High Stakes for Humanity’s Future

Author(s): Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, Elizabeth Florescu

Publisher: The Millennium Project (2012)

Binding: CD-ROM, 10000 pages

List Price: $39.95

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The Millennium Project calls for global action on challenges that touch every country.

Americans once thought that landing astronauts on the Moon would be impossible, but the U.S. government’s Apollo program made it happen within a mere 10 years. It is now time for China and the United States to jointly marshal an Apollo-like program to tackle climate change and boost renewable energy, argue the authors of the 2012 State of the Future. The report praises global progress in many areas of life but sounds warnings about our overall future.

“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 report states.

The Millennium Project, an international, participatory think tank, has been publishing the State of the Future reports annually since 1996. Like its predecessors, this year’s report drew from ongoing surveys of 3,000 contributing researchers to compile a list of 15 Global Challenges that world leaders will have to address collaboratively, as well as a State of the Future Index (SOFI) that delineates areas of life that are improving and others that are worsening or remaining unchanged.

The latest SOFI indicates that the world has less poverty, lower rates of infectious diseases, and fewer wars. People are living longer, literacy rates are rising, more women serve in elected office, and Internet connectivity is more widespread than ever. The report looks forward over the next two decades to health disparities between rich and poor countries narrowing, and biotechnology aiding efforts to cope with climate change, demographic imbalances, and scarcities of natural resources.

The world is also growing more ethically aware, the authors indicate. Corporate social responsibility, socially responsible investing, and ethical marketing are all becoming more commonplace, and the Internet and new media are connecting and empowering activists everywhere.

“New technologies make it easier for more people to do more good at a faster pace than ever before,” the report states.

But dangers lie beneath the surface: Political instability directly threatens as much as half the world’s people, terrorism and organized crime are growing, supplies of water and other vital resources are shrinking, and greenhouse-gas emissions are on the rise. The world still grapples with pervasively high unemployment, burgeoning debts, rich–poor gaps, and rising prices for food and electricity. If humanity does not make huge strides forward over the next few decades in green nanotech manufacturing, desalination, urban design, electric vehicles, sustainable farming, and synthetic biology for medicine and energy, the authors warn, then turmoil and mass migrations will ensue.

The report presents plans of action for the international community to put into effect. A global R&D strategy on climate change is among these recommendations, as well as:

• An international campaign against organized crime.
• An international science and technology organization that connects the world’s scientists, tracks advancements, and forecasts their consequences, so that the world community understands the impacts of new technologies before they reach widespread use.
• A universal commitment to nonviolence that mobilizes public education systems; implements an early-warning system that connects NGOs and media services with governments and UN agencies; employs Web-based citizen collaborations for peace promotion, rumor control, fact finding, and reconciliation; and enacts better land ownership recording systems in developing countries to remove land grabbing as a cause of conflict.
• Renewed international legislation to combat violence against women and to safeguard women’s rights.
• International attention to water shortages, and implementation across the Earth of saltwater agriculture on coastlines, hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical urban agriculture installations in buildings, production of pure meat without growing animals, vegetarianism, repair of leaking pipes, and reuse of treated water.

The 2012 report has a few new features, as well. For instance, there is a first-ever national SOFI for Azerbaijan. It charts progress from 1990 through 2010, and a continuing rate of progress through 2020, depending on such feasible (but not guaranteed) developments as year-by-year improvements in energy efficiency, increasing enrollment, utilization of fiber-optic cable to expand broadband capacity, and accession of Azerbaijan into the World Trade Organization.

Kuwait also has a first-time spotlight in the report. A chapter details 16 hopes and 16 fears for Kuwait that the prime minister’s Technical & Advisory Office devised through analysis workshops. The “hope” ledger includes fostering human capital formation, restoring the rule of law, and enhancing transparency and accountability throughout the government. Increases in corruption, declines in oil revenues, and water scarcities are among the fears.

The 2012 State of the Future affords these additional insights:

• Cooperatives can be a major generator of employment and development, particularly in lower-income countries, and merit greater consideration as an option for developing economies to reduce their rich–poor disparities.
• Companies, universities, and research centers will increasingly form partnerships and cooperation networks, combining their expertise to bring new advancements in nanotechnology, photonics, advanced manufacturing, and other areas of endeavor to fruition.
• The fast-growing science of ontology could exert a greater impact on humanity than the rise of the Internet. (Ontology is a type of linguistic abstraction used in artificial intelligence, software, biomedical informatics, and information systems; ontologies allow for data to interoperate and for machines to make inferences.) The report calls for more education and training opportunities for ontologists, and for better means of connecting ontologists with organizations that need them.

“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,” states the report. “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.”

Although rivalries and mistrust have afflicted international relations throughout history, this year’s State of the Future shows that the international community will ultimately rise or fall together, and it puts forth concrete plans by which we might rise together toward a better future.

The Millennium Project, continuing its tradition of forward-thinking global scholarship, has once again delivered an opus that is impeccably researched and worthy of world leaders’ study.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is associate editor of THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. Email rdocksai@wfs.org.