*EPF405 12/21/00
Text: Overview of Global Trends 2015 Report
(Population, science, environment shape future, analysis says) (3400)

Demographics, natural resources, science and technology are among the issues that will shape the future, according to a forecast released December 18 by the National Intelligence Council. The report was compiled by experts in a variety of fields, working under the auspices of the National Intelligence Council.

"Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future with Nongovernment Experts" identifies what it calls drivers and trends that will influence the future. The report overview says, "The major contribution of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), assisted by experts from the Intelligence Community, has been to harness U.S. government and nongovernmental specialists to identify drivers to determine which ones matter most to highlight key uncertainties, and to integrate analysis of these trends into a national security context."

The report cautions that the trends will unfold differently in different places, and no single one will dominate what the world becomes.

The key drivers identified by this analysis are:

Demographics: A population increase of almost 1,000 million people by 2015 will have widely divergent effects in various countries. The report predicts increased populations bringing the potential for greater stability in some places, greater instability in others.

Natural Resources and Environment: Food supplies will be adequate, but distribution problems will leave some nations with famine, according to these analysts. Water scarcity will be an ever-growing problem in some regions.

Science and Technology: More "quantum leaps in information technology" will further contribute to "the most significant global transformation since the Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century," the report says. It projects that disaffected states and terrorists will exploit these developments in pursuit of illegal activities.

The Global Economy and Globalization: A "rocky" evolution and "chronic financial volatility" will mark the expansion of the globalized economy. But the analysts forecast that utimately globalization will lead to increased political stability.

National and International Governance: "States will continue to be the dominant players on the world stage, but governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, disease, migrants" and other trends, the analysis predicts.

Future Conflict: The United States will face three types of threats -- aysmmetric threats attempting to minimize U.S. strengths and exploit weaknesses without direct engagement; threats from strategic weapons of mass destruction; and regional military threats.

The Role of the United States: The United States will continue to be a major force in the world community, the report concludes. "U.S. global economic, technological, military and diplomatic influence will be unparalleled," the report forecasts.

The full report is available at: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html#link2

Following is the text of the overview of the report Global 2015:

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Overview

Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts

Over the past 15 months, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), in close collaboration with US Government specialists and a wide range of experts outside the government, has worked to identify major drivers and trends that will shape the world of 2015.

The key drivers identified are:

(l) Demographics.

(2) Natural resources and environment.

(3) Science and technology.

(4) The global economy and globalization.

(5) National and international governance.

(6) Future conflict.

(7) The role of the United States.

In examining these drivers, several points should be kept in mind:

-- No single driver or trend will dominate the global future in 2015.

-- Each driver will have varying impacts in different regions and countries.

-- The drivers are not necessarily mutually reinforcing; in some cases, they will work at cross-purposes.

Taken together, these drivers and trends intersect to create an integrated picture of the world of 2015, about which we can make projections with varying degrees of confidence and identify some troubling uncertainties of strategic importance to the United States.

The Methodology Global Trends 2015 provides a flexible framework to discuss and debate the future. The methodology is useful for our purposes, although admittedly inexact for the social scientist. Our purpose is to rise above short-term, tactical considerations and provide a longer-term, strategic perspective. Judgments about demographic and natural resource trends are based primarily on informed extrapolation of existing trends. In contrast, many judgments about science and technology, economic growth, globalization, governance, and the nature of conflict represent a distillation of views of experts inside and outside the United States Government. The former are projections about natural phenomena, about which we can have fairly high confidence; the latter are more speculative because they are contingent upon the decisions that societies and governments will make.

The drivers we emphasize will have staying power. Some of the trends will persist; others will be less enduring and may change course over the time frame we consider. The major contribution of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), assisted by experts from the Intelligence Community, has been to harness US Government and nongovernmental specialists to identify drivers, to determine which ones matter most, to highlight key uncertainties, and to integrate analysis of these trends into a national security context. The result identifies issues for more rigorous analysis and quantification.

