“The World If” focuses on climate change

For the first time ever, the annual scenarios supplement has a theme

Every summer The Economist publishes its annual scenarios supplement, “The World If”, which appears as a special report inside the newspaper. Its aim is to provide some mind-stretching beach reading, imagining future scenarios in politics, business and science, and describing them in articles that are presented as reports from the future. It’s great fun to do, and gives our writers an opportunity to write fiction, though always grounded in historical fact and real science.

This year, for the first time, “The World If” has a theme: scenarios for a warming world. Each article considers climate change from a different viewpoint in the future. They do not present a unified narrative, but are set in different worlds, on different emissions pathways. In some scenarios humanity has done a good job of tackling climate change; in others it has not.

For example, one scenario set in 2050 imagines water shortages causing internal political tensions in China, in a rapidly warming world. Another scenario, also set in 2050, describes the emergence of a vast new “carbon removal” industry that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and buries it underground. It’s the opposite of the oil industry — rather than Big Oil, we call it Big Suck. Another scenario, set in 2030, considers the rise of a global system that tracks everyone’s carbon footprint, pitting privacy activists, who object to blanket surveillance, against environmentalists who consider it a price worth paying to save the planet. And in a report from the Republican national convention of 2024, we tell the story of how the party did a U-turn on climate change, and picked an environmentalist as its nominee.

Other scenarios examine eco-terrorism, covid-19’s impact on aviation, how bringing mammoths back to life could help fight climate change, and how the world might look if more countries had adopted nuclear power in the 1970s, like France did. It’s all rather different from our usual reporting and analysis, but it has the same aim: to encourage the reader to see the world in a new way.

We hope you will enjoy reading it.

The Economist does not just report on the news. It also peers into the future. We spot trends, explore scenarios and make predictions. All of our future-gazing, The World in… and The World if, both annual special publications, are gathered under one editorial platform — The World Ahead.

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