THE MILLENNIUM PROJECT
STATE OF THE FUTURE 2012
Executive
Summary
The world is improving better than most pessimists
know, but future dangers are worse than most optimists indicate. After 16 years
of The Millennium Project’s global futures research, it is clear that there is
more agreement about how to build a better future than is evident in the media.
When you consider the many wrong decisions and good decisions not taken—day
after day and year after year around the world—it is amazing that we are still
making as much progress as we are.
This year’s report verifies that the world is getting
richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected and
that people are living longer, yet half the world is potentially unstable.
Protesters around the world show a growing unwillingness to tolerate unethical
decisionmaking by power elites. An increasingly educated and Internet-connected
generation is rising up against the abuse of power. Food prices are rising,
water tables are falling, corruption and organized crime are increasing,
environmental viability for our life support is diminishing, debt and economic
insecurity are increasing, climate change continues, and the gap between the
rich and poor continues to widen dangerously. However, extreme poverty has
fallen from 52% in 1981 to about 20% in 2010.
It is increasingly clear that the world has the
resources to address its challenges. It is also increasingly clear that the
current decisionmaking structures are not making good decisions fast enough and
on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges. The Rio+20 UN
Conference on Sustainable Development energized many of the leaders from NGOs,
corporations, universities, and municipalities to synergize their efforts
without waiting for national government action. New forms of collaborative
action are beginning to emerge from self-organizing Arab Spring/Awakenings to
websites like makerbot.com and adafruit.com, which share open-source 3D printer
programs for individuals to be local manufacturers, and other websites for
political people power websites like avaaz.org. Public-private partnerships and
coalitions of the willing have formed to fight disease and poverty and to
create a smarter planet. Information and communications systems from simple
mobile phones to supercomputers are augmenting human decisionmaking around the
world. It is reasonable to assume that the accelerating rates of these changes
will eventually connect humanity and technology into new kinds of
decisionmaking with global real-time feedback.
But history has taught us that good ideas and
technologies can have unintended and negative consequences. These capabilities
will eventually make it possible for a single individual acting alone to make
and deploy a bioweapon of mass destruction and for organized crime to become
far more powerful than today—when its combined income is already twice that of
all the military budgets combined. These and other dangerous future
possibilities discussed in Chapter 1 are not inevitable; there are many
excellent solutions being pursued and making great progress, unbeknownst to the
general public. Every year, The Millennium Project updates data about the
global situation and prospects for the future, with most of the data updates
going slowly but surely in a positive direction. Nevertheless, the world is in
a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition
and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.
So, how is the world doing in this race? What’s the
score so far? A review of the trends of the 28 variables used in The Millennium
Project’s global State of the Future Index provides a score card on humanity’s
performance in addressing the most important challenges. (See Box 1.)
An international Delphi panel selected over a hundred
indicators of progress or regress for the 15 Global Challenges in Chapter 1.
Variables were then chosen that had at least 20 years of reliable historical
data. The resulting 28 variables were submitted to an international panel
selected by The Millennium Project Nodes to forecast the best and worst value
for each variable in 10 years. The results were integrated into the State of
the Future Index’s 10-year projection. Chapter 2 presents a summary of this
research. SOFIs can also be created for countries or sectors.
Where are we winning?
Access to water
Literacy rate
Life expectancy at birth
Poverty $1.25 a day
Infant mortality
Wars
HIV prevalence
Internet users
GDP/capita
Women in parliaments
School enrollment, secondary
Energy efficiency
Population growth
Undernourishment prevalence
Nuclear proliferation
Where are we losing?
Total debt
Unemployment
Income inequality
Ecological footprint / biocapacity
ratio
GHG emissions
Terrorist attacks
Voter turnout
Where there is no significant change
or change is not clear?
Corruption
Freedom rights
Electricity from renewables
Forest lands
R&D expenditures
Physicians per capita
The 2012 SOFI in Figure 1 shows that the 10-year
future for the world is getting better—but at a slower rate of improvement than
over the past 20 years. However, in many of the areas where we are winning we
are not winning fast enough, such as reductions in HIV, malnutrition, debt, and
nuclear proliferation. And areas of uncertainty represent serious problems:
corruption, political freedom, fossil fuel consumption, and forest cover. Some
of the areas where we are losing could have quite serious impacts, such as
unemployment, greenhouse gas emissions, debt, income gaps, and terrorism.
