# How We Prepare for the New World ## The Map and the Storm In 2021, I read *Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World*, published by the National Intelligence Council. It is the seventh edition of a strategic foresight report published every four years since 1997, with a clear objective: to help policymakers think about the future not as prediction, but as a field of possibilities. The report's architecture is simple and effective. First, it identifies the structural forces shaping the world over the long term—demographics, environment, economy, and technology. Then it analyzes how these forces interact with political and social factors, and how they impact human behavior, states, and institutions. Finally, it constructs five plausible scenarios for 2040: not as futurology, but as alternative maps of the same territory. I read it like someone reading a weather map for a long crossing. Not to know the exact day of the storm, but to understand the pattern of the clouds, the direction of the wind, and the zones where the sea changes its mood. When I finished, I felt anxious. Not from drama, but from clarity. The report said, in a contained and almost clinical way, that the world until 2040 would be more contested, more fragmented, and harder to govern. In 2021, that sounded like a thesis. In 2026, it sounds like a description. --- ## What Happened Since Then Between 2021 and today, the world didn't wait for 2040 to accelerate. And reality confirmed the report faster than many expected. War returned to Europe on a large scale. Russia invaded Ukraine, and the continent that had built its political identity around peace found itself confronted with trenches, missiles, and millions of refugees. NATO, which some had declared in "brain death," expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Germany announced its largest rearmament since 1945. Energy became an explicit geopolitical weapon. Europe, which imported 45% of its gas from Russia, was forced to reconfigure in months what should have changed over decades. In two years, that dependency fell to 15%. The price was enormous—in bills, in industrial competitiveness, in social tension—but the lesson stuck: energy dependency is strategic vulnerability. Inflation returned to developed economies as a political and social factor. In October 2022, the eurozone reached 10.6% inflation—the highest since the single currency was created. In the United States, prices rose at the fastest pace in 40 years. Suddenly, the cost of living became the dominant issue in elections, protests, and labor negotiations across the West. Artificial intelligence stopped being a distant promise and became critical infrastructure. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months—the fastest adoption of any technology in history. By 2024, 78% of organizations were using AI in their operations. Governments rushed to regulate what they barely understood. The European Union passed the AI Act. The Bletchley Park summit brought together 29 countries—including the United States and China—to discuss existential risks. No one expected the conversation about "superintelligent AI" to arrive so soon. Disinformation went from marginal phenomenon to strategic tool. The World Economic Forum classified it as the number one risk for the short term. Deepfakes, coordinated campaigns, fabricated narratives. Truth became a battlefield where states, companies, and citizens compete—often without knowing they're competing. Climate stopped being a future issue and became a present crisis. 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded—every month from June to December broke historical records. Severe droughts in Europe and China. Megafires in the Mediterranean and Canada. Devastating floods in Pakistan that displaced 33 million people. The frequency and intensity of extreme events exceeded projections. What was predicted for 2040 is happening now. And geopolitics stopped being "out there" and definitively entered the economy, business, and daily life. The war in Gaza showed how a regional conflict can redraw alliances, narratives, and internal tensions across multiple countries. Trade tariffs between the United States and China became permanent. "Friend-shoring" went from academic concept to industrial policy. European companies learned, by force, that geography matters. None of this contradicts the NIC report. On the contrary. The world confirmed its premises—just in five years, not twenty. --- ## The Four Structural Changes The central point is this: crises stopped being isolated events and started behaving like cascading systems. A pandemic causes logistical disruptions. The disruption feeds inflation. Inflation opens space for radicalization. Radicalization weakens governments. Weak governments respond worse to external crises. Suddenly, everything is connected, and the system fails in a chain. There are four structural changes that, together, explain the new world. ### Risk Now Comes in Cascades For decades, we thought of risks as discrete events: a pandemic, a war, a financial crisis. Each had its time, its space, its response. Today, risks interact. They feed on each other. They amplify. COVID-19 wasn't just a health crisis. It was a supply chain crisis, an energy crisis, a social cohesion crisis, an institutional trust crisis. The