Competence Centre on Foresight

Demand for water, food, energy, land and minerals is rising substantially, making natural resources increasingly scarce and more expensive.

The majority of resources used today are non-renewable and are set to become increasingly scarce given rising demand and unsustainable consumption patterns. Global material extraction...

Globally, the absolute number of undernourished people has been on the rise since 2014, reaching an estimated 821 million people (some 11% of the population) in 2017. In 2017, some...

Growing population, urbanization, increasing demand for agricultural and industrial production, economic growth, and climate change are putting water resources under ever-increasing strain (pdf)...

By 2040, more than 1 billion households and 11 billion smart appliances could be part of the interconnected electricity systems. The digitalization of the energy system can considerably...

Increasing rate of desertification reduces the amount of farming land.| Related Megatrends: Climate and environment In China, soil erosion is of about 5 billion tonnes annually affecting...

Despite the international efforts, the world hunger has been on the rise for the past three years. The absolute number of undernourished people (those facing chronic food deprivation)...

Desalination only provides 1% of the world's drinking water via 18,000 desalination plants using either thermal evaporation or membrane separation. New technologies create lower...

The share of renewables in the power mix could rise from 25% today to 40% or even 66% in 2040. In 2017, only 12.1% of global power came from clean sources...

If present trends continue, human demand on the Earth's ecosystem is projected to exceed nature's capacity to regenerate by about 75% by 2020, and by 100% (meaning that we would...