The Futures of the World: A Cartographic Essay in Global Foresight

In late 2010, Virginie Raisson published 2033, atlas des futurs du monde (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2010), a richly illustrated work which Pierre Bonnaure discussed in the Bibliography section of Futuribles last February. In that book, she shows the extent of the challenges facing our planet and the degree to which foresight studies have an essential role to play in interpreting them and offering various scenarios capable of providing positive solutions to problems that may at times seem insoluble. By way of some original, dynamic graphic features, this Atlas lays before us both the present, with all that it portends for future generations, and the future, with all the potential scenarios that may be possible, if only we all decide genuinely to act on them right now. In this article Virginie Raisson outlines the motivations that led her to produce this original exercise in foresight studies and the choices she made in illustrating it graphically. In particular she shows, with this work – though this perhaps needs no repeating in our columns – that humanity’s future is not set in stone and that we all still have sufficient resources, material and intellectual, to shift it in the most desirable direction.