The recently released global foresight report, Navigating New Horizons – A Global Foresight Report on Planetary Health and Human Wellbeing, highlights eight critical global shifts that exacerbate the interconnected crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These shifts include environmental degradation, technological advancements like AI, resource competition, widening inequalities, and declining trust in institutions. Together, these elements are creating a polycrisis, where simultaneous global crises amplify and synchronize, posing significant threats to both human and planetary wellbeing.
Accompanying these shifts are eighteen signals of change, identified through extensive consultations with global experts and youth. These signals provide insights into potential disruptions and opportunities that the world must prepare for.
“As the impacts of multiple crises intensify, now is the time to get ahead of the curve and protect ourselves from emerging challenges,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen. “The rapid rate of change, uncertainty, and technological developments we’re seeing, against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence, means any country can be thrown off course more easily and more often.
“By monitoring signals of change and using the foresight approach outlined in this report – including looking outside the traditional environmental space – the world can avoid repeating mistakes of the past and focus on solutions that can withstand future disruption.”
The report outlines several key shifts and signals of change:
The transition to net-zero will increase the demand for rare earth elements, minerals, and metals fourfold by 2040. This could lead to deep sea and space mining, posing threats to biodiversity, increasing pollution, and sparking conflicts.
As permafrost thaws, ancient pathogenic organisms could be released, causing significant environmental, animal, and human impacts. This has already led to an anthrax outbreak in Siberia.
While beneficial, AI and digital transformation demand critical minerals, rare earth elements, and water resources for data centers. The environmental implications of AI in weapons systems and synthetic biology need careful review.
These conflicts degrade ecosystems and cause pollution, affecting vulnerable populations.
One in every 69 people is now forcibly displaced, nearly double from a decade ago, driven by conflict and climate change, impacting health and the environment.
The report emphasizes that foresight tools can help the world anticipate and prepare for emerging challenges and future disruptions. Peter Gluckman, President of the ISC, stated, “Foresight provides a useful set of tools to step outside of short-termism to help identify future opportunities and risks provided that it is done in a truly pluralistic manner, transcending narrow institutional mandates, sectors and other artificial divides that constrain our framing of the problems and the solutions.”
To address these challenges, the report recommends several actions:
Engage a diverse range of stakeholders, including indigenous people and youth, and rethink measures of progress beyond GDP.
Introduce shorter-term targets and indicators for more agile governance. Reconfigure financial systems and redirect capital flows to reduce inequalities, eradicate extreme poverty, and address environmental crises.
Improve monitoring of environmental changes and make data and knowledge more accessible.
The solutions to the current crises are within sight, and actions are already underway to address the global shifts and signals of change identified in the report. Foresight can accelerate these actions and inspire additional measures to safeguard planetary health and human wellbeing in an increasingly complex world.
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