Revisiting Global Trends 2010: How Our Assessments Have Changed

Over the past four years, we have tested the judgments made in the predecessor, Global Trends 2010, published in 1997. Global Trends 2010 was the centerpiece of numerous briefings, conferences, and public addresses. Various audiences were energetic in challenging, modifying or confirming our judgments. The lively debate that ensued has expanded our treatment of drivers, altered some projections we made in 1997, and matured our thinking overall-which was the essential purpose of this exercise.

Global Trends 2015 amplifies several drivers identified previously, and links them more closely to the trends we now project over the next 15 years. Some of the key changes include:

-- Globalization has emerged as a more powerful driver. GT 2015 sees international economic dynamics-including developments in the World Trade Organization-and the spread of information technology as having much greater influence than portrayed in GT 2010.

-- GT 2015 assigns more significance to the importance of governance, notably the ability of states to deal with nonstate actors, both good and bad. GT 2015 pays attention both to the opportunities for cooperation between governments and private organizations and to the growing reach of international criminal and terrorist networks.

-- GT 2015 includes a more careful examination of the likely role of science and technology as a driver of global developments. In addition to the growing significance of information technology, biotechnology and other technologies carry much more weight in the present assessment.

-- The effect of the United States as the preponderant power is introduced in GT 2015. The US role as a global driver has emerged more clearly over the past four years, particularly as many countries debate the impact of "US hegemony" on their domestic and foreign policies.

-- GT 2015 provides a more complete discussion of natural resources including food, water, energy, and the environment. It discusses, for example, the over three billion individuals who will be living in water-stressed regions from North China to Africa and the implications for conflict. The linkage between energy availability, price, and distribution is more thoroughly explored.

-- GT 2015 emphasizes interactions among the drivers. For example, we discuss the relationship between S&T, military developments, and the potential for conflict.

-- In the regional sections, GT 2015 makes projections about the impact of the spread of information, the growing power of China, and the declining power of Russia.

Events and trends in key states and regions over the last four years have led us to revise some projections substantially in GT 2015.

-- GT 2010 did not foresee the global financial crisis of 1997-98; GT 2015 takes account of obstacles to economic development in East Asia, though the overall projections remain fairly optimistic.

-- As described in GT 2010, there is still substantial uncertainty regarding whether China can cope with internal political and economic trends. GT 2015 highlights even greater uncertainty over the direction of Beijing's regional policies.

-- Many of the global trends continue to remain negative for the societies and regimes in the Middle East. GT 2015 projects at best a "cold peace" between Israel and its adversaries and sees prospects for potentially destabilizing social changes due to adverse effects of globalization and insufficient attention to reform. The spike in oil revenues reinforces the assessment of GT 2010 about the rising demand for OPEC oil; these revenues are not likely to be directed primarily at core human resources and social needs.

-- Projections for Sub-Saharan Africa are even more dire than in GT 2010 because of the spread of AIDS and the continuing prospects for humanitarian crises, political instability, and military conflicts.

The Drivers and Trends

Demographics: World population in 2015 will be 7.2 billion, up from 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and in most countries, people will live longer. Ninety-five percent of the increase will be in developing countries, nearly all in rapidly expanding urban areas. Where political systems are brittle, the combination of population growth and urbanization will foster instability. Increasing lifespans will have significantly divergent impacts.

-- In the advanced economies-and a growing number of emerging market countries-declining birthrates and aging will combine to increase health care and pension costs while reducing the relative size of the working population, straining the social contract, and leaving significant shortfalls in the size and capacity of the work force.

-- In some developing countries, these same trends will combine to expand the size of the working population and reduce the youth bulge-increasing the potential for economic growth and political stability.

Natural Resources and Environment: Overall food production will be adequate to feed the world's growing population, but poor infrastructure and distribution, political instability, and chronic poverty will lead to malnourishment in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The potential for famine will persist in countries with repressive government policies or internal conflicts. Despite a 50 percent increase in global energy demand, energy resources will be sufficient to meet demand; the latest estimates suggest that 80 percent of the world's available oil and 95 percent of its gas remain underground.

