1999 State of the Future: Challenges We Face at the Millennium

 Executive Summary

The Millennium Project is a global network of over 550 futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who assess the future of humanity, evaluate policies, and document a range of views on the issues and opportunities likely to be faced at the millennium. It connects informed, perceptive, and imaginative individuals and institutions around the world to collaborate on research, surveys, and interviews. In order to connect research to implementation, leaders are interviewed as part of the assessment and are encouraged to participate in other project activities. The Project is not a one-time study of the future, but provides an on-going capacity for a broad selection of humanity to think together.

Each year, the Project produces an annual State of the Future report that shares results, invites feedback, and provides a mechanism for accumulating thinking about the future. The previous reports are: 1997 State of the Future: Implications for Actions Today, and 1998 State of the Future: Issues and Opportunities. This is the third annual report.

What’s New in This Year’s Edition

1. Identifying and rating of developments, not identified by the previous Global Lookout Panels, that could evolve in the foreseeable future to significantly change the human condition.

2. Updating of the descriptions of the 15 Global Issues, 15 Global Opportunities and actions appropriate to each that were previously identified by the Millennium Project.

3. Defining global challenges that should drive major global decisions; these challenges are stated in the form of questions and are based on the updated global issues, opportunities, and actions. The challenges were formed by seeking synergies and eliminating redundancies among the issues, opportunities and actions, and by stating the underlying uncertainties that apparently drive them.

4. Identifying and rating new developments not included among the several hundred ones identified in the past two reports.

5. Identifying and discussing the impediments and aids to timely responses to early warnings or alerts, and the ethical issues involved.

6. Identifying and rating a range of definitions for environmental security, and creating a conceptual framework to assist in the development of environmental security policy, and potential threats to environmental security.

7. Creating prototype software that permits users to interact with and modify scenarios while maintaining internal consistency.

8. Extending last year’s normative global scenario produced through a global participatory process.

9. Designing and testing an experimental questionnaire based on the moral issues involved in the resolution of global dilemmas.

10. Exploring the use of self-rated expertise in assessing the responses of the Global Lookout Panel.

11. Adding about 50 scenarios or scenario sets to the 250 contained in the annotated scenarios bibliography prepared last year.

  1. Overview of the 1998-99 Program

    2.  

     
     
     
     
     
     

    This year’s report represents a distillation of views of approximately 300 participants from around the world who have contributed their judgments about the state of the future and improvements in the decision process that can help close the gap between early future-oriented alerts and timely action; it also explores related issues of ethics, and environmental security, and breaks new methodological ground in dealing with scenarios.
     
     
     

  • Principal Findings and Conclusions

    •  

     
     
     

    The world has many systems and organizations for providing early alerts including, for example, NGOs, the media, national intelligence services, and think tanks. What is lacking is the willingness to act in a timely fashion or to act at all once the alerts have been sounded. The Millennium Project asked the Global Lookout Panel via questionnaires, and policy makers via interviews, to identify and rate impediments to reducing the time between early alert and action.

    The top set of impediments were judged to be:

       
      • Institutional: no one has responsibility to act

      • Lack of funding

      • Lack of interest in the future

      • Planning inadequacy

      • Lack of decision skills

      • Lack of clear-cut strategy

      • Paradigm lock

      • Complexity of the problems addressed

      • Political

      • Lack of accurate data and information

      • Lack of consensus
       

    The types of information that were judged to be most useful in moving from early warning to action were:
      • Information that demonstrates unequivocally that a crisis is pending.

      • Knowledge about what is possible.

      • Education of decision-makers and opinion shapers on issues of long-term significance, rather than those of short-term populist interest.

      • Simple, clear, precise information in political, cultural and social (non-technical) terms, connected to goals and strategies.

      • Sufficient information about what is required to implement various policy options: e.g. manpower, systemic effects, technological change, etc.

      • Information about how a contemplated decision may affect stakeholders.

      • Information about the success or failure of other institutions and countries that have similar problems and have attempted to implement policies; inspiring success stories.

      • Development and popularization of appropriate indicators; coordination of indicators among institutions that rely on cooperation to design and implement policy.

      • Testimony of eminent scientists.
       

    The most significant moral and ethical issues involved with the will to act in closing the gap between alert and action were judged to be:
      • Insufficient attention to the needs of future generations

      • Greed and self-centeredness

      • Waste

      • Corruption in government

      • Economic inequities

      • Lack of respect for the environment

      • Corruption of political leaders, policy makers, corporate leaders

    The analysis of the responses to questions dealing with ethics in decision making produced the following results:
      1. There were important differences by region.

      2. There was a very high correlation between the panelists’ judgments about practicality and effectiveness of actions suggested to improve the moral and ethical issues in decision-making; the higher the practicality, the higher the effectiveness. Nevertheless, the more important an issue was judged to be, the less effective were the suggested actions perceived to be.

      3. The actions designed to improve the ethical standards of decision-making fell into a number of categories, as follows:

      • legal actions, such as assuring equal protection under the law

      • education at all levels

      • using the media to promulgate desirable values and moral codes

      • other actions: a number of highly rated actions did not fit these categories; these other suggestions included, for example, parental guidance and economic opportunity for women
       

    The analysis of self-rated expertise showed that the more expert a participant judged himself or herself to be in a particular area, the more important that area was seen to be. Similarly, the more expert a participant judged himself or herself to be in a particular area, the higher the likelihood of that area was ranked.

    In addition to the several hundred developments previously identified by the Global Lookout Panel over the past two years, the following new developments were identified and rated this year as to likelihood and importance:

      1. Availability of computers that "understand" natural language and solve everyday problems faced by ordinary human beings.

      2. Failures in local electronic/communications systems affecting the whole world; e.g., Y2K and satellite paging system failures.

      3. Evolution of new effective means of inculcating values such as TV programs that depict desirable behavior and relationships.

      4. Ability to copy any natural product with an exact synthetic copy.

      5. Privatization of genetic research, including patenting of human genetic information.

      6. Attempts by governments to use "social engineering" to control violence in society by capturing the "hearts and minds" of the population.

      7. Change in view of what is natural vs. synthetic and hence a need to conserve different global resources.

      8. Development of a thorough understanding of zero-point energy physics (ambient energy that pervades space).

      9. New and recurrent psychiatric diseases.
       

    The Global Lookout Panel saw almost no change in the importance of previously identified developments, and only modest changes in the likelihood of a few.

    All of the previously identified issues and opportunities were seen to have become more important.

    The issues perceived as increasing the most in importancewere:

      • Scarcity of fresh water in localized areas of the world

      • Information technology holds both promises and perils

      • The adverse interaction between, on the one hand, growth of populations and economies and, on the other, environmental quality and natural resources

    The opportunities perceived as increasing the most in importancewere:
      • Achieving sustainable development

      • Developing alternative sources of energy

      • Increasing advances in biotechnology

      • Globalizing the convergence of information and communications technologies

      • Expanding potential for scientific and technological breakthroughs
       

  • The Cumulative Results

    •  

     
     
     

    The Millennium Project, in contrast to many other studies, is cumulative in its work and findings. This year’s activities supported and extended the themes and observations of the Project’s prior work by updating and integrating the previous global issues and opportunities, identifying and rating impediments and the form of information which could reduce the gap between early alerts and action, ethical issues involved in decision making, and environmental security. Despite this extended scope, we find that many of the prior themes appear again, sometimes in different form. The evolving themes and observations, including some new entries, appear below.

    The 15 Global Issues presented in the 1997 State of the Future and the 15 Global Opportunities in the 1998 edition and their associated actions have been updated and merged into Global Challenges the world faces at the millennium.

    As was illustrated in the 1998 State of the Future Report, these issues and opportunities are interdependent. The Global Challenges which emerge from their synthesis present the crucial questions for policy action now and in the next decade. Making wise and timely decisions about these challenges will set the course of global development, and societal achieve-ments in the years immediately ahead. Figure 1 gives an image of how the developments, issues and opportunities and their related actions evolved in the 15 challenges.
     


     

    The Project’s normative scenario, constructed as sketches last year, has three themes:
     

    1. technological capacity

    2. improved human development

    3. political/economic policies
     

         These sketches were based on a unique normative scenario process that included project participants from around the world, in which norms were identified, rated, and used as the basis for selecting primary scenario norms: environmental sustainability, plenty (economic success), global ethics identified and accepted (like compassion, honesty, etc.), and peace. The sketches also used the results of the Global Lookout Study of 1996 -1998 plus the Lessons and Questions from History. This year the sketches were enriched by considering the newly perceived developments suggested by the Lookout Panel, assessing the Global Challenges and ethical issues and peer review. At this point the normative scenario, with three themes, stands as a picture of the year 2050 which achieves the desired norms.

