Hi, Edgeryders!
A while ago, my team was pegged by the UNDP Regional Innovation Center to perform a work of futurism - roughly in Naisbitt’s vein - for the Asia Pacific, 2030. Population stresses, geopolitics, the works. Instead of just newspapers, though, we’ve been analyzing projections from economists and futurists, digging through policies from governments in the region, cross-checking with experts on the ground to try and paint a grounded picture of what our part of the world will look like by 2030.
It’s a roughly 30,000 word set of interlinking pieces. I’m sharing this here in case anyone wants to discuss, build on - there’s space here for futures work; fiction; policy; and a lot of stuff in between.
We chose not to write yet another dreary report - these are narratives, and narratives influence each other, collide, warp, and mutate. So this link will take you to six core, highly interlinked pieces:
Feeding the Beast (population stresses and needs)
The Next Big Economy (economics)
The Mega-Sprawl approaches (cities)
The 4th Industrial Proletariat (how recent tech will impact the bottom and middle of the pyramid)
The Dogs of War (conflict in the region, military investments, and tech)
and the Wrath of Nature (climate change affects everything).
Spinning off from these are pieces that dig into wildcards - for example, Pakistan’s ambitious bid to plant 10 billion trees, or the alt-nuclear narrative of thorium and how that may change energy geopolitics.
There’s some pretty interesting stuff (IMO), particularly from China, Singapore, and lots of regional tensions and innovations that will shape our societies in the years to come.
Hope you find it useful!
