Printed in Colour: Global Trends 2040

The 7th edition of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends report, published every four years since 1997, assesses the key trends and uncertainties that will shape the strategic environment for the United States during the next two decades. Global Trends is designed to provide an analytic framework for policymakers early in each administration as they craft national security strategy and navigate an uncertain future.

The goal is not to offer a specific prediction of the world in 2040; instead, the intent is to help policymakers and citizens see what may lie beyond the horizon and prepare for an array of possible futures. The process involved numerous steps: examining and evaluating previous editions of Global Trends for lessons learned; research and discovery involving widespread consultations, data collection, and commissioned research; synthesizing, outlining, and drafting; and soliciting internal and external feedback to revise and sharpen the analysis.

A central component of the project has been conversations with the world outside the security gates. The authors benefited greatly from ongoing conversations with esteemed academics and researchers across a range of disciplines, anchoring the study in the latest theories and data. They also broadened their contacts to hear diverse perspectives, ranging from high school students in Washington DC, to civil society organizations in Africa, to business leaders in Asia, to foresight practitioners in Europe and Asia, to environmental groups in South America. These discussions offered new ideas and expertise, challenged assumptions, and helped to identify and understand biases and blind spots.

One of the key challenges was how to organize all the analysis into a coherent, integrated, and forward-looking story. The team built the analysis around two central organizing principles: identifying and assessing broad forces shaping the future strategic environment, and exploring how populations and leaders will act on and respond to these forces.

The analysis is presented in three general sections. First, structural forces in four core areas - demographics, environment, economics, and technology - are explored. These areas are foundational in shaping future dynamics, relatively universal in scope, and projections can be made with a reasonable degree of confidence based on available data and evidence.

The second section examines how these structural forces interact and intersect with other factors to affect emerging dynamics at three levels of analysis: individuals and society, states, and the international system. This section involves a higher degree of uncertainty due to the variability of human choices in the future. The key emerging dynamics at each level, including what is driving them and how they might evolve, are identified and described.

Finally, the third section identifies several key uncertainties and uses these to create five future scenarios for the world in 2040. These scenarios are not intended to be predictions but to widen the aperture as to the possibilities, exploring various combinations of how the structural forces, emerging dynamics, and key uncertainties could play out.

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