Recap: 2011 State of the Future

originally posted at The Trends and Foresight Blog by Chris Carbone and Whitney Drazovich

“We are winning more than we are losing”, emphasized co-founder and Director, Jerome Glenn at the 2011 State of the Future Conference. The State of the Future is an annual report state by the Millennium Project, which is “an independent non-profit global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers.”

SOF2011: Dave Rejeski, Jerome Glenn, Paul Werbos, Jonathan Peck

Glenn and his group have put out the State of the Future reports since 1996, and we’ve found it to be a great resource for foresight and global awareness. In a process that Glenn describes as “picking 3,000 minds around the world” they work with 40 “nodes” to gather and synthesize intelligence about the future. The project provides an ongoing global study tracking 15 long-term global challenges as well as other future-focused topics. For example, this year’s State of the Future covers the 15 challenges plus a range of additional topics such as:

- the future of the Egyptian revolution
- scenarios for Latin America
- and the future of arts, media, and entertainment

We were excited to attend the launch event for the publication this week in Washington, DC at the Woodrow Wilson Center and here are a few of the takeaways from the comments of Glenn and his other panel guests (Dave Rejeski, Paul Werbos, Jonathan Peck).

• Winning—Glenn noted that on a global scale we are “winning” in important areas including expanding the reach of education and in adult literacy, in delivering economic opportunity and increased income to more people around the world, in GDP per unit of energy, in population growth, and in representation of women in parliament/government around the world.
• Losing—While these are huge strides, there are clear areas where we are “losing” including CO2 emissions, corruption and organized crime (which Glenn claims siphons $3 trillion per year from the global economy), and food reserves which appear to be at 25 year lows.
• Interconnected futures—Glenn made it a point to explain that every global challenge outlined in State of the Future is interconnected to the others, and a change in one can affect the others. For example, food, water and energy are interconnected global challenges. Solutions to feed the next 2 billion people (projected population increase by 2050) need to be approached in concert with questions of providing energy and fresh water for the future, not in isolation.

On the whole, Glenn kept the message of the State of the Future 2011 upbeat, though this quote is a good reminder of the need for all of us to build better futures:

“We’re winning more than we’re losing, but where we are losing is deadly dangerous.” –Jerome Glenn