war in Ukraine wasn't just a military crisis. It was a food crisis in Africa, an energy crisis in Europe, a global inflationary crisis, a refugee crisis, a narrative crisis. The international system no longer absorbs shocks—it transmits them. ### Technology Became Sovereignty For years we talked about digital as productivity. Now we talk about it as security. Whoever controls chips, cloud, AI models, data, energy, and submarine cables controls the capacity to act. Sovereignty is no longer just territory. It's infrastructure. Artificial intelligence is the best example. In just a few years, it went from a technical topic to a political, regulatory, labor, and even existential question. It created real productivity gains, but also deep asymmetries. States and companies with access to compute, talent, and data advance exponentially. The rest fall structurally behind. The semiconductor war between the United States and China is not a commercial dispute. It's a dispute for control of the technological foundations of the 21st century. Europe—which produces virtually no advanced chips—realized, perhaps too late, that depending on Taiwan for 90% of the most sophisticated processors is an existential vulnerability. ### Climate Became a Crisis Multiplier For decades, we treated climate change as an environmental problem—important, but separate from "real" geopolitics. That time is over. Climate is now a multiplier of all other crises. Droughts destroy harvests and fuel migrations. Migrations generate political tensions. Political tensions weaken governments. Weakened governments fail to respond to new climate crises. The cycle accelerates. In January and February 2026, Portugal lived this reality in brutal fashion. A "train" of Atlantic storms—Ingrid, Joseph, Kristin, Leonardo, Marta—crossed the country in just a few weeks. Storm Kristin was classified by Portugal's meteorological institute (IPMA) as the strongest since records began, with winds exceeding 200 km/h and a rare phenomenon called a "sting jet." The result: more than a dozen dead, hundreds injured, millions without electricity, roads destroyed, critical infrastructure damaged. The Government declared a state of calamity in 68 municipalities and mobilized a support package of 2.5 billion euros. In Spain, more than 7,000 people were evacuated in Andalusia due to flooding. What happened? The Azores High—the high-pressure system that normally protects the Iberian Peninsula by deflecting storms northward—positioned itself persistently further south than usual. A direct corridor opened from the North Atlantic to Portugal. The depressions that formed over the ocean, fed by warmer-than-normal waters, came in sequence, with unusual intensity. Scientists are cautious about attributing a specific event to climate change. But the science is clear about the trend: higher temperatures mean more evaporation, more water vapor in the atmosphere, oceans with more accumulated energy. When storms arrive, they arrive stronger. Projections indicate that the number of storms may not increase much—but their intensity will. And Portugal, in a transitional climate between subtropical and mid-latitudes, is particularly vulnerable to this exponential variability: periods of severe drought followed by winters with extreme, concentrated precipitation. NATO identifies climate collapse as the most consequential and, in the long term, most existential challenge societies face. Water and food scarcity already fuels conflicts in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East. By 2040, studies point to a 50% probability of simultaneous crop failures in the four largest agricultural producers worldwide. Climate isn't waiting for 2040. It's reshaping the world now. And as a Portuguese commentator wrote in recent weeks: "Storms in series aren't bad luck—they're a warning." ### The International Order Lost Its Brakes and Gained Friction The world is not collapsing into total chaos, but it's also not returning to the "normal" of 1995–2015. It's reorganizing into blocs, variable alliances, and gray zones. Multilateral institutions continue to exist, but function increasingly by exception and less by rule. The UN Security Council is paralyzed. The WTO lost its dispute resolution mechanism. The Bretton Woods system—IMF, World Bank—faces a crisis of legitimacy before the Global South. Cooperation exists, but by sectors and convenience, not by trust. The United States and China can sit at the same table to discuss AI risks, but continue to impose reciprocal sanctions on semiconductors. Europe coordinates with Washington on the war, but diverges on trade policy. India buys weapons from Russia while participating in the Quad with the United States. The world is not bipolar. It's multipolar, fragmented, and unstable—with rules that apply to some and not to others. --- ## The Trump Dimension: Volatility as Policy And there's a fifth variable that has become impossible to ignore. With Donald Trump back in the White House in 2025, the biggest change isn't a specific policy. It's the systemic message: the American pendulum can swing rapidly. For Europe, this means that "guarantees" become "probabilities." Days after taking office, Trump revoked executive orders on AI development safety. He signaled conditions on support for Ukraine. He publicly questioned NATO's