Projections and Relevant Effects of Demographic Implications, Changes, and Trends (PREDICT)

PREDICT (Projections and Relevant Effects of Demographic Implications, Changes, and Trends) was launched at the end of 2013 as a follow-up study to NATO Allied Command Transformation’s Strategic Foresight Analysis (SFA). SFA was designed as an iterative process that NATO intends to update regularly to provide NATO, national leaders and defence planners with a perspective of the challenges facing the Alliance in the decades to come. SFA is organized around five different themes, which can be used to forecast future scenarios, and the goal set for PREDICT has been to further develop the research of the “human theme.” Within this theme, human demographics is believed to be a far less mutable variable in the short and medium term: significant short-term changes in demographics can come only from major catastrophic events, such as world wars or plagues, or from sudden, large-scale immigration. For this reason, human demographics was chosen as the forecasting variable employed in PREDICT.