehensive responsibilities framework based on the “polluter pays” principle. The European
Commission opened several infringement procedures against member states for not complying
with EU environmental legislation.
Increasingly powerful analytic models and tools are being created to compare national
environmental status. New international watchdog bodies emerge and others are being proposed
to assist legal action against environmental crimes.
Some noteworthy environmental agreements or regulations that were recently adopted or
strengthened or are in negotiation are presented in Box 6. A complete list and further details on
the agreements are available on the CD in Chapter 9.1.
Negotiations have begun for a post-2012 treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Bali
Action Plan adopted in December 2007 outlines a two-year agenda of negotiations for a global
climate regime to enter into force by 2013 but does not include emissions reduction targets,
despite strong support by the EU and other countries. The final agreement is to be adopted at the
end of 2009 at the Copenhagen summit. It should include both national and international
mitigation and adaptation actions to address the effects of climate change, methods to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, development and transfer of climate-friendly technologies, and
financing and investment measures. Meantime, questions are growing about better enforcement
mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol to compel governments to respect their commitments.
Aviation and shipping, industries not covered by the Kyoto Protocol, account for some 5–8% of
global greenhouse gas emissions. IMO estimates that the shipping industry’s share of global CO2
emissions could grow from about 4.5% in 2007 to 6% in 2020. Europe projects shipping
emissions to grow by 32% and aviation by up to 90% over the same period and therefore is
advocating emission reduction targets for these two sectors.
A growing number of industries and local governments are developing appropriate
environmental and energy policies and regulations in the absence of national leadership. In many
cases these are based on international standards or agreements. Civil society in some countries is
increasingly involved in the design of local and regional regulations, in many cases with the help
of international NGOs.
Trade of endangered species and hazardous substances is increasingly profitable, difficult to
tackle, and involved with international organized crime. Custom administrations reported more
than 9,800 endangered species (CITES violations) and 220 hazardous waste seizures in the last
few years. The Basel Convention estimates international haz-ardous waste movement to be at
least 8.5 million tons per year. Although it is difficult to estimate the illegal portion of this, a
project undertaken in 13 European countries found that over 50% of the waste shipments
examined were illegal. There could be even higher percentages in countries with fewer
inspection capabilities and in failed states. The 20–50 million tons of e-waste generated annually
is growing worldwide, and about 70% of it is dumped in developing countries in Asia and
Africa.
Box 6
Some accords and regulations related to environmental security
recently adopted, strengthened, in negotiation, or proposed
•
International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism (entered into force in
July 2007)
•
Convention on Cluster Munitions (adopted in May 2008)
•
EU resolution to lead negotiations for a global treaty to ban depleted uranium weapons (adopted
in May 2008)
•
Stockholm Convention evaluation mechanisms (adopted in May 2007) and continued
negotiations for noncompliance mechanisms (expected for 2009)
•
Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forests (adopted in December 2007)
•
International Declaration of Reef Rights (received first signatures)
•
Network of Marine Protection Areas, to be adopted by 2012
•
Bali Action Plan and other negotiations for post-2012 treaty to curb greenhouse gases
•
Tougher regulations for mandatory greenhouse gas emission targets are being adopted by
countries, regional authorities, local governments, and industries
•
European Environmental Liability Directive (entered into force in April 2007)
•
EU protection of the environment through criminal law (proposal approved in May 2008)
•
Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) (entered into force in June
2007)
•
EU Revised Green List of the Waste Shipment Regulation (entered into effect in December 2007)
•
EU legislation on transboundary shipments of waste (entered into force in July 2007)
•
International Convention on the Control of Harmful Anti-Fouling Systems on Ships (enters into
force in September 2008)
•
EU airlines mandatory participation in carbon trading scheme to start in 2011
•
Fine Particles Air Quality Directive (adopted in December 2007)
•
Tougher European waste management strategy with reduction targets to 2008, 2012, 2020
•
China’s restrictions on plastic bags (effective June 2008)
•
Restrictions for harmful underwater sonar to protect marine mammals (proposed)
•
A global ban on mercury (in negotiation)
•
Conventional light bulbs to be banned in many parts of the world by 2012
At a high-level meeting in April 2008, the World Customs Organization, representatives of
UNEP, customs administrations, and other interested organizations agreed on an Action Plan to
improve enforcement and tackle increasing environment crime. The plan calls for increased
detection efficiency by customs offices, creation of environmental crime units, and international
cooperation and information exchange.
