Special series on the Institute for the Future’s new 10 year forecast

The Institute for the Future is one of the oldest and best futures think tanks around.  They recently published their “10 year forecast“, which integrates a variety of key trends and drivers into a beautiful framework.

From the executive summary:

As we look out from 2008 over the next decade, we see a planet in which the ecologies of life are dissolving before our eyes.  Their constituents are disappearing, or migrating, reconstituting themselves anew.  We see this process mimicked in our own social and institutional systems, as the familiar forms in our landscape also begin to dissolve – to be replaced by something that may be hard to recognize if we look for well-known structure and recognizable boundaries.  This year’s forecasts point us beyond these shifting structures to what may be the emerging life forms.

The forecast touches on a variety of important themes and trends.  Among the themes are:

1. New Diasporas
   
2. Financial Innovation
   
3. New Commons
   
4. Open-Source Warfare
   
5. Food Webs
   
6. The Blue Economy
   
7. Innovation: Enabled!
   
8. Pervasive Eco-Monitoring
   
9. Neuro-Futures

Heady, powerful, and innovative stuff with profound consequences for humanity in general, and humanitarianism in particular.  

We will be excerpting a trend per day for the following few days here on the HFP blog, giving time for adequate digestion of each one.  We hope you enjoy this series of posts and, as always, look forward to your comments on and off the blog.