value. He threatened generalized tariffs on European imports. Strategic predictability—the foundation of any alliance—became a scarce commodity. The impact goes far beyond the United States. It affects allies' trust, the stability of multilateral institutions, and adversaries' boldness. China watches. Russia calculates. Global South countries reposition themselves. An already contested world becomes more unstable when the center of the system changes direction easily. Preparing for 2040 therefore means preparing for cycles of political volatility in major powers—including, and perhaps especially, in the United States. The Europe that built its security architecture on the premise of a stable America now needs to build capacity for scenarios where that premise doesn't apply. --- ## What 2040 Might Look Like 2040 won't be a single clean scenario. It will be a hybrid. The NIC proposed five possible scenarios: "Renaissance of Democracies," "Competitive Coexistence," "A World Adrift," "Separate Silos," and "Tragedy and Mobilization." The reality of 2026 already shows that we're not in a pure scenario—we're in a turbulent combination of "A World Adrift" (weakened institutions, permanent volatility) with "Separate Silos" (formation of economic and technological blocs). The dominant trait tends to be this: **a world of blocs and selective interdependencies.** **Economy:** Shorter and more expensive globalization. Redundancy in critical chains. "Friend-shoring" as normal. Efficiency loses ground to resilience. The IMF estimates that complete fragmentation into blocs could reduce global GDP by 5%—but many countries have already decided that's an acceptable price for security. **Energy:** Mass electrification, but with new dependencies. Less Russian gas, more Congolese lithium. Less Saudi oil, more Chinese cobalt. The maps of power change, but haven't disappeared. The energy transition is also a geopolitical reconfiguration. **Climate:** Global warming will likely exceed 1.5°C before 2030. Extreme events will be routine, not exception—as Portugal has just experienced. Entire regions will become less habitable. Migratory pressure will increase. Competition for water and arable land will intensify. The energy transition will be simultaneously a climate emergency and a geopolitical reconfiguration—with winners and losers. And countries that don't invest in resilience and adaptation will pay an ever-higher price in lives, infrastructure, and social cohesion. **Technology:** AI as a cross-cutting layer, in everything. Enormous productivity, but also brutal asymmetry. By 2040, the difference between those who master AI and those who consume it will be comparable to the difference between those who had the industrial revolution and those who suffered it. **Security:** Constant hybrid warfare. Attacks on infrastructure, information, markets, and trust. More frequent regional conflicts, with global effects. The border between peace and war has become porous. We're always in some degree of conflict with someone. **Society:** Greater polarization in cycles, more economic anxiety, more stress on social cohesion. More than half the world's population already has little or no trust in their government. The democracies that survive best will be those that can "govern complexity" without breaking trust. And Europe? Europe can be the continent that learns fastest—or the continent that hesitates longest. It can be the first to build a model of democratic strategic autonomy—or it can become a rich market in a hard world, dependent on others' decisions. --- ## Preparing for the New World The temptation is to respond to this context with fear, slogans, or vague futurology. The alternative is simple and hard: structural preparation. There's a practical framework, applicable to countries, companies, and people. ### 1. Trade Pure Efficiency for Deliberate Resilience Resilience isn't "having a plan B." It's designing the system to fail gracefully. Systems designed only for efficiency fail badly. A hospital without stocks. A factory with a single supplier. An economy dependent on a single market. An electrical grid that collapses with 150 km/h winds. When shock arrives, the system collapses—and recovery is slow and expensive. Resilience costs more in the short term, but fails better. It means duplicating critical suppliers and logistics routes. Reducing single dependencies in energy, technology, and data. Maintaining rapid substitution capacity, even when it seems redundant. Burying power lines in risk zones. Rethinking territorial planning so rivers don't flood cities and forests don't fuel catastrophes. ### 2. Treat Technology as Strategy, Not as Accessory This applies to governments and boards of directors. Have a clear strategy for AI: where to create value, where to prohibit, where to audit. Invest in internal competencies. Don't outsource the brain. Ensure minimum sovereignty over data and infrastructure. Cloud and models are power—not just services. Europe decided to regulate AI before mastering it. It could be a smart move (defining the rules of the game) or a historic mistake (regulating what others create). The difference will lie in the ability to simultaneously invest massively in its own capacity. ### 3. Take Climate Adaptation Seriously Climate change is no longer a problem for the future. It's