The EU legislation on transboundary shipments of waste came into effect in July 2007,
establishing a legal framework to ensure that waste is properly handled from the time it is
shipped to the time it is disposed of or recovered.
More than 50,000 chemical compounds are used commercially, hundreds more are added
annually, and UNEP estimates global chemical production to increase by 85% over the next 20
years. There are fears that the International Strategy for Chemicals Management adopted in 2006
is not strong enough to ensure adequate security and that a biosecurity watchdog and codes of
conduct for scientists should therefore be established. Policymakers and experts reinforce the
need to apply the precautionary principle in the context of chemical safety, to extend globally the
regulations on heavy metals, and to tackle the widening gaps among countries in following
chemical safety policies.
Studies on the environmental and health impacts of various forms of nanotechnology, as well as
international research projects on regulating nanotechnologies and adopting nanotechnology
standards, are increasing rapidly around the world. The first nanotechnology genotoxicity tests
found that carbon nanotubes could damage DNA. China was the first nation to set standards; the
European Commission has adopted a Code of Conduct for Responsible Nanosciences and
Nanotechnologies Research; the UK’s Royal Society and a group of other organizations have
begun an initiative to develop a “Responsible NanoCode” for businesses working with
nanotechnologies, while Indian scientists warn that India faces serious nanotech environmental
health and safety issues due to absence of guidelines on nanoparticle toxicity and biosafety
regulations in India and worldwide.
Biotechnology industry is expanding rapidly, and the supervision of controversial experiments is
voluntary and irregular at universities and private laboratories around the world. The Convention
on Biological Diversity needs to be adapted in view of the new developments, and verification
and monitoring regimes should be developed to ensure compliance. In May 2008, the timetable
and framework were set for a liability and redress regime concerning potential damage caused by
the movements of GMOs, which will be further discussed in October 2010 at the next meeting of
the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. An ad hoc technical expert group was
mandated to consider the risk assessment and risk management issues of GMOs.
UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere network is expanding, comprising now 529 sites in 105
countries. The UN notes that only 0.6% of the oceans are protected compared with 12% of the
world’s land, and a roadmap was launched in 2007 to meet the goal of establishing a network of
marine protected areas by 2012. The global map of human impacts to marine ecosystems reveals
that while no ecosystem is completely unaffected, human activities had high impact on over 40%
of the world’s ocean-covered area, with the most affected being the North Sea, the South and
East China Seas, the Caribbean, and North America’s East Coast. Although the UN Convention
on the Law of the Sea is recognized as the legal framework for all activities in the oceans and
seas, the debate continues on how the convention applies to marine genetic resources in areas
outside national jurisdictions. The EU Marine Strategy Directive requests member states to adopt
by 2015 strategies to attain good environmental status by 2020.
Space observations have become a major tool for monitoring environmental change, helping
policymakers develop adequate strategies, assisting in the enforcement of environment-related
regulations, and improving early warning and disaster management. Examples of these include
NASA’s computer model to anticipate food shortages/crises, a new UN Outer Space Affairs
office as part of a future network dedicated to carry out the UN Platform for Space-based
Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response, the Global Monitoring for
Environment and Security, and support for early warning systems at global and regional levels.
* * *
Environmental security analysis should include the impacts of new kinds of weapons;
asymmetrical conflicts; increasing demands on natural resources; urbanization (which makes
more people dependent on vulnerable public utilities); impacts of environmental degradation and
climate change; continued advances in environmental law, with escalating environmental
litigation; and the globalization that is increasing interdependencies. In view of increased threats
of conflicts triggered by environmental factors, enforcement of international multilateral
agreements should be strengthened. Figures 29 and 30 reveal significant efforts on ratifications;
however, more efforts are needed in the area of implementation of the regulations, as well as in
developing a global environmental consciousness.
Figure 29. Ratifications of 12 multilateral environmental agreements, by UNEP GEO regions
(in parenthesis, number of countries in the region)
Source: UNEP GEO Data Portal with updates by the Millennium Project
Figure 30. Number of parties to multilateral environmental agreements, 1975–2008
Millennium Project Nodes
Appendix
Millennium Project Participants Demographics
There were 229 futurists, scholars, business planners, scientists, and decisionmakers who
contributed this year to the global challenges, State of the Future Index, government futures
strategy units, global energy collective intelligence system, and future international
environmental security issues studies. The following graphs show the regional and sectoral
demographics.
Figure 31. Participants in the 2007–08 program
Total participants: 229
Sectoral Demographic
Regional Demographic
However, much of the work is cumulative in nature, which has come from 2,553 participants
over the past 12 years. The second set of graphs shows their regional and sectoral demographics.
Figure 32. Participants since 1996
Total participants: 2,553
Sectoral Demographic
Regional Demographic
Current and Previous Sponsors
Alan F. Kay & Hazel Henderson Foundation for Social Innovation, St. Augustine, FL (1996–2000)
Amana Institute, São Paulo, Brazil (2004)
Applied Materials, Santa Clara, California (2002–08)
Army Environmental Policy Institute, Arlington, Virginia (1996–2010)
Dar Almashora for Consulting, Kuwait (for Kuwait Oil Company 2003–04 and
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation 2005–06)
Deloitte & Touche LLP, Cleveland, Ohio (1998–2008)
Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, Michigan (1996–97, 2005–06)
Foundation for the Future, Bellevue, Washington (1997–98, 1999–2000, 2007–08)
General Motors, Warren, Michigan (1998–2003)
Government of the Republic of Korea (via UN Future Forum) (2007–08)
The Hershey Company (2008–09)
Hughes Space and Communications, Los Angeles, California (1997–98, 2000)
Ministry of Communications, Republic of Azerbaijan (2007–2011)
Ministry of Education and Presidential Commission on Education, Republic of Korea (2007)
Monsanto Company, St. Louis, Missouri (1996–98)
Motorola Corporation, Schaumburg, Illinois (1997)
Pioneer Hi-Bred International, West Des Moines, Iowa (1997)
Rockefeller Foundation (2008–09)
Shell International (Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum Company), London, United Kingdom (1997)
UNESCO, Paris, France (1995, 2008)
United Nations Development Programme, New York, (1993–94)
United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan (1992–95, 1999–2000)
U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, D.C. (2000–03)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C. (1992–93, 1996–97)
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
(Foresight and Governance Project), Washington, D.C. (2002)
World Bank (via World Perspectives, Inc.) (2008–09)
ACRONYMS and ABBREVIATIONS
AARP
American Association of Retired Persons
ABE
acetone, butanol, and ethanol
AC/UNU
American Council for the United Nations University
AEPI
Army Environmental Policy Institute
AFAT
All Futurists Association of Turkey
AI
artificial intelligence
AIDS
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
ANC
African National Congress
AOG
Agent of God (in Scenario)
APCCT
Asian and Pacific Center for Transfer of Technology
ARPA NET Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
ASAT
anti-satellite
ASEAN
Association of Southeast Asian Nations
ATC
Appalachian Trail Conference
AT&T
Atlantic and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company
B2B
business-to-business
BIS
Brazil Institute of Science (in Scenario)
BTS
Brain Trans-science Service (in Scenario)
BTWC
Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention
CBD
Convention on Biological Diversity
CDC
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S.)
CERN
European Laboratory for Particle Physics
CGIAR
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
CAPMs
Capital Asset Pricing Models
CATV
Cable Television
CBSE
Central Board of Secondary Education
CDC
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
CEO
chief executive officer
CFC
chlorofluorocarbons
CI
collective intelligence
CNN
Cable News Network
CO2
carbon dioxide
CSCE
Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe
CWC
Chemical Weapons Convention
DAC
Development Assistance Committee
DARPA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (U.S.)
