World Trends Hotspots *

Demography

• Demography will reach a maximum around 9 billion by 2050 and then decrease back to 7 by 2100

• Gene therapy will help eradicate inherited diseased by 2013.

• The bet is that the world population will peak by 2025, at something around 7.8 billion, and decline after that.

• The age of the population in the United States will increase from about 35 today to about 42 in the year 2020, signaling a much older population.

• Research is underway to discover ways of slowing the clock down, thus enabling you to live longer, perhaps as long as 150-300 years. Treatments which may be available by 2015.

• There have been enormous advances in science and medicine --vigorous health at 80 and 90 years of age is now common

Water

• New techniques, such as precision farming and hydroponics will be commonly used by 2015.

• Water, already scarce in North Africa and the Middle East, will become more so, adding to tensions in an already conflict-prone region.  

Waste

• Around 2016, additional improvements in fossil fuel efficiency will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one-half. In these years consumers will recycle about half their household waste

Energy

• The most rapidly expanding energy source is wind power with an average growth rate of 33 percent between 1998 and 2002. Wind capacity is projected to increase 15-fold over the next 20 years

• Europe has nearly 73 percent of global wind capacity, more than half of which is in Germany. In 2002, Denmark, a nation of 5 million, installed more wind capacity than all of the United States (population over 290 million) installed that year.

• One recent study asserts that world oil production will, finally, peak in 2007.

• By 2010 or so we should expect manufacturers to adopt “green” methods, and a significant portion of energy usage will be derived from renewable sources and biomass.

• Most recent Hydrogen Fuel Cells: up to 200kw

• In 2000 report the UK Marine Oversight Panel asserted that converting less than 0.1% of the ocean’s energy into electricity would supply the total world demand five times over. More conservatively, the World Energy Council says that ocean waves could supply twice the current world consumption of electricity

• The probable near term future (5-15 years), for economic and political reasons, is to pursue cheap fossil fuels. But maybe not forever or even for long. The middle-term possible future (10-25 years) is for substantial progress in alternate and cleaner technologies,

• Annual global energy usage is 375 exajoules and grows 1.5% per year. Asia is now the world’s largest energy producer and consumer.

• Natural gas has become the fastest growing of all fossil fuels, representing nearly 24 percent of the world’s energy consumption. But annual growth rates of two percent in this sector pale in comparison to alternative sources such as wind.

Transportation

• Before people commonly drive advanced electric cars in the 2010s, hybrid vehicles combining the advantages of electric and internal combustion systems will be seen on the road by 2006.

• The high growth projections assume that Europe will expand at 3% annually the GDP  until 2025 and then at 2.5%; the medium growth projections assume 2.5% until 2025, then 1.5% annually

• Because developments in car design and propulsion are progressing rapidly, there is no indication yet which combination of hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, or other technologies will power the vehicles

• If the linear growth in emissions characterizing the past 20 years were to continue into the next century, OECD countries would still account for fully 60 percent of global motor vehicle emissions by the year 2050.

Technology

• Almost all countries will cross the threshold of ten telephone lines per one hundred inhabitants before 2020

• In 2015, the majority of farmers will have adopted organic or alternative farming methods and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will have declined by 2012.

• Most people will not have access to the information superhighway until 2008.

• Expert systems, once heralded as the undeniable decision-making software for the 1990s, have a 72% chance of finding routine use by 2010. Computer programs that can learn and adjust their own programming will not be commonly available until 2012.

• Microprocessor development has proved so successful that chips are now three times faster than they were predicted to be in the early 1980s. It is as if we have in 1997 computers from the year 2000.

Housing

• Relocation starts : medium-sized towns, technopolis, ocean cities

Other relevant hotspots

• The first NASA model estimates that the rise in temperature over the next 50 years will be in the order of 10 degrees near the polar circles and only 1 or 2 degrees near the equator, while the sea will rise about 1 metre.

• As part of this scenario a new continent, the Ocean, will be born. A fairly sizeable population will begin living in marine cities at sea and then in cities in space in the following century.

• The tax system of the next century can no longer be based on the same principles as today. It needs to become international to provide equality of opportunity for economic players.

* All this hotspots are excerpt from the websites and papers listed on the Possible Futures page