Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Ten-Year Forecast Program 2010 Research Agenda
The 2010 Ten-Year Forecast will be a benchmark forecast for the decade. It will focus on five driving forecasts:?
• The Carbon Economy, including basic forecasts for the energy costs of energy production, the potential for energy efficiencies, and the likely trajectory for carbon markets and their impact on overall energy strategy.
• The Future of Water, including the water costs of many economic value centers (energy, food, manufacturing, etc.); the impacts of climate disruptions and global conflicts; and the emerging ocean economy.
• The Future of Urbanization, including the role of emergent infrastructure, the potential for suburban reinvention, and the impact of the changing urban food landscape.
• The Future of Global Power, including South-to-South development strategies, new issues in territory and sovereignty, and the potential for the collapse of states.
• The Future of Identity, including new scientific understanding of gender and sexuality, the evolution of the "neuro-self," and the prospects for human speciation.
The program will explore each of these basic forecasts through the lens of four alternative scenarios, trying to make explicit our assumptions about the future and creating detailed pictures of what the forecasts look like in these alternative worlds:
• The Growth Scenario, where we continue to pursue economic growth as a primary measure of progress.
• The Collapse Scenario, where strains on the world add up to local collapses of various systems.
• The Discipline Scenario, where we adapt to a new set of constraints on many of our activities.
• The Transformation Scenario, where key aspects of our familiar world shift to the unfamiliar.
Across all these scenarios, we'll explore the issue of happiness: what constitutes happiness in each of these worlds and how will people around the world seek to achieve it? For each scenario, we'll also look at the different signals that are emerging from the northern industrialized nations, the BRIC countries, and the newly emerging southern economies.
For more information, please contact Sean Ness at 650-233-9517 or [email protected]