Nevertheless, this selection of data indicated that 10 years from now, on
balance, will be better than today. We are winning more than we are losing.
Some Factors to Consider
The world is warming faster than the latest IPCC
projections. According to NOAA, the first six months of 2012 were the hottest
in the U.S. since record-keeping began in 1895. The U.S. is also experiencing
the worst drought in 56 years, cutting its corn and soybean production, which
is expected to increase world food prices. Total human-induced GHG emissions
are about 49.5 gigatons of CO2 equivalent
per year. Nature absorbs about half of this annually, but its ability to do
that is diminishing. Global ecosystem services are being depleted faster than
nature can resupply. Glaciers are melting, polar ice caps are thinning, and coral
reefs are dying. Rapid population and economic growth over the past hundred
years has reduced environmental viability for life support; the impact over the
next hundred years could be far greater. It is time for a U.S.–China
Apollo-like 10-year goal and global R&D program to address climate change.
These two countries are the greatest emitters of GHGs and have the largest
economies.
Over 2 billion people gained access to improved
drinking water since 1990, but 783 million people still do not have such
access. However, water tables are falling around the world, 40% of humanity
gets water from sources controlled by two or more countries, and global water
demand could be 40% more than the current supply. The slow but steady Himalayan
meltdown is one of the greatest environmental security threats in Asia. Its
mountains contain 40% of the world’s freshwater, which feeds 40% of humanity
via seven great Asian rivers. Breakthroughs in desalination—such as
pressurization of seawater to produce vapor jets, filtration via carbon
nanotubes, and reverse osmosis—are needed along with less costly pollution
treatment and better water catchments. Future demand for freshwater could be
reduced by saltwater agriculture on coastlines, hydroponics, aquaponics,
vertical urban agriculture installations in buildings, production of pure meat
without growing animals, increased vegetarianism, fixes for leaking pipes, and
the reuse of treated water.
World population is expected to grow another 2 billion
in just 38 years, creating unprecedented demand for resources. Most of that
growth will be in low-income urban Asia. Today Asia has 4.2 billion people and
is expected to grow to 5.9 billion by 2050. By 2030, the global middle class is
expected to grow by 66%—about 3 billion more consumers with increased
purchasing power and expectations. Population dynamics are changing from high
mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility. The world’s
fertility rate has fallen from 6 children in 1900 to 2.5 today. If fertility
rates continue to fall, world population could actually shrink to 6.2 billion
by 2100, creating an elderly world difficult to support. Today life expectancy
at birth is 68 years, which is projected to grow to 81 by 2100. By 2050 there
could be as many people over 65 as there are under 15, requiring new concepts
of retirement. Scientific and medical breakthroughs are likely over the next
20–30 years that could give many people longer and more productive lives than
most would believe possible today. People will work longer and create many
forms of self-employed tele-work, part-time work, and job rotation to reduce
the economic burden on younger generations and to maintain living standards. If
new concepts of employment are not invented, increased political instability
seems inevitable.
Current demographic shifts and improved education,
compounded by economic volatility, increase demands for more transparent
democratic systems. Although democracy has been growing for over 20 years,
Freedom House reports that political and civil liberties declined in 2011 for
the sixth consecutive year. New democracies must address previous abuses of
power to earn citizens’ loyalties without increasing social discord, slowing
the reconciliation process, and reducing human rights. An educated and
correctly informed public is critical to democracy; hence, it is important to
learn how to counter and prevent various ideological disinformation campaigns,
information warfare, politically motivated government censorship, reporters’
self-censorship, and interest-group control over the Internet and other media,
while reinforcing the pursuit of truth.
Humanity needs a global, multifaceted, general
long-term view of the future with long-range goals to help it make better
decisions today to build a brighter future. Attaining such long-range goals as
landing on the moon or eradicating smallpox that were considered impossible
inspired many people to go beyond selfish, short-term economic interests to great
achievements. Short-term, selfish economic decisionmaking has led to many
problems, ranging from the Euro crisis to the political stalemate in Washington
and insufficient actions from Rio+20. The options to create and update
national, global, and corporate strategic foresight are so complex and are
changing so rapidly 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 consequences of incoherent policies are so serious that
new systems for collective intelligence are needed to improve resilience.
Over 2 billion Internet users, 6+ billion mobile phone
subscriptions, and uncountable billions of hardware devices are
intercommunicating in a vast real-time multi-network, supporting every facet of
human activity. The race is on to complete the global nervous system of
civilization. Ericsson forecasts that 85% of the world’s population will be
covered by high-speed mobile Internet in 2017. Humanity, the built environment,
and ubiquitous computing are becoming a continuum of consciousness and
technology reflecting the full range of human behavior, from individual
philanthropy to organized crime. New forms of civilization will emerge from
this convergence of minds, information, and technology worldwide.
Assuming no new European crisis and that Europe’s
recession will only shrink their economy -0.3%, IMF estimates that the world
economy will grow at 3.5% in 2012. With world population growth at 1%, humanity
will get about 2.5% wealthier by traditional standards.
According to the World Bank, extreme poverty
($1.25/day) has fallen from 1.94 billion people (52% of the world) in 1981 to
1.29 billion (about 20%) in 2010, while world population increased from 4.5
billion to nearly 7 billion during the same time.
At this rate, however, about 1 billion people might
still be living in extreme poverty in 2015. World unemployment grew to 9% in
2011 from 8.3% in 2010. The landscape of geo-economic power is changing rapidly
as the influence of BRIC and other emerging economies as well as of
multinational enterprises is rising. Lower- and middle-income countries with
surplus labor will be needed in higher-income countries with labor shortages.
This could continue the brain drain problem, yet online computer matching
systems can connect those overseas to the development process back home. The
world needs a long-term strategic plan for a global partnership between rich
and poor. Such a plan should use the strength of free markets and rules based
on global ethics.
The health of humanity continues to improve. The
incidence of infectious diseases is falling, as is mortality from such diseases
as malaria, measles, and even HIV/AIDS. New HIV infections declined 21% over
the past 12 years, and AIDS-related deaths dropped by 19% between 2004 and
2010. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada, the first drug
approved to reduce the risk of HIV infection in uninfected individuals.
However, a new infectious disease has been discovered each year over the past
40 years, 20 diseases are now drug-resistant, and old diseases have reappeared,
such as cholera, yellow fever, plague, diphtheria, and several others. In the
last six years, more than 1,100 epidemics have been verified. International
collaboration to reduce HIV, SARS, and H1N1 (swine flu) has built better global
health systems. The dramatic improvements in health and medical services over
the past 20 years could be reduced by the ongoing economic problems that are
cutting health budgets around the world. The global public debt is about $40
trillion, while the world’s GDP in 2012 is about $80 trillion (PPP). Bill Gates
and others supporting health programs are pleading with G20 governments to keep
their pledges of $80 billion annually from 2015 onward to create a healthier
world. Because the world is aging and increasingly sedentary, cardiovascular
disease is now the leading cause of death in the developing as well as the
industrial world. However, infectious diseases are the second largest killer
and cause about 67% of all preventable deaths of children under five
(pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and measles). Nevertheless, over the last 20
years 30% fewer children under five are dying. Mortality from infectious
disease fell from 25% in 1998 to less than 16% in 2010.
The acceleration of change and interdependence, plus
the proliferation of choices and the growing number of people and cultures
involved in decisions, increase uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity, and
surprise. This increasing complexity is forcing humans to rely more and more on
expert advice and computers. Just as the autonomic nervous system runs most
biological decisionmaking, so too are computer systems increasingly making the
day-to-day decisions of civilization. The acceleration of change reduces the
time from recognition of the need to make a decision to completion of all the
steps to make the right decision. As a result, many of the world’s institutions
and decisionmaking processes are inefficient, slow, and ill informed.
Institutional structures are not anticipating and responding quickly enough to
the acceleration of change; hence, social unrest is likely to continue until
new structures provide better management. This may also trigger a return to the
city and subregional cooperation as the locus of policy leadership and
management. 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 have to be created for transinstitutional strategic decisionmaking
and implementation.
Although the vast majority of the world is living in
peace, half the world continues to be vulnerable to social instability and
violence due to growing global and local inequalities, falling water tables,
increasing energy demands, outdated institutional structures, inadequate legal systems,
and increasing costs of food, water, and energy. In local areas of worsening
political, environmental, and economic conditions, increasing migrations can be
expected, which in turn can create new conflict. Add in the future effects of
climate change, and there could be up to 400 million migrants by 2050, further
increasing conditions for conflict. Yet the probability of a more peaceful
world is increasing due to the growth of democracy, international trade, global
news media, the Internet, NGOs, satellite surveillance, better access to
resources, and the evolution of the UN and other international and regional
organizations.
The number of nuclear weapons has fallen from 65,000
in 1985 to 11,540 in 2011. Wars—as defined by 1,000 or more battle-related
deaths—have been steadily decreasing over the past two decades, although the
past two years have seen an increase, mainly due to the Arab Spring/Awakening.
Terrorism is changing from transnationally organized attacks to attacks by
small groups and single individuals. Mail-order DNA and future desktop
molecular and pharmaceutical manufacturing could one day give single
individuals the ability to make and use weapons of mass destruction from
biological weapons. Ubiquitous sensor systems in public spaces plus better
mental health and education systems will be needed to reduce such future
threats. Governments and industrial complexes find themselves under multiple
daily cyberattacks (espionage or sabotage) from other governments, competitors,
hackers, and organized crime. It seems intellectual software arms races will be
inevitable. Back-casted peace scenarios should be created through participatory
processes to show plausible alternatives to the full range of conflict
possibilities.
Empowerment of women has been one of the strongest
drivers of social evolution over the past century and is acknowledged as
essential for addressing the global challenges facing humanity. Women are
increasingly engaged in decisionmaking, promoting their own views and demanding
accountability. Women account for 19.8% of the membership of national
legislative bodies worldwide, and in 32 countries the figure is over 30%. Women
represent 14.3% of the total 273 presiding officers in parliaments. There are
20 women heads of state or government. Patriarchal structures are increasingly
challenged around the world. Women are 41% of the world paid employment, but
hold 20% of senior manager positions. The process toward gender
political-economic equality seems irreversible. Meanwhile, violence against
women is the largest war today, as measured by death and casualties per year.
In some areas, violence against women at one point in their lives can be as
high as 70%. About 70% of people living in poverty are women, who also account
for about 64% of the 775 million adult illiterates.
The world is slowly waking up to the enormity of the
threat of transnational organized crime, but it has not adopted a global
strategy to counter it. In the absence of such a strategy, TOC income has grown
to more than $3 trillion a year.. Its potential ability to buy and sell
government decisions could make democracy an illusion.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has called on all
states to develop national strategies to counter TOC as a whole. This could
provide input to the development and implementation of global strategy and
coordination.
In just 38 years, the world should create enough
electrical production capacity for an additional 3.3 billion people. There are
1.3 billion people (20% of the world) without electricity today, and an
additional 2 billion people will be added to the world’s population between now
and 2050. Compounding this is the requirement to decommission aging nuclear
power plants and to replace or retrofit fossil fuel plants. About 3 billion
people still rely on traditional biomass for cooking and heating. If the
long-term trends toward a wealthier and more sophisticated world continue, our
energy demands by 2050 could be more than expected. However, the convergences
of technologies are accelerating to make energy efficiencies far greater by
2050 than most would believe possible today. So the world is in a race between
making a fundamental transition fast enough to safer energy and the growing
needs of an expanding and wealthier population.
Over half of the new energy generation capacity comes
from renewable sources today. IPCC’s best-case scenario estimates that
renewable sources could meet 77% of global energy demand by 2050, while the
World Wildlife Fund claims 100% is possible. The costs of geothermal, wind,
solar, and biomass are falling. Setting a price for carbon emissions could
increase investments. If the full financial and environmental costs for fossil
fuels were considered—mining, transportation, protecting supply lines, water
for cooling, cleanups, waste storage, and so on—then renewables will be seen as
far more cost-effective than they are today. Without major breakthroughs in
technologies and behavioral changes, however, the majority of the world’s
energy in 2050 will still come from fossil fuels. In 2010, the world spent $409
billion on fossil fuel subsidies, about $110 billion more than in 2009,
encouraging inefficient and unsustainable use.
