Trends Identified
Green technology
2017
Science & Technology Foresight Malaysia
Malaysia, Academy of Sciences Malaysia
Green vaccine
(Definition) The technology uses genetic engineering technology to insert useful genetic trait into plants where they can create mass production of useful proteins (vaccines).(Application) The technology can help mass production of economic vaccines without the risk for pathogenic infections and with simple cultivation condition. Therefore, when there is a large scale of the epidemic, vaccines can be provided quickly and easily (Impact) The plants can be consumed for treatment of diseases, and through mass production, it will cut the social and economical costs. Vaccine market has the market size of $ 12.5 billion world wide.
2014
KISTEP 10 Emerging Technologies 2014
South Korea, Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP)
Grid-scale Electricity Storage
Electricity cannot be directly stored, so electrical grid managers must constantly ensure that overall demand from consumers is exactly matched by an equal amount of power fed into the grid by generating stations. Because the chemical energy in coal and gas can be stored in relatively large quantities, conventional fossil-fuelled power stations offer dispatchable energy available on demand, making grid management a relatively simple task. However, fossil fuels also release greenhouse gases, causing climate change – and many countries now aim to replace carbon-based generators with a clean energy mix of renewable, nuclear or other non-fossil sources. Clean energy sources, in particular wind and solar, can be highly intermittent; instead of producing electricity when consumers and grid managers want it, they generate uncontrollable quantities only when favourable weather conditions allow. A scaled-up nuclear sector might also present challenges due to its preferred operation as always-on baseload. Hence, the development of grid-scale electricity storage options has long been a “holy grail” for clean energy systems. To date, only pumped storage hydropower can claim a significant role, but it is expensive, environmentally challenging and totally dependent on favourable geography. There are signs that a range of new technologies is getting closer to cracking this challenge. Some, such as flow batteries may, in the future, be able to store liquid chemical energy in large quantities analogous to the storage of coal and gas. Various solid battery options are also competing to store electricity in sufficiently energy-dense and cheaply available materials. Newly invented graphene supercapacitors offer the possibility of extremely rapid charging and discharging over many tens of thousands of cycles. Other options use kinetic potential energy such as large flywheels or the underground storage of compressed air. A more novel option being explored at medium scale in Germany is CO2 methanation via hydrogen electrolysis, where surplus electricity is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen later being reacted with waste carbon dioxide to form methane for later combustion – if necessary, to generate electricity. While the round-trip efficiency of this and other options may be relatively low, clearly storage potential will have high economic value in the future. It is too early to pick a winner, but it appears that the pace of technological development in this field is moving more rapidly than ever, in our assessment, bringing a fundamental breakthrough more likely in the near term.
2014
Top 10 emerging technologies for 2014
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Grim Reaping
Simultaneous breadbasket failures threaten sufficiency of global food supply
2018
The Global Risks Report 2018
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Growing abroad: East meets west
Nearly half the CEOs interviewed for our survey are involved in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, but the stereotypes of acquiror and target are set to change.
2007
10th Annual global CEO Survey
PWC
Growing and ageing population
The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data on demographic change helped identify three major trends as particularly relevant. First, the global demographic profile will be characterised by population growth, led by middle-income and lower-income countries, about which the literature and projections strongly agree. The second major demographic trend analysed in the literature has to do with population ageing, initially in high-income countries and subsequently in the rest of the world, starting with middle-income countries. The literature points to a third trend that is likely to develop in the European Union and other developed economies in the future, namely transformations in the structure of families and household sizes.
2013
Europe's Societal Challenges: An analysis of global societal trends to 2030 and their impact on the EU
RAND Corporation
Growing availability of big data and the data deluge
Data in the world is doubling every 18 months and has become the ‘21st Century’s new raw material’.95 The overall trend is that the world is becoming more and more interconnected by globally and continuously available data.
2014
Challenges at the horizon 2025
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Growing competition and the rise of emerging powers and relative decline of the West calling for a redistribution of global power and the EU's role in international organisations and the global diplomatic stage
By 2030, the economic power will have shifted from the West to the East and the US, the EU and Japan’s share of the global economy could shrink significantly— reversing their importance relative to the emerging world. As a result, the calls for rebalancing and more effective global coordination are one of the great challenges of current times. Under such trend, the need for cooperation in the framework of WTO as well as materialisation of a single European voice in multilateral institutions becomes imperative.
2014
Challenges at the horizon 2025
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Growing demand for food, water, and energy
A growing middle class and gains in empowerment will lead the demand for food to rise by 35%, water by 40%, and energy by 50%, government research suggested. Regions with extreme weather patterns — like rain-soaked Singapore or muggy Mumbai — will get more extreme due to the effects of climate change. Dry areas such as northern Africa and the US Southwest will feel the effects of diminished precipitation especially hard. We will still have enough resources to avoid energy scarcity by 2030; however, whether those resources include fracking or renewable forms like solar and wind is yet to be seen.
2017
4 mega-trends that could change the world by 2030
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Growing dominance of relatively young digital tech corporations
Relatively young digital technology corporations now dominate the world’s top ten companies, with Apple heading the list, followed by Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook18.
2017
Surfing the digital tsunami
Australia, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)