Planning Committee Meeting
July 22-23, 2000
Westin Galleria, Houston, Texas
The occasion of the third millennium presents a
timely opportunity for the only global
organization, in terms of its membership as
much as of its areas of work, to identify the
challenges that it will face in the future and to
engage in an imaginative exercise to enhance
and strengthen a unique institution
--- United Nations Secretary-General
Kofi Annan, Millennium Report
Current Sponsors
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Deloitte & Touche
Foundation For the Future
General Motors
Hughes Space and Communications
United Nations University
U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute
U.S. Department of Energy
Recent accomplishments
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Partnership for Sustainable Development
State of the Future at the Millennium
State of the Future: The Video
UN and Environmental Security
26 Ways to increase futures in decisionmaking
Very Long-Range Factors and Scenarios
UNU Technology Paper for UN SG’s Millen. Report
Translations - Chinese, Spanish, Farsi, Japanese
Articles: TF&SC, Futures, Foresight, FRQ, AEPI
UN Habitat: continued listing in Best Practices
What’s New in this Year’s Report
1. Combination of a short version in print and more detailed 1000page version on CD-ROM.
2. Regional perspectives on the global challenges - distilled views
from the regional perspectives are in the print version, while more
detailed regional perspectives are on the CD-ROM.
3. Indicators to measure progress on the challenges which were rated
the most useful are in this book, while all the indicators and
discussions are on the CD-ROM.
4. "Meta Strategies" abstracted from the hundreds of actions suggested
to address the challenges.
5. Factors that might affect the next thousand years; a range of views
about the possible trajectories of these factors are detailed on the CDROM, along with a discussion of the value of such an exercise.
What’s New in this Year’s Report (cont.)
6. Six very long-range scenarios based on the factors and trajectories
are in this print edition, and an additional five scenarios and comments
are on the CD-ROM.
7. A distilled version of the Millennium Project's study on
environmental security and the United Nations appears in Chapter 5,
with more detailed analysis plus environmental security threats with
related international agreements and organizations on the CD-ROM.
8. The book details 26 ways to make early warnings more effective in
decisionmaking, with a detailed discussions and case studies on the
CD-ROM.
9. The CD-ROM adds 54 annotated scenarios and/or scenario sets to
the 350 in last year's book.
Evolving new idea: A Strategy to
Counter Transnational Crime
intergovernmental body - with a situation room to:
 Set up information traps at money laundering locations
 Identify a top criminal and prepare the legal case
 Identify assets that can be frozen, and readiness of
banks, etc. to freeze them
 Identify where the criminal is now and get readiness of
local authorities make the arrest
 Identify best location to prosecute and get readiness of
local courts to move immediately
 When every thing is ready, all the orders would be
executed at the same time to: apprehend the criminal,
freeze the assets and access, and open the court case.
“State of the Future:
The Video”
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About 2 minutes per challenge (29:20)
Node translations for showing in their region
WFS added to catalog
Fund raising video copy to WETV and Hazel
Show at SOWF’s Forum 2000 in parallel with
UN Millennium Summit
Hughes asked that we improve the English
audio track
Translations/Special editions
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Chinese edition of the 1999 SOF
Farsi edition of the 1998 SOF
Spanish edition of Futures Research Methodology
AEPI editions: (a) futures and decisionmaking
(b) UN and Environmental Security
Technological Forecasting & Social Change (99SOF)
Other MP articles in
– Futures (very long-range scenarios)
– Futures Research Quarterly (Futures Research and
Decisionmaking)
– Futurist (Futures Research and Decisionmaking - similar)
– Foresight (Normative Scenario)
Principal Findings
1. The most important challenges are transnational in nature and transinstitutional in solution. They require collaborative action among
governments, international organizations, corporations, universities, and
NGOs.
2. Hundreds of futurists, scholars, business planners, scientists, and
decisionmakers were asked what could significantly affect the future.
Their responses have been rated in questionnaires and discussed in
interviews over the past four years. The results can be organized into 15
global challenges.
3. Global challenges had regional and local counterparts (sustainable
development could be discussed as a global or neighborhood objective).
4. Some of the challenges are exploding or have the potential to explode
into crises and require immediate, thoughtful, and inspired action.
Principal Findings
(cont.)
5. There is greater consensus about the scope of global issues and
opportunities than is evident in the media. There is good agreement
about many promising actions, although diverse views exist about
other constructive actions.
6. Suggested actions could be organized into 12 meta strategies:
•establishing new alliances, agreements, and treaties
•engaging in social marketing
•creating standards and permits
•enforcing or modifying laws and regulations
•performing scientific research and development
•engaging in meetings, dialogs, or workshops
•creating and amending economic systems, sanctions, and incentives
•improving planning, accounting, and forecasting
•creating and improving new educational programs
•developing and sharing information
•modifying institutions, infrastructure, and priorities
•initiating new institutions, projects, and programs
Principal Findings
(cont.)