DFID
Department for International Development
DoD
Department of Defense
DVC
Digital Video Communications
EC
European Commission
ECA
Economic Commission for Africa (of the UN)
ECOSOC
Economic and Social Council of the UN
ECOWAS
Economic Community of West African States
EFTA
European Free Trade Association
EMS
EMSs
ENMOD
EOR
EPA
ESA
ESCAP
ESOP
EU
FAO
FDA
FRG
G-7
G-8
GATT
GBN
GDP
GEF
GEIS
GEN
GENIS
GEO
GEMS
GHG
GHS
GLEEM
GMO
GNI
GNP
GW
GWP
HDI
HIV
IAEA
ICC
ICE
ICSU
ICT
IDC
IDP
IDRC
IEA
IEEN
IFs
Emergency Medical Services
environmental management systems
Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any other hostile use of
Environmental Modification Techniques
enhanced oil recovery
Environmental Protection Agency
European Space Agency
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
Employee Stock Ownership Program
European Union
Food and Agriculture Organzation of the UN
Food and Drug Administration
Federal Republic of Germany
Policy Consortium of the United States, Germany, Japan, France, United
Kingdom, Italy, Canada
G-7 plus Russia
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
Global Business Network
gross domestic product
Global Environment Facility
Global Energy Information System
Global Energy Network
Global Energy Network and Information System
Global Environment Outlook
Global Environmental Monitoring System
greenhouse gas
Globally Harmonized System for the Labeling and Classification of Chemicals
Global-Local Energy-Environment Marshall Plan (in Scenario)
genetically modified organism
gross national income
Gross National Product
gigawatts
Gross World Product
Human Development Index
Human Immunodeficiency Virus
International Atomic Energy Agency
International Criminal Court
internal combustion engine
International Council for Science
information and communication technology
International Data Corp
internally displaced person
International Development and Research Council
International Energy Agency
Indo-European Electrical Network (in Scenario)
International Futures
IFAD
International Fund for Agricultural Development
IGO
intergovernmental organization
IIST
International Institute for Software Technology
ILO
International Labour Organization
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INEDSAT
International Education Satellite Consortium (in Scenario)
INMEDSAT International Medical Satellite Consortium (in Scenario)
INSOLSAT International Solar Satellite Consortium (in Scenario)
INSPACECO International Space Consortium (in Scenario)
INWEH
International Network on Water, Environment, and Health (UNU)
IO
International Organizations
IP
International Property
IPCC
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IR
interdisciplinary research
ISO
International Organization of Standardization
ISS
International Space Station
ISTO
International S&T Organization
IT
information technology
ITU
International Telecommunications Union
LETS
Local Exchange Trading Systems
LDC
Lesser Developed Countries
LQ
lower quartile
LWR
Light Water Reactor
MDG
Millennium Development Goal
MEA
multilateral environmental agreement
MED
median
Mercosur
Common market formed by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and
Uruguay
MIPT
Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MOO
MUD’s object oriented
mpg
miles per gallon
Mtoe
million tonnes of oil equivalent
MUD
Multi user domain
MW
megawatt
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NASA
National Aeronautics and Space Agency
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NBC
nuclear, biological, and chemical
NBIC
nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science
NDPVF
Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (in Scenario)
NEPAD
New Partnership for Africa’s Development
NGO
Non-governmental organization
NIF
National Islamic Front
NPT
Non-Proliferation Treaty
OAU
Organization of African Unity
ODA
OECD
OPEC
OSCE
OTA
PAEG
PERT
PGD
POPs
POTS
ppm
PPP
quart
RAC
R&D
REACH
ROHS
S&T
SAARC
SADAC
SARS
SD
SDRs
SEC
SETI
SIMAD
SOFI
SPO
STD
STI
S&T
SIGS
SIMAD
SOFI
SON
TAB
TB
TEF
TFG
TIA
TOC
TPE
TWh
TQM
UK
ULO
official development assistance
Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris
Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
Office of Technology Assessment
Pan-American Electrical Grid (in Scenario)
Program Evaluation and Review Technique
Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis
persistent organic pollutants
Plain old telephone service
parts per million
purchasing power parity
quartile
Recombinant Advisory Committee
research and development
Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals
Restriction of Hazardous Substances
science and technology
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
South African Development and Cooperation
severe acute respiratory syndrome
sustainable development
Special Drawing Rights
Securities and Exchange Commission
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Single Individual Massively Destructive
Strategic Policy Office (Singapore)
Sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted infections
science and technology
special interest groups (in Scenario)
Single Individual Massively Destructive (in Scenario)
Son of Noah (in Scenario)
Office of Technology Assessment (Germany)
tuberculosis
Tele-Everywhere-Feedback (in Scenario)
The Futures Group
trend impact analysis
transnational organized crime
Total Petroleum Energy
terawatt-hour
Total Quality Management
United Kingdom
Uighur Liberation Organization (in Scenario)
UN
United Nations
UNAIDS
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
UNCCD
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
UNCED
UN Conference on Environment and Development
UNCTAD
UN Commission for Trade and Development
UNDP
United Nations Development Program
UNECLAC UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
UNEP
United Nations Environment Programme
UNESCO
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
UNFCCC
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
UNCLOS
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
UNDP
United Nations Development Programme
UNEP
United Nations Environment Programme
UNFPA
United Nations Population Fund
UNHCR
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNICEF
United Nations Children’s Fund
UNIDO
UN Industrial Development Organization
UNO
UN Organizations
UNSIA
United Nations Security Insurance Agency (in Scenario)
UNU
United Nations University
UNU/BIOLAC Biotechnology for Latin America and the Caribbean
UNU/INWEH United Nations University/international Network on Water, Environment, and
Health
UNU/IIST
United Nations University/International Institute for Software Technology
UNU/WIDER United Nations University/World Institute for Development
Economics Research
UQ
upper quartile
U.S.
