The British Club Worldwide

Britain 2020

A look into the future

  Woe betide anyone who prophesies the future.

These fascinating forecasts originated in The Guardian, September 2004.

Much is relevant not only to Britain but to the world.  

Building a new Briton

By 2020 our national identity will have been reconfigured, says Tom Bentley, and Britishness will have a new meaning

Baked beans. Big Ben. The blitz. Bobby Moore. Bannockburn. Some symbols of our identity appear as fixed cultural points in a changing landscape. Others crystallise particular moments, helping us define exactly who we are and how we are seen.

The current British self-image largely rests on images of expansionism and ingenuity. The idea of "overcoming the odds" runs deeply through our histories of ourselves. But like our faces as we age, our cultural identity can change imperceptibly. Suddenly, a reflection seen from a new angle shows an accumulation of tiny changes that significantly alters the overall appearance.

Such reinterpretations of national identity are often triggered by an unexpected event: the abdication crisis of 1936; the blitz; Suez; the intervention of the International Monetary Fund in 1976; the 1984 miners' strike; the death of Diana - all had an impact on our national sense of self. So who might we be in 2020? Which of the myriad small changes currently taking place will define us? Which activities and institutions will dominate our sense of ourselves?

One way to gauge the nature of the changes the nation is likely to undergo by 2020 is to look back the same distance in time. In 1988 EastEnders was Britain's most popular soap opera and Thatcherism was in its high summer. The major privatisations were behind us, but the poll tax was only just beginning to glimmer. House prices were booming but the stock market had crashed. Mobile phones were a novelty item and the second summer of love was in full swing in Manchester's clubland. Rumours about Charles and Diana's marriage troubles were beginning to spread. Nobody had uttered the words "New Labour" in public and conventional wisdom saw race riots as a thing of the past. The Berlin Wall stood intact.

Much of that seems reassuringly familiar, but there have also been abrupt changes. The television programme that prompts office conversation is a real-life soap opera, with people locked in a house for three months. A CND supporter of the 80s is prime minister - and led us to war. The poll tax is a distant memory and that the nature of the monarchy has changed is beyond doubt, despite the leadership of the Firm remaining in place. The utterly unexpected can therefore materialise alongside the easily predictable. This will remain true as we go forward to 2020.

We make sense of change partly by falling back on shared national or cultural characteristics: a psychological dependence on a successful past; confidence in one's own tolerance and sense of fair play; the maintenance of a particular family or religious tradition; a belief in one's own formative beliefs and values as radical, even once the comfortable trappings of middle age have been bought and paid for. But all these types of self-image will be tested by the way our society changes over the next generation. The question is whether we can respond in ways which strengthen or diminish them.

The traditional analysis holds that the story of Britain over the past half-century is one of decline. Despite rising wealth, social freedoms and political projects dedicated to national renewal, we have struggled to overcome the pervasive decay. Our grand institutions - the trade unions, the church, the monarchy - are all in retreat. Britons' willingness to make an emotional or political investment in those external institutions has fallen dramatically. The number of people prepared to say they have great confidence in the legal system, the church, the civil service or parliament has more than halved since the early 1980s, from a healthy majority to a creaking minority. But asked who they trust to tell the truth, the British are more likely than 20 years ago to identify teachers, doctors, professors and newsreaders, and overall levels of trust appear not to have declined catastrophically, apart from trust in politicians.

Although the erosion of traditional social organisations has not diminished our sociability, the onward march of individualism - either through choice or fate - is still probably the major force shaping our society. British society in 2020 will be significantly older than today, which will further that process of individualisation. Those over 65 will be a third as many again as those of working age, as opposed to a quarter as many again today. The combination of the postwar baby boom, increased life expectancy and declining fertility rates will mean a million more people over 65 than under 16. As a result we will spend twice as much money on health and long-term care.

Intertwined with ageing is the shrinking size of our households, so that by 2020 about a third of us will be living alone, and as many as 2 million older people may have no regular contact with friends or family. These new household structures will also drive suburbanisation, as more people spill into the space between the inner-city neighbourhoods and the rural villages.

How we communicate will help determine who we are - a transformation that has already begun with the mobile phone culture. Mobiles were barely a feature of life in 1988, but a recent survey found that 46% of young British adults described the loss of their phone as akin to bereavement. Phones are just one way we tell the world about ourselves. We can already construct historical and family narratives from the internet, create newsgroups and meet strangers with shared interests.

We design our bodies in gyms and tattoo studios; by 2020 we could be doing so in the genetics lab and the prosthetic workshop. The use of diet and drugs to enhance performance will spread from elite sport and start a new mass debate about how to boost intelligence and educational achievement. So the cultural pressure to define and design ourselves will only grow between now and 2020. We cannot know how we will respond to those choices, but their very existence will make discussion of human nature and identity central to our self-perception.

The changes in society will pit personal identity against the more traditional markers of collective belonging - the belief systems and rituals underpinning everything from politics and the church to television viewing and football supporting. People will still care about these activities, but they will be much less likely to organize their own lives around fixed institutional routines.

Television over the past 50 years has reinforced our common identity and culture by amplifying shared social events. We would remember key TV moments, such as Gazza crying or Angela Rippon on Morecambe and Wise, and talk about them the next day. But the same forces that are fragmenting our cultural loyalties are at work on television, too. Already, about 60% of households have multichannel TV and the internet, and by 2020 the model of terrestrial broadcasting most of us grew up with will be a dusty memory.

Given all this, the central question is: will the slow collapse of institutions that have been vehicles for our shared identity mean the collapse of the identity itself? The answer is that we should not be too afraid, for our essential cultural characteristic as Britons is, arguably, not the way we cling to past verities but the way we change with the cultural tides. A mixture of pragmatism and self-preservation has blended British culture and politics into new forms many times over the centuries. It is why Chaucer's 14th-century English would be unrecognisable to today's English speaker, and probably why English is now the global business language.

This quality of pragmatism is experienced as tradition by many Britons, but as arrogance and ingenuity in equal measure by much of the rest of the world. It has enabled us to reinvent ourselves by stealth while maintaining a pose of continuity. In working out how this pattern might unfold over the next 16 years, three features of the landscape are especially influential.

The first is hybrid culture, which is the art of mixing different elements to create a coherent whole - that is the logic by which ours was identified as a "mongrel nation" in Philip Dodd's 1995 Demos essay The Battle Over Britain. The second area is the rise of the city-region as a source of economic dynamism and a vehicle for identity. While regional government may continue to stutter, regional identities are strengthening. Third comes Britain's cultural relationship with the rest of the world; as power and wealth swing east towards Asia, this will develop into a form of reverse colonialism.

This year's film of King Arthur self-consciously relocated the familiar legend to a different period - the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. If you forget the acting, the film is a masterclass in the art of myth-making through breeding hybrids. It purports to document the birth of a Greater Britain and the rise of its English icon, Arthur. The plot races through imperial withdrawal, Saxon invasion, Celtic resistance, the compassionate defence of women and children, an embryonic theory of equality through free will, military triumph against the odds, and romance, climaxing in intermarriage and the birth of a new British dynasty. Not bad for two hours, especially given the number of battles the film-makers had to slot in. King Arthur both portrays and typifies the art of cultural mixing that has made up the British identity. Our sense of what it means to be British has evolved from successive waves of settlement, conquest, intermingling, trade and exchange. One way in which we have done this is to construct institutions - the monarchy, armed forces, the civil service, the British Museum, the BBC - that have all enabled successful mixing by establishing shared symbols and traditions. Throughout the waves of change, however, those institutions - with their own distinct culture - have maintained a serene view that Britain exports civilisation through commonsense values and organisational methods.

Helpful though it has been, that view does not match the reality. From baked beans to gin and tonic, from Birmingham balti to tea with milk, our trademark foods are the result of combining foreign cultural practices with local tastes. My great-grandfather entered family history in the 1940s on visiting a Chinese restaurant, inspecting the menu and declaring, "I can't deal with any of this foreign nonsense; bring me a cup of tea." Hybridity has always been part of our lives, whether we realised it or not.

Hybrid culture will have a special claim on the next generation, precisely because it holds the greatest cultural dynamism and energy. As tradition declines, we are left to form our identities while increasingly exposed, by global communications, travel and trade, to a much wider range of cultural influences and pressures. Amid an ageing population, for example, the fastest-growing ethnic category in Britain is "black - mixed race". Half the people in this group are under 16, while just 8% are over 45. The number of people from ethnic minorities grew by half during the 1990s, from less than 5% to almost 8% of the population.

Film, television and literature are increasingly fascinated by what happens when cultures connect, collide and combine. From East is East and Goodness Gracious Me to Massive Attack and Mike Skinner, from Monica Ali to Ms Dynamite, Salman Rushdie to Irvine Welsh, our most potent pieces of culture emerge from the ability to meld the disparate elements at work in Britain into a coherent but edgy whole. This will spread from the arts into the wider culture. The brokers of our society will increasingly be those who can interpret and navigate such differences.

Just as our culture evolves new hybrids, so will our politics. Politicians are increasingly absorbed in trying to handle the conflicts generated by cultural collision, from the US-EU split over Iraq to community division in Bradford and Burnley. However, despite the accelerating demographic trends, by 2020 it is unlikely that more than 15% of the whole British population will come from ethnic minority backgrounds. Race should not be the dominant issue of our political debate, but it will still be a trigger for wider debates about shared culture, as it is now.

Perhaps most intriguing are the newly blended national cultures of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In Scotland, the long wait for a constitutional settlement has been immediately followed by a wave of anti-political disillusionment. A recent survey found that only 2-3% of voters considered the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly to have serious influence over their lives. One of Scotland's main newspapers refused to endorse any party in the most recent Scottish parliamentary elections, an extraordinary event for so new a system. Yet as a current Demos project on Scotland in 2020 has found, there is strong commitment to creating a distinctive, creative and optimistic Scottish political identity that can circumvent dependence on political institutions.

New, flexible governing arrangements will offer scaffolding to hybrid identities. It is no coincidence that this is happening at sub-national level. In Northern Ireland, the political rules are actually designed to allow two opposing nationalist cultures to coexist peacefully. In England the renaissance of city-regions is obscured by London's impact as a city-state and its tendency to suck in skills and wealth from surrounding areas. But, partly driven by economics, the cultural character and influence of major British cities are changing.

The shape of these cities, from housing to neighbourhoods to transport links, was formed around the industries that provided most jobs: steel in Sheffield, the Liverpool docks, shipbuilding in Glasgow, chocolate-making in Birmingham and so on. Now they are being transformed by new patterns of wealth arising from other kinds of work: law, finance, media, software, science. Cultural activities, symbols and buildings play a newly important part in the shaping of city centres. "Doughnut" structures of wealth and travel - whereby money concentrates in city centres by day and travels into outer suburbs, new towns and commuter villages by night - are entrenching poverty at the neglected edges of cities. But the city-regions offer new symbols and forms of congregation.

In the wider world, the global shift of economic, cultural and technological power eastwards will have a profound influence. China's rise will challenge the assumptions underpinning layers of our identity - from western interpretations of democracy to philosophies of class and well-being. But the economic dynamism of Asian nations will create a new need for us to compete for their attention, and to succeed in supplying services and know-how to them, rather than simply competing against them for jobs and investment. In a generation's time our wealth will be drawn, as it was in past eras, from our place within global networks of exchange.

In navigating this new world, Britain has a great opportunity. Our colonial legacy ought to prompt mutual understanding and empathy with other cultures and nations, not just resentment at decline of our power or the injustices of past British rule. Much of the most important cultural production in English now arises from the cultures of the commonwealth, from places that were dominated and then abandoned by British institutions and have generated their own hybrid identities. By 2020 we will need to have turned our past to our advantage and engaged with our former empire again - this time as collaborator, rather than conqueror.

But doing this requires us to overcome our equally strong tendency towards insularity, to engage more confidently with the unfamiliar, and to understand cultural difference better. Too often, a British (and especially English) attitude to the world has rested on the aggressive assertion of "common sense" - a tactic still used by Britons of all classes.

In turn, our ability to engage properly with the world may rest on our success in finding new, popular vehicles for shared identity within Britain. Our capacity for creating hybrid identities from disparate ingredients is beyond dispute. But our success in doing so again by 2020 is not assured. It is perfectly plausible to see the splintering of identity and allegiance into many different cultural tribes; some socially conservative, insular and resentful, some hedonistically self-absorbed, some cosmopolitan but detached from the everyday life of most others. The diminishing influence of our institutions could leave no one with the power to mediate successfully between these mutually ignorant clans.

So it would be too easy to conclude that we can all become naturally confident cosmopolitans. In a survey last year 77% of those polled said different cultures in Britain coexist rather than connect with each other. At the same time, however, 80% of the same survey thought we could not build a new British society without interacting with different cultures.

Learning to live in a new society - especially one reflecting cultures profoundly different from the one you were born into - is a painful process, and for many people the incentives to make the effort are weak. But there are some grounds for hope. A study last year by Richard Florida, the prophet of the "creative class" in North America, found that tolerance and respect for difference in Britain are comparatively high in Britain compared to other European societies. There is clear evidence that people's interest in political issues and social fairness remains strong, even though they are less likely to engage through traditional channels.

Who, then, will the new Briton be in 2020? Imagine a millennium baby, born in 2000, approaching 20 years old. She will have a life expectancy of 90 and will be trying to imagine a working life of at least 50 years. Her job prospects will depend heavily on her educational credentials, and she will expect at least five more years of formal training. Specialist skills, particularly ones that can be used creatively, will determine her earning power. She is already likely to be accumulating big debts in order to finance her pathway towards this specialist skill.

Our young woman's network of friends and family will be crucially important to her; more so than her ethnic or national identity. That will continue a trend already in process: a study in the mid-90s found that most people saw their own values, principles and friends as being more important to their own identity than being a Briton; in the 2001 census, only 46% of people described themselves as British. This woman's informal network, though she may not yet know it, will have a profound influence on her future opportunities and life chances, and may play the most direct role in how far she travels in later life.

The likelihood is that her social values will be more liberal even than today's typical young people, and that economic liberalism will largely look like common sense. Some specific "ethical" issue - maybe climate change or human rights or stem cell research - will dominate her political sense, but if she has joined a political party she will be among a tiny minority.

Her knowledge of the detail of British history and sense of allegiance to a "national" culture will be significantly weaker than it might be today, but her critical abilities - communication, and the ability to access and investigate different forms of culture - are likely to be much sharper. She will customise her use of the dizzying array of media services with a degree of discrimination and fluency we would find surprising today.

That sense of discernment might apply equally to her sense of identity, which will be moulded from family, neighbourhood and city. She might be a devout Christian, though she would be slightly more likely to be a practising Muslim. Either way, if it is a strong and explicit part of her identity, she may well have discovered a faith for herself and opted to join a specific community rather than simply inheriting a general tradition.

By 2020 it is unlikely that our young adults will be "citizens of the world" in any full-blooded sense that really banishes British identity. Although a global outlook is increasingly common, it is hard to see how anyone could find forms of identity strong enough to channel allegiance in any meaningful way. But the attachments we form to particular organisations, causes or routines are the institutional expression of our values. If we take the globally connected outlook our millennium child will have, we can see that exclusively national institutions will have begun to overlap and blur with other layers of identity: time spent studying at European universities, working with American NGOs or living in cities to which she feels especially drawn.

A foreign country

By 2020, Britain's green and pleasant land will also be one of palm trees and pomegranates. But watch out for the mosquitoes.

 

Very soon, you will be able to buy British figs in your supermarket. Lines of palm trees will sway on the south coast. Devon and Cornwall will begin to resemble the Azores, with blankets of ferns and evergreen trees crowding the countryside. Migrating birds will stay in the country for longer. And the seasons will become even more blurred.

Unfortunately, pests will also be on the increase. The mosquitoes so common in the sticky climes of southern Europe will start to invade Britain, too; rats and cockroaches will proliferate as we become increasingly urban and temperatures rise enough for them to survive the relatively mild winters.

Environmental futurology is an inexact science. But it is certain our climate is changing. The effects of this change over the next 16 years will be subtle. If the predictions are correct (and the Gulf Stream stays where it is), the trend towards wetter winters and hotter, drier summers will continue. Summer droughts will become more commonplace and some of the southern parts of England (particularly Essex) will be subject to frequent flooding. Indeed, some parts of the county at the mouth of the Thames will probably become uninhabitable - because the homes there will be uninsurable.

While the physical landscape of Britain undergoes these changes, the country's flora and fauna will see a much more subtle, often unnoticeable, alteration. Look out of your window and you will probably see leaves turning red and golden well before the supposed start of autumn. Frogspawn, usually an indicator of the start of spring, has been spotted in ponds on the south coast of England before Christmas. And some flowers - snowdrops, for example - have started to bloom at the height of winter.

Tim Sparks, an environmental scientist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Monks Wood in Cambridgeshire, says his studies in phenology - an intricate science that involves recording the exact times during a year that things happen in the natural world - show that the blurring between the beginnings and ends of the seasons will only get worse. "We have some records going back to the 18th century - there's been a lot of phenological change, particularly in the last 20 to 30 years," he says. "As a rough rule of thumb, we've seen spring events advance by some three weeks over the last 50 years. Between now and 2020, we may well see a similar advance in phenology if the country warms as predicted." The occasional sightings of snowdrops and frogspawn before the end of the year will become much more common.

There is also evidence that trees are starting to break bud much earlier. Dr Simon Leather, an ecologist at Imperial College London, studies trees. "I've seen big changes in timing of bud burst - when the leaves start to come out," he says. "And that's a temperature effect." Sycamore and bird cherry trees are classic examples.

These changes in the seasons are not just a scientific curiosity. Many animals rely on their sources of food - plants, for example - being ready to eat exactly when they are needed. At the start of spring when there are plenty of young around, for example.

"We're probably already going to see some evidence of a mismatch between different bits of the natural world working together," says Julian Hughes, the head of species conservation at the RSPB. "You can imagine that if spring [bird] migrants start arriving from Africa earlier than they do at the moment, they would therefore arrive before quite a lot of the food does, in terms of emerging insects. Even for common things like blue tits and great tits, if the caterpillar hatches emerge at a different time from when the broods are hatching, then clearly it's going to have a problem. We might also be starting to see some evidence of that."

