Policy Horizons Canada, the Canadian government’s foresight centre, has just published a report entitled Perturbations à l’horizon [Disruptions on the Horizon], available in both French and English, which provides a brief overview (around 40 pages) of a series of 35 disruptions that will, or could, occur in the coming years. The aim of this work is to help decision-makers select the disruptions they should anticipate as a priority.
Policy Horizons Canada, Disruptions on the Horizon: 2024 Report, Policy Horizons Canada, April 2024, 37 p.
Methodology
As a first step, the Policy Horizons team compiled a list of 35 plausible disruptions based on a literature review, interviews with experts and policymakers, and workshops with futurists. This list of disruptions has been classified into five areas: society, the economy, the environment, politics/geopolitics and health. Each was described in a few lines, in the present tense, as if it had already happened. They were then submitted to a panel of 500 foresight experts in the form of a survey asking them, for each of them, to assess the probability of the disruption occurring, the impact it could have, the possible time horizon for its occurrence; and then to give their opinion on the interconnections within subsets of disruptions. The results of the survey are then presented graphically according to these different criteria. Eighteen key disruptions likely to have a significant impact on Canada (and beyond) are detailed. But the authors also point to eight disruptions that they feel are under-anticipated in the survey, but which they also feel deserve particular attention.
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