Selected for the Global Economic Symposium 2011

The last decade has clearly demonstrated that the nature of threats and challenges for international security has changed significantly. Structural threats like terrorism, cyber-attacks, and nuclear proliferation have created an entirely new security environment. The national states’ monopoly on using force is eroding, state-boundaries have lost much of their importance, and private actors become increasingly powerful in international security. History has demonstrated that many security threats would have never grown into a full-fledged problem, if they would have been identified and addressed at an earlier stage. Today, leaders and societies have to act as early as possible to reduce the probability that well-known (and lesser known) risks develop their potential of turning into serious threats for regional or even global security. Identifying realistic potential scenarios where terrorism, insurgency, nuclear proliferation, or cyber-attacks could evolve from an abstract and hypothetical menace to a real and severe problem and seeking tangible solutions for prevention are key challenges.

Selected for the Global Economic Symposium 2010

The following global developments are on collision course: (1) the surge in global population, currently expected to reach 8.9 billion by 2049, up from just 2.5 billion a century earlier, (2) rising demands for higher and more diversified consumption, fuelled by economic success and the celebration of wealth, (3) the rapid and accelerating destruction of our inherited natural capital (ground water, marine life, terrestrial biodiversity, crop- and grazing land and our life-enabling atmosphere) and (4) deepening pockets of poverty, rapidly growing urban slums, collapsing states and uncontrolled migration, heightening the risk of new pandemics. The increasing tension between rising populations, with expanding needs and desires, and the limited, falling stock of natural capital is not sustainable. Most new population growth will occur among the very poor, moreover, in remote rural areas and shantytowns around huge cities. Problems of ungovernability, terrorism and new migratory waves are foreseeable. The collapse of weak states will sharpen political and cultural tensions and deepen poverty. The interconnectedness of the global economy means that, according to the principle of subsidiarity, the lowest level of organization at which the spillovers can be addressed is the supranational level.