The World In 2030 - 2012 Edition is Ray Hammond's completely rewritten and updated version of the work first published in 2007.

The book is a comprehensive survey of the trends that are going to shape life over the next two decades.

The following section is an extract from the Executive Summary of the book:

The speed of technological development is accelerating exponentially and, for this reason, by the year 2030 it will seem as if a whole century’s worth of progress has taken place in the first three decades of the 21st century.

By 2030 it will appear as if a mass of dizzying scientific breakthroughs have suddenly been made simultaneously – in computing, in healthcare, in communications, in wealth generation, in materials performance (including smart plastics), in travel and in robotics.

In many ways, life in 2030 will be unrecognisable compared with life today. But not all of the changes in the world are going to be beneficial.

Climate change, already the cause of extreme and unpredictable weather around the world, will almost certainly have worsened by 2030. Even if the world magically stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, those gases emitted over the last thirty years will continue to influence the Earth’s atmosphere deleteriously until the middle of the 21st century. For this reason, solving the problem of climate change must be seen as humankind’s greatest and most important challenge over the next twenty-five years. Any exercise in futurology is a process of identifying key trends in the present and then extrapolating from them in a systematic way in order to discern how they may affect our future. This approach can yield useful results over a period limited to the next twenty-five years but beyond that point lies a barrier which inhibits our ability to speculate meaningfully about humanity’s longer-term future.

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