Megatrends Project Update Q2 2012

Linking Citizens. Spreading Knowledge.

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2nd Quarterly Update April - July 2012 Megatrends in Global Interaction Book Launch Dear Readers, We have spent the last two years compiling the Megatrends in Global Interaction study. This comprehensive study includes chapters from renown scholars on six megatrends that we have identified as important to the progress of the world over the course of the next half century. These six areas of study are:

BIODIVERSITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE Wolfgang Cramer Research Director, Institut MÊditerranÊen d’Ecologie et de PalÊoÊcologie Katrin Vohland Guest Scientist, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE Bruce Jones Director and Senior Fellow, New York University Center on International Cooperation GLOBAL SECURITY Benjamin Wittes Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution ENERGY and NATURAL RESOURCES Joel Darmstadter Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future Stephen P. A. Brown Professor and Director, Center for Business & Economic Research, University of Nevada, Las Vegas DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE Jack Goldstone Director, Center for Global Policy, George Mason University

Scott Barrett Professor of Natural Resource Economics, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

This publication is available for purchase from the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Please contact our office in Washington, DC in the US or Guetersloh in Germany to order a copy. Excerpts from the study as well as the infographics will be posted online at www.futurechallenges.org.

We are excited to release this study to the public and to share our findings with you.

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The first in a series of Future Days took place on July 2, 2012 at the Kalkscheune in Berlin, Germany. This day of presentations, workshops, and discussion centered on the themes of demographic change and economic globalization. The aim of the day was to debate and prepare for the biggest challenges that we are facing as a global community.

Annual Searchlight Convening: New York, USA

The morning sessions consisted of talks by Andreas Esche, Jonathan Stevens, Ole Wintermann, and Jan Arpe from the Bertelsmann Stiftung, as well as talks

by Dennis Snower, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Jack Goldstone, author of the demographics chapter in the Megatrends in Global Interaction book and Director of the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University. The talks focused on the two megatrends economic globalization and demographic change. The speakers also held a question and answer session with the audience, a prelude to the afternoon’s discussion sessions.

Jonathan Stevens and Ole Wintermann present FC.org and the Megatrends study.

by Anneliese Guess

Participants at the Future Day discuss solutions to and challenges of demographic change.

Our FutureChallenges.org Regional Editors then told stories from their regions about the future challenges they anticipate. During the lunch break, we discussed the outcomes of the morning sessions with the Regional Editors.

In the afternoon sessions, our participants broke into three smaller groups to discuss the challenges and solutions for younger, expanding populations, the challenges and solutions for older, contracting populations, and areas of cooperation between the developing and developed worlds. Our Regional Editors led these discussions. Over the course of the afternoon discussions, participants were encouraged to write their “napkin pitch� ideas and solutions on Future Challenges coasters.

We are glad to have the opportunity to come together at this event to discuss important issues that will affect our future and the ways in which we can influence events to create a positive and sustainable future society. For more information on the Berlin Future Day and details about upcoming Future Days, see our website at www.futurechallenges.org.

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Moving ahead to new horizons – transparency, participation, sustainability

by Ole Wintermann “Moving ahead to new horizons “might be a good project title for the happenings in the first week in July in Berlin which gave us the opportunity to step back for a moment, examine what we normally take for granted and venture a look forward as well as a glance back on roads already traveled.

This last eventful week saw planning meetings, the Future Day and our yearly meeting with the regional editors of the FC.org blogger network with people coming from the USA, Pakistan, India, Australia, Belgium, Romania, Ghana, San Salvador and Brazil.

The project team was formed three years ago with the aim of using the FC.org platform to focus attention on the complex theme of global interdependencies. Given that politics with its mostly outmoded decision-making channels is no longer capable of dealing with increasingly dynamic and high-speed global contexts, we set out to use FC.org to bring together the know-how of experts and civil society in the shape of bloggers and offer the insights thus generated to policy-makers. (continued on page 4.)

Demographic Change and Migration

Economic Globalization

Global Governance

Regional Editors’ Meeting in Berlin

Regional Editors working at the Betahaus.

Over the course of the two days following the Future Day, FutureChallenges.org held its annual Regional Editors’ meeting at the Betahaus in Berlin, Germany. During this time, the regional editors workshopped ideas aimed at improving the FC.org platform and contributed insights from their regions and blogger networks. The workshops included presentations from several local speakers who are active in the web 2.0 community in Berlin.

Guest experts included Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Open Leaks, former spokesperson for Wikileaks) and Anke Domscheit-Berg (Open Government activist), Ahmet Acar (from the Humboldt Institut fĂźr Internet und Gesellschaft), Isabel Gahren (Internet und Gesellschaft Co:llaboratory, Berlin), and Eike Leonhardt (Social Media Specialist and Online Community Manager for the Global Economic Symposium)

Climate Change and Biodiversity

Security

Natural Resources and Biodiversity

For more information who our regional editors are and what they do, visit: futurechallenges.org/ about/wefuturechallenges-–-regional-editors/.

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Moving ahead to new horizons – transparency, participation, sustainability (...cont. from page 3) Three years later we can now report that – quite independently of our own project – this issue is increasingly coming to the forefront which shows that the direction we embarked on back then was largely the right one.

The financial crisis, the political and academic debates sparked by the euro crisis, the Arab Spring and the rise of what has come to be known as the “enraged citizen� in western democracies are all symptoms of the increasing inability of political and economic processes to respond to the interdependent global challenges that lie ahead.

Insecurity on the global level is making deep inroads all around whilst nobody so far seems to have any clear idea of what methods can best be used to understand and deal with this new quality of challenges.

In the course of our activities we have established a worldwide network of 150 bloggers in 60 countries and gained the support of renowned partners such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Club of Rome, the United Nations and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Our Facebook community has over 6,000 fans. In Germany itself we have worked together with a host of national partners to initiate innovative formats like the Open Gov BarCamp. And finally in 2012 we were lucky enough to win the German Award for Online Communication in the “internal project communication� category.

Based on the first experiences made with the implementation of an open solution at the Global Economic Symposium we shall also considerably enlarge the scope of the crowd-based approach in the elaboration of substantive positions. The conventionally placed commentary function as used thus far shall be extended with a module that enables collaborative work on substantive positions. Introduction of this module is informed by the simple fact that commentaries in general tend to be little more than the voicing of dissatisfaction. When they intend to offer and do actually offer constructive insights, more often than not they fall wide of the mark because up to now no provision whatsoever has been made for integrating such productive participation in the decisionmaking processes of economic and political decision takers.

With this on-going evolution of our project we want to put a much stronger focus than before on transparency and participation. At the same time the debate on sustainability will serve as an overarching core element that ideally couples the twin aspects of globalization and global governance.

For further information on Future Challenges and the Megatrends Project, contact +POBUIBO 4UFWFOT t %JSFDUPS (MPCBM 'VUVSFT 1SPKFDU t t KPOBUIBO TUFWFOT!CGOB PSH "OOFMJFTF (VFTT t 1SPKFDU .BOBHFS *OUFSOBUJPOBM 3FMBUJPOT t t BOOFMJFTF HVFTT!CGOB PSH

Visit us online at: www.futurechallenges.org www.bfna.org