The 21st Century is likely to be one of major change, with climate change and resource depletion presenting major challenges. Historians have identified periods of major crisis in the past - for example in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were associated with widespread wars and economic collapse. Are we heading for another, even greater, major crisis?
We are bombarded with news and opinion like never before but much of it can be false and misguided. Commonly the focus is on the immediate and sensational. Social media increasingly isolates people in their own bubble. Very rarely do we get presented with the big picture in a way that attempts to get at the underlying facts.
This website is a personal attempt to understand what is going on and may happen by building on my experience in systems modelling and scenario planning. The world is too complex and there are too many unknowns to precisely forecast the future. Scenarios are not forecasts but they can help us think about what might happen and prepare for it.
The long term aim is that this site will contain a number of things:
- Information on techniques and approaches that can be used for modelling and scenario planning.
- Modelling of the various drivers that will influence the future.
- A set of scenarios based on this modelling.
- Collections of stories related to each scenario to help people understand what life might be like under each of them.
Some of the factors to be considered are shown in the diagram below:
