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? 

International development organizations do not exist outside of global systems of oppression. However virtuous their intentions, the power held by development actors remains largely in the hands of the western elite, echoing colonial-era global dynamics.

If raging wildfires, extreme drought, and superstorms haven’t made it clear, the latest IPCC report tells us in plain language: the world is poised for worsening climate impacts over the next 30 years. The report’s release—during an unprecedented pandemic and natural disasters that magnify the connections between climate, health, livelihoods, and human well-being—is a grim reminder of the fragility of life on Earth. There is hope, however: the winding links between climate, health, and well-being also present tremendous opportunities. What if, collectively, thought leaders, negotiators, practitioners, and policymakers in the climate, health, business, and international development communities could do a better job of advancing solutions that address these crises simultaneously? When climate, poverty alleviation, and human well-being are addressed together, a vision of a better future emerges like a beacon in the night.

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.

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 for safe, sufficient, and available water has always been important. Compounding challenges—from climate change and increasing migration within and across borders to COVID-19 and its multiple variants—makes achieving the human right to water more urgent. But what is often missed in discussions related to water access is that what determines access to safe and sufficient water is about more than gaps in governance or lack of funding—it is intertwined with entrenched inequality in societies, including the planning of urban spaces.

The recently released draft report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out in no uncertain terms that we face an insurmountable challenge in addressing climate change and its impacts. One shocking takeaway is that sea-level rise is now thought to be irreversible. Indeed, rising temperatures and changing weather patterns threaten to send some cities under water, while causing others to dry up. These opposing challenges increasingly threaten the lives and livelihoods of people in many countries as rapid urbanization is making cities even more densely populated. Floods and droughts threatening the world’s cities will force governments of the world to reevaluate the quality of their infrastructure, their disaster management strategies, and of course, their environmental footprints.

Climate change is no longer an abstract issue we may face in the future. Devastating forest fires, the hottest June on record in the United States, lethal flooding in Europe and Asia, and extreme droughts in Africa reveal that the climate is already changing with extreme consequences. Even more concerning than these events alone is the reality that the drivers of climate change, violent conflict, and fragile states compound each other. Climate change exacerbates unstable social, economic, and political conditions, while conflict and fragility can hinder effective climate change response and adaptation. The U.S. can address the compound risks created by both of these issues only through integration of conflict prevention and climate change in its foreign policy and development assistance.

In 2007, at the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council, a colleague and I set out to determine if we could forecast two distinct political phenomena, the rise and the demise of high levels of democracy. To guide our decade-long forecasts, we relied on a simple statistical model and a spreadsheet of demographic projections from the UN’s 2006 World Population Prospects data set. Now that the experimental period (from 2010 to 2020) has ended, we can look back and ask: How well did these forecasts perform?