This past March, the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) offered five scenarios for global development in 2040. Two months later, the OECD released three scenarios for the future of global cooperation in 2035. Curious development professionals and others who like to peer into the future are no doubt asking: How does each organization see the future? Are the scenarios similar, different, closely aligned or wildly divergent? 

The world needs strategic foresight now more than ever, and not just because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Mounting climate crises across the globe underscore the need—blistering “heat domes” and extensive wildfires across the parched United States West, catastrophic floods of unprecedented scale in Germany and Europe, and more rain in just twenty-four hours in Zhengzhou China than typically falls over the course of an entire year. Scientists warn that for the first time, deforestation now threatens the capacity of the Amazon forest to absorb carbon dioxide. Foresight is no longer a luxury and climate change is no longer a distant threat.