Badminton: Climate Change Will ‘Reshape’ Healthcare

Medscape 2050: The Future of Medicine

This transcript has been edited for clarity. 

In the area of futures exploration and as a futurist, it’s about really understanding what comes next and how the world is going to change. To do that, we look at thousands of different signals of change that indicate that the world is shifting. It might be technological. It might be societal. It might be things like climate change and pandemics. 

We then start to think about global warming and the potential effects on the medical field as a whole: pharmaceuticals and what’s going to be needed; population migration, etc. We’re going to find more chaotic weather, more flooding, more population moves. More parts of the United States and other parts of the world will become very difficult to live in, especially for younger and older members of the population, who are more fragile and not able to react in good ways to these extremes of cold and heat. So, we’re going to see a reshaping of our world.

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As a futurist, it excites me to explore those opportunities to see the unknowns of what might come next. Once we do that, we can bring evidence from those futures back to our strategic planning today. It’s been found that companies that do this work and governments that do this work are ultimately more profitable. They’ve got higher rates of growth. They’ve got higher value and vigilance. And that’s what’s exciting to me.