7. Issues and opportunities are interdependent. Study of
interactions should be part of future policy analyses. From the
standpoint of interdependence, the interactions of greatest
potential were:
•widespread adoption of a long-term perspective - e.g. taking the needs of future
generations into account
•the movement toward sustainable development
•the reduction of population growth rates in most countries of the world.
Principal Findings
(cont.)
8. Factors that impede action and decisionmaking are similar
everywhere and largely independent of nationality and culture. The
most important of these factors could be grouped as follows:
•Institutional: no one has responsibility; lack of adequate coordination; institutional inertia
•Financial: lack of funding, or the fact that the people who ought to pay are unwilling to do so
•Disinterest in the future: near-term issues gain more attention than those that have more distant
consequences
•Planning inadequacy: lack of a long term view
•Personnel: lack of decision skills; decisionmakers who do not understand the issues they must
decide
•Strategic: lack of clear-cut strategy and goals, lack of coordinated actions among actors
•Complexity: lack of understanding of the magnitude of problems and consequences of actions
•Political: the action interferes with national interests or it has been proposed by an opponent
•Information: lack of accurate, reliable, and sufficient data and information, or the uncertainty of
the risk
•Lack of consensus: differing interests and ideology among key actors, politicians, the public,
and lobbying groups
Principal Findings
(cont.)
Barriers to the use of futures research in timely decisionmaking can also include
moral factors. Those identified and rated as the greatest moral impediments were:
•Insufficient attention to the needs of future generations
•Caring about the well-being of only own group or nation
•Corruption of political leaders, policymakers, corporate leaders
•Waste
•Greed and self-centeredness
9. Technological futures are easier to forecast than cultural or political futures.
10. Corruption and transnational crime preventing the solution to many of our
problems could be turned around by targeting money laundering through
sophisticated information technology and intergovernmental coordination on the
location for prosecutions. The lack of ethical behavior and moral underpinnings has
given rise to a new hunger for global ethics and the need to identify common ethical
norms.
Principal Findings
(cont.)
11. Decisionmakers are generally not trained to make good decisions; in the future,
formalized training for decisionmakers could result in an improvement in the
quality of global decisions.
12. Information to reduce the time from early warning to timely action should
unequivocally demonstrate that a crisis is pending and that details are available
about what is possible and how action might alter the outcome of the situation.
13. Science and technology promise to give new capabilities that will change lives,
values, social structure, and politics. New science and technology is essential to the
solution of many world problems.
14. Sustainability is a concept that has spread globally and provides useful
guidance to policymaking. Many global policies are now based on perceptions
about their impacts on sustainability.
15. Economic growth is essential; it provides the means to increase employment,
help solve environmental problems, improve the general welfare, and promote
political stability.
Principal Findings
(cont.)
16. Many desirable policies, especially those addressing environmental and
economic relationships, depend on scientific, technical, and economic standards
that do not yet exist.
17. Since education is one of the fundamental strategies to address most of the
global issues, it is important to identify the most effective educational materials,
curricula, and distribution media for global education as well as institutional
arrangements to accelerate learning.
18. In decisionmaking, the short term almost always wins over the longer-term
when there is a conflict between the two perspectives; this is true even when the
costs of doing so are clear.
19. The status and progress made on all the challenges can be assessed in large
measure through the tracking of indicators, most of which already exist.
20. Environmental security is of increasing concern in world affairs and moving
up the policy agenda in some countries.
Principal Findings
(cont.)
21. The Project assessed the factors that might affect humanity over the next
thousand years. While there was some disagreement about whether such an effort
was worthwhile, the exercise proved intellectually challenging. The most significant
factors affecting the long-range future were judged as:
•evolving human-environment dynamics, including the complex interactions
among population and resources
•the use of human genetic engineering to control disease, aging, and human
characteristics
•the availability of safe energy
22. As evidenced by the use of previous State of the Future reports by international
organizations, governments, NGOs, corporations, and universities, it is possible to
perform global futures research in a coherent fashion on a global basis that is
international, interinstitutional, interdisciplinary, and independent.
Principal Findings
(cont.)
23. While quantitative methods have been devised to assess the
relative costs and benefits of alternative policies, these methods
depend on assumptions about the future, which will always be
imperfectly and incompletely known. The methods researched in the
Millennium Project contribute to reducing uncertainty. Among the
methods incorporated by the project are:
• global panels with feedback, augmented by in-depth interviews that built on
the results of the panels
• exploratory and normative scenarios constructed from panel suggestions
• modeling to provide a quantitative backbone to scenarios
• cross-impact methods for modifying scenarios
• drawing lessons from history for forecasting
• trend impact analysis for extending historical indicators in view of perceived
future developments
Current work
(to be discussed in more detail Sunday)
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Future Issues of Science & Technology
Environmental Security Scanning
Environmental Crimes
Futures Research Methods - V 2.0
Indicators with historic and projected data for
possible "State of the Future Index"
Node Millennium Symposiums (South
America, Italy, and China)
Forum 2000 in conjunction with UN
Millennium Summit in September
Future Science & Technology Issues
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Trial list to Science Attaches, ICSU, and MP
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What are the key emerging international issues in S&T? How can the S&T
gap between developed and developing countries be bridged? How is the
global environment changing for science? What are the trends in counterscience? What are some of the significant emerging characteristics of the
international scientific complex?