    The exploratory scenario process was extended through the development of new interactive software to permit users to modify scenarios and yet maintain internal consistency.

    Sometimes scenario users want to make a change or two in a scenario, but because the internal structure of the scenario - the causes and effects that link the scenario statements into a cohesive whole - is obscure, the effects of a single change are difficult to reflect in other scenario statements. The project produced prototype software to demonstrate a method that permits people to interact with previously prepared scenarios in a way that allows them to make a change to essentially any statement in the scenario and have the remainder of the scenario "adjust" to reflect the change.

    Sustainability, identified by one of the participants in the Project’s last report as the "third global revolution (after agriculture and industrialization)" - is a concept that continues to provide useful guidance to policy. Indeed, half of the Global Challenges and many of the ethical issues relate in some way to sustainability; it was found to be one of the opportunities that increased significantly in importance.

    Many expect threats to environmental security to be more important than in the past and efforts are increasing to understand who should address such threats and how.

    The Global Challenges are interdependent: implementing the answer to one helps to address the others.
     

    The 15 Global Challenges we face at the Millennium  

    1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all ?

    2. How can water conflicts be prevented while making water available to everyone?

    3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance ?

    4. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes ?

    5. How can global long-term perspectives be more frequently used in policy making?

    6. How can the globalization and convergence of information and communications technologies be shaped for the good of all ?

    7. How can ethical markets increase economic development to reduce the gap between the rich and poor?

    8. What can be done to reduce the threat of new and reemerging diseases, and the increasing number of immune micro-organisms?

    9. How can the capacity to make correct decisions be improved, as institutions and the nature of work are changing?

    10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflict and terrorism?

    11. How can the increasing autonomy of women improve the human condition ?

    12. How can organized crime be stopped from becoming more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises ?

    13. How can the growing energy demand be met safely ?

    14. What are the most effective ways to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and technological applications to improve the human condition ?

    15. How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

         Many desirable policies - especially those addressing environmental and economic relationships - are dependent on scientific, technical and economic standards which do not yet exist. There is an increasing desire to create mechanisms for global standards and protocols without creating a global government.

    Last year’s report stated that economic growth provides the means to increase employment, help alleviate environmental problems, improve the general welfare, and promote political stability. Applied against the demands of the Global Challenges, rational economic growth continues to appear as an engine of improvement of the human condition.

    Education was previously seen to be a fundamental strategy that addressed most of the global issues. The 1998 State of the Future stated that "It is time to identify the most cost/effective educational materials, curricula, and distribution media for global education and institutional arrangements to accelerate learning. Special attention should be given to training leaders and prospective leaders in reconciliation, decision making, and dealing with uncertainty. Education strategies can also help keep the best and the brightest future leaders in their home countries." This theme is decisively reinforced in this year’s work, and appears again and again in considering means for removing impediments to effective action and in improving decision-making ethics.

    Last year, technology was viewed as having the potential to contribute to solutions of some of the world’s major problems. This still appears to be the case: additional technologies were suggested this year that add to this view; in particular: new means of producing food, the prospect for major advances in desalination, and new energy opportunities.

    The 1998 State of the Future quoted one respondent as saying: "...we are now a global people and we need global values." This year’s work elaborated this theme and identified value-related issues.

    This year’s work did not assess lessons from history. Previously we found that both futurists and historians had doubts about whether history could be used to predict the future; the futurists were more skeptical than the historians. We still believe that greater interaction between the two should produce more insight into the usefulness and nature of lessons of history.

    Other themes identified in previous reports which continue to be supported by this current work include:

    • The need to strengthen existing international organizations and to invent other organizations and global authorities "with real but limited powers" to successfully address the Global Challenges.

    • Globalization, a trend affecting all of the aspects examined this year, including new developments, impediments to action, and the ethical issues.

         Last year, the Project found that increasing numbers of people around the world have the ability to think together about their common future. The information revolution - creating humanity’s nervous system, concern about Y2K and other such newly emerging issues, and the advent of the millennium have stimulated many people and institutions to consider where the future might take us and where we might take the future. It is even clearer now than then, that the millennium gives the psychological focus to begin this exploration, and through a variety of activities, could be the greatest teaching moment in History.

    Millennium Project home page
    Millennium Project publications