Spy Trends

[Mood Phaneuf]

The Center for the Future of Libraries works to identify trends relevant to libraries and librarianship. This collection is available to help libraries and librarians understand how trends are developing and why they matter. Each trend is updated as new reports and articles are made available. New trends will be added as they are developed.

Trends will be organized into seven categories: Society, Technology, Education, the Environment, Politics (and Government), Economics, and Demographics (STEEPED). We have shared more information about the organization and classification of trends below.

Many futurists and trend scanners encourage the organizing or classifying of trends to help improve our understanding of trends, piece them together, and to ensure a broad view of the trends shaping our world. The DEGEST method of classification (Demography, Economy, Government, Environment, Society, and Technology) is among the most popular. For our purposes, we have expanded the classification to include Education as its own category and have re-labeled to form the acronym STEEPED: Society [red], Technology [light blue], Education [dark blue], the Environment [green], Politics & Government [orange], Economics [purple], and Demographics [yellow]. Each trend icon is color-coded to a category per the key below:

What is Sea Level?

Why does Sea Level change over time?

What does Sea Level have to do with Climate?

What are the differences between historical and new sea Level trends and confidence intervals?

The increase to 117.3 million at the end of 2023 constitutes a rise of 8 per cent or 8.8 million people compared to the end of 2022 and continues a series of year-on-year increases over the last 12 years.

New and ongoing conflicts have driven forced displacement across the globe. Conflict in Sudan broke out in April 2023, causing one of the largest humanitarian and displacement crises in the world. More than 6 million people were displaced within the country, with a further 1.2 million fleeing to neighbouring countries.

This figure includes estimates of new internal displacements. These refer to movements, and are a comprehensive cumulative figure of displacement. Depending on certain situations the same people can be displaced several times over a given period and would therefore be reported multiple times in the cumulative figures.

The global refugee population increased by 7 per cent to reach 43.4 million during the year. This includes 31.6 million refugees and people in a refugee-like situation and 5.8 million other people in need of international protection under UNHCR's mandate, as well as 6 million Palestinian refugees under UNRWA's mandate. Compared to a decade ago, the total number of refugees globally has more than tripled.

According to interviews with 31,500 refugees and migrants along the Central Mediterranean route, the predominant risks include severe threats to life, rape, torture, kidnapping, arbitrary detention, robbery and human trafficking, among other risks.

Between 2021 and 2023, 950 people are known to have died while crossing the Sahara Desert, although the actual number is believed to be much higher. During the same period, 7,600 people on the move died or went missing in the Mediterranean Sea.

Most people who are forced to flee never cross an international border, remaining displaced within their own countries. Known as internally displaced people, or IDPs, they account for 58 per cent of all forcibly displaced people.

At the end of 2023, 68.3 million people remained internally displaced due to conflict and violence. An estimated 9.1 million people were displaced within Sudan, the largest internally displaced population ever reported. This was followed by Syria (7.2 million), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6.7 million).

A further 9.1 million Sudanese were displaced within the country, including people displaced by previous conflict. Sudan now has the largest internally displaced population ever reported.

Prior to the April conflict, Sudan was also host to almost 1 million refugees, primarily from Eritrea, South Sudan and Syria. Many were forced to return to their home countries prematurely or move on to other countries.

In 2023, nearly 1.1 million refugees from 39 countries decided to return home from a total of 93 countries of asylum. Four out of five of those returning were Ukrainian or South Sudanese. However, as most returns occurred in contexts not entirely conducive to return in safety and dignity, they may not be sustainable.

In addition, 5.1 million people displaced within their own country returned to their place of origin during the year. Nearly 62 per cent of all IDP returns were within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1.8 million) and Ukraine (1.3 million).

According to official government data, 158,700 refugees were resettled to third countries in 2023, representing 35 per cent more (40,000) than during the previous year. Despite the uptick in numbers, this still only accounted for 8 per cent of the estimated 2 million individuals globally identified by UNHCR as in need of resettlement. A further 30,800 refugees acquired the citizenship of their host country during the year and were locally integrated.

Without urgent adaptation, mitigation and measures to address loss and damage, climate change impacts are expected to increasingly, and disproportionately, affect climate vulnerable States and communities, including forcibly displaced people.

UNHCR releases two flagship statistical reports on global forced displacement each year, the Global Trends report and the Mid-Year Trends report. The Global Trends report, released annually in June, analyses changes and trends in forcibly displaced populations in the previous calendar year (from 1 January to 31 December). It provides key statistics on the global numbers of refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced people and stateless people, as well as their main host countries and countries of origin.

In October each year, the Mid-Year Trends report is released to provide updated figures and analysis for the initial six months of the current year (from 1 January to 30 June). These figures are preliminary, and the final data is included in the subsequent Global Trends report.

Data and official statistics on forcibly displaced and stateless populations are critical to inform and guide policy-making and programming at the global, regional and national levels. Through this, UNHCR and partners can more effectively safeguard the rights and well-being of displaced people.

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The authors would also like to thank Mari Marcotte and Catherine Gergen for keeping the project on track with their expert program leadership; Brittany Bjornberg, Sarah Hechtman, Kristine Priemer, and Molly Rogers for their leadership in managing the individual chapters in this report; and Madeline McEachin, Dhara Puvar, and Regina Miller for their support and activation efforts.

This report could not have been written and published without the partnership of the Deloitte Insights team, led by Corrie Commisso. The author team extends special thanks to Rithu Thomas for editorial contributions and to the following members of the visual and design team for their artwork and data visualizations: Matthew Lennert, Sylvia Chang, Sonya Vasilieff, Molly Piersol, Sofia Sergi, and Govindh Raj. They also thank the Deloitte Insights production editors, Blythe Hurley and Preetha Devan, for their flexibility and guidance.

Furthermore, the authors express gratitude towards the survey team that was instrumental in the data collection and analysis for this project. They thank Shruti Kalaiselvan and Ananshi Chugh, who mentored and advised the entire survey and data analysis team; Priyanka Sahu and Vikas Arora, who led the global survey and data analysis efforts; Rishab Kumar Agarwal, Aniket Abhijeet Kale, Disha Nagpal, Shruti Garg, Simran Bakshi, David Goott, Erin Spencer, and Zhi Ming Wang who provided insightful analysis of the survey results; and Lokesh Kumar and Justin Johnson David, who supported survey translations and survey response analysis.

And last (but not least!), the author team thanks the outstanding marketing and public relations team, led by Marissa Copeland and Jennifer Donegan, for their support and leadership in releasing the 2024 Global Human Capital Trends into the wild: Tyra Cannady, Charlean Parks, Christian Slike, and Malia Maack.

The air quality trends summaries are intended to reflect actual air quality and therefore include concentrations that may have been impacted by episodic events like wildfires and dust storms. Air Quality Design Values are used to designate and classify nonattainment areas and intended to reflect air quality that is not impacted by exceptional events. Therefore if concentrations are shown to be impacted by an exceptional event they are not included in design value calculations. The EPA defines exceptional events as unusual or naturally-occurring events that affect air quality but are not reasonably controllable using techniques that tribal, state, or local air agencies may implement.

PHMSA has collected pipeline incident reports since 1970. The reporting regulations and incident report formats have changed several times over the years. PHMSA merged the various report formats to create pipeline incident trend lines going back 20 years.

The trend links will initially present reports including all data for the incident type. The table below lists the year PHMSA began collecting incident reports by system type. The reports can be filtered by State and by System Type:

PHMSA also provides data about the causes of the incidents. Each link appearing with a trend line report leads to a new screen showing the incident causes. From this screen, you can also select a link to view details about the location of the incidents.

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