1st Editorial Board Meeting

The experiences in Afghanistan and Libya have pointed to the consequences of chronically underfunding defense establishments, the difficulties in getting twenty-eight sovereign states to commit resources equitably and predictably, and the challenges of responding effectively to new, rapidly emerging threats. The transatlantic alliance must confront a number of fundamental strategic questions about its future.

While the US has been constantly modernizing its armed forces, NATO European states, with the partial exception of the United Kingdom (UK) and France, have lagged far behind (even if one factors in the differences in resources). When pondering on how much and on what to spend public money, European governments are invariably driven by domestic considerations – which for Europeans rarely revolve around military issues – rather than NATO commitments. As a result, a growing imbalance has ensued, with certain allies proportionally contributing to Alliance activities much more than others. While this problem is anything but new in NATO’s history, its proportions – augmented by the economic crisis, which has led to cuts in military spending in most NATO member states – have now acquired an unprecedented scale.

This Foresight Project has considered disasters resulting from natural hazards in developing countries. The aim has been to provide advice to decision makers on the difficult choices and priorities for investing in disaster risk reduction (DRR), so that the diverse impacts of future disasters can be effectively reduced, both around the time of the events and in the longer term. The work looks out to 2040 and takes a fresh look at how science and evidence could help in understanding evolving future disaster risks, how those risks may best be anticipated, and the practical actions that could best be taken in risk reduction.

In recent decades, a remarkable degree of strategic mobility and military reach, significant social and human capital, and an advanced industrial and scientific base have endowed the European Union with capable and effective armed forces. However, as centuries of European (or Western) dominance are currently giving way to a more multipolar and less governable world system, protecting common ‘strategic interests’ without adequate military capabilities may become ever more difficult. Although Europeans remain relatively well-equipped to mobilise the tools needed to tackle potential threats, within the EU there is limited awareness or recognition of the emerging challenges, a basic disinterest in strategic matters, and relatively few voices calling for effective and sustainable armed forces. In addition, the European political and institutional landscape regarding defence and military matters is extremely segmented. It is in this context that this Report seeks to place European military capabilities in a broader perspective and highlight potential avenues for exploration and development over the next decade.

This study explains the current state of Europe’s fresh waters and explores the challenges ahead. First, the state of water availability and quality are linked to climate change, energy, finance and nature protection. Then the current gaps and challenges are identified in terms of water efficiency, land-use, economic instruments, knowledge, governance, global aspects, and climate change.

This report is an output of the Resources Futures project, which explores the range of critical constraints and uncertainties faced globally, and the implications for future policies and political agendas. The report builds on the findings of a study prepared for the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in early 2012 assessing the impacts of natural resources on US national security by 2020, 2030 and 2040.
The spectre of resource insecurity has come back with a vengeance. The world is undergoing a period of intensified resource stress, driven in part by the scale and speed of demand growth from emerging economies and a decade of tight commodity markets. Poorly designed and short-sighted policies are also making things worse, not better. Whether or not resources are actually running out, the outlook is one of supply disruptions, volatile prices, accelerated environmental degradation and rising political tensions over resource access. Fears of resource scarcity are not new. On many occasions, higher rates of investment and improved technology have resolved the problem of the day, though often with additional environmental and social costs. With the maturation of technologies to access non-conventional gas and oil, as well as the global economic downturn, some analysts suggest that the resource boom of the past decade is coming to an end – especially in the extractive industries – and that resource related tensions will ease. The hard truth is that many of the fundamental conditions that gave rise to the tight markets in the past ten years remain. In the case of food, the world remains only one or two bad harvests away from another global crisis. Lower prices in the meantime may simply trigger another bout of resource binge, especially in the large and growing developing countries. This report focuses on the new political economy of resources. It analyses the latest global trends in the production, trade and consumption of key raw materials or intermediate products and explores how defensive and offensive moves by governments and other stakeholders are creating new fault lines on top of existing weaknesses and uncertainties. The report also proposes a series of critical interventions, including new informal dialogues involving a group of systemically significant producer and consumer countries (‘Resource 30’ or R30) to tackle resource price volatility and to improve confidence and coordination in increasingly integrated global resource markets.

The World Energy Scenarios: Composing energy futures to 2050 is the result of a three-year study conducted by over 60 experts from nearly 30 countries, with modelling provided by the Paul Scherrer Institute. The report assesses two contrasting policy scenarios, the more consumer driven Jazz scenario and the more voter-driven Symphony scenario with a key differentiator being the ability of countries to pass through the Doha Climate Gateway. The WEC scenarios use an explorative approach to assess what is actually happening in the world now, to help gauge what will happen in the future and the real impact of today’s choices on tomorrow’s energy landscape.
Rather than telling policymakers and senior energy leaders what to do in order to achieve a specific policy goal, the WEC’s World Energy Scenarios allow them to test the key assumptions that decision-makers decide to better shape the energy of tomorrow.

The "Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform" supported by the United Nations proposes reports of analyses conducted by the UN on sustainability. Many areas are covered: food and agriculture, urbanisation, land management, economy, energy,...

Since the 1960s the family in the OECD area has undergone significant transformation. In many countries, the extended family has all but disappeared, and the traditional two-parent family has become much less widespread as divorce rates, re-marriages, cohabitation, single parenthood and same-sex partnerships have all increased. With rising migration, cultures and values have become more diverse, with some ethnic minorities evolving as parallel family cultures while others intermingle with mainstream cultures through mixed-race marriages. Families have seen more mothers take up work in the labour market, their adolescents spend longer and longer in education and training, and the elderly members of the family live longer and, increasingly, alone. The repercussions of these changes on housing, pensions, health and long-term care, on labour markets, education and public finances, have been remarkable. Recent demographic projections perfromed by many OECD countries suggest that the next 20 years are likely to see a continuation and even acceleration of changes in household and family structures. In particular, the numbers and shares of single-adult and single-parent households are expected to increase significantly, as is the number of couples without children. This report explores likely future changes in family and household structures in OECD countries; identifies what appear to be the main forces shaping the family landscape between now and 2030; discusses the longer-term challenges for policy arising from those expected changes; and on the basis of the three subsequent thematic chapters, suggests policy options for managing the challenges on a sustainable basis.

Launched in March 2010 by the European Commission, the Europe 2020 strategy aims at achieving “smart, sustainable and inclusive” growth. This growth is intended to be driven by three sets of engines: knowledge and innovation, a greener and more efficient use of resources and higher employment combined with social and territorial cohesion. This CEPS report takes an in-depth look at the Europe 2020 strategy and the goals it sets for the EU, with the aim of shedding light on the question of whether the strategy will succeed in fostering the global competitiveness of the European Union. While finding that the Europe 2020 strategy identifies the right key indicators for its targets, the authors advise that it should be revised in several important respects and conclude with relevant policy steps to foster the future capability of European economies and their prosperity.