Steering committee
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Suggests panel members, critiques questionnaire drafts, discusses results of
rounds 1 and 2, and review all drafts of this research.
Composed of several Science Attachés and MP Participants
Each Node selects 10 participants in their region
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Round 1 -
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Round 2
Rate list as to importance, and potential consequences on both
the S&T enterprise and the broader community.
key issues.
– explore reasons for differences and potential actions to address
Environmental Security Scanning
70 items identified from August 1999 to June 2000
Two Examples:
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The Prime Minister of France wants a UN World Environment
Organization. He proposes this UN organization to be a mechanism for
rules and enforcement for environmental agreements in the same way
that the World Trade Organization is for trade agreements. This will
raise environmental matters higher on the policy agenda. It is an
additional indicator that political pressure is mounting to complete the
global architecture of rules for global behavior and enforcement in
general, and environmental policy change in particular. This could
reduce environmental threats, which might have lead to conflict.
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If present funding trends continue, destruction of chemical weapons in
Russia will not be completed in our lifetime. With potential for
smuggling and leakage, this issue deserves greater attention from the
international community.
Environmental Security Scanning
Some patterns and questions
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Sovereignty - UN early warning response teams, ICC and war
crimes, genetically modified foods and organisms, environmental
conditions that affect public health, “Bioagent Chips” deployed to
detect biological warfare attacks. Where should the nation-state end
and the UN begin, when transborder action is necessary?
Worsening environment - forests, fish, wet lands , water,
greenhouse gases, and the interactions of these and other factorsg.
With water tables falling in all continents, and ethnic tensions on the
rise, water pollution caused by one group affecting another could
escalate more seriously than in the past. Putin abolishes Russia’s
environmental protection agency
Environmental Accounting - $ value of environmental conditions
Environmental Ministers: “... we can ensure environmental security
through early warning...” raising environmental security on global
agenda.
Futures Research Methodology - V 2.0
• Existing CD-ROM
1. Introduction & Overview
2. Environmental Scanning
3. Participatory Methods
4. Structural Analysis
5. Delphi
6. Systems and Modeling
7. Decision Modeling
8. Scenario Construction
9. Trend Impact Analysis
10. Cross-Impact Analysis
11. Tech Sequence Analysis
12. Relevance Trees and Morphological Analysis
13. Statistical Modeling
14. Simulation-Gaming
15. Futures Wheel
16. Normative Forecasting
17. Genius, Vision, Intuition
18. Method Frontiers and Integration
• On line methods (e.g. i-Delphi and Group Systems)
• TRIZ
• Science Road Maps
• Multiple perspectives for forecasting and impact assessment
• Agent Models
• Self Modifying Scenarios
• Decision Sciences
• AI and Pattern Recognition
• Mic Mac
The current processes to improve the
Millennium Project are:
Nodes - individuals and institutions
who connect global, regional, and
Planning Committee Meetings
local perspectives in eleven cities
of 20 people to review and
around the world via questionnaires
set agenda
Planning Committee and interviews
Questions to the
and Node email lists
Global Lookout Panel
and Decisionmaker
Annual State of the Future
Interviews
report - forces accumulative
analysis, focuses feedback, and Integrate research by
writing scenarios
gets others up to speed
Web Site - initial dynamic
knowledge repository
Two Listservs:
1) Professional Participants
2) self-section from the Public
Additional Millennium Project
ideas and issues
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Node coordination and InfoSystem
Methodological Issues (batching vs short
questions, on-line questionnaires, translation)
Use and promotion of State of the Future
Dissemination, promotion, book reviews, etc.
State of the Future translations
Report on Project finances and outlook
Node fund raising
Public Relations
Objectives for 2000-2001
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Science & Technology Issues
Environmental Crime
Futures Methods - V 2.0
Indicators/data for possible
"State of the Future Index"
Global Lookout panels per
Challenge to peer review text,
data, concepts, actions
Supplemental Research for
Challenge Up-dates
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Nodes’ plans for next year
Additions to annotated
scenario bibliography
Produce V.20 SOF@M
Project’s Information System
and Web site as collective
intelligence
Public Relations (Forum
2000, Node Symposiums,
talks, articles, Op Eds)
Pending additional funding
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UN Millennium Summit Special Edition
Scenarios: exploratory and normative
Lessons of History
Video series (for seminars/conferences,
training, education materials)
Individuals & Institutions to Futures Matrix
MP trainings in methods and challenges
Articles (Op Ed) and talks
Hire an additional staff member
State of the Future Version 2.0
with chapters - possibly - on:
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Updates on challenges
Indicators - history and forecasts
Feasibility of a “State of the Future Index”
Future Science and Technology Issues
Environmental Security scanning results
Exploratory & Normative Scenarios
Environmental Crime
UN Summit, Forum 2000, Node seminars
Futures Matrix