United States
USAID
United States Agency for International Development
VoIP
voice over Internet protocol
VR
virtual reality
WDI
World Development Indicators
WEC
World Energy Council
WECS
world environmental computer simulation (in Scenario)
WEO
World Energy Organization (in Scenario)
WHO
World Health Organization
WIPO
World Intellectual Property Organization
WMD
weapons of mass destruction
WSO
World Sustainable Development Organization
WSSD
World Summit on Sustainable Development
WTO
World Trade Organization
WWF
World Wide Fund for Nature
List of Figures and Boxes
Figures
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
Figure 5.
Figure 6.
Figure 7.
Figure 8.
Figure 9.
Figure 10.
Figure 11.
Figure 12.
Figure 13.
Figure 14.
Figure 15.
Figure 16.
Figure 17.
Figure 18.
Figure 19.
Figure 20.
Figure 21.
Figure 22.
Figure 23.
Figure 24.
Figure 25.
Figure 26.
Figure 27.
Figure 28.
Figure 29.
Figure 30.
Figure 31.
Figure 32.
SOFI 2007 with alternative projections by trend impact analysis...........................7
Global surface temperature anomalies (0C)...........................................................13
Global trends of freedom.......................................................................................19
Regional Internet population growth.....................................................................23
Share of people living on less than $1 a day (%)...................................................25
Physician density (per 10,000 population).............................................................27
Number of international organizations (NGOs and IGOs)....................................29
Global trends in armed conflict, 1946–2007..........................................................31
Women in national parliaments (percentage)........................................................33
Global challenges and SOFI process.....................................................................42
SOFI 2007 with trend impact analysis...................................................................45
Unemployment with trend impact analysis............................................................47
Correlation between poverty, unemployment, and population growth
(income less than $1 per day) (low- and mid-income countries)...............48
SOFI using IFs data in the Millennium Project template......................................49
SOFI comparison with IFs data and Millennium Project data...............................49
South Korea SOFI using IFs data and Millennium Project data............................49
SOFI of the Republic of Korea..............................................................................52
Screen-shots of the SOFI presentation...................................................................53
Screen-shot of a Real-Time Delphi questionnaire.................................................54
Demographics of RTD participants since 2006.....................................................57
Possible representation of global energy elements................................................73
Example of a unit of information, with column of choices about the information….74
Argument-structured information overview of an issue........................................75
Recursive linked interface......................................................................................77
Politician and staff member, GENIS flow diagram...............................................79
Energy dashboard example for a question during a legislative hearing................79
Failed States Index 2008........................................................................................87
Expenditures and estimated costs of various programs.........................................90
Ratifications of 12 multilateral environmental agreements,
by UNEP GEO regions..............................................................................94
Number of parties to multilateral environmental agreements, 1975–2008............95
Participants in the 2007–08 program.....................................................................97
Participants since 1996..........................................................................................97
Boxes
Box 1. Where is humanity winning and losing...............................................................................6
Box 2. SOFI variables...................................................................................................................44
Box 3. SOFI 2007–08 study..........................................................................................................46
Box 4. Systemic SOFI and 2008 SOFI..........................................................................................50
Box 5. SOFI variables for the Republic of Korea.........................................................................51
Box 6. Some accords and regulations related to environmental security
recently adopted, strengthened, in negotiation, or proposed.....................92

WFUNA Millennium Project - Azerbaijan Future Studies Society

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