I reviewed the 2012 report by the Millennium Project in this journal, and it is my great pleasure to update readers on this year’s issue. As before, the 2014 State of the Future is an encyclopedia of foresight, complied by working groups consisting now of 50 nodes in various nations and totaling 4,500 futurists, planners, scholars and other thought leaders. It is one of the most complete and authoritative analysis of where the world is heading and a guide to create a better world.
The main message of the 2014 report is that the state of the world is mixed. As the report notes:
The global situation for humanity continues to improve but at the expense of the environment and other disorders. People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, increasingly connected, and they are living longer […]. However, water tables are falling, intrastate conflicts are increasing, glaciers are melting, income gaps are increasingly obscene, coral reefs are dying, ocean acidity is increasing, half the world’s topsoil has been destroyed, youth unemployment has reached dangerous proportions, traffic jams and air pollution are strangling cities […]. We are winning more than we are losing – but where we are losing is very serious. Humanity has the ideas and resources to address its global challenges, but it has not yet shown the leadership.
The report begins with its customary focus on 15 greatest challenges facing the world and offers strategies to address them: how to improve the USA–China relationship, develop sustainable agriculture, provide collective intelligence for the globe, form “transinstitutions” to address collective issues and counter the enormous market for organized crime. This work on global challenges is the greatest contribution of the Millennium Project. It truly does comprise the most serious attempt to conduct “strategic planning for the planet”.
Special chapters on critical issues provide a welcome addition to the 2014 report. There is a fine chapter on the growing problem of “hidden hunger” – the alarming trend toward obesity that ironically coexists with malnutrition and unhealthy lifestyles in the West that is now spreading to developing nations. Another chapter provides a cautionary analysis of the vast coastal zones that are increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Still others address terrorism and the need for global intelligence.
An exciting new feature consists of an infographic for each global challenge. Neatly summarizing a wealth of data, the infographics offer a visually compelling highlight of the report’s main findings.
A sign of progress can be found in the activation of The Millennium Projects’ new Global Futures Intelligence System. This state-of-the-art effort to provide a cornucopia of information has been under development, and now it is ready for prime time. As the leader of a similar project that uses collective intelligence (www.TechCastGlobal.com), I have a keen appreciation of the enormity of this accomplishment. I also wonder if it is possible to find synergy among the many such projects to create a new domain of “online futures”.
With all this up-to-date information readily available, it is hard to find good reasons why people, organizations and nations remain unprepared for the massive changes ahead. As I have argued, we now see the limits of knowledge alone, and attention is slowly shifting to the remaining obstacles of understanding and sheer political will.
For more, see www.millennium-project.org
