Www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2013

Futurescaper La bombe à retardement climatique fait trembler Davos Ce qui restait jusqu'à présent le credo de certains écologistes férus d'économie et de plus rares économistes (dont Joseph Stiglitz ou Nicholas Stern) ouverts aux thèses environnementales, pénètre le saint des saints de l'économie mondiale. Alors que la plupart des acteurs économiques, gouvernements, financiers, chefs d'entreprises et consommateurs confondus prennent prétexte de la crise économique pour repousser les investissements nécessaires au traitement de la crise environnementale, l'étude consacrée aux risques, publiée en amont du sommet de Davos, démontre que cette attitude ne fait qu'aggraver les choses. Et que c'est précisément de la collision entre les deux crises que pourraient découler les plus grands dangers de ces prochaines années. Le cortège des crises liées au changement climatique 2% de PIB américain en moins sur les 20 prochaines années La perte en termes de PIB s'élèverait à 2% sur les 20 prochaines années, selon l'ONG américaine DARA.

The Importance of Moving Beyond Negative Visions of the Future | Studentreporter When I walked into pavilion 1 at the Riocentro on my first day at Rio+20, I passed a large white exhibitions space which was labelled ” The Future We Want.” I glanced at the big blue word clouds and five large TV screens – “What future do we actually want?,” I asked myself. Hallway entrance area Riocentro; Source: Student Reporter. The cynic in me felt there was no need to answer that question because even if we could agree that the future must be a more sustainable, prosperous one for all, politicians from all over the world, partially with completely different backgrounds, capabilities and ideals, representing conflicting needs and interests, won’t be able to agree upon a shared, long-term vision for the future anyway. My optimistic side countered that in the last 100 years alone humanity has overcome two world wars, ended apartheid in South Africa, escaped total nuclear destruction and developed the internet, among other things.

Insurer: Hey, these climate-related disasters are getting expensive There is no industry less enthusiastic about climate change than the insurance industry. After all, if something bad happens to a house or a business or a person, it’s the one that has to pay out — and its entire business model is predicated on minimizing how often it has to pay out. More and more floods and fires and derechos and who-knows-what means more and more checks flowing out of corporate headquarters. Not a pleasant prospect. Munich Re is a reinsurance company, a company that insures insurers. The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Roder.The report focuses on weather disasters since 1980 in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. That last point is remarkable: a fourfold increase in disaster-related losses. But, then, it’s easy to be skeptical when your economic interests aren’t on the line.

Our Role in Shaping the Future | Foresight Culture I am hoping you’ll take a moment to complete a quick SURVEY. It’s focused on how what people do shapes the future. In late July my colleague Jennifer Jarratt and I will offer a conference session at the WorldFuture 2012 Conference called “Our Role in Shaping the Future“. We will explore the critical role of human agency: what you, and I, and anyone does to shape society, in shaping mankind’s future. This is perhaps the seminal question for anyone engaged in foresight. Our session is on Saturday, July 27, 2012, at the conference in Toronto. Futures work depends on identifying patterns of change, understanding data and systems, determining forces, and drivers shaping an organization or a society. The SURVEY is our chance to gather your insights on how what people do matters to shaping the future. Tagged as: change, foresight, future, futures, human agency, leadership, survey, WFS, World Future Society

Insurers Stray From the Conservative Line on Climate Change Photo If there were one American industry that would be particularly worried about it would have to be , right? From ’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating $35 billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than the average over the last decade. And the industry expects the situation will get worse. “Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me last week. Yet when I asked Mr. Last week, scientists announced that the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 400 parts per million — its highest level in at least three million years, before humans appeared on the scene. The milestone puts the earth nearer a point of no return, many scientists think, when vast, disruptive climate change is baked into our future. Mr. Mr.

