Atlantic Council: Welcome to 2034

Picture a world with competing power centers, an unstable Russia stumbling into its post-Putin era, a nuclear-armed Iran emerging in the midst of an unruly nuclear age, and a United Nations incapable of carrying out its core functions—including convening the world’s countries to tackle problems, such as climate change, that no one state can solve and that pose a grave threat to global security and prosperity.

That’s just a glimpse into the future that leading global strategists and foresight practitioners forecast when the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security surveyed them in November on how they expect the world to change over the next ten years.

If this sketch leaves you gloomy, you’re in good company: Sixty percent of the experts who participated in our annual Global Foresight survey think the world will be worse off a decade hence. But despite the pessimism about the overall direction of global affairs that many expressed, their responses also turned up cause for hope when we asked more specific questions regarding geopolitics, the environment, disruptive technology, the global economy, and other domains.

The 288 respondents were mostly citizens of the United States (60 percent of those polled), with 17 percent from Europe and 11 percent from Latin America and the Caribbean. In total, respondents’ nationalities were spread across forty-eight countries.

Respondents also work in a variety of fields, including the private sector (27 percent), nonprofits (18 percent), academic or educational institutions (16 percent), government (16 percent), independent consulting (14 percent), and multilateral institutions (4 percent). They are dispersed across age ranges as well, with 10 percent between eighteen and thirty-five, 23 percent between thirty-six and fifty, 37 percent between fifty-one and sixty-five, and the remaining 29 percent aged sixty-six or older.

So what do these seasoned forecasters of the global future expect over the coming decade? Below are the survey’s ten biggest findings.

 
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