5 Questions from Global Trends 2040
Global transformations and shifts are increasing the urgency of rethinking policies, programs, investments, and strategies that support the well-being of all young children.
By Joseph Stella - Yale University Art Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37803593
by Joe Waters
Last month the Strategic Futures Group of the United States’ National Intelligence Council produced its quadrennial Global Trends report. This document “assesses the key trends and uncertainties that will shape the strategic environment for the United State during the next two decades.” An invaluable aid to foreign policy makers, it is fruitful reading for those concerned about the well-being, flourishing, and development of the world’s children and families. This report should be read through multiple lenses, as it assesses the strategic environment not only for international affairs, but also for social policy and human development. The report demands that we grapple with key questions related to the flourishing of children. Here are five of the most important:
Fragmentation within communities and states and across the international system is well documented and will remain an ongoing challenge. Thanks to digital technology, we will continue to be connected with one another over the next two decades and we are likely to continue fragmenting along “national, cultural, or political preferences” as we move towards information sources that reinforce existing worldviews and opinions. As we have written elsewhere, fragmentation presents persistent and unique challenges for the world’s children and families:
How might stakeholders create solutions and build public will for more interconnected and solidaristic approaches to supporting young children and their families, particularly families furthest from opportunity?
The impacts of climate change and ecological degradation will increase over the next two decades, with potentially devastating consequences for young children, their sensitive brains, and their developing, fragile bodies. While the Earth is as complex as it is sensitive, “increased data collection, computing power, and sophisticated modeling” give us more certainty about the future effects of climate change. Extreme heat and devastating weather events caused by current and anticipated atmospheric conditions present potentially traumatic threats to children that our health and human service systems are poorly equipped for. More investment in infant and early childhood mental health care is the first step we must take in preparing to ameliorate the traumas our children will experience in the coming decades. Climate change and ecological degradation may also drive poorer health outcomes for children overall due to “decreased water, air, and food quality” and habitat loss may drive future zoonotic disease outbreaks, which may not be as sparing to children as Covid-19 has been.
While continuing to combat climate change and ecological degradation as an increasingly urgent child-rights intervention, will we build child-centered social infrastructure capable of buffering and healing the traumas from extreme heat and extreme weather events?
Birth rates are low and median ages are rising in much of the developed world. Populations in developed countries will soon peak before beginning their decline, unless they are counteracted by upticks in fertility or increased migration. Older populations will strain social security systems and slow economic growth. Developed countries will need to find ways to increase investment in children — tomorrow’s workers — to support aging populations and remain economically competitive in the future. Sub-Saharan Africa will likely double its current population by 2050, “portending extensive strains on infrastructure, education, and healthcare.” India will overtake China’s population by 2027 and Nigeria will overtake the United States by 2050. Migration from developing countries to developed ones will continue to be both necessary to meet the workforce needs of the developed world and contested by political volatility.
Will developed countries like the United States support families that wish to have more children? Will they support young people who feel that raising children is out of reach or undesirable because of the cost of child care and other economic burdens? Will developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa build adequate infrastructure to meet the educational and human service needs of younger populations?
“During the next 20 years, the success or failure of cities will shape opportunities and quality of life for a growing share of the world’s population.” By 2040, the world’s urban population is expected to increase to nearly two-thirds and most of that growth will take place in the developing world. It remains to be seen whether these urban environments of the future will be built in ways that support the well-being and flourishing of children and families. The Bernard van Leer Foundation’s Urban95 initiative and the lessons learned in cities that have already taken up the challenge to “change the way families with young children live, play, interact and move through cities” will provide important orientation for this work in coming two decades.
Will municipal governments deliver on the infrastructure needs of children and families, and will donors and NGOs shift their focus to support the development of child-centered urban “ecologies of flourishing’?
Growing demand for public investment combined with political volatility, economic constraints, and a mix of environmental, demographic, and governance challenges will strain the capacities of governments at all levels to deliver on their social contracts with citizens. Rising national debts — further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic — and the costs of providing social security and health care to aging populations in G20 economies will constrain the willingness and capacities of governments to invest in their futures by providing services that meet the needs of children and their families. The negative impacts of climate change will also be a unique challenge for governments of all sizes and at all levels. Major populations may need to be relocated due to rising sea levels; climate migrants will place an increasing strain on both immigration systems and politics (as we’ve seen in the first 100 days of the Biden administration); polarization, protests, and populism are likely to remain dominant factors. As the complexity of 21st century governance grows and public demands mount, a shift to “adaptive approaches to governance” is expected with more non-state actors complementing, vying with, or outright replacing the state and local governments exercising more responsibility and innovating more rapidly.
Will governments rise to the challenge of simultaneously addressing the range of present crises while investing more generously in children and families to secure their futures?
As we wrote in Foundations for Flourishing Futures: A Look Ahead for Young Children and Families, global transformations and shifts are increasing the urgency of rethinking policies, programs, investments, and strategies that support the well-being of all young children. Yet despite these transformations and the necessary rethinking of our approaches, children’s timeless needs — for care, love, stability, support, and dignity — remain. Collective action to meet these needs fully and equitably will be slowed unless we urgently attend to the rapidly changing contexts in which young children and their families live, policy is made, strategies are hammered out, programs operate, and investments in the future are made.
Joe Waters is the Co-Founder + CEO of Capita. This post was edited by Nancy Vorsanger and published on April 14, 2021.