Vancouver, Canada - "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."

These are not the Cassandra like warnings of a doomsday prophet, but the observations of a surprisingly upbeat report from the United Nations about the state of the world’s future due to be published later this month.

Produced by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of the United Nations Associations (WFUNA), the 2008 State of the Future Report distils the collective intelligence of over 2,500 leading scientists, futurists, scholars, and policy advisors who work for governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, universities, and international organizations.

The Report goes on to note 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, a 25-year lows in global food stocks, and market speculation.

"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", it declares.

In addition, some 700 million people already face water scarcity  and 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."

Against this backdrop one might expect that the authors of the State of the Future Report would be extremely pessimistic about the future well being of the human race. Rather they believe it is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address these common challenges, only 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. "

The report notes that many important things already are getting better. Life expectancy and literacy rates are increasing worldwide; infant mortality and the number of armed conflicts have been falling fast; and per capita income has been growing strongly enough to cut poverty by more than half by 2015 except, importantly, in Africa.

The report says advances in science and technology, education, economics, and management are capable of making the world work far better than it does today.  Medical breakthroughs, for example, are offering the hope of defeating inherited diseases, tailoring cures to individual patients, and even creating replacement body parts.

And computers are spreading even to remote villages in developing countries and dramatically increasing in power to provide "collective intelligence for just-in-time knowledge to inform decisions".

Despite these optimistic observations, the report’s authors note that things could still go terribly wrong. It states categorically that many of the world’s decision making processes are inefficient, slow, and ill informed, especially when given the new demands from increasing complexity, globalization, and the acceleration of change.

That being said, the report notes also that the world is moving toward ubiquitous computing with collective intelligence for just-in-time knowledge to inform decisions. While creating collective intelligences for subjects like energy or water may be difficult or even impossible, it will be increasingly difficult to improve the world without collective intelligence.

Jerome Glenn, one of the report’s main authors was quoted in an article in the UK newspaper The Independent "There seems to be an interest in creating global strategies, but it needs a little push. There’s more within us now to collaborate in the face of shared problems."

For example, 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 is ripe to upgrade global policy and decision making systems, according to the report.

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.

Specifically, 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.

Other environmental predictions contained in the report are: 

• The great melt - 5 years before the Arctic could be ice-free in summer. Sea-ice last year shrank to 22 per cent below the previous record low, a level that had not been expected to be reached until 2030-50, opening up the Northwest Passage.
  
  
• Fossil fuel - 850 coal-fired power stations are planned to go into operation across the US, China and India over the next four years. Each station would operate for about 20 years, greatly accelerating global warming.
  
  
• Solar energy - 25% of Europe’s electricity could come from solar-powered stations in North Africa by 2050. African leaders and aid organizations are to invest $10bn a year in renewable energy over the next five years.

The Millennium Project

The Millennium Project is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgments from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future" Reports.

The 2008 State of the Future report comes in two parts: a 100-page print executive summary and a CD containing about 6,000 pages of research that supports the report and the Millennium Project’s 12 years of cumulative research and methods.  Some unique features of this year’s report are:

• 15 Global Challenges - Prospects, Strategies, Insights
• State of the Future Index for the world and nations
• Government Future Strategy Units and some potentials for international strategic coordination
• Global Energy Collective Intelligence - system design options
• Environmental Security - Overview
• Real-Time Delphi techniques
• 700 Annotated Scenario Sets
• and more futures intelligence on technology, environment, governance, and the human condition

The Executive Summary of the Report is available here:

Information of ordering the report can be found here.

Source 2: The Independent