The fractionally warmer weather will also ensure that new types of plant will thrive in Britain. "You have to recognise that this is a country of gardeners, and what is more and more in fashion now is that we have exotic plants in the gardens," says Dr Johannes Vogel, the keeper of botany at the Natural History Museum. "And more and more are going to escape and establish in the wild."

Plants such as laurel - certainly not hardy enough to be a native of these shores - have already been identified as having established themselves from a gardener's seeds in the south-west of England. The last time laurel grew in Britain was literally in another age - well before the last ice age, in fact.

"We will get more and more of these non-hardy plants, the ones which hard winters would normally knock back," says Vogel.

Rhododendron is growing wild in north Wales - one of many plants for which the conditions just keep getting better. "There's undoubtedly going to be other species which are not quite in their optimal climate at the moment, but if you raise it by a few degrees in the summer and make the winters milder, then they might be and they may take off," says Sparks. Palm trees already manage to survive on the south coast of England and it is only a matter of time before they, too, are thriving further north.

The warm weather will not just affect the "exotic" plants introduced by gardeners. "At the moment about 31% of people cut their grass in the winter in the south-west of Britain and 8% in Scotland. The numbers in both are likely to increase - many more people are likely to be cutting the grass in winter because it will continue to grow," says Sparks.

If climate change will have the biggest effect on our changing wildlife, what we do with the land will also have an impact. Plans to build thousands of houses, for example, are sure to change the shape of the countryside. "We're going to see a lot more concrete and asphalt in the south, which is going to have major impacts on a lot of wildlife," says Leather. And increased urbanisation will mean cities exert a stronger "heat island" effect. London is a few degrees warmer than its surroundings, for example, and the bigger it grows, the greater the effect of the heat island. In some German cities, warmer conditions have led to the establishment of termite colonies. Devon has already had these unwelcome visitors and it could be London next. Anyone in buildings with structural timbers should watch out.

More houses also means more household waste. "We're going to get more flies around," says Leather. "We're going to get the sorts of things that are associated with sticky climates - we have mosquitoes but what we may get are some of the mosquitoes that can transmit some of the nasty things." In short, that could mean malaria (see panel).

But there is good news. The increased flooding due in the south of England thanks to climate change has the potential to cause the birth of new wetlands and marshlands. The government is currently scratching its head on what to do about people living in the flood plains (the options include moving them out or installing flood barriers). If it decides to allow the waters to run and move the people out, wildlife will benefit. Then, says Vogel, we will once more have extensive river ecosystems. "If you let the rivers meander and don't stem them and don't try to protect houses from flooding, you will get superb wildlife areas."

Historically, farming has been one of the great drivers of countryside change, and that will continue. "The focus of agriculture since the war has been to maximise productivity," says Dr Matthew Thomas, an agricultural ecologist at Imperial College. "One of the changes that's happening in farming at the moment is an increased awareness of managing the landscape, not just for goals of productivity but to see how one can balance productivity with benefits for wider society and the environment."

One big contributor to that process currently is reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). "What this means is that farmers won't get subsidised for production per se - subsidies will be on the basis of production based on market forces," says Professor Richard Ellis, the head of the school of agricultural policy and development at Reading University.

"You could see changes in the incentives to grow certain crops," adds Thomas. "You could see a shift to new energy crops, for instance, or fibre crops or pharmaceutical crops. Very large, uniformly managed environments or landscapes can be maintained relatively profitably. Smaller, individual farmers might find it more difficult to respond to some of these changes." Some land will simply drop out of production. The hills of Wales, the Pennines and Scotland, for example, are already difficult to eke a living from. After CAP reform the farmers who work them may be forced to give up.

And how will the changes in farming affect our wildlife? "The extent to which those are going to impact on individual species is, in many cases, rather unclear," says Thomas. "Many species of invertebrate have scope and capacity to shift their ranges and shift with the changing landscape and changes in land use." How we perceive our countryside will also affect how we allow it to change. "There could be considerable pressure to maintain the classic patchwork landscape of hedgerows and fields and a few cows or sheep dotted around, because that's what society wants from the landscape and that's what it perceives as a healthy and vibrant landscape," says Thomas.

But what people want from an aesthetic point of view may go against what is actually best for conservation. "Coppice woodland is better on a rotational basis for biodiversity than a wood that's dying and hasn't been cut back for 70 to 80 years," says Ellis. "But often mature woodland looks extremely attractive to people, even though it's dying."

Will we have to adapt to a new idea of the British green and pleasant land, then? That really depends on how you define "British". "Our perception of what flora and fauna we perceive as being British will change," concludes Vogel. "Also, it will become much more difficult for 'experts' to recognise what is actually British." By experts, he means not only botanists and zoologists toiling in the country's universities and museums, but also the armies of amateur naturalists who spend their evenings and weekends scouring the country in search of rare birds, plants and insects.

The country will still be populated by species of animal and plant. They may not be the species we want to protect; in fact, they are more likely to be the ones capable of adapting to more extreme conditions. The species we are already trying to save are liable to be more susceptible to the changes ahead. Summer droughts may have an adverse effect on some of the rarer butterflies, for example. Conversely, the milder winters may increase the number of pest species we get - rats would thrive simply because their winter survival rate will be better. "There are always species that will succeed in any environment, but they will change and we may not necessarily like the ones we end up with," says Sparks.

"If you want to say that there is a need for us to protect what is British, then of course we are going to lose," cautions Vogel. "If you want to say we want to maximise diversity, then we are on to a winner."

Ellis points out that change is a natural part of the life of the British countryside. "It's worth remembering that the landscape has gone through quite a lot of changes in the last 70 to 80 years," he says. "Often when people are looking back, they're looking back to a small snapshot in history which is the one that they want - maybe the 1930s, when things were difficult for agriculture, whereas many non-farmers think of it as a golden time."

The difference now, though, is the pace of the change. "I don't think that we've ever seen changes at the sort of speed that we are experiencing and that we are predicted to experience in the next 20 to 50 years," adds Hughes.

Here we get into politics. We can be fairly sure what will happen to our climate - and hence to our countryside - in the next 20 years because we know about the carbon that is already in the atmosphere. What happens after that is less certain and depends on what the governments of the world do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That matters because we can't know if we are making the right preparations for change if we do not know what changes are likely to happen. "You can overspeculate and there is a risk that we make a whole load of decisions to change things now that actually prove to be the wrong thing," says Hughes.

We are also hampered by our lack of knowledge about the present: we have records for only a fifth or so of the flora and fauna on these islands. "There's still great uncertainty," says Sparks. "While we probably know more about our wildlife than anywhere else in the world, we're still conscious of the lack of knowledge in some areas." That ignorance is unlikely improve in the immediate future.

Vogel says getting to know more about the country's flora and fauna and creating a comprehensive inventory of wildlife is a major objective for scientists. "For politicians, it might be more opportune to remain ignorant and say, 'Well, we didn't know.'" A little bit of knowledge, he adds, might actually be a dangerous thing for politicians, because they would then be forced to address some of the concerns for the future that understanding the present would bring.

Take issues

Will we have solved the big political questions - education, transport, the economy and immigration - by 2020?

 

Education

This year lies halfway between 2020 and 1988, when Kenneth Baker, the then education secretary, delivered a package of measures that continue to define the modern educational era. In schools alone, the Education Reform Act introduced the national curriculum and testing at seven, 11 and 14; handed control of budgets to headteachers; and invented grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges, the precursors of specialist schools and city academies.

Sixteen years on, some of the act's roughest edges have been smoothed, but the educational landscape is more than merely Baker-lite. Since 1988 Whitehall has meddled virtually at will in the content of the curriculum, prescribing huge chunks of the daily school timetables of children across the country. On the other hand, headteachers have become the most influential lobby group in education, as successive Tory and Labour governments pass ever greater power - and responsibility - towards them and away from local councils. And specialist schools have become this government's preferred model for (it believes) raising standards and (it hopes) persuading into the state fold some of the stubborn 7% of parents who continue to send their children to private schools.

Maybe somebody - perhaps Gordon Brown if he changes his address by one digit - will abandon specialist schools and the perverse logic of expecting big rural comprehensives to focus on a particular area.

But how wide will the changes in education really be by 2020? Heads will still hold the purse strings and local education authorities will probably not even exist. The best guess is that something called, and reminiscent of, the national curriculum will still be in place. Possibly this will be confined to five- to 14-year-olds, especially if trends to greater specialisation and differentiation from 14 on continue. If the government can get a positive consensus on the proposals in Mike Tomlinson's final report, in October, on reform of education of 14- to 19-year-olds, that will become more likely.

Fourteen will have replaced 16 as the watershed moment in secondary education, with many more students taking vocational courses. There will be new qualifications to replace GCSEs and A-levels, the exams hardly anyone fails. But students will also take fewer exams: the generation at university now have had the worst of that. But there are almost bound to be complaints in 2020 about the failure to deliver "parity of esteem" between work-related and academic learning. There is nothing to suggest industry will deliver the input and enthusiasm to really turn that around.

Taking a wider view, it is likely that many children will be taught in classes of 50 or more, with teachers working in teams, with other teachers or groups of classroom assistants. No counter-revolution will be able to obliterate that trend. The status of the teaching profession will still be diminished and the government will not have been able to convince jobseekers that the classroom is the place for them. Most of the best graduates will continue to turn their backs on teaching, to the constant complaints of the (by then) single classroom teachers' union.

Transport

As they power along eight-lane motorways in their Asian-built electric cars - set to cruise control, naturally - drivers in 2020 will have plenty of time to think about how they will pay their next road-charge bill. A monthly envelope totting up the cost of each car journey will be routine by the end of the next decade if the government's long-term transport plans are anything to go by.

Satellite tracking technology will enable the authorities to monitor every car journey - how long it took, how far it was, how fast it was - to calculate a journey charge of up to £1.30 a mile. Driving in many of Britain's cities will require a congestion charge; many motorway journeys will be punctuated by toll booths.

The transport secretary, Alistair Darling, wants to begin levying a price for road space. The Conservatives support the idea in principle. But without such a radical change, the future for motorists will be bleak.

Wages, wanderlust and globalisation are fuelling a desire to travel. Professor Marcial Echenique of Cambridge University reckons that, by 2021, we will all clock up an extra 1,000 miles a year by road or rail - raising the prospect of rush hours lasting from 5am until midday. "The congestion will extend, so there will be no period without congestion," Prof Echenique warned in a study published earlier this year.

Maverick motoring groups who blow up speed cameras will have more to get militant by 2020. A government-funded initiative on trial at Leeds University is examining the possibility of cars having "intelligent" accelerators that resist when drivers try to break the speed limit. Traditional speed humps are likely to go in favour of advanced models, which will sink for slower vehicles but stiffen to impede speeders. Many commuter routes will have high-occupancy vehicle lanes for cars with at least two people on board. To help pay their five-figure annual tuition fees, students will be hiring themselves out as passengers.

The alternatives to motoring are likely to suffer from familiar problems. Network Rail reckons that by 2015 it can bring punctuality on the railways up from 81% to 91.7%. Says Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics: "There are some eternal verities about transport policy. One is the maladministration of the railways and the fact that they're forever teetering on the brink of some form of Beeching's axe."

On the bright side, both east and west coast mainlines ought to have been upgraded by 2020, with superior signalling allowing twice as many trains between London, the north of England and Scotland. But while tilting technology will be commonplace, there is little indication the money will be forthcoming to push speeds beyond the present maximum of 125mph.

Commuters in the south-east will benefit from an upgrade to Thameslink and from high-speed local trains through Kent on the Channel tunnel rail link. The East London Line will be extended and joined to other suburban tracks to create an "inner rail ring road" around the capital. But only the most devoted optimists can confidently predict that Crossrail, the £10bn east-west link across London, will be built by 2020.

Britain's Victorian railway network will never be likely to match its German or Japanese rivals in speed and reliability for long-distance journeys. The disastrous £7.5bn, decade-long struggle to model the west-coast mainline is likely to cast a shadow over rail policy for decades, deterring ambitious state schemes.

Aviation could play a much bigger part in domestic transport. In a white paper on aviation last year, the government backed new runways at Stansted, Heathrow, Birmingham and Edinburgh. Government figures say the number of passengers using Britain's airports will leap from 189m to 460m by 2020.

Heathrow will no longer be the world's busiest international airport, losing out through lack of space to Paris and Amsterdam. But journeys from Bournemouth to Newcastle or between London and Plymouth could well be on fast, cheap aircraft.

Whether a Labour, Conservative or UK Independence party government is in power in 2020, the job of secretary of state for transport will still be a hiding to nothing. The challenges of congestion and pollution will persist. Travellers are likely to have more choice in how they get from A to B and their journeys will probably be safer. But whether moving around will be quicker, cheaper or more reliable than today is deeply doubtful.

Immigration

Immigration will feature ever more strongly in daily politics as the 21st century unfolds. In Britain immigration will be seen as an essential component of economic growth and a prerequisite for a healthy economy. But this will not happen in the same way as in the US and Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, when they built multicultural societies on a positive historical legacy of integrating waves of migrants through the common goal of citizenship.

Instead, by 2020 British immigration policy will be founded on the fact of our ageing society. Britain will have fewer people of working age trying to support a growing number of retired people. Britain is likely to encourage immigration on a scale that current levels only hint at, but in the process there is a danger we will develop a two-tier workforce that has more in common with the gastarbeiter economy of the old West Germany than on any American melting pot example.

The basis for that prediction lies in the United Nations report Replacement Migration, published in 2000. It estimated that Britain needs to attract a million people a year between now and 2050 to maintain the balance between the workforce and the retired population. That might be regarded as unduly pessimistic, but even the most recent figures from the government actuary suggest that by 2020 there will be 20% more older people than younger adults.

The majority of people in their 60s and 70s will be healthy and active; they will demand ever more consumer items and the personal services that go with increased leisure time. There will also be a growing welfare sector to care for the ageing population. The retirement homes of Bournemouth and Eastbourne will become key models for economic regeneration projects across the country. Home Office studies predict this will mean an increase in low-paid, low-skilled jobs that may be difficult to fill from the existing labour force.

The pattern is already beginning to emerge in the hospitality and catering industries, where low-wage jobs with little security are increasingly being filled by migrants. The government's role is to ensure they can come here legally and get paid the minimum wage. But for this strategy to succeed longer-term, British governments will have to have come to terms with the flourishing hidden economy of illegal migrants. Otherwise the two-tier workforce will be even more likely.

That means that a way to "regularise" the position of illegal migrants already in Britain will have to be found. By 2020 it could become a regular feature of British life, with amnesties granted to illegal immigrants before each general election. And if you think that could not happen, look to the US. Earlier this year, President George Bush thought it politic to give three-year work permits and possible citizenship to up to eight million "undocumented" workers living mainly in New Mexico and Arizona. His "compassionate conservative" move was, of course, really an attempt to capture the increasingly powerful Hispanic vote. Migrants here could soon hold equivalent political power.

Economy

Forecasting the economy is a mug's game. Who in the aftermath of the three-day week in 1974 would have predicted that by 1990 Britain would be down to a handful of pits and that the National Union of Mineworkers would be shrivelled and beaten? Who in 1984 would have bet that the early brick-like mobile phones would become the fastest-spreading technology in history?

On the big assumption that current trends continue, we should expect the UK to become even more dominated by the service sector, the City and the south-east. Europe's wealth is concentrated in a so-called golden banana that runs from northern Italy, through western Germany, eastern France and the Benelux countries and on across the Channel. While Europe's centre of gravity has moved eastward with enlargement, the plains of Lombardy, Bavaria, the Seine basin and the London diaspora will be the continent's unchallenged economic powerhouse for the next two decades at least.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the big story will be the continued emergence of the three big developing countries - China, Brazil and India. In sheer size, rather than per capita incomes, these countries may soon rank behind only the US. Europe's demographics and its sluggish growth rate mean it will stay rich but be in relative economic decline.

That's the easy bit. In reality, things will probably work out differently. The optimistic scenario is that the new wave of inventions over the past couple of decades has pushed the global economy to the cusp of a new golden age. All previous long upswings were based on technological change, and in this view the internet, the mapping of the human genome and robotics are to the coming boom what the car, the plane and the cinema were to the postwar golden age.

The pessimistic view is that the future of the global economy is jeopardised by two big threats - one financial, the other environmental. Over the past decade, there has been a rise both in the number of financial crises and in the damage they have caused. With the US awash with personal debt, and running massive trade and budget deficits, the danger is that the next crisis will not be in a developing country like Argentina but at the very heart of the global economy.

The other danger is that nobody has worked out what to do if and when the oil runs out. This is an issue that has been ducked by policy makers since the Yom Kippur war in 1973 brought to an end the long postwar boom.

Eat up!


One of the biggest challenges facing us is how to feed the world. It can be done by 2020, but it means the rich world changing its diet. Britons need to say goodbye to burgers and meat pies, because the over-emphasis on meat in the western diet is one of the things that stifles sustainable food production. Put simply, growing food for animals to eat is a vastly inefficient way to use the land. Instead, we should use more of the land to grow more food for human consumption and eat less meat. If we give over more land to growing food and increase yields, we can produce enough food even for the increased populations of the future.

In 1999 the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency produced a sustainable diet (see below). It looked at the implications of reducing the environmental impact of the farming and food production system, and produced a diet that, if implemented, would reduce energy consumption in food production by 30%, reduce artificial fertiliser use by between 20% and 40%, and reduce the acreage needed to produce food.

A weekly diet that would mean enough food for the whole planet

Losing our religion

Will the church evolve to cope with modern beliefs?

Predictions of the imminent demise of God - and His churches - have been around for a very long time but have never quite come to pass. Michael Ramsey - a famously saintly Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s - once startled an audience of journalists when asked whether he thought the church would survive into the 21st century by replying: "Well, you know, that is not certain, not certain, not certain at all. Not certain. It might easily, easily, it might easily, quite easily, just fall away after 20 years or so. Just fall away."

Those remarks brought incredulity in a more church-attending and maybe more complacent age 40 years ago, as Ramsey perhaps intended. But his prediction has not been borne out, even though church-going has indeed fallen away sharply in recent years. Periodically, statisticians draw up projections showing that in 40 years no one will be attending church at all, but that does not seem very likely either.

One prediction that is quite certain is that by 2020 - for believers - God will still be in His heaven and still of crucial importance for those who follow Him, of whatever faith. What is less clear is how many of those followers there will be, which religious services they will be attending and where and how central faith will still be to the life of the nation. If the past few years have made anything clear, it is that religious belief still matters to many people. It still divides worshippers fundamentally and can still rouse a few of them to levels of fanaticism at odds with what their faith purports to teach them - especially when it is fuelled by grievances that have other roots and which give them a sense of identity that belief alone cannot furnish. Ecumenism still has a very long way to go.

Christians cling to several straws of hope for the future. They draw comfort from the knowledge that, in a country where fewer than 7% of the population attend church most weeks, two-thirds of the population consistently tell researchers that they have a sense of spirituality, or longing. That is sometimes ill-expressed - along the lines of David Beckham telling an interviewer that he and Posh wanted their son Brooklyn to be christened but weren't yet sure into what religion - but is there to be tapped.

The Church of England has not been able to take advantage of that desire for a spiritual side to life terribly well, despite its self-proclaimed "decade of evangelism" in the 1990s, which ended with fewer people attending church at the end than at the start. Nevertheless, the established church is proud to maintain its presence in every parish in the country, from the inner cities to the villages, from the great cathedrals to the most modest, smallest parish churches.

The CofE is likely to remain the established church, too, despite its declining attendances. Although its senior bishops may eventually lose their privileged places in the House of Lords, no prime minister is likely to relish giving up the powers of patronage that come from appointing those bishops and a raft of other placements each year. That is the real nature of establishment power nowadays.

However, the church is going to have to adapt to changing times if it wants to keep its position at the heart of the state. The marital relationship of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, who will inherit the title of defender of the faith and receive an Anglican coronation, will doubtless be finessed. When or if he chooses to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, the Church of England will doubtless accommodate him, even though she does not fulfil the conditions by which the church agrees to remarry divorced people (she was instrumental in the break-up of her former marriage). Someone will be prepared to conduct the service.

And if Prince William eventually falls for a Catholic girl, expect the 1701 Act of Settlement, which ensures that the throne is only occupied by a Protestant, to be repealed in an afternoon. Otherwise, however, the tangle of ancient laws and statutes cementing the church's established status in place will probably remain, being too complicated, arcane and time-consuming to unravel. Governments these days, even with enormous majorities, have difficulty abolishing fox hunting, so establishing who owns a cathedral or even who controls rights of access to granny's grave will probably be beyond them.

It is always possible that the Church of England will unravel of its own accord without secular political assistance, of course. Its divisions over sex, particularly homosexuality, are deep and precarious, with an intransigent conservative evangelical faction refusing to allow any compromises in its view of Biblical injunctions on a matter that directly affects a minority of the population. Many have been preparing for an impending split over that issue with unseemly relish for a number of years; the normal Anglican methods of dealing with division - fudge and procrastination - are incapable of assuaging their anger.

Even if the gay issue were to be resolved, however, the church still faces a further problem with the ordination of female bishops. Irreconcilables, who never accepted that women could be ordained as priests in the first place, will almost certainly demand their own privileged, semi-autonomous status with their own bishops and hierarchy, a church within a church. Women bishops seem inevitable sooner or later, now women clergy fill one in seven of all paid ordained posts and nearly half of those that are unpaid, but a few will not accept it.

The Church of England, then, is likely to be very different in 2020: more fissiparous, with problems of internal authority and probably, as a consequence, congregations in still further decline. "We have a special relationship with the cultural life of our country and we must not fall out of step with this if we are not to become absurd and incredible," contends the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. This may have a hollow ring if the established church becomes increasingly divorced from the attitudes of the society around it, to which it is supposed to minister indiscriminately.

Britain's Catholics are likely to have similar problems. The current crisis of falling numbers of ordinations - just 18 new priests this year in England and Wales, compared with 230 in 1964 - may be exacerbated further if the hierarchy is unable to surmount the authority and esteem gap that has opened up across the western world in the wake of the priestly child abuse scandal. The Vatican has seemed unable or unwilling to address this catastrophic decline in trust.

Parishes are being amalgamated and, where once priests were recruited from Ireland to fill the gaps, now they are coming from the developing world, and sometimes have a poor command of English or an inadequate understanding of British society. By 2020 there will, presumably, be a new Pope but will the church have changed? Will its injunctions still be being followed more in the breach than the observance by the Catholics of the western world? If Rome has not allowed the ordination of women priests by 2020, will the Catholic church have resolved its recruitment crisis by at least permitting married male ones?

Only connect

Wireless living will have transformed our lives by 2020.


Some people look to the future and see the rise of the machines. Others wonder how their machines will ever make them rich. In 1943, for example, the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson, was asked how he viewed the future of technology. His response, it is said, was that there would one day be a worldwide market "for maybe five computers". It is not clear whether Watson actually made such a rash statement - and if he did, his apparent lack of vision clearly did his emerging business no harm - but even if the story is untrue, he would surely be astonished at our reliance on his electronic tabulating machines.

HG Wells, by contrast, would probably be a little surprised by how backward we are when it comes to getting around. In 1901 he envisaged public transport taking the form of a series of parallel moving walkways, each a little faster than the previous one. Commuters would step from walkway to walkway in order to reach their destinations.

Predictions of technological advance have always emphasised the headline-grabbing pipedreams - robot housemaids to lift us out of domestic drudgery, for example - and we still boast of the potential of new developments before we know how to unlock it. Stem cell technology and quantum computers, for example, remain no more than an alluring promise. We can predict everything, after all, except the future.

The sticking point in technological development is often not the technical wherewithal but the financial will. "People can have a base on the moon now if they are willing to pay for it," says Jim Lewis, director of technology policy at the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC. "It's not clear to me that people want to, but we could do it."

As Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in California, puts it: "What defines each decade is not a technology's invention, but rather a dramatic shift in price and performance that triggers a sudden burst in diffusion from lab to marketplace." Lunar accommodation is still at the pricey end of the market - and that is unlikely to change by 2020.

So what will change? The answer lies in the way information technology will transform our day-to-day lives. "The big trends that are going to change things are the availability of cheap sensors that provide digital data, cheap computing power and ubiquitous connectivity - the ability to connect to networks," Lewis says. "Then part of what I think people will do over the next decade is start to look for things they can automate, so you won't have to do them any more." In other words, by 2020 everything large enough to carry a microchip probably will, and from there the possibilities are endless.

We could have fridges that can read the use-by date on the milk carton and order another litre before the current one goes off. We could be sent gas bills that include an electronic reminder to pay them. We could do our laundry in washing machines that contact service engineers when their bearings wear down, and that automatically arrange a visit after finding a window in your electronic organiser. "You won't have to worry about whether you took your medicine," says Lewis. "The medicine jar will know when it was last opened and how much its weight went down."

Even low-value items such as household bricks could be fitted with individual electronic identifiers, allowing an architect or surveyor to walk round a half-finished school or hospital and see an image of the building skeleton pop up instantly on their ultra-thin laptop.

The driver of this revolution will be the dreaded radio frequency identification (RFID) chip, the use of which to guard easily pocketed items such as razor blades against shoplifters has already attracted the attention of privacy groups in the UK. The chips, which can be as small as a grain of dust, communicate with detectors several metres away and transmit information, ranging from unique serial numbers to more complex product details. There are concerns they could be used as covert surveillance devices. Anyone with a detector could read any active chip in their vicinity, raising the possibility that embedded tags in clothing could be used to trigger customised adverts on nearby billboards, or that people could be tracked as they move.

"There is a loss of privacy that is going to be very difficult for people and we haven't figured out how to deal with that," Lewis says. "But if you explain what is does, how much information it provides and where it goes - and that the trade-off is that you don't have to wait as long in line at the supermarket - then people will take the trade-off. With the right rules and regulations this sort of stuff should be more acceptable."

Some of the trade-offs do seem appealing. How about RFID chips in your clothes that automatically programme your phone to different settings, depending on whether you are in your work or casual clothing? No more work calls in the pub, and no more football text messages in the middle of business meetings.

By 2020, it is even possible that such devices will be able to communicate in ways vastly more sophisticated than the clumsy radio signals of today's wireless devices: in June this year the computer giant Microsoft was awarded a patent to transmit data by exploiting the electrical conductivity of human skin. Microsoft envisages using skin's conductive properties to link a host of electronic devices around the body, from pagers and personal data assistants (PDAs) to mobile phones and microphones. According to the patent, the technology could usher in a new class of portable and wearable electronic devices, such as earrings that deliver sounds sent from a phone worn on the belt, or special spectacles with screens that flash up images and video footage.

Linking electronic devices raises other possibilities. Gadget lovers could use a single keypad to operate their phone, PDA and MP3 music player, or combine the output of their watch, pager and radio into a single speaker - assuming watches, pagers and radios still exist in their current form.

It is certain that by 2020 a whole range of technologies will be on stream to make our daily lives simpler. One of the first could be a handheld "electronic paper" device, on to which books and the ultimate compact newspapers could be downloaded. Sony unveiled the latest and best prototype earlier this year in Japan, and as the price tag falls (it currently costs £220), so demand will rise. Others are working on electronic paper that, just like the real thing, can be rolled up and stuffed into a pocket. But as everyone who still prints their emails - to the dismay of acolytes of the paperless office - will swear, paper is a hard thing to make redundant.

Other electronic boxes of tricks will be able to monitor our health. By 2020, we could have earrings able to read our pulse rates and bracelet monitors that analyse the composition of your sweat. Medical information would be sent through the skin to a central chip, which would be able to transmit all the necessary information to your doctor, back through the skin, when you shake hands with them at your appointment. Your updated medical history could be on the doctor's computer before you had even sat down.

The rise and rise of RFID chips raises a new environmental problem: data pollution. "When you walk down the street with your PDA, cellphone and laptop they will be bombarded with information. There will be all this noise out there and controlling this noise will be one of the problems we haven't thought about," Lewis says.

Another will be the computing power needed to handle the deluge of information streaming from every angle. "Hopefully one of the things that will change over the next 15 years is that we'll have much better software that will be much easier to use, much more transparent and will fail less often," he adds.

One of the first areas of our lives likely to be affected by the coming information saturation will be transport, specifically the car. As the number of cars on the roads continues to rise, many believe the current system - in which each individual vehicle effectively goes where it pleases - is simply unsustainable.

"One reason why we have these enormous pile-ups and bumper-to-bumper gridlocks is because everybody is expressing their free will to go where they want, when they want to," says Stephen Millet, the "thought leader" and manager of technology forecasts at Battelle, a US company that publishes regular reviews of developing strategic technologies. "I think what we're moving towards is every time we leave our garage we're going to file a driving plan to some central system, which will send back a message saying go ahead or don't go that way, it's all jammed up." Intelligent highways could pass back information on driving conditions, traffic density and roadworks to the master system, which would reduce speed limits or set up diversions accordingly. Speeding could even be made impossible - trials of "smart" GPS tracking satellite systems that prevent the car going over the limit for a particular stretch of road are already under way.

"I think if we had better information and better coordination then we could really go a long way to relieving gridlock," Millet says. What free driving we do should get easier - nobody was surprised when GPS navigation technology filtered down from luxury models to production cars; expect the same to happen with everything from smart cruise control, which uses radar to match the speed of the car in front, to infrared night-vision displays on windscreens.

"The big problem we'll run into is that as we put more computers and more electronics in the cars then where is the electricity going to come from?" Millet says. "I think we'll see fuel cells come on board to generate electricity because the alternator cannot bear the demand we'll be putting on it."

Fuel cells - hi-tech batteries that draw power from a simple chemical reaction between fuel and air - could replace the current electric batteries found inside the increasingly popular hybrid cars. However, barring an extraordinary rise in oil prices, it's unlikely that anything will arrive by 2020 to seriously challenge the dominance of the internal combustion engine.

Ignition keys could be consigned to a museum, however, and there is good news for the generation that grew up watching Knight Rider. "Voice-pattern recognition is coming," Millet says. "It's been slower than we thought but this business of being able to talk to your computer is definitely possible within 20 years. People are just going to have to be careful about what they say." And although expensive prototypes capable of crossing water and even taking to the skies have already been developed, the future of the automobile is undoubtedly a little more down to earth.

Just don't expect technology to have delivered that sight beloved of science fiction movies: cars flying down the street, hovering in the air next to aerial doors. "We've looked at flying cars and I'm very sceptical," Millet says. "Having helicopters or flying cars is an enormous control problem and we have so much further we can go to improve land transportation. I think that will remain the preferred method."

And what of robots? Will the current crop of hi-tech vacuum cleaners, expensive electronic pets and clumsy humanoids evolve into anything you would actually want to have around the house for more than novelty value?

"Do we really want that?" says Paul Newman, a robotics expert at Oxford University. "If I built a robot to do the dishes and it got it right 98% of the time then I'd be pretty pleased with it because it's way beyond what we can do now. But if it broke two out of 100 dishes then you would throw it out after a month."

We are still a long way from developing robots that can interact with humans on any meaningful level, because their artificial intelligence brains simply cannot cope with change and unpredictable events - or anything they are not programmed to respond to. "That's why robots do so well in car factories because you can engineer a situation to be absolutely predictable," explains Newman.

Where robots will definitely make strides by 2020 is in places where sending a person would be hazardous, costly or impossible: there is already talk of sending a robot to fix the Hubble space telescope later this decade; by 2020 fleets of underwater robots could patrol the oceans, surfacing regularly to beam back environmental data on temperature, acidity and salinity. "Then if we had a machine that was only 70% successful that's a whole lot better because previously we couldn't do it in the first place," Newman says.

But to go beyond the performance of repetitive data-gathering or maintenance tasks, robots must be able to answer the simple question: where am I? "Fundamentally it's just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and real tree," Newman says.

Still, great advances in artificial intelligence by 2020 cannot be ruled out - although they would be dependent on the kinds of things we cannot predict. "You're talking about the Isaac Newton of AI coming along," Newman says. "It could happen next month - someone could produce something and we all say, 'Of course, why didn't we think of that?'"

The same is true in other fields, too. "If we could find different ways to create energy or lift things off the ground, that would be really helpful," says Lewis at the CSIS. "That's the kind of breakthrough that doesn't appear to be on the horizon, but if someone locks on to something then someday we might see something very different emerge. That's what I would look for."

Who will be who

Ever wondered who will be holding down Britain's top jobs - from Labour leader to Queen Vic licensee - in 2020? We canvassed expert opinion to bring you the definitive list. Just don't hold us to it ...

 

James Bond

Who Ioan Gruffudd
Current job Actor, best known as Horatio Hornblower for ITV
Age now 30

Nominated by Nick James, editor of Sight & Sound magazine

Ioan Gruffudd made the leap from TV heartthrob to blockbuster star this summer when he appeared as Lancelot in King Arthur. He's already shown the versatility to go far, and Nick James believes he could become the second Welsh James Bond, following in the footsteps of Timothy Dalton. "He's got the right kind of mysterious look about him," says Dalton. "What kind of Bond he will be depends on how he would play it, but he'll be 46 by then, and will have more physical presence. I think he could be quite sardonic."

Vice-chancellor, University of Cambridge

Who? Martha Lane Fox
Current job Non-executive director, Lastminute.com
Age now 31

Nominated by Edward Luce of the Times Higher Education Supplement

"In 2020, the Cambridge vice-chancellor - or rather chief executive - will be preoccupied with marketing its global brand in an increasingly cut-throat marketplace," says Edward Luce. "With dwindling state funding, the challenge will be to maximise revenues from fee-paying students - sorry, customers - star professors, spin-off companies, alumni contributions and business sponsorship deals. Forget scholarly credentials; what will be needed is a name and a brain that can spearhead marketing campaigns - with an entrepreneurial zeal to match."

Monarch

Who? Queen Elizabeth II
Current job Monarch
Age now 78

Nominated by James Whittaker, royal correspondent for the Daily Mirror

Prince Charles will still be waiting for his day on the throne come 2020, reckons James Whittaker, although the Prince of Wales will be 71 by the time the year arrives. Nor will Prince William, with middle age approaching, be donning the crown. Instead, the Queen will have reached her 94th year and be entering her 68th year as monarch. "I would think it's unlikely that Prince Phillip will still be around then, but the Queen will still be going strong," Whittaker says. "I hope she will, anyway. She'll be a merry widow."

England football manager

Who? Leroy Rosenior
Current job Torquay United manager
Age now 40

Nominated by Hugh Sleight, editor of FourFourTwo magazine

Torquay United isn't famed as a breeding ground for football legends, but the Gulls' current manager is tipped for the country's top football job. "He could be the first black England manager," says Hugh Sleight. "There are very very few black managers anywhere in English football, and he's part of a new wave." Football culture will need to change for that to happen, however, because black people still face discrimination in non-playing roles. "You simply have to work a lot harder," Rosenior said earlier this year. "It is a challenge. You have to change people's perceptions."

Leader of the Labour party

Who? Hilary Benn
Current job Secretary of state for international development
Age now 50

Nominated by Mark Seddon, editor of Tribune magazine

Hilary Benn will have only have been a cabinet minister for a year next month. Since entering parliament in 1999, Tony's boy - the third of successive generations of his family to reach cabinet level - has made a rapid rise through the ranks of government and has attracted a number of admirers. "His political dynasty, track record as a minister, and regard in which the Labour party holds him would all make him a good choice," says Mark Seddon. "But he will have to reinvent himself, as by then the Labour party will have moved to the left."

BBC director general

Who? Helen Boaden
Current job Head of news, BBC
Age now 48

Nominated by Conor Dignam, editor of Broadcast magazine

Helen Boaden took over from Richard Sambrook as head of BBC News in July, charged with steering the corporation's news output back on course after the trials of the post-Hutton period. She had previously been the controller of Radio 4, which last year enjoyed a record-breaking audience of 10 million - and which Boaden claimed had "reconnected with the rock'n'roll generation". The DG in 2020 is "likely to be one of the younger, high-profile women in the BBC's management", says Conor Dignam, "and she's the most likely choice".

Poet Laureate

Who? Mark Ford
Current job Poet, senior lecturer in English at University College London
Age now 44

Nominated by John Sutherland, professor of modern English literature at University College London

"There's no question that the most promising poet of the age is Mark Ford - he's the man of the moment," says the Guardian columnist John Sutherland of his UCL colleague Mark Ford, who has authored two acclaimed collections , Landlocked and Soft Sift, as well as a study of the French writer Raymond Roussel. "He's come out of the New York school, and is the British Ron Silliman. John Ashbery and Helen Vendler, who is the kingmaker of British poets, have both anointed him."