-- Although the Persian Gulf region will remain the world's largest single source of oil, the global energy market is likely to encompass two relatively distinct patterns of regional distribution: one serving consumers (including the United States) from Atlantic Basin reserves; and the other meeting the needs of primarily Asian customers (increasingly China and India) from Persian Gulf supplies and, to a lesser extent, the Caspian region and Central Asia.

-- In contrast to food and energy, water scarcities and allocation will pose significant challenges to governments in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and northern China. Regional tensions over water will be heightened by 2015.

Science and Technology: Fifteen years ago, few predicted the profound impact of the revolution in information technology. Looking ahead another 15 years, the world will encounter more quantum leaps in information technology (IT) and in other areas of science and technology. The continuing diffusion of information technology and new applications of biotechnology will be at the crest of the wave. IT will be the major building block for international commerce and for empowering nonstate actors. Most experts agree that the IT revolution represents the most significant global transformation since the Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century.

-- The integration-or fusion-of continuing revolutions in information technology, biotechnology, materials science, and nanotechnology will generate a dramatic increase in investment in technology, which will further stimulate innovation within the more advanced countries.

-- Older technologies will continue lateral "sidewise development" into new markets and applications through 2015, benefiting US allies and adversaries around the world who are interested in acquiring early generation ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) technologies.

-- Biotechnology will drive medical breakthroughs that will enable the world's wealthiest people to improve their health and increase their longevity dramatically. At the same time, genetically modified crops will offer the potential to improve nutrition among the world's one billion malnourished people.

-- Breakthroughs in materials technology will generate widely available products that are multi-functional, environmentally safe, longer lasting, and easily adapted to particular consumer requirements.

-- Disaffected states, terrorists, proliferators, narcotraffickers, and organized criminals will take advantage of the new high-speed information environment and other advances in technology to integrate their illegal activities and compound their threat to stability and security around the world.

The Global Economy and Globalization: The networked global economy will be driven by rapid and largely unrestricted flows of information, ideas, cultural values, capital, goods and services, and people: that is, globalization. This globalized economy will be a net contributor to increased political stability in the world in 2015, although its reach and benefits will not be universal. In contrast to the Industrial Revolution, the process of globalization is more compressed. Its evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide.

-- The global economy, overall, will return to the high levels of growth reached in the 1960s and early 1970s. Economic growth will be driven by political pressures for higher living standards, improved economic policies, rising foreign trade and investment, the diffusion of information technologies, and an increasingly dynamic private sector. Potential brakes on the global economy-such as a sustained financial crisis or prolonged disruption of energy supplies-could undo this optimistic projection.

-- Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it. They will force the United States and other developed countries to remain focused on "old-world" challenges while concentrating on the implications of "new-world" technologies at the same time.

National and International Governance: States will continue to be the dominant players on the world stage, but governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions, whether licit or illicit, across their borders. Nonstate actors ranging from business firms to nonprofit organizations will play increasingly larger roles in both national and international affairs. The quality of governance, both nationally and internationally, will substantially determine how well states and societies cope with these global forces.

-- States with competent governance, including the United States, will adapt government structures to a dramatically changed global environment-making them better able to engage with a more interconnected world. The responsibilities of once "semiautonomous" government agencies increasingly will intersect because of the transnational nature of national security priorities and because of the clear requirement for interdisciplinary policy responses. Shaping the complex, fast-moving world of 2015 will require reshaping traditional government structures.

-- Effective governance will increasingly be determined by the ability and agility to form partnerships to exploit increased information flows, new technologies, migration, and the influence of nonstate actors. Most but not all countries that succeed will be representative democracies.

-- States with ineffective and incompetent governance not only will fail to benefit from globalization, but in some instances will spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today.

