Let us talk about the future! In this short journey we will examine global megatrends that we predict today will shape our way of life. This effort is made in order to prepare policy makers as well as individuals in developing resilience, improve decision making and navigate the unknown future through a safer path. We want to leverage our ability to cope with black swans and in parallel, locate and take advantage if possible, white leopards.
The basis for our research comes from the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023, the EU JRC (Joint Research Centre, an EU Policy Lab) and its 14 megatrends cards, the UN 2022 Handbook of statistics and the Global Megatrends 2022 paper by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. Taking the above-mentioned information, we will try to combine their findings, in order to formulate an assumption about the way the world might look like in the future. After that, we will try to answer to some questions that any strategic planning has to deal with.
We borrow the term megatrends, that was first coined in 1982 by futurist John Naisbitt as a popularization of a concept previously explored by military strategist and futurist Herman Kahn in the 1970s: high-level drivers of change that will greatly impact the future of societies globally in the decades to come. Due to their massive scale and impact, megatrends are often interconnected, and they have a life-time stretching at least 10-15 years into the future. To that end, we monitor a continuous interaction between linear trends and unsteady drivers of change including human decision that finally, will formulate our future.
Multipolarity
Megatrends help us evaluate a certain part of the scenario, but this is how forecasting works. We try to drive our decision makers in a more secure pathway, providing information and analyzing critical indicators. In this article, we have chosen as a first step to identify through a cross consistency analysis, a group of trends or key issues in our existing knowledge, concerning the same topic and debate on the extension of a likely future world, where multipolarity is realizing. But, what multipolarity really means?
Many analysts, scholars and others speak today about multipolarity, whereas if someone asks for a specific analysis the answer will be disappointing. Of course, this is something normal, who is able to say if we are going to see one, two or multiple poles that will dictate the global order? Can we except regional centers of power that will act independently? As a starting point let us illustrate why we assess that multipolarity is a growing megatrend.
First of all, we experience a more intense geoeconomic confrontation due to the war on Ukraine, a war that brings us in the brink of nuclear warfare, where just a few of policy-makers and leaders have the experience to manage. Moreover, growing military expenditure and proliferation of new technologies to a wider range of actors could drive a global arms race in emerging technologies. This ongoing war drives any country to assess its military doctrines, their relevance in today’s reality and generates new operational guidelines. Combined arms operations, multi-domain conflicts, hybridity, asymmetry, new-tech weaponry, to name just a few.
On the other hand, the EU points out the expanding influence of east and south in a changing security paradigm, while the UN report adds even more details about the growing economic importance of Asia in 2021, which remained the world-leading maritime freight area with Asian ports, including in developed and developing regions, loading around 4.6 billion tons of goods, or about 42 per cent of total goods loaded in ports worldwide.
Furthermore, the 39% of global FDI inflows were directed to developing Asia and in parallel global shipbuilding was concentrated in China, the Republic of Korea and Japan. These three economies accounted for 94 per cent of shipbuilding in terms of gross tonnage. In ship recycling, Bangladesh and Pakistan jointly accounted for 72 per cent and India for an additional 18 per cent. As of January 2022, the top five ship-owning economies combined accounted for 53 per cent of world fleet tonnage. Greece held a market share of 18 per cent, followed by China (13 per cent), Japan (11 per cent), Singapore (6 per cent), and Hong Kong SAR (5 per cent).
Economic forecasts assess that the seven greatest economies in 2050 – the true G7 – will be (in order) China, USA, India, Indonesia, Germany, Japan and Brazil; a list dominated by the Global South. Economic strengthening comes hand in hand with policy shifts, if the new global economic center is being transferred to the Asia-Pacific, then the decisions made there, will structure global policies. The dominance of the West in international geopolitics and economics, will be paused and the world will enter the so called multipolarity phase. Power struggles are going to be probably more intense, while a major question for the future is, if this global power shift will lead to a more stable and peaceful world, or not.
The multipolarity projection for the future, needs someone to be creative and even though we tried to bring some indicators on the table, more and more questions arise that need answers. Today the U.S. hegemony is being questioned by other actors but no one seems able to challenge that reality on a global scale, if that is going to change in the future how a new bipolarity would look like, when China rises to a genuine superpower? What structure can we imagine, if the U.S. is a leading power but no longer dominant? How the world would look like, if China becomes the dominant global power? Can we imagine a new Asian rules-based international order? Can major powers create blocs or spheres of influence, to manage and share the pieces of the global cake?
In conclusion, global distribution of power includes several elements of power, static forces and dynamic interactions mix up, to generate real life results. Also, Thucydides taught us many centuries ago that, a conflict could be triggered aiming to block an emerging power from dominating. Asia and the Pacific will be for sure the main chessboard, where the global players will locate their pieces to exercise global influence, search for balance or cooperation, generate tensions or conflict.
Climate change
The next megatrend we have chosen is climate change, an issue that humanity has not taken appropriate measures and many believe that this inaction will drive us to the point of no return. Climate change is closely connected with severe wildfires, draught, extreme heat, resource scarcity and of course environmental degradation. Moreover, climate change is believed that, it has the ability to act as a disaster accelerator and create multiple “polycrisis”.
Recently, we have recognized new terms to describe the world we live in and as such, we got familiar with the term “post-normal world” after the outbreak of COVID-19 to articulate how the virus affected everyday life globally, next we entered the phase of “permacrisis”, because we saw that the return to “normal” never happened as many believed, due to various reasons such as energy crisis, the cost of living crisis, geostrategic turbulence, erosion of social cohesion and societal polarization, widespread cybercrime, wealth inequality, etc.
