Book Review

Hope in the State of the Future

The Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations has released a State of the Future report every year since 1996. This latest edition draws upon all 12 predecessors and incorporates findings from 229 new contributing futurists, business planners, and scientists.

The report identifies 15 Global Challenges that experts conclude will demand worldwide cooperation to resolve; summarizes in a State of the Future Index data collected over the last 20 years to project five areas in which the human species will gain ground and five in which it will lose ground; and proposes ways for new systems of communication and information-sharing to coordinate global action necessary to address the 15 Global Challenges.

The report’s authors bring together much of the contributors’ research findings through a survey method called Real-Time Delphi Technique, in which participants answer questionnaires in one year and are allowed to revise their answers at any time thereafter. The 15 Global Challenges are the results tallied from a delphi survey ongoing since 1996; the State of the Future Index used a Real-Time Delphi Technique survey dating back to 2006.

The report looks forward to substantially reduced world poverty, rising literacy, and vast increases in worldwide Internet availability and use. Yet it also finds much to fear: As much as half the world might witness violence and upheaval due to rising energy and food costs, unstable governments, climate change, water shortages, desertification, and increasing migrations of refugees.

The survey participants find hope for solving these problems, however, in ever-evolving communications technologies and in government “foresight units.” Communications technologies such as the Internet enable people across the globe to share ideas, cooperate on initiatives, and allocate resources more easily than ever before. Foresight units keep public officials aware of worldwide developments that need to be considered when formulating policies. The report spotlights the present foresight units of 10 individual governments, and urges other governments to form foresight units as well. The authors hope that those units might connect to each other and to partners in the nonprofit and business sectors to form a worldwide grid of information sharing, idea development, and strategy implementation.

“This does not mean world government; it means world governance—civilizations working better by cooperating with some common rules,” the report states.

Additional international coordination systems might target the specific challenges of sustainable energy policies: a Global Energy Network to link energy experts and a Global Energy Information System to serve as a knowledge base for information about energy. Energy and environmental matters in general merit special consideration since ecological problems factor into many armed conflicts.

A new global system for the identification, analysis, assessment of possible consequences, and synthesis of energy options for decision making is urgently needed,” the report states.

The 2008 State of the Future report is an ambitious meeting of research and vision, presenting a grand-scale sweep of today’s world and its difficulties. Looking forward from the difficulties, it puts forth blueprints for an ambitious mobilization of world-conscious citizens and governments across the globe. That mobilization is a powerful break from the squabbles that feed the world news sections of today’s newspapers. It becomes clear that the contributing researchers hope for a new and better world. Anyone who shares their hope will find the 2008 State of the Future report a welcome resource. —Rick Docksai

2008 State of the Future, by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. Washington, D.C.: The Millennium Project, www.unmillenniumproject.org. 2008. 104 pages plus a CD-ROM containing 6,300 pages. $49.95. Order from the Futurist Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.