The National Intelligence Council is “. . . the intelligence community’s center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking.“ NIC has released Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, the latest in a series of reports that is intended to

… stimulate strategic thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where they seem to be headed, and how they might interact. It uses scenarios to illustrate some of the many ways in which the drivers examined in the study (e.g., globalization, demography, the rise of new powers, the decay of international institutions, climate change, and the geopolitics of energy) may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decisionmakers. The study as a whole is more a description of the factors likely to shape events than a prediction of what will actually happen.

The Council has previously prepared three other reports in this series including Mapping The Global Future, Global Trends 2015 and Global Trends 2010. Each report is interesting in its own right. You will find the Global Trends 2025 report and more here.

The NIC reports and resulting analysis are examples of broader sources of input for our project. It will be important for us to look beyond the obvious for additional sources to base our examination of ideas and trends as we build those sources out over before we return in January.

Where do we look next?