In this context, to delineate the “polycrisis” phenomenon, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 portrays a potential “polycrisis”, relating to shortages in natural resources such as food, water, and metals and minerals, illustrating the associated socioeconomic and environmental fall-out through a set of potential futures. To that end, present and future risks can create an explosive blend, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part.
Climate change carries key risks for ecosystems and cultures, whereas the UN pushes for sustainability that seeks a mutually beneficial balance between human activity and the environment. A future scenario for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and Sustainable Development by 2050, is the Low Energy Demand futures scenario (LED), where it describes a world, that becomes increasingly interconnected and focused on education, science and technology.
Can this future come true? What if the head of states agree to move forward towards this pathway? A UN report assumes that in such a case, the world becomes high-technology interconnected and the Sustainable Development Goals are achieved by 2030, and broader sustainability by 2050.
Particularly, governments, organizations, societies and every individual should start to imagine how to adjust in strategies like: (a) electrify energy end use worldwide; (b) bring homes, appliances and transport modes to the technological efficiency frontier; (c) support multifunctionality through the convergence of multiple services onto single devices or business models; (d) promote a generational shift from the ownership of material goods to the accessing of services; (e) increase the utilization rates of goods, infrastructure and vehicles (sharing and circular economy); (f) promote user-oriented innovation; (g) ensure decentralization, allowing new roles for end users not just as consumers but also as producers, innovators and traders; and (h) achieve pervasive digitalization and rapid innovation in granular technologies.
Is it possible to reach an agreement on the above globally? Can any country take initiatives to act on its own? What would be the cost-benefit ratio? For example, energy security policies are continually being rewritten and assessed (e.g. the role of nuclear energy), an investment that addresses a current crisis should have a view also to the future, to rebalance current spending. Failure to mitigate climate change is a great risk, the UN Summit of the Future, to be held in September 2023, will be an opportunity to find possible solutions for a better world envisioned in the 2030 Agenda and protect the planet, let us hope vital decisions shall be taken.
Migration
The third megatrend is the significance of migration and its expected increase. According the World Migration Report 2022, in 1970 migration represented a percentage of 2,3% of the global population, while in 2020 this number increased in 3,6%. Currently, Europe is the largest destination for international migrants and India has the largest emigrant population in the world, whilst in the top 20 countries of migrant’s origin none comes from Africa, a fact that it is predicted to change.
In this vein, the Mexico to United States corridor is the largest in the world at nearly 11 million people and the second is from the Syrian Arab Republic to Turkey, comprising mainly refugees displaced by the Syrian Arab Republic’s decade-long civil war. In parallel, the third largest corridor in the world, India to the United Arab Emirates (over 3 million), comprises mainly labor migrants.
Specifically, the UN 2022 Handbook of statistics points out that the population of Africa is growing much faster than that of any other continent. Of the 30 economies with the fastest growing population, only Afghanistan, the Syrian Arab Republic and Solomon Islands are outside Africa. In terms of population growth, the world population will see an explosive growth throughout the 21st century and is expected by the UN to peak at 11 billion in 2100.
Based on the above statistics, the UN reports that climate change could lead to a great increase in environmental migration toward 2050 – between 25 million and 1 billion worldwide. Climate change and extreme weather events are significant triggers of displacement, they affect the lives of people and they can trigger tensions over natural resources, often resulting in large migration flows.
It is expected that international migration will continue to grow, whereas from social and political aspect its importance will define wider policies in the future. Especially, if we take into consideration the multidimensional character of migration and its complexities, for example human trafficking, the instrumentalization of migration, resource scarcity, economic insufficiencies, social tensions, criminality, failure of assimilation policies and many more.
Conclusion
In this article, we studied four different reports about the future and tried to assess from the one hand, the common ground between these reports and from the other, to highlight the most significant megatrends in terms of human survival, human relations and the interaction amongst them. Furthermore, we pointed out specific indicators that support a certain pathway, for a megatrend to realize and generated critical questions in order to support better understanding.
It is an effort to structure a framework where global cooperation or confrontation, climate change and migration interact, in order to develop a futures forecasting. To that end, it is a reality that those three megatrends are close interconnected and have the potential to create multiple crises. In this context, the degree of cooperation and climate change have the potential to provoke on the future, severe negative consequences concerning human survival, while migration on its side will formulate the structure of future societies, that will be summoned to be resilient and deal with incoming future challenges.
Preparedness is an investment that it should be a priority, risk identification and intelligence can help navigate between mass amounts of data, whilst countries have to seek for cooperation and prioritize lines of action.
Still, it should be noted that multilateralism, climate change and migration concern human safety and security, human relations and the development of human societies, things essential to our survival. In comparison with other megatrends, like technology, artificial intelligence, or the generally the digital space issues that are optional we have to wonder and act accordingly; What really matters the most and where we should prioritize?
Decision makers, should set the planner to save finite resources, strengthen resilience in key areas and build a bridge that will take us to the future in the safest possible way. After all whether we like it or not, a crisis will come to our way, the matter is how we will respond, well-prepared or not?
Finally, anyone regardless its position should wonder what is our country’s/organization’s goals? Do we consider any of these megatrends when we develop our strategy? Do we engage with others to find common ground? How do we take advantage talent in our environment? Do we exercise agility and adaptability? Are we prepared for a “polycrisis”?
Download this PDF to get more info: CIFS. UN LED TREND. WEF REPORT. UN IOM REPORT.
You can see a also, Tom Orlik and Bjorn Van Roye: “An Economist’s Guide to the World in 2050”, Bloomberg (2021), bloom.bg/3L9OvlB. Happy to see you here!