2012 State of the Future

October 24, 2012

“The world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected, and people are living longer; yet half the world is potentially unstable,” according to Jerome C. Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project and co-author of the “2012 State of the Future,” an overview of our global situation, problems, solutions, and prospects for the future.

The 16th Annual Edition includes 145 pages and a 10,000 page electronic supplement with more than 1,500 additional pages of detailed current material, and searchable research from the past 16 years. It is available on CD, USB flash drive, or download.

The report is a distillation of research, including tables, graphs, and charts with special chapters on 15 Global Challenges, the State of the Future Index, changing stereotypes about women around the world over the past 50 years and projected next 50 years, future factors affecting cooperatives and businesses, and futures of ontologists.

Among the trends:

  • Protesters around the world show a growing unwillingness to tolerate unethical decisionmaking by power elites.
  • An increasingly educated and Internet-connected generation is rising up against the abuse of power.
  • Food prices are rising, water tables are falling, corruption and organized crime are increasing, environmental viability for our life support is diminishing, debt and economic insecurity are increasing, climate change continues, and the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dangerously. However, the most recent data from the World Bank shows that the share of world population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 52% in 1981 to about 20% in 2010.
  • The world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.

The report’s 15 Global Challenges include energy, food, science and technology, ethics, development, water, organized crime, health, decisionmaking, gender relations, demographics, and war and peace.

The briefing is especially critical for senior executives, thought leaders, strategic planners, public policy experts, policy advisors, non-profit organization leaders, teachers/professors of world issues, and anyone interested in a global overview of our prospects for the future.

The approximately 10,000 pages detail the global situation with a range of strategies, analyses, and regional considerations for 15 Global Challenges facing humanity; eleven years of research and analysis for developing a State of the Future Index; several global and regional scenarios; governance-related studies; concepts for building collective intelligence systems; environmental security studies; over 850 annotated scenarios; and various approaches for improving futures research, making it an extraordinary resource and data base for exploring the prospects for humanity.

The Millennium Project was established in 1996 as the first global futures research think tank. It conducts independent futures research via its 46 Nodes around the world that connect global and local perspectives. Nodes are groups of individuals and institutions that pick the brains of their region and feed back the global results. It is supported by UN organizations, multinational corporations, universities, foundations, and the governments of Azerbaijan, Kuwait, South Korea, and the United States.