a problem of the present—with real, measurable costs paid in lives and billions of euros. Portugal needs to map climate risk for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Understand which zones become floodable, which infrastructure is vulnerable, which agricultural crops become unviable. And then act: reinforce dams, protect waterways, reform forests, adapt cities. Not as an expense—as an investment in survival. Mitigation also counts. Without emissions reduction, adaptation will always be insufficient. The energy transition isn't just environmental policy—it's national security policy. ### 4. Do Modern Defense: Cyber, Information, and Infrastructure Defense today is protecting the invisible. Cybersecurity as business continuity—not as a technical department. Protection of critical infrastructure and suppliers. Capacity to respond to disinformation campaigns quickly and legitimately. The war in Ukraine showed that conventional defense still matters—but it also showed that 500-euro drones can destroy 5-million-euro tanks, that a cyberattack can paralyze an electrical grid, and that a disinformation campaign can divide allies faster than any army. ### 5. Rebuild Social Cohesion as a Strategic Asset Without internal trust, no foreign policy can hold. Social cohesion isn't a "soft" issue. It's a strategic asset. Divided societies are vulnerable societies. Disinformation exploits existing fissures. Radicalization grows on fertile ground of inequality and abandonment. External adversaries don't need to invade—just amplify divisions. Protect transitions with clear compensation and perceived justice. Combat inequalities that feed radicalization. Treat public truth as infrastructure: media literacy, transparency, accountability. ### 6. Build Strategic Autonomy Without Falling into Autarky Strategic autonomy isn't closing doors. It's choosing dependencies. The European Union has a historic window here. Either it consolidates capabilities in energy, defense, and technology, or it becomes a rich market in a hard world, dependent on others' decisions. NATO and the EU will remain central, but Europe needs more of its own muscle so that alliances are an option and not a condition for survival. The bare truth is this: in 2040, whoever doesn't have internal capacity negotiates on their knees. --- ## Challenges for Those Who Govern Those who govern face the hardest challenge: making long-term decisions in systems designed for short cycles. Democracy wasn't designed to manage exponential complexity—but it will have to learn. **Ten priorities for policymakers:** 1. **Invest in anticipation, not just reaction.** Create institutional capacity for strategic foresight—not as an academic exercise, but as a governance tool. Systematically ask: what if the "unimaginable" happens? Portugal had no post-catastrophe recovery plan when Storm Kristin arrived. That has to change. 2. **Treat climate adaptation as critical infrastructure.** Map climate risk. Reinforce dams, protect waterways, reform forests, adapt cities. Every euro invested in prevention saves many euros in reconstruction. 3. **Treat the energy transition as a national security issue.** Decarbonizing is an environmental imperative, but also a geopolitical one. Reducing external energy dependencies means reducing vulnerability to coercion. 4. **Accept that technology is politics.** Regulate, yes—but also invest. Europe cannot be only the continent that defines rules for technologies that others create. 5. **Rebuild European defense without waiting for Washington.** NATO remains essential, but Europe needs its own capacity for scenarios where American support is uncertain or conditional. 6. **Protect critical infrastructure as if it were territory.** Energy networks, telecommunications, submarine cables, financial systems. An attack—or a storm—on any of these is an attack on sovereignty. 7. **Combat disinformation as a hybrid threat.** Not just with fact-checking, but with structural media literacy, algorithmic transparency, and platform accountability. 8. **Prepare social systems for work disruption.** AI will profoundly transform the labor market. Transitions without compensation generate political backlash—and political backlash can destroy the capacity to reform. 9. **Rebuild institutional trust.** Democracy doesn't survive without perceived legitimacy. This requires transparency, accountability, and visible results. 10. **Accept that multilateralism needs deep reform.** Post-war institutions were designed for another world. Either they reform, or they lose relevance. Europe can lead that reform—or be dragged along by its erosion. --- ## Challenges for Those Who Build Entrepreneurship in 2026 is different from entrepreneurship in 2015. The context has changed—and companies that don't realize this will find out too late. **Ten realities for entrepreneurs and managers:** 1. **Geopolitics has entered the balance sheet.** Where are the suppliers? Where are the customers? Where is the data? These questions have stopped being operational and become strategic. 2. **Climate has entered the balance sheet.** What physical risks does the supply chain face? Which facilities are in vulnerable zones? What insurance covers extreme events? The January storms showed these questions aren't theoretical. 3. **Resilience is competitive advantage.