These are brief notes that begin a small collection formed by three articles, including this one. Here we will talk about the relevance of the prospective study to face the uncertain, risky and challenging future that lies ahead in the coming decades. The changes in the twenty-first century are likely to be greater than all previous changes in human history. Following this article, we will analyze the likely trends in tourism over the next two decades, to conclude with an exercise of focusing on Bahia 2035. These are simple and, if possible, didactic notes. Useful for those who are starting to think about the future of tourism in Brazil. And a small tribute to my advisees, as well as colleagues, who created and currently animate LETS, and will live the following decades, facing, with the courage that is peculiar to them, their challenges.
Planners and prospective scholars often say that 2035 is tomorrow, that the future has already arrived. Of course, they are marketing expressions, built to attract attention. Ultimately, they seek to produce media effects. 2035 is not around the corner, about 12 years separate us from it. However, they have a bit of truth. Much of what will happen until 2035 is already contracted. Probably the trends identified today will occur, such as: the decrease in the pace of population growth, the increase in the speed of the energy transition, the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence, the higher growth of emerging countries compared to developed countries, the centrality of the economy in the Pacific Ocean, the mediocre improvement of education in Brazil (unfortunately), international tensions, with wars and disorganization of value chains, the growth of nature tourism, in its various modalities, etc. However, even if some of these predictions occur, they express trends, and, as the popular saying goes: "trend is not destiny". Trend is something that may or may not occur. Some are covered with a lot of uncertainty and others with little. In any case, humans are not endowed with the ability to foresee, except in special situations. We could not predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nor the attack on the twin towers in the United States in 2001. It is true that half a dozen economists announced in the early years of the twenty-first century that we were heading for an economic crisis, but the overwhelming majority were taken by surprise by the economic and financial crisis of 2008/2009. Very few thinkers at the beginning of this century, including Morin and Bill Gates, predicted that a major pandemic would happen among us at any moment. This inability to predict occurs because, we must not forget, the future is the privileged abode of uncertainty. Who could have predicted in 1980 that China would be the world's second power 40 years later? Or Russia's current invasion of Ukraine three years ago?
About 12 years separate us from 2035 and some things may occur completely changing the current expectation. Technological innovations can surprise us, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, new materials, and health. By 2035 we could have a partial nuclear war, which even seems to be a contradiction in terms; We may have the two powers of the new world war under electoral authoritarian regimes [1] (the case of the United States with Trump), with influence over other countries; or a gigantic ecological migration in the world. Or simpler things, but impactful, such as the reduction of the costs of desalination of the waters of the Ocean, with the correct disposal of waste ("and the hinterland will become the sea"), the control of nuclear fusion, or global warming entering a feedback process, or even, to get closer to science fiction, the contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Almost anything is possible in a world of such rapid technological change and about which we have precarious and partial knowledge.
Brazil, in turn, will be able to remain, as it has done for forty years, as a country with a medium economy, with one of the worst educational systems among emerging countries (not to mention the developed ones); destroying its two most precious capitals: the human being and its vegetation cover; maintaining legal uncertainty. In addition to more recent phenomena such as the expansion of drug trafficking and crime in medium-sized cities (Ilhéus is the city with the highest mortality per 100 thousand inhabitants in the country today). Brazil is a country that kills some of its future talents, with the murder of young people, especially from the periphery, and loses emerging talents, who migrate to other countries, because here they do not have the fertile ground to develop their skills. In addition to driving away others, such as investors. But it may change course. Stimulate the energy transition, which could be exemplary for the world, and become energy exporters; developing the bioeconomy, leaving our forests standing, yielding better living conditions for their inhabitants and a good international image for the country, attracting investors, in addition to ensuring the evident ecosystem services produced by forests; controlling and reducing crime and drug trafficking, and in particular, producing a revolution in our educational system. In this scenario, in 2035 we will be in transition to a different country, committed to building global sustainability and changing levels; reducing inequality and eliminating poverty.
Despite the fact that uncertainty is occupying a prominent place in our perspectives, and Morin tells us that "the most probable thing in the future is that the improbable will occur" (Morin, 1981:23), and Taleb (2008) that "We must expect the unexpected". And despite the "black swans" [2] constantly destroying our predictions, we cannot live without prospecting the future, not necessarily with predictions. After all, in some areas of knowledge we have been able to expand this capacity for forecasting, such as meteorology (Silver, 2013), but in several others we are a nonentity, such as in economics, in which economists are unable to make predictions even for the following year, let alone for the following decade.
However, despite our prospective limits, we persist in the exercise of anticipation. First, because it gives us comfort (we have a pleasant feeling of control of the situation) and, second, because we can anticipate some things and prepare for them. Especially if we can make robust scenarios. As Randers (2012:8) says: "It is simpler to prepare for the future if you start by imagining what it will be like".
We have, however, some structural difficulties in thinking about the future, which we must be aware of and take precautions as far as possible. We tend to learn the specific rather than the general. We value what we know and despise what we do not know, and these are the decisive ones, as Ortega y Gasset says: "We do not know what passes and this is what happens".
We are not gifted to apprehend logics, dynamics or laws, we are able to learn facts and narratives. We are averse to thinking about complexity and randomness. Complexity confuses us and randomness makes us uncomfortable. We love storytelling because it makes the world simple, predictable, and comfortable. We prefer the normal to the extraordinary, to think about the future, and then we make mistakes. Most of the changes were not the result of planning, but of "black swans," events or processes that were relatively unknown or overlooked. TV, the computer and the internet, in their birth, were the object of completely erroneous opinions of great businessmen and scientists; object of irony and mockery on the part of these characters.
Changes occur as a result of facts, resulting from our decisions. However, we are rarely aware of the set of consequences of these decisions, as they are made according to the vision we have of the world, of which, by the way, we are little aware; they are taken in certain contexts and these are not born overnight, they are formed gradually, procedurally. And we became aware of them belatedly. For example, the pattern of development (and thinking) that has dominated us in the last 100 years has been that of economic growth as synonymous with happiness, measured by GDP performance. This is the pattern fueling the climate emergency that is leading us into a world of suffering and death. To this day, we have not been able to adopt a new standard, that of sustainability as a synonym for happiness, signaled in the 1970s. However, to this day it is not fully accepted. This perception is contained in the most successful book after the Second World War, published in 1972 – The limits of growth. His basic teaching is that The world is prepared to grow to the stage of exceeding the availability of its natural resources, and it cannot remain there for long, because the result will be collapse. And what is the alternative? Say the Meadows and their collaborators: the organized slowdown.
Humans are slow to understand and act on big issues, especially if they are as complex as climate change. It took 40 years for human societies to become aware of the problem (1972-2012). Not fully understanding it, they decided to adopt a bizarre solution: organized acceleration, under the name of sustainable development, with particular names such as green economy, SDGs [3] , ESG, etc. In the midst of an intense denialist campaign: "climate change does not exist", "the climate always changes"; "climate change does not depend on human activities, it is the result of natural processes"; "It is an invention of imperialism to prevent our development," say the deniers, among other bizarre statements. It is only now, when climate change is beginning to gain the status of a climate emergency, at a time when its effects are gaining greater visibility and causing greater harm, that human societies are beginning to be concerned differently with the problem and to suspect that the solutions adopted do not solve it. For 30 years they applied the same measures expecting different results: the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere did not stop growing. But between the awareness of the problem, its full understanding, the adoption of new measures and their implementation, a few decades should still pass. The greatest risk is that climate change will take off on its own, that is, it will self-reproduce at higher levels with the release of new gases in the polar regions. The risk of collapse will undoubtedly increase, but it is probably not likely to occur in 2035, but then perhaps in the 2040s or 2050s.
In view of these considerations, how to work with prospective thinking? It will certainly not be with absolutely innocuous forecasts, especially in the long term. The scenario technique, when well used, can be useful. But, especially, if we observe the threats and opportunities contained in the various scenarios constructed as possible. And always attentive to the unforeseen. For example: nuclear fusion. If we control it to the level of being able to commercialize and disseminate it, we will have profound transformations in the energy transition, with a substantive change in the field of the ecological crisis and its tip of the iceberg, climate change. A true black swan, today absolutely despised by most politicians and political institutions. Therefore, the essential thing is: once the trends have been identified, imagine their repercussions in terms of threats and opportunities.
Assuming that climate change will not get too worse, that we will not have a destructive nuclear war or a pandemic of high lethality (otmist vision of the future), it is possible to think about several interesting things, including the evolution of tourism in the national territory. What are the most robust global trends? How will these trends behave in a climate emergency? And in the case of the adoption of a new pattern of evolution (sustainability as the center, and no longer GDP growth), what measures will be adopted, what transformations will be provoked? These and other issues, with tourism as a backdrop, will be the subject of the next notes.
Some references
Morin, Edgar. Pour sortir du XXe siècle. Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1981
Taleb, Nicholas Nassim. The logic of the black swan. The impact of the highly improbable. Managing the unknown. Rio de Janeiro: Best Seller, 2008.
Meadows, Daniela; Meadows, Denis; Randers, Jorgen and Behrens III, William W. The limits of growth. São Paulo: Perspectivas, 1972.
Randers, Jorgen. 2052. A global forecast for the next forty years. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012. Preface to the Brazilian edition by Heitor Gurgulino de Souza
[1] Expression used to designate some authoritarian regimes such as those of China, Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, Iran, which are reproduced through elections, with or without opposition parties.
[2] "Black swans" are for Taleb (2008:14) a Outlier – spurious data from a statistical sample; that which we do not foresee or to which we do not pay due attention. Or else, the non-occurrence of an event or trend that we are waiting for.
[3] Among its 17 objectives is strangely the sustainable economic growth that Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Randers and Clóvis Cavalcanti, clearly demonstrated to be something unfeasible. In Serge Latouche's expression – an oxymoron.