Globalization will increase the transparency of government decision-making, complicating the ability of authoritarian regimes to maintain control, but also complicating the traditional deliberative processes of democracies. Increasing migration will create influential diasporas, affecting policies, politics and even national identity in many countries. Globalization also will create increasing demands for international cooperation on transnational issues, but the response of both states and international organizations will fall short in 2015.

Future Conflict: The United States will maintain a strong technological edge in IT-driven "battlefield awareness" and in precision-guided weaponry in 2015. The United States will face three types of threats:

-- Asymmetric threats in which state and nonstate adversaries avoid direct engagements with the US military but devise strategies, tactics, and weapons-some improved by "sidewise" technology-to minimize US strengths and exploit perceived weaknesses;

-- Strategic WMD threats, including nuclear missile threats, in which (barring significant political or economic changes) Russia, China, most likely North Korea, probably Iran, and possibly Iraq have the capability to strike the United States, and the potential for unconventional delivery of WMD by both states or nonstate actors also will grow; and

-- Regional military threats in which a few countries maintain large military forces with a mix of Cold War and post-Cold War concepts and technologies.

The risk of war among developed countries will be low. The international community will continue, however, to face conflicts around the world, ranging from relatively frequent small-scale internal upheavals to less frequent regional interstate wars. The potential for conflict will arise from rivalries in Asia, ranging from India-Pakistan to China-Taiwan, as well as among the antagonists in the Middle East. Their potential lethality will grow, driven by the availability of WMD, longer-range missile delivery systems and other technologies.

Internal conflicts stemming from religious, ethnic, economic or political disputes will remain at current levels or even increase in number. The United Nations and regional organizations will be called upon to manage such conflicts because major states-stressed by domestic concerns, perceived risk of failure, lack of political will, or tight resources-will minimize their direct involvement.

Export control regimes and sanctions will be less effective because of the diffusion of technology, porous borders, defense industry consolidations, and reliance upon foreign markets to maintain profitability. Arms and weapons technology transfers will be more difficult to control.

-- Prospects will grow that more sophisticated weaponry, including weapons of mass destruction-indigenously produced or externally acquired-will get into the hands of state and nonstate belligerents, some hostile to the United States. The likelihood will increase over this period that WMD will be used either against the United States or its forces, facilities, and interests overseas.

Role of the United States: The United States will continue to be a major force in the world community. US global economic, technological, military, and diplomatic influence will be unparalleled among nations as well as regional and international organizations in 2015. This power not only will ensure America's preeminence, but also will cast the United States as a key driver of the international system.

The United States will continue to be identified throughout the world as the leading proponent and beneficiary of globalization. US economic actions, even when pursued for such domestic goals as adjusting interest rates, will have a major global impact because of the tighter integration of global markets by 2015.

-- The United States will remain in the vanguard of the technological revolution from information to biotechnology and beyond.

-- Both allies and adversaries will factor continued US military pre-eminence in their calculations of national security interests and ambitions.

-- Some states-adversaries and allies-will try at times to check what they see as American "hegemony." Although this posture will not translate into strategic, broad-based and enduring anti-US coalitions, it will lead to tactical alignments on specific policies and demands for a greater role in international political and economic institutions.

Diplomacy will be more complicated. Washington will have greater difficulty harnessing its power to achieve specific foreign policy goals: the US Government will exercise a smaller and less powerful part of the overall economic and cultural influence of the United States abroad.

-- In the absence of a clear and overriding national security threat, the United States will have difficulty drawing on its economic prowess to advance its foreign policy agenda. The top priority of the American private sector, which will be central to maintaining the US economic and technological lead, will be financial profitability, not foreign policy objectives.

-- The United States also will have greater difficulty building coalitions to support its policy goals, although the international community will often turn to Washington, even if reluctantly, to lead multilateral efforts in real and potential conflicts.

-- There will be increasing numbers of important actors on the world stage to challenge and check-as well as to reinforce-US leadership: countries such as China, Russia, India, Mexico, and Brazil; regional organizations such as the European Union; and a vast array of increasingly powerful multinational corporations and nonprofit organizations with their own interests to defend in the world.

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(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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