Archbishop of Canterbury

Who? Canon Dr Judith Maltby
Current job Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Age now 46

Nominated by Rev Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney, writer and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford

An awful lot would have to change in the Church of England before Judith Maltby could be enthroned in Canterbury: the church doesn't currently allow women to be ordained as bishops. She would also be the first American to head the worldwide Anglican communion. She has denied any interest in becoming a bishop, but her admirers would be keen for her to change her mind. "She's clever, she has a strong sense of social justice, and we need women in positions of power in the CofE," says Giles Fraser.

Licensee of the Queen Vic, EastEnders

Who? Chloe Jackson
Current job Infant
Age now Three

Nominated by Kevin O'Sullivan, Daily Mirror features editor and soap fan

When Sonia Jackson gave birth to her daughter Chloe in October 2000, it came as a huge shock to the residents of Albert Square - Sonia didn't even know she was pregnant. Although Sonia and Martin Fowler, Chloe's father, had her adopted, the laws of soap demand she return to the show. "If I was an EastEnders scriptwriter I'd bring her back into the show when she is grownup and put her behind the bar," says Kevin O'Sullivan. He fears, though, that Peggy Mitchell, played by Barbara Windsor, might well cling on to the licence at the Vic - "and by then she'll have had about 400 facelifts".

Leader of the Conservative party

Who? David Cameron
Current job Chief policy coordinator for the Conservative party
Age now 37

Nominated by Quentin Letts, Daily Mail parliamentary sketchwriter

David Cameron is at the centre of the "Notting Hill set", the group of young Tories close to Michael Howard's heart, and is charged with masterminding the party's election strategy. The old Etonian became an MP in 2001, having previously been head of corporate affairs for Carlton. "By 2020 he will be greying nicely around the temples, and will look a bit like Richard Gere," says Quentin Letts. "His raffish good looks will help, as Tory leaders always used to be good-looking - Anthony Eden and Edward Heath were both pin-ups in their day."

Chief excecutive of Marks & Spencer

Who? Karan Bilimoria
Current job chief executive of Cobra Beer
Age now 43

Nominated by Adrian Chiles, presenter of BBC2's daily business programme, Working Lunch

Recently it has been tricky predicting the top people at M&S from one week to the next. But Karan Bilimoria could be a good bet for the longer-term future. He is one of the UK's most successful businessmen, and this year returns to his alma mater in the unlikely sounding post of visiting entrepreneur at Cambridge University. "He took Cobra Beer from nothing into one of the big beer brands," says Adrian Chiles. "He may not be as passionate about the M&S brand, as it's not his own, but having spent some time with him, he's my man."

Director of Tate

Who? A current student on the MA course in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art
Age now Mid-20s

Nominated by Brian Sewell, art critic for the London Evening Standard

It will be little surprise that Brian Sewell, the scourge of so many artistic institutions, is not wholly optimistic about the future of the Tate, and believes it will be a long job to make it great. "My inclination is to say the director would be somebody who comes out of the curating course at the RCA. They would be about 25 at the moment; by then they'd be about 40 or so," he says. "But anybody with half an ounce of sense would clear out all the present reconstruction of the Tate Modern building and do something sensible with it."

Governor of the Bank of England

Who? Shriti Vadera
Current job Economic adviser to Gordon Brown
Age now She's not saying

Nominated by Evan Davis, BBC economics editor

Shriti Vadera, a publicity-shy former banker, is one of the key figures behind the scenes in the Treasury, where she has been central to the development of public-private partnerships. She's the main point of contact between the Treasury and the City, and has impressed those she has dealt with. "She combines financial expertise and political common sense," says Evan Davis. "Her appointment would be greeted with gushing enthusiasm everywhere, from City wine bars to high-street charity shops - she is on Oxfam's council of trustees."

Archbishop of Westminster

Who? Right Rev Declan Lang
Current job Bishop of Clifton
Age now 54

Nominated by Catherine Pepinster, editor of the Tablet

A shrinking coastline

How does it feel to live in a village that may not even exist by the time 2020 rolls around?

 

The haze of mid-July hangs over Happisburgh. A great fug of warmth smothers the tourists and motor cars flowing as sluggishly as treacle towards the coast in search of some brisk maritime air. They find it where wind whips off the North Sea, through the dunes, up Beach Road, and over the cricket field to dance among the branches in the churchyard.

Happisburgh is a village of some 850 people, sitting on the Norfolk coast, 40 miles north-east of Norwich. There is a pub, a post office, a primary school, and tentative claims to have housed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. There is even a resident ghost, who goes by the rather gruesome moniker of the Happisburgh Torso. Rising up out of the cluster of houses are St Mary's Church and, a little way out, a red-and-white-striped lighthouse, each gazing staunchly out over the sea: God and man levelling an ever watchful eye over the waves.

In the case of Happisburgh that watch is increasingly necessary. For centuries the coast here has been steadily, silently eroding; the sedimentary rock that formed 12,000 years ago is proving no match for the might of the North Sea. In the past few years, the erosion has gathered pace and it is now moving six times faster than the experts had predicted - in just 15 years, 25 seafront homes have been lost and many more teeter on the edge. A 2001 report claimed the parish church might be likely to disappear within 20 years. By 2020, Happisburgh as we know it may very well not exist. The government has already written it off.

It is a most forlorn tale, one exacerbated by bureaucracy, politics and the lack of hard cash. In 1958 wooden revetments were built along the beach in an effort to damp the force of the waves, reducing the rate of erosion to a mere couple of inches a year. When the revetments were worn away in the early 1990s, after 35 years of faithful service, the district council removed them and began to speak of a concrete sea wall. Funds, however, were not forthcoming. Since then, there have been no replacement revetments, and the council has grown quiet on the subject of the sea wall. Meanwhile the sea has continued to lick slowly but steadily away at the coast, like a child with an enormous lollipop.

"It is a little worrying for a village which holds the backdoor key to the Norfolk Broads," says Malcolm Kirby, a retired company director who moved to Happisburgh five and a half years ago and now runs the Coastal Concern Action Group. He says there are a number of reasons for Happisburgh's terrible problems with erosion: an offshore granite reef system, for one; the hulking great concrete sea walls further up the coast, for another; and the aggregate dredging off Great Yarmouth, where, in the 11 years between 1992 and 2002, over 114 million tonnes were dredged from the area, making a hole in the coastline's natural defence system. "There's nothing natural about this 3km gap where Happisburgh sits," Kirby says. "Man has interrupted the natural situation, so he has no choice but to continue that defence."

Meanwhile, the sea rises stealthily, tip-toeing up the coast when our backs are turned, each year adding to the weight of water that is sweeping away the rocks upon which Happisburgh stands. Global warming brings the sea level up 3mm every 12 months, and the shifting of tectonic plates adds a further 2mm, to make a net rise of 5mm a year. "It doesn't sound very much," says Kirby. "But when you look at the North Sea, the vastness of it, you can't imagine how much water is contained in that 5mm rise. It's mind-bogglingly huge."

The next homes to succumb to the waves will be the stately Edwardian houses on Beach Road. "And they can't be insured for landslip or heave," Kirby sighs. As the sea sneaks closer, the houses will be demolished and the residents offered council accommodation, but there will be no government compensation. The village suffers in other ways, too: should the erosion continue at its current pace, tourism will inevitably decline, and "those eight weeks of summer to put enough meat round the bone" - as Kirby puts it - will grow thinner.

It is a strange truth that as our metropolises grow ever more corpulent, our island's very seams seem to be fraying. Happisburgh's passing will not only be the death of a village, but the loss of a sweet kernel of British life. It is how we all like to think of the British seaside, a Betjeman poem writ large: it is doors left unlocked, ice cream wafers on the front and the soft, slow swish of the sea against the shore. This is how we remember it, and this is how we wish it preserved, as in aspic. But the cold truth is that when we go back, it may not be there.

If one wished to speculate on the future of Happisburgh, one need only gaze out to sea, where the remains of most of the village of Eccles lie beneath the waves. Legend holds that the village was swallowed up by the sea during the 17th century: one storm saw the loss of more than 70 houses, and with them, 300 lives. Skeletons from the Eccles churchyard still wash up on the shore.

No city limits

You might hate them, but the world's expanding cities are a way out of poverty for millions.
 

Rubbishing cities is a popular sport. Not simply because of the garbage, graffiti, pollution, congestion and crowds people complain about - there is something about the very essence of cities and their inhabitants that offends. too. When Brighton and Hove succeeded in its bid to become a Millennial city, for instance, Julie Burchill declared that wanting to be a city was "about as sensible and life-affirming as wanting to be a wart".

Surveys have shown that, while around three-quarters of Britain's town- and country-dwellers are satisfied with their quality of life, only about 10% of urbanites are happy. According to Burchill, that's why you see so many of them on the Brighton seafront every weekend - "thousands of Londoners set free for the day, blinking and smiling with surprise at all this light and space, poor mole-people above ground at last."

But whatever people say about cities, their behaviour tells a different story. More people live in cities now than ever before. In the 1700s less than 10% of the world's population were city-dwellers. By 1900 the proportion had reached 25%; today it stands at around 50% and the trend is set to continue. Soon, two out of every three people on Earth will be living in a city. Will they all be complaining, or will the city have become a better place?

At the very least, life in cities should offer more variety and be more fulfilling than a life spent scratching a bare living direct from the soil; it might even be more fun. But as cities have severed the ties that once bound people firmly to the land, so the links between urban and rural environments have become more important than ever. The inhabitants of today's cities are more utterly dependent on the services of nature than at any previous time in history. We tend to forget that, while London, Paris, Venice, New York and numerous other cities sustain and entertain millions of us, cities are monstrous parasites, consuming the resources of regions vastly larger than themselves and giving very little back. In fact, though cities today occupy only 2% of Earth's land surface, they consume more than 75% of its resources. The implications of that are powerfully illustrated by a concept environmental scientists developed during the 1990s: the ecological footprint.

Question: "What is 120 times the size of London?" Answer: "The land area required to supply London's needs." Having analysed the workings of London as though the city were a giant machine, consuming resources and spewing out wastes, researchers found that although the city itself occupies an area of only about 1,500 square kilometres, London actually requires roughly 20 million square kilometres of territory for its supplies and waste disposal. This is London's ecological footprint. Though the city is home to just 12% of Britain's population, it uses the equivalent of all Britain's productive land. In reality, of course, the horizons that supply London extend beyond the British Isles to the wheat prairies of Kansas, the soybean fields of the Mato Grosso, the forests of Scandinavia - and thousands of other locations.

The ecological footprints of many cities have been assessed in this way, and the results are uniformly alarming. Vancouver, for instance, though rated highly in terms of the quality of life its half a million residents enjoy, has an ecological footprint more than 200 times the size of the city. The 29 largest cities of the Baltic Sea drainage system appropriate the resources of an area 565 times larger than the land they occupy.

Furthermore, the assessment of ecological footprints puts a measure on the enormous disparities in resource appropriation that have opened up between the world's developed and developing regions. For example: each of North America's 300 million inhabitants consumes the resources of about 4.7 hectares (11.75 acres) per year on average - the equivalent of almost 10 soccer pitches. That is a huge, disproportionate chunk of Earth's surface, especially when compared with the average of just 0.4 hectare (about half the size of the centre court at Wimbledon) that each of India's one billion inhabitants manages on. And consider this: 80% of North Americans live in cities - many without even a windowbox, never mind a productive garden the size of 10 soccer pitches. In India only 30% of people live in cities; the remainder are sustained entirely by their notional half a tennis court.

Meanwhile, of course, global resources have remained finite. Ominously, as the human population has risen above 6 billion, and cities have grown to accommodate an ever larger proportion of them, the ecologically productive land "available" to each person has decreased, from about 5.6 hectares per person in 1900 to three hectares in 1950, and down to no more than 1.5 hectares now. That means that the ecological footprint of the average North American (4.7 hectares) is more than three times his or her share of Earth's resources. So, if living standards everywhere were raised to levels that the average North American enjoys, we would need three planets to provide for them all. That's not an option, but redressing the balance between urban and rural environments could help.

Given the success of the evolutionary trajectory humanity pursued for the first few million years - no other species has achieved such total dominance of the global environment - cities are a complete contradiction. It is biology that drives evolution and, from a biological point of view, cities are a seriously bad idea. The dangers of disease multiply when people are crowded together, and our aversion to squalor and unpleasant odours is a measure of the depth at which an innate acknowledgement of those dangers is set in our evolutionary history. We are social animals, true enough, but there are limits, and our hunting and gathering ancestors probably had the numbers about right. They were nomadic, moving around in groups of up to 40 or so, and never staying long enough in one place for pathogens to build up to potentially deadly levels. But cities have been - quite literally - the breeding grounds of disease.

Bacterial and viral diseases are the price humanity has paid to live in large and densely populated cities. Virtually all the familiar infectious diseases have evolved only since the advent of agriculture, permanent settlement and the growth of cities. Most were transferred to humans from animals - especially domestic animals. Measles, for instance, is akin to rinderpest in cattle; influenza came from pigs; smallpox is related to cowpox. Humans share 296 diseases with domestic animals.

Thus, until comparatively recent times, cities had a well-earned reputation for being unhealthy places. In the early 19th century half the children born in Manchester died before they were five years old; in London half died before the age of three, and conditions were even worse in Vienna and Stockholm, where half died before they were two. No wonder demographers and historians write of the "urban graveyard effect". Deaths exceeded births in all great cities. The amazing thing is that cities continued to grow. Despite their deathly reputation, more and more people wanted to live in them.

Between 1551 and 1801, for instance, the population of London grew more than tenfold, from 80,000 to 865,000, even though deaths consistently exceeded births throughout those 250 years. Left to its own reproductive capacity, London would have died out. It survived and grew by attracting thousands of migrants from the countryside, where death rates were generally 50% lower than in the cities, and birth rates 13% higher. Clearly, living conditions were healthier in the countryside. But, as agriculture and cottage industries such as spinning and weaving were mechanised, redundant labour had no choice but to seek employment elsewhere - and the industrial cities beckoned.

In the 30 years to 1910, Vienna's population trebled to more than 2 million in this way; the population of Paris soared from 2.25 million to 4.8 million during roughly the same period, and London gained 3.5 million new residents. New York grew from a city of 1.9 million in 1875 to become the home of nearly 8 million people by 1925, making it the world's largest city. New York was still leading in 1950, with 12.3 million inhabitants; and again in 1960, with 14.2 million; but by 1970 the greatest growth had moved around the globe. Japan's postwar economic achievements had pushed Tokyo into first place, with 16.5 million inhabitants, a position it still holds. At the time of writing, second place is taken by Mexico City, an ascendancy indicating that economic vitality is no longer a primary determinant of city growth. Huge cities have been appearing in all parts of the world - in poor countries as well as in the regions of greatest wealth. In 1970 only three cities - Tokyo, New York and Shanghai - had 10 million or more inhabitants; 30 years later there were 19 of them, 14 in the developing world. And the trend is set to continue: by 2020 at least 23 cities will have passed the 10 million mark, all but four in developing countries. By then, several cities in the developing world are likely to have populations of more than 20 million. In all, nearly 600 cities will have a million or more inhabitants by 2020. Of those, more than 400 will be in developing countries.

The quality of life for many in the cities of the developing world is desperately low, with squatter or slum housing being the norm rather than the exception. But, contrary to the idealised western view of the countryside as a haven to which city-dwellers yearn to escape, conditions are far worse in the rural areas. The cities may be poor, but the countryside is poorer still.

The brutal fact is that, while one-third or more of city-dwellers in the developing world live on or below the poverty line, only about one-third of the rural population lives above it. A typical study of urbanisation in the developing world concludes that despite appalling housing conditions, lack of fresh water and services, minimal health care and few chances of finding a job, the urban poor are on average "better off than their rural cousins, on almost every indicator of social and economic well-being".

The balance of power

We can still have all the electricity we want in 2020. But we need to learn to love renewables

 

What will happen when the gas runs out, when the deepest oil well of the Arabian peninsula finally runs dry, when the giant drills of the offshore platforms reach nothing but dry rock? Will we face a future of blackouts and electricity rationing, or will we find a way to avert the doomiest scenarios and continue living lives in which energy consumption is crucial to everything we do.

Think of the electricity you use in a day. You are woken by the clock radio buzzing into life, and you turn the bathroom light on as you climb into your power shower. After dressing you head downstairs, where you turn on another radio, put some bread into the toaster and turn on the kettle, getting the milk from your fridge to put in your tea. After breakfast you head to work, where the lights are burning - and on go the computer and desktop fan.

Those are just the most obvious of personal uses and the day has barely even begun. How can we possibly sustain such a level of usage? In short: renewable energy sources.

There is no longer any doubt that renewable energies will play a large part in the future of mankind. If politicians show sufficient will and intelligence, and invest in a raft of new technologies, then we should be able to maintain our electricity supply and, as a beneficial side-effect, avert the disaster of rapid global warming.

But as with the debate about nuclear power in the 1980s, it will not be environmental arguments that win the day, but economics.

Nuclear power lost out not because of the vexed question of radioactive waste but because the truth finally emerged that it was a very expensive way to keep the lights on.

When oil and natural gas begin to run out - and, more importantly, when demand exceeds supply - their prices will escalate and the cost of using them to generate electricity will become prohibitive. Continuing to use coal or, worse, increasing the quantity we burn will be more and more unacceptable, because it will add to the excessive quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those factors make both renewables and nuclear more and more competitive.

The renewables revolution has begun already, because researchers are anticipating the moment when renewables become economic. Although there are a range of renewables already in use, the contribution to world energy production - hydropower aside - remains relatively minor, at less than 1%. But there is a large selection of new renewables under research and development.

Hydropower is already one of the largest and most established forms of renewable energy, providing 19% of the world's electricity. Of the others, geothermal is a long established and growing energy resource, and wind power is already a mainstream technology. A variety of other smaller technologies are also already economic, the best of which involves using methane from landfill sites. Across the world a mixture of other fuels from specially grown trees, forest offcuts, pig slurry, straw and even chicken litter are generating power. And there are others that are, as yet, underexploited but with great potential: solar is growing fast, and tidal, ocean currents and wave power are also undergoing rapid development. Further ahead, though not before 2020, lots of other possibilities exist - the prospect of the hydrogen economy and completely clean energy production has led to much excited speculation.

In Europe, money is being poured into wave and tidal power. Undersea turbines, working on much the same principle as wind turbines, are already in operation in the UK and Norway. Their potential is huge, particularly because all along the Atlantic coast with its large tides, and many inlets and islands, there are countless sites for exploiting the power of the sea. And unlike the winds, tides are completely predictable.

Wave power has great potential in exactly the same areas, and although the technical difficulties already encountered in its development means it has been expensive, there are many companies confident they can make it work.

There is a race among developed countries to become leaders in these new technologies because of their vast potential to create jobs and exports.

Geothermal technology is increasing in regional importance, particularly in countries that do not have a wind, tidal or wave resource. This heat is as inexhaustible and renewable as solar energy and comes from hot rocks near the earth's surface. Water is pumped into the hot ground and used on its return to the surface to create electricity and for district heating. The main geothermal areas of this type are located in New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Philippines, the western coastal Americas, the central and eastern parts of the Mediterranean, Iceland, the Azores and eastern Africa.

But while all that sounds very exciting, leading environmental groups and engineers to take on the challenges of developing energy technology, mainstream organisations such as the World Energy Council still see fossil fuels dominating the agenda in 2020. That is mainly because the worldwide demand for electricity is escalating so fast they cannot see renewables catching up with the demand. The council is first to admit it could be wrong. It all depends on how quickly the oil and gas begin to run out.

And then there is the nuclear question. It is not only the renewable industry that sees opportunities in the coming energy crisis and in our fears about the devastating effects of global warming. The nuclear industry rightly claims it provides a reliable source of energy that does not produce the carbon dioxide that fossil fuels do. But nuclear power is still dogged by the old, familiar problems: it takes a long time to take a nuclear power station from the drawing board to production; nor has anyone yet come up with a satisfactory method of disposing of nuclear waste. Neither of those disadvantages are attached to the new renewables.

Currently there are 444 nuclear reactors worldwide, producing 16% of the world's electricity. Some countries rely on nuclear power for most of their electricity. France is the top of the list, generating 75% of its electricity in nuclear power stations. But most of the countries that have a lot of reactors - particularly in North America and Europe, with Japan also on the list - have stopped building new ones or have curtailed their programmes. As a result the closure programme is exceeding the rate of new building.

But that does not mean there will be no nuclear revival. The nuclear industry is looking to expand into the growing economies of Asia, particularly in China, South Korea and India. China has just ordered four new stations and may confirm another four before Christmas. There are said to be plans to build two a year but even that expansion would only account for a tiny part of the massive need for power in that vast and fast-growing economy. Even the fourfold increase in the rate of Chinese nuclear expansion which the industry hopes to see by 2020 would provide less than 20% of the country's power. Other solutions are needed.

The nuclear industry's other hope for a big push is the United States, not only because it is the world's largest economy but also because it is the one most dependent on oil and gas, and the one that wastes most of both. The energy crisis, when it comes, is going to hit first, and worst, the US. It is from there that the political push to make the world change course may come.

The current administration does not give the world many reasons to hope. President George Bush was the man who repudiated the Kyoto protocol, which was designed to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto was one of the drivers of the renewable revolution and the fact that it has stalled because of the objections of the US and indecision of Russia has slowed progress towards their greater use.

Despite his links to the oil industry, Dick Cheney, the vice president, pushed hard at the start of Bush's four-year term for a revival of the nuclear dream. So far nothing has happened, partly because of continued public resistance in the US and partly because of the lack of private investment. But the main barrier still remains the large capital cost of building a new nuclear power station. If you forget the costs of the pollution caused by fossil fuels (which is what the US does in its energy planning) then new coal or gas stations are far cheaper.

But part of America's charm is its diversity of view. In August, California announced a plan to subsidise solar power for one million homes by surcharging consumers about 15 pence a month. The state aims to rival Japan and Germany in being a world leader in solar power.

This debate about whether nuclear power is a viable energy source for the future has also started to grip Europe. Despite the heat being generated in the debate, expansion does not seem a viable option, mainly because of public resistance. Instead, many of the countries of western Europe have invested heavily in wind power, particularly Portugal, Spain, France, Denmark and Germany.

In the UK, where nuclear stations are closing on a regular basis as they reach the end of their lives, about 20% of electricity still comes from reactors. However, there would be serious obstacles to building a new station, as a minority demands. It is estimated it would be 2020 before a new station could be finished, even if planning began now. By that time wind power will be producing about 15% of the UK's power, replacing the lost nuclear production.

The opponents of the nuclear option say the future lies in the new breed of renewables, the potential of which is only now being fully understood. Although there is still room for more hydropower, it is the new technologies that hold out most hope.

Oil and troubled water

Nobody expects the world's oil reserves to last forever. The question is, when will they run out, and how serious will the knock-on effects be?


The oil jitters we saw this summer are likely to become commonplace as this decade progresses. This year, oil prices became news when the price of a barrel approached the $50 barrier. The knock-on effects were huge. For motorists, the prospect of the price of a litre of petrol rising towards a pound edged closer. For the stock markets, however, rising oil prices spelled panic.

Energy prices affect the world economy more than any other single factor. A stable economic future depends on the oil supply always keeping pace with worldwide demand. But an increasing number of experts believe that stability will soon disappear. This is known as the tip-over point, the moment at which demand exceeds supply and prices begin to rocket. The result, apart from the possibility of a worldwide recession, will be to spur investment in alternative energies. But will they be sufficiently developed to take the strain?

The problem is who to believe. Oil is still being discovered, but consumption is rising at around 3% a year and oil wells elsewhere are running dry. Oil production is well past its peak in the US, and is running out in the North Sea - just 30 years after it was first exploited. Most of the world's reserves remain in the Middle East. The amount Iraq and Saudi Arabia pump into the world economy over the next 10 years will make a decisive difference to whether the tip-over point is reached.

Some experts believe it will be reached by 2007. Dr Colin Campbell, a founder of the Association of Peak Oil, says the number of new oil discoveries has been declining since 1964. Given the need for continually increasing production, he believes oil supplies won't be able to keep pace with demand within three years.

Traditionally inclined experts, including the World Energy Council, expect discoveries to continue, and shortfalls to be made up by new extraction technologies that will allow oil to be taken from shale deposits. But these predictions rest on a lot of assumptions.

What is clear is that everyone is guessing, even if everyone claims their guess is better informed than anyone else's. One point they all agree on is that the oil and gas will run out: the arguments are about when, and how soon demand will exceed supply. But for now, the world carries on as if oil was going to last for ever. Everyone must accept that the more oil we use, the quicker tip-over point will be reached.

The drowned world

Icecaps will be melting, sea levels will be rising ... If you don't like today's weather then wait for the horrors we could face by 2020


"Good morning. Here is the shipping forecast for midday, June 21 2020. Seas will be calm, and visibility will range from good to excellent for the next 24 hours. The sea lanes from Bergen to Tokyo via the north-east passage will largely be free of ice, but occasional small floes may drift near the Siberian coast. The north-west passage from Europe to Fairbanks, Alaska, and Vancouver will also be clear, although iceberg hazards cannot be ruled out between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The Bering Strait was, for the fourth time in the past decade, free of ice for the entire winter and will remain open for the rest of the summer."

That's just the Arctic. By the summer of 2020, global warming will have had such devastating effect on the northern icecap that European ships may routinely cross the high latitudes to take the short routes to Asia and the Pacific. The Arctic Ocean, once frozen solid all winter and choked with hazardous floes for most of the summer, could be one of the friendlier seas. The perilous shortcuts that defied the heroic attempts of the Englishman Martin Frobisher and the Dutchman Willem Barents more than 400 years ago may soon become not just plain sailing, but the standard summer sea route from Europe to the Pacific.

Cruise tourists and shipping magnates might wish to thank global warming. But the chances are they will not. That is because one of the Arctic's great spectacles, the polar bear, will have taken a dive: they need the sea ice to survive. For them, the ice is the way to a diet of seals, walruses and small whales. When the floes go, ursus maritimus will be on the road to extinction.

The polar bear's base of operations has been shrinking inexorably as the planet warms. Over the past 40 years, the sheath of ice that covered the Arctic Ocean has thinned by 40%. The area covered by ice has also shrunk by more than 25%. Although much climate science is necessarily based on indirect evidence, the state of the Arctic Ocean has been monitored directly by people whose lives depend on the accuracy of their measurements. US, Russian and British nuclear submarines began charting the thickness of Arctic ice at the height of the cold war, and satellite cameras have been recording seasonal changes in ice cover for more than three decades. The conclusions are beyond dispute and the process is unstoppable. By 2020, according to the US Office of Naval Research, the north-east and north-west passages should be navigable. By 2050, according to the UK Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in summer.

That will happen because although the planet as a whole is warming perceptibly, the Arctic is warming eight times faster - largely because of a phenomenon called the albedo effect.

Put simply, white reflects light, but dark absorbs it. So the sunlight crashing on to the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, the Alpine and tropical glaciers, and the snows of the great mountain chains bounces back into space. In effect, ice is its own insulator: glaciers tend to keep themselves glacial even in the summer.

But once ice starts to melt, dark ocean or rock is exposed. That absorbs the heat, and begins to accelerate the melting process. As long as the average temperatures stay low, there is a natural brake: in high summer, snow evaporates but falls again in winter, to replace the melting ice and to keep conditions more or less stable. The problem is that things have begun to change. Glaciers in Alaska and the mountains of tropical Africa are in retreat, and climate scientists have predicted that by 2020 the snows of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya will have vanished.

In Europe, Alpine economies built on skiing and other mountain sports will have begun to fail. In south Asia, for at least part of the year, snow melt is the only source of water for millions of farmers.

Adventure tourists will lose their holidays. Others stand to lose rather more. On the Indian subcontinent, half a billion people depend on the Indus and Ganges rivers, whose sources lie among melting snows of the the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram and the western Himalaya. But these great snowfields, too, are disappearing.

All this is on the basis of an annual global average temperature rise of 0.1C a decade up to now. But it wouldn't take much to make things change faster, and those changes would be irreversible. If global average temperatures rise by more than 2.7C, according to calculations published in Nature in April, then the great sheet of ice that covers Greenland will start to melt faster than it can be replaced. The Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark warned this summer that the ice sheet, which covers 772,000 square miles and is up to two miles thick, is melting 10 times quicker than previously thought. The sheet is thinning at 10 metres per year, not one metre. It could take 1,000 years for the sheet to completely disappear, but as it does so, sea levels will begin to rise by about 7mm a year. Once all the ice has gone, the world's oceans will have risen by around seven metres.

This will happen, because global temperatures seem likely to rise by far more than 2.7C. Ten years ago, the UN's Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set up to study global warming proposed a maximum temperature rise of about 3C by 2100. Three years ago, IPCC revised that prediction. The maximum temperature rise during the present century is set at almost 6C. And the predicted maximum temperature rise for Greenland is put at up to 8C.

That is not the only danger posed by the thawing of the world's cold places. The Arctic regions are rimmed by permafrost: regions of tundra that enjoy an urgent spring, a brief, brilliant summer and then a long, hostile winter. These landscapes hold stores of ancient carbon and methane in the form of decaying vegetation imprisoned for 10,000 years or more. Once the permafrost starts to melt, awesome quantities of carbon dioxide and methane - two potent greenhouse gases - will be released from thawing peat bogs to accelerate the warming process yet further. This climate phenomenon is known as "positive feedback".

By 2020, then, the Arctic will have begun to change for ever. The adventure tales of the past will be distant history: stories of explorers fighting their way by sled across the perilous frozen seas will be science fiction to young readers and nostalgic yearnings for a lost world to their parents.

"Here is the long-term weather forecast for the tropical and temperate zones at midday, June 21 2020. After a series of increasingly wet winters, northern Europe could once again be at risk of a lethal heat wave. Forest fires are raging in the Iberian Peninsula, southern France and the Balkans. Water rationing has once again been imposed in California. Relief agencies have warned that late rains raise the spectre of widespread hunger in the Sahel and southern Africa. Bangladesh, however, is once more preparing for catastrophic floods."

It's a matter of simple physics: a warmer world means a rising sea level. Warm water is less dense than cold, so some of the sea level rise will happen just because the water already in the oceans has begun to expand. But sea levels have begun to rise still further with the melting of continental ice and the retreat of the glaciers. The effects of the rise will only slowly become apparent - even the most pessimistic predictions suggest that by 2100 the sea level will only be a metre higher - but even at that slow rate many millions of people will be imperilled. Sea level rise is a threat to anybody who lives at or a fraction above sea level, and especially to citizens of those countries classed as developing. That, of course, means poor.

For such people, the future looks very bleak. There are 54 members of the Commonwealth. Only six of these are classed as developed nations. Around 93% of the Commonwealth lives in the other 48. Some of these countries may have no future at all. "If the scientific forecasts prove correct, then by the end of the century membership of the Commonwealth will have declined because two or three nations will have disappeared," warned Clive Hamilton, director of the Australian Institute, in September 2003. Two Commonwealth states - the Maldives and Tuvalu - are at risk of complete submersion by 2080. Two other groups of islands - Kiribati and the Bahamas - will be in a bad way, because almost all their territories lie below the four-metre mark.

Each of those states will already be facing periodic devastation and permanent crisis by 2020. The bedrock of many of the islands is coral limestone. Coral is a living thing, so if sea levels were to rise slowly enough - over 1,000 rather than 100 years - then coral could grow to keep up with the water levels. But coral is extremely sensitive to rising temperatures: the corals that make up most reefs and atolls are already at the limits of their temperature tolerance. Those reefs near human settlements are choked by man-made pollutants, and their ecologies have been permanently altered by intensive fishing.

Any increase in ocean temperatures means death by bleaching - the corals turn white and die. This has happened a number of times in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Great Barrier Reef near Australia, with cyclical rises in water temperatures. Those rises have been followed by cyclical falls, so the corals have had the chance to recover. But global warming means permanent heating, and the living corals that support life - both human and non-human - in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are expected to perish on a massive scale.

The coral won't be the only thing to suffer. The oceans will seep into the bedrock, polluting the subterranean fresh water. Agriculture will become impossible, supplies of drinking water will be minimal and as the waters rise the islands will start to drown in seawater.

Island dwellers, of course, will not be the only ones at risk. Hundreds of millions of people in densely populated countries with low-lying coastal plains or vast estuaries will come under threat from rising sea levels. According to Sir John Houghton, a former director of the UK Met Office and author of Global Warming: The Complete Briefing, a sea level rise of half a metre could sweep away or make uninhabitable about 10% of the habitable land of Bangladesh. That land is currently home to at least six million people. Sea levels will not need to rise by half a metre worldwide to make this happen: the delta region of Bangladesh is subsiding, partly because groundwater is being abstracted for agriculture to feed the nation's 140 million citizens.

By 2050, waters could have risen by a metre, claiming 20% of Bangladesh and displacing 15 million people. By 2100, the ocean may have encroached up the rivers almost as far as Dhaka, one of the world's fastest growing cities, and across the Indian border to the edge of Calcutta.

A glance around the world shows the same pattern being repeated again and again. In Egypt, a metre rise in the Mediterranean will mean the fertile lands of the Nile delta will disappear beneath the sea, claiming 12% of the country's arable land and displacing seven million people. A sea level rise of half a metre would also cause havoc in the Netherlands and in the Mississippi delta. But the difference between those two regions and those in the developing world is that the Dutch and the Americans already spend money on sea defences and can afford more. In China, a half-metre rise in the sea level could inundate the alluvial plains of the eastern coast, covering an area of land the size of the Netherlands, leaving 30 million homeless.

And if the sea doesn't get you, the storms will. Hurricanes and cyclones are freak events whose existence is controlled by sea temperatures. If the surface temperature of the ocean is below 26.5C, typhoons, tropical cyclones and hurricanes hardly happen. But with each rise of the mercury beyond that point they become more frequent and more ferocious. Savage storms, and the sea surges they bring, will pose huge threats to small island states and could scour low-lying land completely clear.

Twenty years ago, climate scientists warned that in a greenhouse world, the kind of fierce storms that had been once-a-century occurrences would come around every decade. The fatal combination of very high tide and tropical cyclone has hit Bangladesh and the Bengal coast of India many times. In 1991, one such storm surge claimed an estimated 139,000 lives. In 1970, another killed 300,000 people. UN researchers warned in June that an estimated one billion people live in the path of the kind of flood that used to occur every 100 years: by 2050, the number of potential victims could reach two billion.

If two billion people are at risk of dramatic inundation in 2020, around 2.3 billion others living in the world's water-poor nations could face an even more wretched future. They will see increasingly parched landscapes, empty wells, polluted lakes and rivers that run dry. UN experts calculated that in 2000, people in 30 nations faced water shortages. By 2020, they predict, that number will have risen to 50 nations.

As temperatures rise, more water will evaporate, but rainfall will remain capricious. Countries in the monsoon belt will face more severe droughts in the dry season but could also have to deal with more catastrophic flooding. Other regions - the southern Mediterranean, north Africa, southern Africa and the Sahel - could become even more arid, with olive groves succumbing to desertification. The great plains of North America, the breadbasket for the planet, could turn again into a dustbowl, delivering less and less grain to a world that acquires an extra 240,000 mouths to feed every single day.

The pattern of falling crop yields will be seen all over the planet. They are expected to decline by at least 10% in most African Commonwealth countries, and by even more in Mozambique, Tanzania, Botswana and Namibia. There could also be dramatic falls in food production in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, although harvests could increase by 10% in Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Papua New Guinea. Canada and New Zealand could also see dramatic increases in crop yields but Australia, already largely arid, will be one of the economic losers.

And forget the glib remarks about the one good side-effect of global warming being decent summers. In 2003, more than 20,000 people died in northern Europe because of a heat wave that saw Germany roasting in its hottest temperatures for 450 years. Climate scientists believe that if atmospheric warming continues unchecked, such heat waves can be expected every 20 years or so - so expect summer 2020 to be every bit as oppressive as last year.

"The summer of 2003 was a summer of the future," said Gerhard Berz, head of natural risks research at Munich Re, one of the insurance giants that has to calculate hazard and pick up the bill for floods, heat waves, ice storms, hurricanes, forest fires and droughts.

Global warming is expected to bring good news for some. But right now it looks like it will be delivering bad news to most people by 2020. The IPCC, the international consortium of climate scientists that has delivered increasingly urgent warnings since it was established in 1988, is that rare thing: a group of scientists who would love to be proved wrong. Their predictions have been made in the hope that governments will take action, and in doing so direct the planet towards a less fearful future. There is evidence that governments have been listening.

Action, however, has been slow. Acting now would be too late to avert the challenges of 2020. We are starting to see the effects of carbon emissions of a few decades ago: your fuel-efficient small car is an investment in the future, because we're currently paying for that great gas guzzler your family was driving in the 70s. Every cook who knows a bit about science understands a concept called thermal inertia: the gas is on full, but the kettle takes a few minutes to boil, and though the gas is off, it takes a while to cool down. We're still waiting for the earth to start

Can we predict the weather?

As Sam Goldwyn said, prediction is always difficult, especially of the future. There are huge uncertainties in climate forecasting. The planet is a complicated place: its climate is influenced by the interplay of sunlight, atmosphere, dust, ocean currents and rainfall; by the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles; by the topography of continents; by the balance of forests, wetlands, deserts, savannahs and oceans, as well as by the chemistry and biochemistry of the seas.

To grasp the patterns of the future, climate scientists have to know the pattern of climate change in the past. That means they have to examine the indirect evidence provided by ice cores, tree rings, coral growths, and mud samples from oceans and lakes in order to estimate greenhouse gas levels and average temperatures in the distant past. Then they must monitor the oceans, the upper and lower atmosphere, and weather patterns around the whole planet to understand the mechanics of climate now. Only then can they start composing computer models of what might happen the day after tomorrow. So when politicians - and, sometimes, other scientists - make accusations of uncertainty, speculation and possible error, they have a point. There is no doubt the planet is warming, but how much of that is caused by some natural cycle nobody yet understands? And how much is the result of human interference? And what will humans do in the future that might make conditions better or worse?

Atmospheric chemists say they understand the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, quite well. But methane, though shorter-lived, is an even more potent greenhouse gas: what role could it play in the future? Water vapour, too, is a greenhouse gas: a warmer world means more water vapour in the atmosphere. Will it make the world an even hotter place? Or will it mean greater cloud cover, which might then act as a brake on global warming by cutting out more sunlight? Those questions are unanswered and the debate goes on.

Through 15 years of intensive climate study, however, the broad message from the scientists has remained much the same. They are now convinced that indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels is steadily increasing the global average atmospheric temperature. And the only way to halt or at least slow global warming would be to make dramatic cuts in carbon emissions. Which leads to the other great unanswered question: can we meet that challenge?

Earth blows hot and cold

Earth's climate has always been subject to ups and downs, and there is nothing novel about a warm Arctic. Ninety million years ago, during the Cretaceous era, deciduous forests stretched into the Arctic circle, and carnivorous dinosaurs roamed Antarctica. Five years ago, palaeontologists uncovered the bones of an eight-foot champosaur, a reptile with a crocodile-like snout and razor-sharp teeth, under the Alaskan snows. Such a creature could only have survived in a warmer world, and experts calculate that the average annual temperature in Alaska must have been 14C. That is, it may never have frozen, even in the coldest winters.

The globe can blow both hot and cold: much earlier, glaciers reached almost to the equator. Some climate scientists have hypothesised a "snowball Earth" - a completely frozen world - for at least four spells between 750m years ago and 580m years ago, before things warmed up again.

Human civilisation is generally adapted to a cooler world. Around 21,000 years ago, during the height of the last ice age, sea levels were 135 metres lower than they are today, and the continents were covered by an extra 52 million cubic kilometres of ice. The interglacial thaw that took place 11,000 years ago gave agriculture, metalwork and urban civilisation its kickstart.

For a while back in the 1970s some climate scientists wondered about the possibility of an imminent return of the ice age. And earlier this year, European scientists drilling in the Antarctic settled an answer to that question. The evidence from the ice cores suggests that, even if carbon dioxide levels were normal, there could still be another 15,000 years before the glaciers return to southern England.

Water, water everywhere

The world is not drying up. All we need to ensure the whole world has clean, safe water is some political backbone


It won't be as bad as you think. There is no need for the world in 2020 to be one in which nation fights nation over the contents of a drying river bed. There is no need for the world's poorest people to be dying for want of clean water, nor for droughts to cause mass starvation as whole regions see their food supplies wither away in waterless heat. That might happen, but if we can summon the political and economic will, we can avert it.

In fact, we can address the most crucial area of water scarcity - finding enough water to feed the world - without ever getting our hands wet, thanks to the concept of "virtual water", which has nothing to do with computers. We will be helped in getting water to the world by social trends that are already underway, such as the flight from the country to the cities. And the rich - that's us - will probably not be as selfish with water as one might fear. We are likely to continue to adapt our usage of the water we are endowed with, and we are likely to be putting water back into the environment - by using less fresh water in farming, for example.

Water shortages don't pose serious problems to gardeners in Hampshire or to Californian homeowners with pools to fill. The rich can find a way through. Their water suppliers can build a desalination plant; they can use their water more carefully; they can sometimes even get farmers to stop using water for a while.

The people who suffer when water is in short supply are the poor. About one in six of the world's 6.5 billion people do not have a safe and secure water supply, and most poor families are short of water for the daily needs we take for granted. But the water-saving measures open to the rich are not open to them. If you get your water from a well you cannot stick a brick in the toilet cistern to use less water when you flush. Farmers in poor countries cannot stop farming. If they did, their families would die. And because poor communities cannot change the way they manage water, they are the ones who will suffer if water is scarce in 2020.

The key to avoiding catastrophic water shortages is bringing people out of poverty, and the world is getting richer. At the moment there are between 1 billion and 1.5 billion rich people in the world; by 2020 there could be 2 billion to 2.5 billion. That would not have the desired effect if the world's population was expanding at the rate the "scary science" of the 1970s postulated. Fortunately, it is not. In 1994, demographers at the UN population conference in Cairo argued that the world's population would level off in the second half of the 21st century at around 50% higher than the current level. While this increase might sound like a great deal, it is within our capabilities to make sure the world has the water it needs. Food production accounts for 90% of water consumption, but there is sufficient water in the global system to meet the food needs of a world population at that level, and farmers have shown over the past century they can mobilise the world's natural resources - including water and energy - to meet huge increases in demand for food.

Energy, in fact, is likely to be a far more crucial factor than water in slowing down production, even in agriculture. Water will not be such a problem because we will have achieved major economies in water use, which will mean more production per drop. Production in regions that currently can manage only low yields is likely to improve by between 50% and 100%.

Why, then, do headline writers insist on the notion of water as source of crisis and conflict? In part, because it is easier to see water as a geographic feature, a seemingly static resource: we think of water as being lakes and rivers. In fact, water is everywhere, in many forms. In the past half-century, for example, we have discovered that the industrialised economies in temperate regions, such as Europe and North America, have surplus soil water resources. Soil water is the effective rainfall used to produce a wide range of rainfed crops, and especially the staple grains that are needed to meet the world's food needs. Though it rarely comes up in discussions of water crises, soil water is what makes possible well over half the world's crop production. Water is present in the food we produce, as well: not as an ingredient, but as an element in its production (remember, 90% of water consumption takes place during food production).

To understand the full implications of that, take the case of the desert regions of the Middle East and North Africa. Those areas entered a period of dangerous strategic water deficits in the early 1970s. If ever there was a good time to suffer a severe water shortage, that was it.

The early 1970s saw the farmers of North America and Europe putting staple grains on the world market at half their production cost. They are still doing that, aided by production and export subsidies that will be difficult to unpick within the next 20 years. It takes so much water to produce those vast mountains of grain that when they are exported they amount, in effect, to a global trade in water. That process can spectacularly fix water shortages. It takes 1,000 tonnes of water to produce a tonne of grain, so by importing grain, water-scarce economies can avoid the stress of trying to develop their own water sources for food production. And because 20% of the world's agricultural production is traded internationally, farmers and traders can move this "virtual water" in volumes and over distances beyond the wildest imaginings of engineers.

The trade in virtual water addresses the biggest water challenge for both individuals and nations facing water scarcity: how to use water to produce enough food. Virtual water also eases the pressure that irrigated agriculture places on water in the environment. It is true that large-scale irrigation is an inefficient use of water, but the trade in virtual water means those regions where irrigation is crucial can put water back into the environment.

What of the 10% of water used for activities other than agriculture? Come 2020, domestic water will still be in short supply for the very poor, who will have neither the resources nor the quality of government to address their problems. But the issue is not that there is too little water, rather that too little effort has been expended on finding economic solutions to the problem. If strong, diverse economies can be established in the poor countries, that will enable investment to ensure the necessary supplies of fresh water for non-agricultural use. And virtual water will account for the volumes needed for food production.

Technology will also help the world make water available for domestic and commercial use. Desalination costs, for example, have fallen over the past five years, and the process can provide affordable water for the 70% of the world's population that lives close to major bodies of water. At a cost of around 30p per cubic metre, desalinated water is well within the price range of those living in industrialised economies. At present, the poor can pay nearly £2 per cubic metre for water that is not even safe to drink.

The problem with desalination is that it depends on a secure energy supply, and energy futures are much more uncertain than water futures. The water future could be constrained by the availability of affordable energy. So although we can project that by 2025, and certainly by 2050, a significant proportion of the world's population will be augmenting their freshwater supplies using desalination technology, the possible brake on the process is that energy prices will rise as the economies of east and south Asia expand in the next two decades, exerting new demands on the global energy supply. It is impossible at this point to guess how high a priority of water manufacture will be in an energy-short world.

As an optimist, I believe the manufacture of fresh water is such a huge imperative that the world's leaders will have to address it. I do not believe the politics of allocating energy to water creation will be a problem. And desalination is not the only option. Each drop of London tap water has been through several people; there is no reason why domestic water cannot be reused in the developing world, where economies facing water scarcity are increasingly treating waste water. Some countries gain 20% of their supply from reuse.

Only 10% of water is for non-agricultural use: we could, in theory, get 70% of that back by treating waste water (although there are social problems with water recycling - some people will not drink water that has already been drunk by someone else). So there is no need for a global water shortage. And there is no need for conflict over water. But still we find it difficult to understand the issues surrounding water scarcity, and because we do not understand them we find it difficult to address them all. We do not include soil water in our reckonings, even though it is the major source of water for rural economies. We forget the equalising role of virtual water, which moves commodities that require huge amounts of water to produce from the water-rich to the water-scarce economies. And there is too little understanding of the role of socio-economic development in giving the water-short access to virtual water.

The problem is that what we need to do to supply water to all runs counter to one of the most deeply rooted human needs: the desire for familiarity and security. Most people - western consumers of expensive foreign bottled waters and imported delicacies aside - feel intuitively insecure if they cannot drink local water and eat locally produced food. Across the world, the hundreds of millions who comprise the rural poor do not have the levels of consumer and economic sophistication that are second nature to people in the industrialised world. As a result they are uneasy about accepting any dependence on what they regard as a complex and unfathomable economic system.

But surely it is easy to inform people they have nothing to fear and everything to gain? Sadly, no. The politicians responsible for more than half the world's rural population do not have the resources or political capital, nor the economic policy options, to confront the beliefs of the rural poor. For those people, new ways of thinking and new approaches to water are not an option. There are no other jobs. Once again, however, there is a bright side. It has been estimated that by 2025 two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities, where life is more water efficient. The policeman in Nairobi, the call-centre worker in Mumbai and the teacher in Mexico City will use negligible volumes of water each day but can be far better paid than their counterparts in the fields.

A building occupying a site of a hectare could accommodate 1,000 workers. Those people could generate an annual turnover of £30m, but would use only 10,000 cubic meters of water each year. If that hectare were to be used as a wheat field, it might use the same amount of water, but would generate a turnover of less than £2,000 per year and would only support one tenth of one job. So the key to efficient use of water, through the deployment of virtual water, is job creation and removing people from poverty.

The east is ready

By 2020 China will be on the verge of superseding the US as the world's leading economic power. Time for the US to wake up and smell the soy sauce.


China's rise through America's eyes: "When a speeding freight train is heading towards you, you either get on board or you get out of the way. We want to get on board." The locomotive is China, whose economy is forecast to become the second largest in the world by 2016 and to have overtaken America by 2041. "We" are the people of South Carolina, the southern US state whose textile-based economy is under increasing threat from cheap labour in the People's Republic. And getting on board means trying to get the Chinese to invest in the state rather than trying to keep them out by erecting protective trade barriers.

The speaker is Mark Sanford, South Carolina's Republican governor, who has travelled to Beijing to attract Chinese investment to revive its beleaguered economy. He is speaking at a private dinner in a club so exclusive that it doesn't have a name, just an unmarked red door in a windowless wall. The late Deng Xiaoping used to come here to relax, but today the mix of privacy and transparency has become an irresistible magnet to China's nouveau riche.

In his Southern drawl, Sanford speaks elegiacally of a knitwear factory that closed in his neighbouring state of North Carolina. This closure, and others like it, have led to a heated debate about attempts to restrict "off-shoring". Sanford explains that his goal is to attract investment from Chinese companies such as Haier, which built a fridge factory in South Carolina in 2000, completing an integrated system of production and sales with its design centre in Los Angeles and trade centre in New York. He speaks about turning his state into a "poster-boy" for globalisation, a Chinese gateway into America, reversing the sense of an inexorable flow of jobs and business from the US to China, and creating a "win-win" scenario. The Chinese roar with approval at his speech: they like this new face of America, as supplicant rather than bully. 

But Sanford is a lonely voice in preaching the need to woo China, despite the overwhelming force of the statistics: China has a population of more than a billion, an economy that is growing year-on-year by more than 8%, and had a trade surplus with the US of $124bn in 2003; Chinese imports into the US are outpacing American exports to China by more than five to one. More typical, perhaps, are the words of Roger W Robinson Jr, the former chairman of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the official body charged with assessing the security implications of the trade between the US and China. "The US-China economic relationship is heavily imbalanced and undermining our long-term economic health," he said at the launch of the commission's last report. John Edwards, the vice-presidential nominee who represents the neighbouring state of North Carolina in the Senate, has taken a much tougher line than Sanford: he promises to review US trade agreements and investigate workers' rights abuses in China.

China's growing economic power is doing much more than harming America's trade figures. Its development needs huge quantities of oil, forcing up prices on the world market. That is another big campaign issue in the world's most oil-hungry nation. According to the International Energy Agency, China will generate one-third of global incremental demand for oil between 2002 and 2004. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has argued: "As Asian growth continues, the global balance between demand and supply will continue to be tight, unless (or until) a vast increase in investment takes place. With such tight markets, relatively modest disruptions could lead to explosive jumps in oil prices, as happened twice in the 1970s."

If the US Democrats are exercised by China's economic threat, the Republicans have focused on its military one. President George Bush's first intelligence briefing from the CIA listed China as one of three strategic threats, along with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The thin red mist descends and China becomes, in the neo-con imagination, a Soviet Union of the east, intent on establishing puppet regimes, governed by a modern mandate from heaven. Though not all would go as far as denouncing Deng Xiaoping as a "chain smoking communist dwarf", as the rightwing firebrand Pat Buchanan did, there is a segment of the US political class that recoils at reports of double-digit increases in Chinese military spending, an intense focus on military modernisation and the simmering tensions over Taiwan.

Back in 1997, Paul Wolfowitz, the neo-conservative flag-carrier who is now deputy defence secretary, wrote an article in the journal Foreign Affairs that compared the rise of China at the dawn of the 21st century to the rise of Germany a century earlier. He characterised China as "a country that felt it had been denied its place in the sun", that believed it had been mistreated by the other powers, and that was determined to achieve its rightful place by nationalistic assertiveness. He warned there may be another world war. But rather than a hot war, the two have engaged in a competition for influence in the Asian region.

The establishment of US bases in central Asia, America's tightening defence ties with Japan and Australia, and its growing relationship with India are all seen by China's elite as part of Washington's design to keep them in check. China's response has been to bend over backwards to prove it is no threat either to the US or its neighbours. Li Junru, the vice president of the Central Party School, one of the Communist part institutions, has said the policy of heping jueqi (literally "merging precipitously in a peaceful way") means other nations need not fear. "China's rise will not damage the interests of other Asian countries," he told the Beijing Review. "That is because as China rises, it provides a huge market for its neighbours. At the same time, the achievements of China's development will allow it to support the progress of others in the region." He talks of the Chinese developing free trade areas and security organisations for the region on the model of the European Union and Nato. As part of this strategy, Beijing has resolved virtually all its land border disputes with its neighbours: it has signed a non-aggression pact with the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean); it is working to help resolve the North Korean nuclear issue; it is signing a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Asean which includes free trade agreements and economic aid; and it is conducting joint military exercises with Russia, Kyrgyzstan, India and Pakistan.

The American analyst Robert W Radtke, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, argued that China's soft sell appeals to America's allies in Asia: "China's peaceful rise was introduced to Asia by Chinese President Hu Jintao on his tour of south-east Asia in October - on the heels of President Bush's visit to the region that month. The contrast in tone between the two leaders couldn't have been more striking. In short, China's message was, 'We're here to help,' while the US message was 'You're either with us or against us' in the war on terror. It's not hard to imagine which was the more effective diplomatic strategy."

But the Chinese will not push this competition too far: their biggest fear is that the neo-cons in Washington will encourage Bush to ratchet up the pressure over Taiwan, whose government has been making noises about declaring independence from the mainland, to the displeasure of the Beijing administration. Since the spat early in Bush's term when a US spy-plane crashed into a Chinese fighter, relations between the world's two leading powers have thawed. Beijing has provided Washington with useful intelligence and, like Russia, used the war on terror as an excuse to damn its own separatist movements. Even over Iraq, the Chinese supported the first UN resolution and kept a low profile over the second. During Kosovo, by contrast, Chinese spokesmen were on a 24-hour rota condemning Nato's illegal action. This time the risk of causing a rift with the Americans was judged too great.

American policy towards China is trapped between an imperative for engagement and a preference for containment. Earlier this year US policymakers welcomed a Chinese trade delegation for a multi-billion dollar buying and spending spree, during which the Chinese were to look at making investments. Within days of the delegation's departure, however, the US threatened sanctions that would make the purchases impossible. And in the security sphere the US is seeking the People's Republic's help on the proliferation of WMD in North Korea at the same time as pushing a missile defence shield that could launch a new arms race between the two nations.

What is becoming clear is that the Chinese are no longer easily manipulated. China's welfare is so intimately woven into the international order that its welfare affects the hope and dreams of others across the world. China is already on its way to becoming America's chief banker: the $400bn of foreign reserves it has accumulated allows the US to sustain its astronomical budget deficit. If Beijing stopped buying dollars, the US currency would collapse. The security analyst François Heisbourg has even compared the Chinese hold on the dollar to a nuclear weapon: "Breaking the dollar would be the functional equivalent of using a nuclear weapon," he wrote in 2003. "The possession of such a capability cannot be ignored by the weaker party."

Because of this mutual dependence it is unlikely that Wolfowitz's predictions of world war will come true. But as China rises, the balance of power will continue to shift to the east and more and more Americans will follow Sanford's example: approaching China with a begging bowl rather than a stick. China itself will face intense pressures over the coming years - unemployment, labour unrest, environmental problems and financial problems - but any problems in the People's Republic will also threaten American interests.

Maybe the neocons have got it wrong. Perhaps the only thing worse for the US than a China that is too strong in 2020 will be one that is too weak.

How China is wooing the world

In my local curry house I was greeted like a long-lost friend. A huddle of young waiters gesticulated excitedly towards me. Eventually I realised they were pointing at my bag, picked up during a recent trip to China, and emblazoned with the Chinese script for Shanghai. "You've been to China," they said, "China have just put a man in space - they're taking over from America."

These young Bengalis are not just motivated by regional passions. Everywhere in the developing world people are sitting up and taking notice of the Chinese juggernaut. As a model for development it is a source of inspiration, its giddy growth rates of over 8% a year lifting millions of people out of poverty.

But even more exciting is the prospect of a new superpower that might challenge US hegemony and the American way of doing things. In a paper for the Foreign Policy Centre, Joshua Ramo, a former foreign editor at Time who is based in China, laid out the elements of a new "Beijing consensus", which he sees as a direct challenge to the "Washington consensus" that defined attitudes towards the development debate in the 1990s. Beijing is "driven not by a desire to make bankers happy, but by the more fundamental urge for equitable, high-quality growth", he wrote.

China treats the ideas of privatisation and free trade with caution rather than pursuing them with zeal; the country is defined by its ruthless willingness to innovate and experiment and has created a series of "special economic zones" to test out new ideas. Its foreign policy is driven by a lively defence of national borders and interests (see its attitude towards Taiwan) and an increasing commitment to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, which it hopes will pin the US down. Together these policies have allowed China to grow without surrendering its independence to such financial institutions as the World Bank and IMF, global companies, or the Bush administration.

This recipe for success is so intoxicating that, on visits to countries as diverse as Iran and South Africa, I have been drawn into discussions about the "Chinese model of development". China's model is seducing leaders in countries as different as Vietnam (which is taking business tips from the thoughts of the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin), Brazil (which is sending study teams to Beijing), and India (Ramgopal Agarwala, an eminent sociologist, observed: "China's experiment should be the most admired in human history. China has its own path.").

Few in the west have picked up on this excitement, because they have looked at China's power simply by measuring the size of its economy or the technology of its army. But by focusing on Chinese hard power (its ability to use military force or economic might to get its way) people are missing the extraordinary rise of the country's "soft power" - the ability of its ideas and values to shape the world. It is an unwritten rule in the minds of the west that though China might become wealthy, it is western values and culture that will continue to define the rules of the world.

That is already changing. For the first time there is an emerging pole that is strong enough to change the way things are done on the global stage. Japan was too small and inward-looking; India is too protectionist; Russia too weak. As China emerges as a superpower, it is desperately trying to present itself as a force for good in the world. The past few years have seen a successful Olympic bid, the creation of an English language international TV channel, a series of high-level visits by President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to key countries, and a concerted attempt to befriend not just China's neighbours but other countries as far afield as Africa and Latin America. Two centuries ago Napoleon warned China was a "sleeping giant" that "once awake would astonish the world". That prediction looks like it is about to be fulfilled.

Rise of the east

The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, laid down a marker for the world in April when he outlined China's ambitions in a speech to the Boao Forum for Asia. "We will quadruple the 2,000 GDP to $4 trillion with a per capita GDP of $3,000, and further develop the economy, improve democracy, advance science and education, enrich culture, foster greater social harmony and upgrade the texture of life for the people," he said.

Some in America responded positively to the remarks - former president George Bush Sr said China's peaceful rise was "very reassuring and very, very important to the Asian horizon and Asia's landscape" - but there are many in America who are disquieted by China's rise. Its military expenditure is rising, though it will still not compete with US defence spending and it has become increasingly bullish over Taiwan. In July, Jiang Zemin - the former president who heads China's armed forces - said China would have recovered the island by 2020.

His remarks coincided with military exercises involving 18,000 troops, designed to demonstrate China's air superiority in the Taiwan Strait. It is also seeking to compete in space: Luan Enjie, the head of the national space programme, said last November that China intends to land a man on the moon by 2020.

Chinese walls come down

China will have the world's worst Aids epidemic by 2020. But the spread of the disease could also hasten political reform. Jonathan Watts reports


By 2020, China will have overtaken Japan as the world's second biggest economy. It may even have started to rival the US in terms of the hard power of its military. But if it is to achieve the government's goal of once again being the world's leading civilisation, the country will also have to acquire the "soft power" of universally appealing values.

How can it do that? Paradoxically, the best hope for softening China may be the same thing that poses its greatest threat: the HIV/Aids epidemic. China is on course to suffer the biggest epidemic of Aids in the world, but in the process it may find the illness acts as one of the main drivers for social change over the coming years.

"By 2020, Aids will have transformed society," says Wan Yanhai, an Aids activist who was arrested two years ago for disclosing details about China's HIV problem, which was then deemed a state secret. "Both people and the virus will be more active in China. It is not something we can ignore. People have to ask questions about their way of life, they have to get involved in social politics and get organised. From my personal experience I'm absolutely certain that this kind of activity will lead China towards a democracy."

It is already possible to get a glimpse of China in 2020. It is an impressive sight. Barring a war over Taiwan or an economic crash - both distinct possibilities - the country will have been transformed by the greatest spurt of development in world history. Beijing - currently thick with cranes and noisy with hammers and drills - will have hosted an Olympics to dwarf all its predecessors in terms of scale and spectacle. With annual growth of more than 7% per year, Shanghai, the country's commercial capital, will have overtaken Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore as Asia's leading financial centre. Further south, Guandong province will be the unrivalled workshop of the world. Its giant factories on the Pearl River delta will not only be churning out the labour-intensive goods of old, but also cutting-edge products developed by China's premier institutes of nanotechnology and cloning.

China will have become a land of superlatives. By 2020, a host of world-beating projects will be completed: the biggest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam in Sichuan Province; the longest bridge and tunnel, near Shanghai; and the highest railway, which will rise above 4,000 metres through the Himalayas to connect Tibet with Qinghai.

China will also be leading the world, reluctantly, in HIV/Aids. According to government estimates, the world's most populous nation had 840,000 cases of the disease in 2003. That amounts to less than 0.01% of the population, far lower than the 35% infection rates in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But with the number of new cases rising at between 20% and 40% per year, the United Nations has warned that China could have 10 million cases by 2010 - double the number at present in South Africa, which is currently the world's worst affected nation.

Despite the huge numbers, health officials insist the disease will not derail China's economy. According to the government's latest HIV/Aids impact assessment, the epidemic will cost the country no more than 15.9bn renminbi (£1.1bn) by 2010 - equivalent to only 0.03% of GDP. But that optimistic view was contradicted last year by the former US president Bill Clinton, who warned that lost working hours and rising health costs could derail progress.

"China is moving in a positive direction. The headlines are hopeful and the future looks bright," he told a conference at Tsinghua University last year. "But the weight of 15 or 30 million people living with HIV/Aids could blunt a lot of your progress, especially if the burden falls most heavily on young people."

Officials admit the figures are guesswork. Government cover-ups, social taboos and a dilapidated healthcare system mean very few cases of HIV/Aids are reported. Some provinces, led by Yunnan - a major centre for the drug trade - have been very open about their problem and have sought international help to establish condom promotion and needle-exchange programmes that ought to help control the epidemic by 2020.

Earlier this year, the government followed that lead, extending Yunnan's policies across the country, as well as offering free tests and treatment to sufferers. But not all China's rulers have been so decisive. Henan province, for example, continues to cover up a blood-collection scandal - in which villagers sold their blood en masse, with the result that infected blood became mixed in to the supply - that produced infection rates of more than 50% in countless villages. Official figures suggest Henan has 40,000 people who are HIV-positive, but Aids activists believe the figure is over 1 million and rising because infected villagers are migrating to work in cities and their tainted blood is still being used in hospitals. Given that 23 provinces ran blood-selling operations, the problem could be widespread.

"I'm still very pessimistic about the control of Aids, especially about its spread," says Gao Yaojie, a local doctor who received international plaudits - and official intimidation - for helping to expose the problem in Henan. "The government has started to act on blood collection, but it hasn't done anything on the [black market] blood transfusion problem, which is also very serious. In Henan, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong and Sichuan, there are many underground clinics which offer cheap - and probably polluted - blood."

An equally grim picture is painted by Wan Yanhai,who has set up an NGO called Aizixin in Beijing. "I don't think that infection rates will slow over the next 10 years," he says. "The government has not invested enough in intervention and it is still underplaying the scale of the problem. My guess is that there are already 5 million to 10 million cases. By 2020, this will rise above 20 million."

The World Health Organisation disputes those claims, saying the government has done enough to keep the epidemic in check. Dr Zhao Pengfei, the HIV-Aids coordinator at the WHO's Beijing office, believes that by 2020 the target should be to keep the number of cases below 5 million. "Even in the worst case scenario, I don't think there will be 10 million cases by 2020," he says.

But he warned China must brace itself for the disease spreading from the current high-risk groups of blood-sellers and drug users - who are mostly concentrated in inland rural communities - to sex workers and the general population in urban areas on the eastern seaboard. Zhao's biggest concern is that gay men could pass on the disease to their wives and children. "Because of social pressures in China, most of the gay population is married and lead bisexual lives, so they could act as a bridge for HIV to cross into the general population," he says. "But social stigma has constrained the government from developing a policy to reach out to this group, even though measures are now in place for sex workers and drug users."

The fact that these things can be discussed openly represents a significant break with the past. That - and the influx of international funds to deal with the crisis - explains why so many of China's sharpest minds are drawn to working in the fight against Aids, which is now attracting the sort of idealists who would have been campaigning for democracy 15 years ago.

The slaughter of students and civilians in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989 has taught subsequent generations that engaging in direct political confrontation is dangerous and futile. Graduates of the country's top universities are now more likely to concentrate on making money - either through business or the Communist party. But for those still driven to change the world, HIV is an opportunity. Whether they work as healthcare professionals, journalists or NGO volunteers, they can not only help the sick, but highlight the growing threat of the disease as a means to indirectly shape China's values.

This reform by stealth is working. As the Sars crisis demonstrated last year, health is a vulnerable spot for a communist government that has presided over a growing income gap between rich and poor and a steady deterioration in the quality of rural hospitals. It has also become an opportunity for the new leadership of the Communist party to prove its compassion. Last December, in a marked break with his predecessors, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited an Aids hospital, where he told a patient: "We need care and love, equality and opposition to prejudice."

Many NGOs and health workers see the more compassionate approach to Aids as a sign that the government has shifted from a single-minded pursuit of economic growth to a more holistic policy of balanced development."HIV is already making a huge impact on society," says Lily Liquing of Marie Stopes International, one of an increasing number of foreign NGOs that have been allowed to operate in China. "It is helping to nurture a civil society and greater internationalism because the authorities and NGOs are working with their counterparts overseas in ways that wouldn't have been imaginable before. Homosexuals are getting organised for the first time, schools are working harder on sex education, and women are more conscious of family planning issues. HIV is bringing some very positive social changes. It has brought problems out into the open. We are seeing less taboos in China now."

While the disease has made life a misery for countless Chinese, it also appears to have given others strength. Ren Guoliang, a 23-year-old Aids activist, had to give up his job in the army and he now conducts lectures, works with an Aids hotline and appears on television to talk about the disease. Although he does not expect misunderstanding and discrimination to disappear for many years, his life has been made easier by the government's increased openness and the provision of free retroviral drugs.

"In 2020, I believe China will have more democracy, that there will be better policies for care and treatment of Aids. Civil society will have matured and we'll be more open about the disease, which will help to control its spread."

A world at war?

Will Africa be run by visionary female leaders? Are Libya and Kashmir set to become tourist havens?

Central Africa

What's the worst that could happen?

Over recent decades, central Africa has seen a series of bitter and bloody civil wars and a genocide, with millions dying or uprooted. Because the roots of these conflicts spill over national boundaries, the security of the central African nations is interlinked; any dramatic deterioration in this interlinked security during the next 20 years could mean the virtual collapse of central governments in the region. If that happens by 2020, anarchy could have spread through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and Congo.

The neighbouring countries will then also face deepening insecurity as refugees pour over their borders. Expect more of the same chilling stories we have seen in recent years: reports of mass rape, kidnapping, and forced recruitment drives taking men and boys off the land and into armed rebel factions.

The DRC would be the centre of this regional political and security vacuum, but intervention would be impossible. Given the level of lawlessness, forces under the mandate of the UN, the EU or the African Union would become targets of ambushes or kidnappings by increasingly reckless and confident armed groups. As a result central Africa could become, as parts of eastern DRC and Sudan are now, a no-go area for outsiders, making it impossible to deliver the humanitarian aid that would be desperately needed.

A circular process of dedevelopment could engulf the whole region. If war becomes a permanent state, it will destroy hopes of improved health and education, and reverse the gains of the post-colonial years of the late 20th century. If millions are unable to access any sort of modern healthcare, rampant malaria will run unchecked and could kill tens of thousands, especially babies and small children. Dengue fever and sleeping sickness would attack all sectors of the population, while the failure of inoculation programmes for children would mean epidemics of measles and the probable re-emergence of diseases such as polio. The constant war would also have the side effect of causing HIV/Aids to spread faster than ever: it would be transmitted through the migration of impoverished people forced into refugee status and through the use of rape as a weapon of war (this would be a militarised culture in which powerless women are despised and men live outside any traditional community except their shifting armed groups). The most productive section of society would be hardest hit by deaths from Aids, which in turn would tighten the cycle of poverty. With health disasters piling on the population one after another, life expectancy could drop as low as 30 to 35, and households headed by children or old men and women would be the norm. Those kind of family groupings do not have the strength to cultivate land, and they will be forced into the most marginal subsistence agriculture, or, in some places in DRC, dangerous artisan mining of diamonds, gold and coltan. Girls would be compelled to join the sex trade to survive in the corrupt, swollen mega cities.

After years of warfare, a generation of uneducated youth would know only the brutalised life of the gun, meaning that the gulf between the political elite of the countries and the rest of the population would be wider than ever. The possibility of moving any part of the region towards democracy might disappear for generations. The civilian brain drain would worsen, depriving the civic culture and leaving the military in the ascendant. That would set the stage for new dictatorial regimes as debased as those of Idi Amin in Uganda, or Mobutu Sese Seko in the former Zaire. Africa's standing in the rest of the world would be completely debased, and African writers and artists would no longer be portraying life in the continent, only life in exile.

Would the US seek to make its presence felt to help guarantee security? Yes, but only out of self-interest. With regional war on the horizon, the US would quickly upgrade its warm relations with Uganda and establish a permanent military base for the region, in order to maintain access to the oil reserves of southern Sudan. Like other western governments, however, it will have given up on the people of the region.

What's the best that could happen?

In 2020 central Africa could be a completely different place, where the warlords and kleptocrats of the present day would be nothing but historical curiosities, and where new visionary leadership, much of it female, could lead the continent in transformed relations with the rest of the world.

Under this leadership, arms sales to Africa would be banned by the newly invigorated African Union, and the war zones of central Africa would begin to hold regular competitions for the biggest and longest burning bonfires of small arms. The spark for this would be a major western political figure - perhaps Gordon Brown - taking the initiative in the very near future and persuading the G8 to cancel Africa's debt and remove all agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US, providing equal access to EU and US markets. The 2004 annual global figure of $300bn in subsidies to farmers in the rich nations would be abolished. And if the European leaders would make the leap to fight terrorism by first fighting poverty and injustice, that money could be put into the weakest states in the world - many of them in central Africa.

Massive funding for health and education would then pour into the continent, especially into central Africa's former war zones. New HIV/Aids vaccines could prevent a disastrous shift in the demographics of Africa and successfully arrest the decline of the productive age group, ensuring the the region would not lose their farmers, teachers and nurses.

Education funding on an unprecedented scale would be a priority. By 2020 it might at last be recognised that UN and aid agency piecemeal projects to eliminate illiteracy have failed postwar societies. What Africa's new generations really need is tertiary education if they are to create both civil societies and a political class able to make an impact in the wider world. That could be achieved with a mass of new initiatives planned in the region and funded from outside. Devices such as twinning African universities with western universities and increased use of distance learning for African students could be the fashionable causes for western academic institutions. The judicious use of targeted funding could also address the long-standing problem of the brain drain. The combination of political stability and money could lure back those who have left and keep those who had planned to leave. If that can be achieved, by 2020 central Africa would have leaders capable of transforming the region. With secure, democratic governments free of corruption, the rule of law could become a priority. Warlords would be delivered to the International Criminal Court to stand trial for their war crimes. At home there would be trials for corruption, truth commissions would be established, and governments would be able to compensate survivors.

If Africa, aided by resources from the rich countries, can manage two decades of building skills, free and open communication, and pluralist politics, we can hope by 2020 for the growth of a confident political class unlike any since the first years of independence from colonialism, when Congo's Patrice Lumumba was the region's hero. The impact of these leaders on international bodies such as the UN, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF could help produce by 2020 the new world order so elusive over the previous half century.

What's likely to happen?

By 2020 central Africa will be divided into two types of country. In failing states, such as DRC, large areas of the country will be out of contact and control of the weak central authority. But two decades of strong and visionary leaders in states such as Rwanda and Tanzania will lead to huge investment in education and technology in those countries, which will have emerged as regional leaders. They'll also be recognised across as the first countries to transcend ethnic politics, which will be widely considered old-fashioned and destructive.

In these flourishing countries the population will be moving out of poverty. New computer-based industries will provide work for the educated, as has already happened in Bangalore and Chennai. Ecotourism will be a magnet for high-spending foreigners and bring infrastructure and income to rural areas. The brain drain to the west will be a forgotten phenomenon, and the universities will be linked to the best specialised departments across the world.

The west will have long since cancelled Africa's debt, and vastly increased aid will flow to the continent. And the agricultural subsidies to western farmers that used to be thought an essential part of European and American domestic politics will seem a curious piece of old history. But in places where the leadership is weak and lacks vision, the new external resources will not have been enough to break the cycle of poverty.

Violence will still hold sway, and poor education and poor health - especially the scourge of HIV/Aids - will still cripple the population. In these countries, life expectancy will be the lowest in the world. Ethnic loyalties will still be the determining factor in politics, and a ready supply of small arms into the region means armed factions will still control many areas in shifting alliances with each other, leaving the populations as desperately insecure and poor as they are now. The rich natural resources of those countries will not enable them to escape this bleak future. Outsiders will control the rich mining areas of DRC and the oil wealth of southern Sudan, and the profits will flow out of Africa as they have for centuries.

Middle East

What's the worst that could happen?

The US will blame Iranian interference for the turmoil in Iraq and will launch military strikes against the Tehran regime. Resistance to the US will stiffen in Iran and among Shia Muslims across the region: Shia rebellions could break out in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Anarchy in Iraq will give Kurds the excuse they need to declare independence and foment a Kurdish uprising in Syria.

The "war on terror" will destroy al-Qaida as an organisation but it will not dampen Islamist militancy. Its greatest effect will be to spawn hundreds of small autonomous groups that prove impossible to monitor.

The Yemeni elections of 2009 will prove to be the last in the Arab world as governments backtrack on democracy, blaming the deteriorating security situation. The EU will deal with that same problem by approving a Middle East stability pact that lifts all restrictions on weapon sales to regimes that are deemed to be combating terrorism.

The threat of Islamist terror will continue to spread beyond the Arab world. London will face its gravest threat when an Islamist group threatens to explode a dirty nuclear device unless Britain stops supporting "Arab lackeys of Zionism and Crusaderism". There will be no progress towards peace with Israel, so the Palestinians will abandon their claim for a separate state and demand equal rights with Israeli citizens.

By 2015, the UN will have accepted a plan to divide the whole of historic Palestine into a series of Jewish and Arab cantons, but it will not end the conflict. By 2020, Nato forces sent to implement the plan will still be struggling to impose peace in the face of stiff resistance from extremists on both sides.

What's the best that could happen?

The Arab-Israeli conflict will end by 2008 with the creation of a viable Palestinian state, and a peace treaty between Israel and Syria. All the Arab states, plus Iran, will then recognise Israel and exchange ambassadors. Talks can begin on ridding the Middle East of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and by 2012 UN inspectors will be able to declare the region a WMD-free zone.

Peace with Israel would remove one of the main driving forces behind Islamic militancy in the region, which would in turn lead to a decline in terrorism. Political reform throughout the region would also follow peace, since Arab leaders would no longer be able to blame Israel for their countries' problems.

Iraq will avert civil war and stay in one piece - but only just. Amid the chaos left by its elected civilian government, the return to military rule later this decade will be greeted with widespread relief. By 2020, the Iraqi regime will still be promising elections "next year or as soon as the situation permits".

Elsewhere, the strategy of gradual but steady reform is largely successful. By 2020, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states will have become constitutional monarchies, while Yemen, Egypt and Syria will have all held elections that - for the first time - result in changes of government. In Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia will be readying themselves to join the EU, probably by 2030. Libya, which could be the Mediterranean's fastest-growing tourist destination by 2020, will remain politically eccentric: all government decisions will be made by citizens voting on the net.

What's likely to happen?

How will Iraq be faring in 2020? It will be a toss-up between rule by Saddam Lite (authoritarianism with American blessing) and the fragmentation of the state. The underlying conflicts over religion and ethnicity will take years to play out - probably through violence, unless a strong national leader emerges. Continued instability in Iraq will harm all its neighbours.

But that does not mean the region will have been dragged into continual conflict. By 2020 there will be a new generation of Arabs who have known satellite TV and the internet all their lives; the significance of that should not be underestimated. So far, globalised media has achieved three things in the Middle East: it has engaged ordinary Arabs in international politics in a way that was impossible before; it has given them a view of western lifestyles that some covet and others reject; and it has given them a sense of common Muslim/Arab identity that cuts across borders and the nationalism of individual states.

The belief that Arabs and Muslims are victims of American and Israeli designs is almost universal in the Middle East, as is the feeling that the current leaders are powerless to do anything about it. One response - the dominant one at present - is Islamist militancy, but there are others, especially among the urban young, who want to be like the rest of the world. Among religious believers, too, there are many who privately question the confrontational, backward-looking interpretations of Islamists.

There is a chance that, by 2020, the fundamentalist trend will have peaked and that new, more progressive interpretations of Islam will have begun to emerge. The idea that Arab/Muslim societies can survive as islands of cultural authenticity or religious purity in a globalised world is nothing but pure fantasy. Today, Saudi censors go through every imported newspaper, obliterating "undesirable" material while millions of Saudi citizens are able to watch whatever takes their fancy on satellite television.

Moves towards a form of Islam that is more compatible with modern life will also be reflected in social and political changes. The need here is not for cosmetic democracy but for ideas of tolerance and openness to take hold, for accountability and transparency in public life, and for political parties based on policies rather than tribal, ethnic or religious allegiances.

It's a tall order, but it will have to happen sometime. The two factors most likely to hold it back are American policies towards the region and continued conflict with Israel. It is difficult to imagine that Israeli voters, at some point before 2020, will not weary of the strategy pursued by their present government and decide that there has to be a better way.

Whether American voters will reach the same conclusion is more doubtful. The old, confrontational cold war themes play well with American voters when reapplied to the Arab and Muslim world, but don't really serve American interests. The best thing the US can do for the Middle East over the next 16 years is stop prescribing solutions and ask: "Is there anything we can do to help?" It should also not be too offended when the reply is "Yes. Please go away."

Kashmir

What's the worst that could happen?

India and Pakistan's rivalry over Kashmir could, by 2020, have finally have erupted into a nuclear exchange that might leave 100 million people dead and lay waste to half a million square kilometres of rich agricultural land in Asia. The roots of such a disaster would lie in a series of political miscalculations and in chronic economic mismanagement.

The main problem will be the two neighbours refusing to make the tough decisions required for peace. Political misjudgments would see India failing to realise its potential as an economic powerhouse, with successive governments introducing policies that favour the rise of a small urban elite, rather than lifting the fortunes of the rural poor. This could spark armed insurrection among the poor of northern and eastern India. The Maoist rebellion in Nepal would exacerbate the problem, providing ideological coherence from the Himalaya to the plains of India.

Governance will be a thing of the past in many of India's large northern and eastern states. The country's southern regions, which have their own distinctive culture and languages, will begin to agitate for a form of independence. The north will react differently to the political chaos, electing a hardline Hindu nationalist leadership that would stress national unity. Its plea would fail. The Indian union will unravel if a south Indian fiscal union is formed between Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andra Pradesh and Karnataka. These four wealthy states, with close ties to the hi-tech US defence industry and burgeoning software industries, might refuse to subsidise the central government and the north, leading to a major political crisis.

In Pakistan, the modernisers will lose out to the religious zealots by 2010 after Nato ends all its operations in Afghanistan. The military, in effect, will become the armed wing of a theocracy - one armed with a nuclear bomb. This fundamentalist state would begin to neglect education and would do little to stem the rise of Islamic institutes, preferring instead to produce an army of willing volunteers for jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Religion would not be a strong enough glue for the nation. The simmering tension between the states of Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab would begin to boil over. The argument will be that Punjab's plains soak up most of Pakistan's water and its industry consumes most of the country's coal, depriving other states. Militant groups would declare independence in Sindh and Balochistan and begin targeting Punjabi officials. Pakistan's civil war would have begun.

In Kashmir, the issue of water is going to be crucial. The three rivers that feed Pakistan - the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum - run through Indian Kashmir. With the water table of Pakistan decreasing and north-west India facing shortages, the two nations will abrogate their mutual water treaty by 2015. America might by then have decided that an independent Kashmir is the answer and arm insurgency groups via China. And by then Kashmir will have become a killing field, with Indian and Pakistani-backed fighters engaged in open warfare. This war in Kashmir, Pakistan's anarchy and political chaos in India will turn the region into a live bomb: all that would be needed is someone to light the fuse. Kashmir will be the excuse, not the reason. But by this point apocalypse will be inevitable; the world will have seen its first case of mutually assured destruction.

What's the best that could happen?

By 2020 no one will believe that almost 20 years before, Pakistan and India were poised in a nuclear stand-off over the then restive Kashmir, which will have become the tranquil tourist haven of Kashmir Autonomous Region.

The turning point was the summer of 2002, which marked the end of history for the region. Not long after, the leaders of the two nations began to escape from the prison of the past. India and Pakistan made the commitment to develop friendly relations and leave the settlement of the Kashmir question to the diplomatic process which began this year.

The factor that will lead to peace is the realisation of the leadership of both countries that neither can win militarily. That, and the emergence of a new South Asian Union (SAU) as a single economic area, which will grease the development of sound bilateral relations. Instead of Hindu nationalism and Islamic chauvinism, leaders in both countries would then opt for good governance and development.

The simple fact is that to house, feed and provide jobs for ever-growing populations, both India and Pakistan need to start working together. By making social and economic policies the priority for government, rather than nurturing nationalism, both will lift tens of millions out of poverty. Trade will be the proving ground of the new relationship. If the energy-hungry metropolises of the subcontinent can be supplied by pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan, then both countries will stand to benefit. Islamabad will gain wealth from transit fees while India will be able to buy cheap energy. The two countries will discover that trade is a game of mutual interests, where both will be able to seek and gain benefit. Delhi will allow Pakistani goods to travel by road to reach south-east Asia. In return Islamabad will open transit routes to central Asia for Indian wares.

The cultural and religious antagonisms between India and Pakistan will then fade, reducing the need for perpetual war-footing. No longer will their people consider each other to be in the grip of obscurantist preachers and zealots. They will be too busy setting up factories, rediscovering lost relatives and friends on the other side of the border, as well as taking holidays in hill stations and balmy sunspots. The signing of a nuclear-arms reduction treaty between India and Pakistan will also reduce tensions, and China will play a key role, aware that nuclear war in its backyard will hamper its own peaceful rise.

In Kashmir, under the guidance of an American peace envoy, a ceasefire will be in place by 2007. The Indian army will finally withdraw from the Kashmir Valley and Delhi can then address the human rights violations perpetrated since the insurgency began in 1989. Pakistan, too, will end its shadowy intelligence operations and close down militant camps in Kashmir. Home-grown armed separatists can then move towards the use of the ballot box, not the bullet.

If a settlement is reached, the pace of change could be so fast that the problem will be not peace, but deciding what follows peace. Kashmir's complicated geography and the fact its territory is fractured along the fault lines of national identity and state allegiance mean there would be no easy answers. There are minorities who would fight for the status quo as viciously as they would for independence.

To defuse these tensions will require a peace plan that first devolves power from Islamabad and Delhi to the state capitals of the two halves of Kashmir. Also elections in Pakistani and Indian Kashmir would allow representation from all political shades. The border would remain but crossing it would require no travel documents. By 2020, a single Kashmir political entity could be a reality, in one of the world's most tense and bitter rivalries.

What's likely to happen?

The concept of a separate Kashmiri identity is going to disappear over the next 16 years, as the independence movement is submerged by the crashing waves of Indian and Pakistani nationalism. Kashmir will be simply carved into two by both countries, with China being handed the mountainous portion its army has occupied for decades. India and Pakistan will accept the deal, and the people of Kashmir will pay the price. Lacking an inspirational leader, Kashmiris will be unable to tell the world of their plight.

The likely sop to the Kashmiri people will be a form of travel documents which both India and Pakistan will pledge to upgrade, eventually, into passports. Talk of a cross-border Kashmiri parliament will come to nothing: all that is likely to happen is a regular meeting of Indian and Pakistani-appointed politicians. Such a Kashmir settlement would not be accepted by separatists on either side of the border, but they will be unable to mobilise resistance. A joint Indo-Pakistan covert military operation will pick off the militant leaders and simply repress all forms of dissent.

The reason for the diminishing importance of Kashmir in both national psyches is that both countries simply have more to lose than to gain over the issue. Pakistan will in time come to realise its primary advantage over India lies in its geopolitical location, which gives it access to the huge and growing market across the border. It will be in both countries' interests to agree a nuclear no-first-use pact, probably sponsored by the Americans

The two countries will also be brought closer by the movement towards a south Asian common market. When an agreement to establish a SAU is finally signed in 2015, the region's legal and economic institutions will be forced to improve their services and, to some extent, harmonise their activities. The SAU would have to grant Kashmir special status, but to tempt investors restrictions on land acquisitions will be lifted, leading to a buy up by big business. That will mean the arrival of a migrant workforce for Kashmir's new industrial sector. The distinctive character of the region will start to fade, just like Tibet since its annexation by China.

Blurred visions

Don't believe what writers and novelists have had to say about the future: they see only the extremes


"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth," says St John in the Book of Revelation. He wasn't the only one. Visionaries of every variety have been doing much the same thing, from Plato in Republic through to the present day. Few who imagine the future limit themselves to trying to plot what is likely to happen. That is left to such science fiction writers as Arthur C Clarke, who, among other triumphs, accurately foretold the development of the geosynchronous communication satellite - though even Clarke declines to be classed as a prophet, saying he merely extrapolates from the evidence all around us. Much more of this genre, though, is concerned with dreams. And more often than not, those dreams are nightmares.

Where such dreams are dreams of perfection, we tend to call their products utopias. But that is not what Thomas More meant when he invented the term for use in the book of that name, which he published in 1516. Topia comes from topos, a place; the u before it from eu, the Greek equivalent to the Latin non. Utopia, in other words, means, strictly speaking, a place that does not exist and probably never will. The kind of world where the wolf lies down with the lamb and the leopard with the kid, where the crooked are made straight and the rough places plain - as envisaged in the cheerier thoughts of the prophet Isaiah - is not More's business.

Some later "utopian" writers provide such delights in abundance. James Hilton, for instance, whose 1934 novel Lost Horizon invented a kingdom lost in the Himalayas, where prevailing philosophies, partly Buddhist and partly Christian, have created a kind of paradise. He called it Shangri-la, and its prospects seemed so enticing that when Franklin D Roosevelt created the presidential holiday retreat now known as Camp David he named it Shangri-la. But More's purpose in writing Utopia was to criticise and mock the world he lived in rather than proposing a handy alternative.

In 1932 Aldous Huxley published a book set six centuries in the future called Brave New World - a classic example of what, by derivation from "utopia", we nowadays call a "dystopia"; that's to say, a place which is wretched to live in (the word was invented by John Stuart Mill). By setting his story so far ahead, Huxley avoided the fate of George Orwell, who in 1948 pushed the present forward only as far as its anagram, 1984, thus ensuring that when the real 1984 arrived and wasn't nearly as ghastly as Orwell's, people who should have known better alleged that Orwell had got it wrong. But that's to mistake the purpose of these dystopias. They aren't prophecies; they are warnings. They say: there are tendencies in our world which, if allowed to persist and burgeon, could produce these results.

In Huxley's imagined world, what matters is purchasing and consumption. Pleasure is equated with happiness, and effortlessly sustained on a tide of appropriate drugs. If the wolf lies down with the lamb, and the crooked are made straight, that's because we've discovered genetic engineering. If you don't watch out, it could happen, says Huxley; and 72 years on, in this age of "must have", "to die for", "to kill for", of drugs such as Prozac and Viagra, and a runaway revolution in genetic manipulation, you can see all too well what he feared.

But Huxley also created a utopia, in the Shangri-la sense, in a book he published at the end of his life called Island. A London reporter is shipwrecked in a far distant spot called Pala, unpenetrated till now by any western journalist, and discovers a state with echoes of Shangri-la. All is peace and prosperity, swords have long ago been beaten into ploughshares, crime is almost unknown, and envy and greed have given way to equality. This society is the creation of a local ruler and a Scottish doctor, which means, as in Shangri-la, that the best of Buddhist and Christian traditions prevail. But the outside world has its eye on the island: it is ripe for the arrival of progress, which means exploitation; and in the concluding pages, progress, fuelled by oil company money, old-time Billy Graham religion and the successful reawakening of greed and ambition duly, and bloodily, sweeps shangri-la away.

Huxley's Island is a wistful fantasy. Other utopian writers are aiming at something more. In 1948, the year of Orwell's dark invention, the behavioural psychologist BF Skinner published a novel called Walden Two, set in a community modelled on the Walden of that hammer of consumptionism Henry David Thoreau. The belief behind this community is that if the world is to be changed, politics cannot do it: the only way would be through the successful application of behavioural psychology - a teaching Skinner had advanced in his works of non-fiction.

Much the same calculation had inspired Edward Bellamy to publish, in the final years of the 19th century, a novel called Looking Backward, in which a Bostonian falls asleep in 1887 and awakes in 2000 to find his city transformed. Peace, honesty and equity prevail; the city is fair to look upon; crime and war are concepts scarcely now thought of. Unsurprisingly, the teachings which have brought this about are those advanced by Bellamy in his earlier philosophical books. Books like these seem to be saying: if we mended our ways, some, perhaps all, of this might be possible. But Bellamy's ambitions went further than that. In a postscript, he boldly asserts not just that all he writes of is possible, but that it's now very probable, and that signs are appearing on every side to suggest it might be achieved quite soon.  

One doesn't need to visit Boston today to believe that reality falls wretchedly short of Bellamy's expectations. The heartening thing about works of this genre is that the pessimists get things wrong. The disheartening thing is that the optimists are probably even more wrong.