New Legacies One of my favorite posts from my time here at Open the Future has to be Legacy Futures , from late 2008. The concept of a legacy future is simple: it's a persistent but outdated vision of the future that distorts present-day futures thinking . As I suggest in the original piece, the "jet pack" is the canonical legacy future -- just about every futurist you'll ever meet could tell you about being asked when we'll get our personal jet packs. Nine times out of ten, the person doing the asking thinks that they're being clever. Some of the other legacy futures I brought up in the 2008 essay include Second Life, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and population projections that don't account for technological (especially healthcare) changes. It's important to remember that the problem with legacy futures isn't that they're actually impossible, but that they're wrong in a fundamental way. Those who are familiar with my work will find this particular argument unsurprising at best.

Delaying climate action will triple costs If the world puts off cooperative efforts to fight climate change until 2030, they will be more than three times as expensive as they would be in 2015. That’s according to a study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters. A team of researchers modeled the economic impacts of possible international climate agreements and found that if the world starts in 2015 to take the difficult but necessary steps to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, then international economic growth would be crimped by 2 percent. In the following graph from the paper, the y-axis shows the reduction in worldwide economic growth, while the x-axis shows temperature rise. When it comes to saving the planet, a penny saved is not a penny earned.

The Future According to Schmidt: "Augmented Humanity," Integrated Into Google In the future we will be Google, and Google will be us--the online giant will make us better humans. That's according to soon-to-be ex-CEO Eric Schmidt speaking today at DLD 11 conference in Germany. Schmidt announced this week that he's departing his role as Google's CEO, and then it emerged he was winning a $100 million golden parachute as a thank-you for his time in charge of one of the world's most important tech companies. After some preamble about his time at Google, Schmidt got to the good stuff: The future is mobile, he thinks, driven by the "device of our time," the smartphone--and the tablet. Then Schmidt got brave: Unconnected devices today are "no longer interesting," he thinks. So far so good, but then came the most fascinating bit of the whole speech. That's Augmented humanity. But augmented humanity implies inserting tech deliberately in the way of normal life, to better it. Or is Schmidt revealing that it really is time for him to move on?

Les chances de limiter le réchauffement climatique diminuent, alerte l'ONU Berlin - Les chances de contenir le réchauffement climatique à 2°C au cours du siècle diminuent sensiblement, met en garde un nouveau rapport des Nations unies mardi, publié avant la conférence annuelle sur le climat à Varsovie. "Cet objectif d'une hausse maximum de 2° est de plus en plus hors de portée", a commenté le secrétaire exécutif du Programme des nations unies pour l'environnement (Pnue), l'Allemand Achim Steiner, en présentant ce rapport lors d'une conférence de presse à Berlin. "Le défi auquel nous faisons face n'est pas technique (...), il est politique", a-t-il assuré dans ce texte. Les émissions mondiales de gaz à effet de serre (GES) seront de 8 à 12 milliards de tonnes au-dessus des objectifs en 2020, même si les pays étudiés adhèrent aux accords sur la limitation des émissions, selon ce rapport. Selon ce rapport annuel 2013, les émissions de GES atteindront environ 59 milliards de tonnes d'ici à 2020, un milliard de tonnes de plus que ce qu'estimait l'édition 2012.

Forget real time: 'next time' is far more disruptive This is a guest post by Tom Gray, a Senior Creative Strategist at Imagination in London. He blogs on imagination.com/labs and can be found at @tomoppad. If you're looking for the roots of our obsession with real-time information, you could do worse than look to the London Stock Exchange around the time of the Napoleonic wars. Legend has it financier Nathan Rothschild developed such a fearsome network of spies and couriers that he knew the Battle of Waterloo's result many hours before even the British Government. Then he used it to devastating effect: offloading government bonds, sending the price into a tailspin, before buying them back at rock-bottom prices just ahead of official word arriving in London. Fast forward two centuries and we're in an information arms race, finding faster and faster ways of accessing, filtering and acting on data. Next time stays one step ahead of real time. So far so good, but then we start to get into murky territory: