Yes, there is another big report to draw attention to today.

The National Intelligence Council, the US government’s intelligence policy thinktank, released an updated edition of its ‘Global Trends 2025’ series yesterday—highlighting trends that will shape the international system and frame American foreign policy.

While the report does offer hope for American energy independence, worries over nuclear weapons proliferation and use, climate change, global poverty and conflicts over ever-diminishing natural resources will mount increasing challenges to global stability.

AFP provides an excellent summary of the report:

The use of nuclear weapons will grow increasingly likely by 2025, US intelligence predicted Thursday in a report on global trends that forecasts a tense, unstable world shadowed by war. 

“The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons,” said the report. 

“Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the uneven impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions,” it concludes. 

Called “Global Trends 2025 – a Transformed World,” the 121-page report was produced by the National Intelligence Council, a body of analysts from across the US intelligence community. 

It has good news for some countries. Among its conclusions: 

– A technology to replace oil may be underway or in place by 2025;

– Multiple financial centers will serve as “shock absorbers” of the world financial system;

– Global power will be multipolar with the rise of India and China, and the Korean peninsula will be unified in some form. 

But the report also says some African and South Asian states may wither away altogether, organized crime could take over at least one state in central Europe; and the spread of nuclear weapons will heighten the risk they will be used. 

“The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes,” it said.

…

The report’s introduction is the best place to see what the report aims to achieve, and how it arrived at its conclusions:

We prepared Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World to stimulate strategic thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where they seem to be headed, and how they might interact. It uses scenarios to illustrate some of the many ways in which the drivers examined in the study (e.g., globalization, demography, the rise of new powers, the decay of international institutions, climate change, and the geopolitics of energy) may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decisionmakers. The study as a whole is more a description of the factors likely to shape events than a prediction of what will actually happen. 

By examining a small number of variables that we judge probably will have a disproportionate influence on future events and possibilities, the study seeks to help readers to recognize signposts indicating where events are headed and to identify opportunities for policy intervention to change or lock in the trajectories of specific developments…An even more important message is that leadership matters, no trends are immutable, and that timely and well-informed intervention can decrease the likelihood and severity of negative developments and increase the likelihood of positive ones. 

Global Trends 2025 is the fourth installment in the National Intelligence Council-ledeffort to identify key drivers and developments likely to shape world events a decade or more in the future. Both the product and the process used to produce it benefited from lessons learned in previous iterations. Each edition of Global Trends has tapped larger and more diverse communities of experts. Our first effort, which looked out to 2010, relied primarily on expertise within the US Intelligence Community. There was some outreach to other elements of the United States Government and the American academic community. For Global Trends 2015, we engaged more numerous and more varied groups of non-US Government experts, most of whom were American citizens.