What can 2022 teach us about the future?
Talk of crisis (or “crises”) is all around us. Looking back at the twelve months just witnessed, Collins Dictionary declared ‘permacrisis’ as its word of the year, and in April the Cascade Institute defined the term ‘polycrisis’ as “any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects”.
Here we focus on just three of the principal crises that have dominated the news cycle this year and consider the future trajectories they point to, as well as the complexities of the interactions between them that are emblematic of the ongoing polycrisis.
The accelerating climate emergency
The scale and depth of the climate crisis will be the defining issue of the coming decades and the current outlook is bleak. Recently published UN reports highlighted there being ‘no credible pathway’ to 1.5C warming limit over pre-industrial levels and ‘woefully inadequate’ progress on reducing carbon emissions. Current pledges for action to 2030 would lead to a catastrophic 2.5C rise in global heating and irreversible tipping points, in turn driving increases in droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events that lead to biodiversity loss, ecosystem breakdown, increased resource scarcity and associated conflict and migration.
We are aware that addressing the climate challenge will require fundamental shifts in global human behaviour for example around diet, energy consumption and travel. When set aside other issues, climate change ranked only joint seventh, with taxes, out of 18 concerns in Ipsos’ most recent (November 2022) ‘What Worries The World’ survey suggests the difficulties in achieving large scale societal behavioural change against a backdrop of concern around inflation, inequality, crime and violence, and political corruption.
Another theme of 2022 was the resurgence in international travel as the Covid-19 pandemic receded, but here Ipsos’ own research highlights the problematic issue of the ‘Say-Do Gap’ – the dilemma of intentions not being followed up by actions. Crucially, action is not only up to the individual. People expect government and brands to take a leading role in tackling climate change and environmental issues. In this way, organisations should act on their duty to close this say-do gap (or believe-true gap – a difference between perception and reality exemplified by e.g., underestimating high-impact action such as air travel and overestimating lower-impact actions such as avoiding excess packaging).
The only way that this greatest of challenges for humanity can be addressed is through collective action by governments, businesses and individuals at a global scale. But such action looks alarmingly out of reach, and that was before we even start to think about the second crisis that has dominated 2022.
73% agree that in the next 25 years we could see another world conflict involving superpowers similar to World War I and II
War and geopolitical tensions
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24th February brought land war back to Europe at a scale not seen since World War II, and with it the awful spectre of potential nuclear conflict not seen since the height of the Cold War. The conflict has also triggered a global energy and food crisis and exacerbated economic inflation and cost of living crises in many geographies that will continue to impact over the coming years.
The Ukrainian conflict is, however, representative of wider geopolitical tensions (ranked second place in a survey of 4,500 risk experts from 58 countries and a representative sample of 20,000 people from 15 countries in the 2022 Future Risks Report from AXA and Ipsos) and, ongoing conflicting ideologies between the major powers – US, China, and Russia – that are likely to involve further flashpoints in the future e.g., the disputed status of Taiwan and escalating risks around cyberconflicts and information warfare. These tensions are not inevitable, but the result of strategic decisions taken by state elites within the great powers, seeking to define and cement their conflicting ideologies and worldviews. The events of 2022 would suggest that we are likely to witness more of the same further down the line, and that these tensions make solving other crises facing humanity far more problematic. This is reflected in the public as well, for example 73% agree that in the next 25 years we could see another world conflict involving superpowers similar to World War I and II.
The end of the Covid-19 pandemic
On September 14th WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the end of the pandemic is within sight, alongside key recommendations for governments to strengthen their policies for addressing further mutations in Covid-19 and future pathogens with pandemic potential. Coronavirus delivered a global system shock, and the aftershocks and reverberations will continue to evolve. The pandemic highlighted societal inequalities both regionally and globally, and has driven rapid innovation in remote working technology, as well as exposing vulnerabilities in globalised supply chains, in turn driving inflationary conditions around the world as the health crisis unwinds.
The worry is that it is not a case of if there will be another pandemic but when. Accelerating global habitat loss, urbanisation, and industrial farming techniques increase the risk of zoonotic spill over of infectious diseases from animal to human populations, and climate change poses new risks such as the release of dormant viruses from melting glaciers and permafrost. Pandemic preparedness must therefore be considered in the same context as ecosystem and animal health. As we move seemingly towards the endgame of the Covid-19 pandemic, our vulnerability to future pandemics will be closely tied to the decisions that are made over the coming decade to address the intertwined climate and biodiversity crises.
Preparing for a better tomorrow
Talking about permacrisis or polycrisis does not mean that we should lose hope. Solving these crises is within our gift and the starting point is to take a longer-term view. Here foresight can play an important role in helping us to explore the complex, interrelated and emergent outcomes of change. Ipsos’ own Theory of Change recognises the complex interplay, feedback loops and reciprocities between global macroforces, shifts in societies, markets and people, and emerging signals of future change. The tools and techniques of foresight can help us to avoid the perils of prediction, whilst helping us to define the futures we wish to see and mitigate against those we wish to avoid.
Also critical is to recognise that achieving a better tomorrow is not down to purely technical or financial considerations. Just as the major threats of climate change hinge on the passing of systemic non-linear tipping points with negative outcomes, potential solutions exist by harnessing systemic non-linear tipping points for positive transformation e.g. landscape restoration and rewilding projects that can drive positive impacts in both atmospheric carbon reduction and ecosystem and biodiversity regeneration. Such radical collaboration is hard and requires mindset change, challenge to vested interests, and a transformation of power dynamics. But ultimately if 2022 has taught us anything about what might happen tomorrow, it is that only massive global systemic transformation and change will allow us to address the challenges that are critical to future human prosperity. Such change will not come easy, as evidenced by the challenges in simply maintaining commitment to climate goals agreed at COP 26 in Glasgow, just a year later at COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh.