Al Hammond
"Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century"
Wednesday, June 05, 2002, 12:30 PM
Have recent events rocked our faith in the global marketplace? Will technology help our world enter a new paradigm of openness, or will nations withdraw into separate and hostile fortresses?
Dr. Allen Hammond, futurist and technophile, is optimistic that this time of change offers the opportunity to transform the planet. The author of Which World?: Scenarios for the 21st Century, Dr. Hammond is Vice President of Special Projects & Innovation for the World Resources Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit policy research center in Washington, D.C.
Which World?: Scenarios for the 21st Century
Looking 50 years into the future, Which World? analyzes persistent, long-term trends --demographic, economic, social, environmental, and security trends -- that are likely to shape and constrain the future. It develops three scenarios -- scenarios that reflect very different mindsets or world views -- to explore alternative possibilities for how the future may unfold. And it analyzes both trends and scenarios for each of 7 major world regions, combining information on each region's political and cultural patterns, natural resource endowments and social problems.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Dr. Hammond based his talk on extensive modelling and scenario-building with several groups, including the Tellus Institute and the Global Scenarios Group. From a large array of possible futures, three plausible scenarios emerge: market world, fortress world, and transformed world.
Dr. Hammond began by stressing that he is not in the business of “predicting” the future, but rather providing scenarios that help us choose pathways. His overview of Market World, the de facto world of the 1990s, showed the power of free markets to efficiently deliver goods and services. If you were reading Fortune or Wired or Fast Company or Forbes –at least until 2001– you were reading about Market World. This scenario has worked fairly well for hundreds of millions of people around the world. The problem is, we’ve got billions of others who have not reaped the benefits of Market World. Will this scenario eventually raise everyone’s quality of life, or will it lead to a darker future?
This future is described in Dr. Hammond’s second scenario, Fortress World. And for billions of people the conditions that lead to this future is already here.
