World's Best Thinkers Predict Resource Scarcity in 2025

By Jacquelyn S. Porth

In 25 years, the world likely will face greater shortages of water for drinking and farming, insufficient food to meet demand and competition for energy resources.

The world, as a group of strategic thinkers imagines it, will be more multipolar. No single nation will dominate with overwhelming power; instead, multiple nations will wield great power simultaneously and businesses, tribes, nonprofits, religious groups and even criminal networks will have greater influence on the world stage.

These are some of the suppositions in a new report, "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," prepared by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC). The 115-page study is billed as a description of factors likely to shape future events, rather than a set of predictions about the future. Its purpose is to identify the key dynamics that may shape the international system.

The report sought to tap the best strategic analysis in the United States and around the world, drawing on extensive input from hundreds of specialists in nearly two dozen countries, including people associated with Chatham House in London; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden; and the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, as well as Washington-based research organizations such as the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, and the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California.

NIC timed its release to fall between the November 2008 presidential election and the inauguration of the new president in January 2009. Its authors hope it will shape the thinking of the incoming Obama administration. NIC Chairman Thomas Fingar said it provides an opportunity for new Cabinet members to think about their responsibilities in a broader, global context.

Fingar told members of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington November 20 that the report is designed to give new leaders a heads-up. If they have a sense of how global events may unfold and what key influencers will be, the senior intelligence official said, they will be better prepared to manage and mitigate negative developments.

LEADERS ARMED WITH KNOWLEDGE CAN FIND READY SOLUTIONS

If the president-elect is pleased with a particular direction of events, he may wish to take certain actions to preserve developments along that path, the NIC chairman writes in the report. If not, he may want "to develop and implement policies to change" that trajectory, Fingar says.

In his Atlantic Council remarks, Fingar emphasized the importance of leadership and its ability to change outcomes. "If you know what the problem is," he said, "you can tackle it." Nothing that is projected in the report "is immutable"; everything is susceptible to leadership intervention.

In examining the global landscape ahead, the report's authors divide their analysis into areas of "relative certainties" and examine the "likely impact" as well as "key uncertainties" with accompanying "potential consequences." For example, the report posits that the United States will remain the single most powerful nation, but it will be less dominant. As a result, the United States likely will face challenging trade-offs between foreign policy and domestic priorities due to its shrinking economic and military capabilities.

Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe pointed out that as the authors took drafts of the report on the road and circulated versions of it on the Internet for national and international comment, they learned that the world does not want less American influence, but seeks an America that is smarter and more skillful.

The report states that globalization will continue generating greater wealth and greater inequality at the same time. It says the shift of global wealth and economic power from West to East "is without precedent in modern history." The Global Trends project has been under way for a year, but was completed before the global financial crisis occurred.

The report says China is expected to have greater world impact in the next 20 years than any other country. If trends continue, China will have the second largest economy and be a leading military power by 2025, and it may be the largest polluter and importer of natural resources.

India is also seen to be on a fast economic track and likely will "strive for a multipolar world in which New Delhi is one of the poles," according to the report.

Russia's future could go either way. It could become richer, more powerful and self-assured "if it invests in human capital, expands and diversifies its economy and integrates with global markets," or it could - absent these steps - go into a tailspin, especially if oil and gas prices stay in the $50-$70 per barrel range.

Terrorism will remain a key concern, according to Global Trends, but its attraction to Middle Eastern youth may be lessened, particularly if unemployment there declines. Fingar said al-Qaida's appeal is waning because it opposes modernity and democracy - both of which are desired by youth around the world. The report tackles issues such as demography and climate change. It points to virtually all population growth in the next two decades occurring in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Climatic effects will vary by region, but such change is expected to exacerbate resource scarcities.

This quadrennial report is the NIC's fourth. Fingar said he hopes the newly published version - with sections on women as agents of geopolitical change and the impact of higher education on the global landscape - will stimulate an engaging dialogue among those who read it because the world in 2025 "will be substantially different than today."

The full text of the report is available on the CIA Web site ( http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf ) (PDF; 34 MB).

To read about the NIC's third report, see "Report Predicts Terrorists Will Thrive, But in New Ways ( http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2005/January/20050114134112dmslahrellek0.9146082.html)."

Source: U.S. Department of State

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