Akio Okawara

Executive Director
Sumitomo Shoji Research Institute, Inc.

Time certainly flies. Here we are already in February, a month into the new year and halfway through the winter. It is a season when I enjoy glimpsing snow-covered Mount Fuji from the window of my commuter train. And here we are already 10 years into the twenty-first century. What a tumultuous decade it has been—with the 9/11 terror attacks, the war in Iraq, the SARS outbreak, avian and swine influenza, the Lehman shock, . . .

Probably the prime examples of faster-than-expected change so far this century are China's rise and the progress in information and communications technology. We have reached the point where no discussion of the world economy is complete without mention of China, and in the view of the risk consultants of the Eurasia Group, US-China relations are the biggest area of potential risk in the year ahead. In fact, this bilateral relationship is sure to be a focal point not just this year but throughout the coming decade.

In this age of rising uncertainty, people look for guidance from forecasts. Reading the future is crucial for both governments and businesses as they formulate strategies and lay plans for crisis management. Royal Dutch Shell's energy scenarios are quite well known, and various government organs in Western countries publish their own outlooks. Just recently I came across two interesting ones—the scenarios published by the US National Intelligence Council and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both contained much food for thought.

I have also been following with interest the series in the daily Asahi Shimbun that started on January 22, consisting of follow-ups on the predictions that experts made at the beginning of the century concerning the scientific and technological advances that would be made by 2010. The stories so far have dealt with the fields of the life sciences; robotics; earth, space, and the physical sciences; and information and industrial technology. Overall, the forecasts seem to have been surprisingly accurate.

On January 26 the Japanese government submitted a statement to the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change declaring Japan's willingness to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% from the 1990 level by 2020, "premised on the establishment of a fair and effective international framework in which all major economies participate and on agreement by those economies on ambitious targets." The year 2020 may seem a long way off, but it will be here sooner than we think. How will the structure of the global economy change between now and then? What further progress will be achieved in environmental and energy-saving technologies? Uncertainties abound, but the issues involved in coming up with a post–Kyoto Protocol framework to deal with climate change are an encapsulation of the issues today's world faces. And one thing that we can be sure of is that the decade ahead will bring totally unexpected new developments that will amaze us.

Looking further ahead, I find it endlessly fascinating to imagine how the human race will be living at the end of the twenty-first century. Medical science will doubtless continue to advance, and human life spans will doubtless continue to grow longer—but not long enough, I fear, for me to witness the end of the century myself.