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The 15 Global Challenges provide a framework to assess the global and local prospects for humanity. Their description, with a range of views and actions to addressed each, enriched with regional views and progress assessments are updated each year since 1996 and published in the annual State of the Future. The short description of the challenges appears in the print version of the report, while a detailed, more complex one is on the CD-ROM that accompanies the report. On the CD, each challenge is presented in much details, with extended regional views, actions to address the challenge and indicators to measure progress. The list below links to the short overview of each challenge and the invitation to help update them.

A short (about 2 minutes) video versions of each of the 15 Global Challeges is available on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2C7D2B78000F1C2D
Comments are invited either on YouTube, or using the forms on this website Invitation and instructions to update and improve the Global Challenges Facing Humanity.

15 Global Challenges

1. How can sustainable development be achieved for all?

2. How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict?

3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance?

4. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?

5. How can policymaking be made more sensitive to global long-term perspectives?

6. How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone?

7. How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap between rich and poor?

8. How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune micro-organisms be reduced?

9. How can the capacity to decide be improved as the nature of work and institutions change?

10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction?

11. How can the changing status of women help improve the human condition?

12. How can transnational organized crime networks be stopped from becoming more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises?

13. How can growing energy demands be met safely and efficiently?

14. How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition?

15. How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

Please see the Invitation and instructions to update and improve the Global Challenges Facing Humanity.

Background

The15 Global Challenges facing humanity preesnted by the Millennium Project are the result of the distilation, merger, and update of the 15 Global Issues presented in the 1997 State of the Future and the 15 Global Opportunities from the 1998 edition, and their associated actions. These Global Challenges are interdependent and present what we believe are the crucial questions for policy action now and in the next decade. Making wise and timely decisions about these challenges will set the course of global development and societal achievements in the years immediately ahead.

One of the principal findings of twelve years of research of the Millennium Project is that the most important challenges are transnational in nature and transinstitutional in solution. They cannot be addressed by any government or institution acting alone. They require collaborative action among governments, international organizations, corporations, universities, and NGOs. Transinstitutional mechanisms to focus these global actors are missing. Although listed in sequence, Challenge 1 on sustainable development is no more or less important that Challenge 15 on global ethics. The Challenges are interdependent: and improvement in one makes it easier to address others; deterioration in one makes it harder to address others. Arguing whether one is more important than another is like arguing that the human nervous system is more important than the respiratory system. There is greater consensus about the global situation as expressed in these Challenges and the actions to address them than is evident in the news media. The 15 global challenges provide a framework to assess the global and local prospects for humanity (sustainable development could be discussed as a global or a neighborhood objective).

More detailed treatments of the Global Challenges, totaling over 1,100 pages, are available in Chapter 1 on the CD accompaning the State of the Future. For each Challenge, there is a more comprehensive overview, alternative views or additional comments from participants on the overview, regional perspectives and relevant information from recent literature, a set of actions with a range of views from interviews with decisionmakers to address the challenge, additional actions and views on those actions, and suggested indicators to measure progress or lack thereof on each Challenge.

Both print and CD versions are the cumulative and distilled range of views from over 2,500 participants. The international Delphi panels were selected by Millennium Project Nodes around the world for their knowledge and creativity as futurists, scholars, business planners, scientists, and decisionmakers who work for governments, private corporations, NGOs, universities, and international organizations. Full details of the questionnaires and interview protocols that have been used since 1996 to generate both the short and more detailed treatments of these Challenges are available at www.millennium-project.org/millennium/lookout.html.