The continued acceleration of S&T is fundamentally
changing what is possible, and access to the S&T knowledge that is changing
prospects for the future is becoming universal. Computational chemistry,
computational biology, and computational physics are changing the nature of
science, and its acceleration is attached to Moore’s law. R&D on 3D
printers is merging the industrial, information, and biological revolutions.
Synthetic biology is assembling DNA from different species in new combinations
to create lower-cost biofuels, more precise medicine, healthier food, new ways
to clean up pollution, and future capabilities beyond current belief. Swarms of
nano robots are being developed that should be able to manage nano-scale
building blocks for novel material synthesis and structures, component assembly,
and self-replication and repair. Although synthetic biology and nanotech
promise to make extraordinary gains in efficiencies needed for sustainable
development, their environmental health impacts are in question. CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that it discovered a
Higgs-like boson particle that might explain the fundamental ability of
particles to acquire mass, giving rise to future applications of energy and
matter unimaginable today. We need a global collective intelligence system to
track S&T advances, forecast consequences, and document a range of views so
that all can understand the potential consequences of new S&T.
The acceleration of S&T change seems to grow
beyond conventional means of ethical evaluation. Is it ethical to clone
ourselves or bring dinosaurs back to life or to invent thousands of new life
forms from synthetic biology? Public morality based on religious metaphysics is
challenged daily by growing secularism, leaving many unsure about the moral
basis for decisionmaking. Many turn back to old traditions for guidance, giving
rise to the fundamentalist movements in many religions today. Unfortunately,
religions and ideologies that claim moral superiority give rise to “we-they”
splits that are being played out in conflicts around the world. The moral will
to act in collaboration across national, institutional, religious, and
ideological boundaries that is necessary to address today’s global challenges
requires global ethics.
Collective responsibility for global ethics in
decisionmaking is embryonic but growing. Corporate social responsibility
programs, ethical marketing, and social investing are increasing. New
technologies make it easier for more people to do more good at a faster pace
than ever before. Single individuals initiate groups on the Internet,
organizing actions worldwide around specific ethical issues. News media, blogs,
mobile phone cameras, ethics commissions, and NGOs are increasingly exposing
unethical decisions and corrupt practices. Advance software experts in the
self-organizing international group called Anonymous have become a new force
increasing world attention to help the Arab Spring, Wikileaks, the Occupy
movement, and police brutality.
Global ethics also are emerging around the world
through the evolution of ISO standards and international treaties that are defining
the norms of civilization. It may also be evolving from protests around the
world that show a growing unwillingness to tolerate unethical decisionmaking by
power elites. The proliferation and scope of unethical decisions that led to
the 2008 financial crisis seem not to have been addressed sufficiently to
prevent future crises. We need to create better incentives for ethics in global
decisions, 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. Entertainment media could promote memes like “make
decisions that are good for me, you, and the world.”
Without a serious focus on green growth, falling water
tables, raising food/water/energy prices, population growth, resource
depletion, climate change, terrorism, and changing disease patters,
catastrophic results around the world are likely and will force migrations over
the next few decades to make much of the world increasingly unstable. To
prevent this, fortunes will be made in areas such as green nanotech
manufacturing, synthetic biology for medicine and energy, methods to increase
human intelligence, retrofitting energy plants to produce construction material
and buildings to produce energy, transferring agriculture from freshwater to
saltwater on coastal regions of the word, electric vehicles, growing pure meat
without growing animals, and using the principles of urban systems ecology to
make cities become conscious-technologies.
We have to learn how to cut through all the
information noise to get to the essential intelligence that is important about
the future for us and our civilizations. Consider the volume of information you
allow in your brain that is irrelevant, and how you might be different in 10
years if you only allowed truly relevant and useful information that really
mattered to you and your civilization.
2012 State of the
Future
EXECUTIVE
RESUME