** Companies with redundant supply chains and rapid adaptation capacity will survive the next shocks better. 4. **AI is not optional.** It's not a question of "adopt or not." It's a question of "adopt well or adopt badly." Those who don't integrate AI into operations will lose competitiveness structurally. 5. **Talent is the new oil.** In a world of growing automation, the differentiator is people who know how to think, decide, and create. Attracting and retaining that talent is critical. 6. **Regulation is reality, not obstacle.** Europe regulates. That can be a cost or an advantage—depending on how companies position themselves. Proactive compliance is cheaper than reactive compliance. 7. **Cybersecurity is business continuity.** An attack can stop a company for weeks. Investing in security isn't an expense—it's insurance. 8. **Reputation is fragile and global.** A communication crisis travels at the speed of social networks. Transparency and authenticity are assets—cynicism is a liability. 9. **Sustainability has stopped being marketing.** Customers, investors, and regulators demand it. Companies that don't adapt will lose access to capital and markets. 10. **Think 10 years, not just 10 months.** The short term presses, but companies that don't invest in future capacity will wake up obsolete. --- ## Challenges for the Individual And for those who neither govern nor build? For the ordinary citizen, the worker, the young person entering the market? The world of 2040 will demand more from each person. Not because that's fair—but because it's real. **Ten guidelines for individual navigation:** 1. **Learn to learn.** What we know today may be obsolete tomorrow. The ability to acquire new skills continuously is the only guarantee of long-term employability. 2. **Develop digital and media literacy.** Know how to distinguish information from disinformation. Understand how algorithms work. Protect personal data. This isn't optional—it's cognitive survival. 3. **Cultivate critical thinking.** In a world of information abundance, the ability to think independently, to question narratives, to resist manipulation, is more valuable than ever. 4. **Build networks of trust.** Community, family, friends, colleagues. In times of uncertainty, human networks are safety nets. Investing in relationships is investing in resilience. The January storms showed this: it was local communities that first mobilized to help. 5. **Accept uncertainty as a permanent condition.** The world won't "return to normal." Those who expect stability will live frustrated. Those who accept change as constant will adapt better. 6. **Take care of mental health.** Anxiety, information overload, constant pressure—all of this has costs. Recognizing limits, seeking help, disconnecting when necessary isn't weakness—it's maintenance. 7. **Participate civically.** Democracy doesn't defend itself. Vote, inform yourself, participate in public debate, demand accountability. Abstention is delegation—and those who delegate, obey. 8. **Diversify skills.** Don't depend on a single capability, a single employer, a single sector. Professional flexibility is economic security. 9. **Think globally, act locally.** Problems are global, but solutions start where we are. Community, municipality, region. Possible change is within reach. 10. **Don't give up on hope.** Pessimism paralyzes. Naive optimism deludes. What works is active hope: believing that action matters, even when the outcome is uncertain. --- ## The Final Test The NIC spoke of adaptation as an advantage. Today, that seems like the most important phrase of all. But "adapting" isn't being flexible. It's being fast without losing identity. It's changing direction without losing course. The new world will reward those who can achieve three things at once: - **Speed** to react to shocks. - **Resilience** to not collapse in cascades. - **Cohesion** to not destroy themselves from within. Europe has everything to be one of the winners in this new world. It has democratic institutions. It has human capital. It has values that attract. It has economic scale. It has experience managing complexity. But it also has chronic hesitations, dangerous dependencies, and a historic difficulty in acting with urgency. The time it had to decide calmly is over. The decisions made in the next five years will determine Europe's position for the next fifty. --- ## The Right Question Perhaps the most important question is no longer "what will happen." It's this: **in a world where almost everything can be automated, accelerated, or manipulated, what do we decide not to delegate?** What do we want to remain human? What do we want to remain ours? What are we unwilling to hand over—to algorithms, to markets, to foreign powers, to short-term conveniences? That's where any serious preparation for the new world begins. And that's where it's decided who arrives at 2040 standing—and who arrives on their knees. --- ## Source This article is based on the analysis of **Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World**, published by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in March 2021, cross-validated with reports from CSIS, Brookings, Chatham House, NATO Strategic Foresight Analysis, and ESPAS. 📄 **[Read the full NIC report (PDF)](https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf)**