Redefining Security for the Future

Security is a moving target. Its meaning shifts era to era, and its interpretation depends on who’s asking and what they’re most afraid of losing. Horizon 2045’s Security & the Future: 2030 Scenarios makes this vivid by imagining three alternative futures branching off from the same starting point—the year 2024—each with a distinct ethos: collaboration, competition, and transformation. These scenarios are designed to be read alongside the Horizon 2045 Foresight Radar, which catalogs the underlying signals of change that feed the three futures.

Security as Mutual Benefit

In Border Crossing, security is a collective experience. No nation, sector, or species is safe unless the wider system is stable. The work of security, then, centers on building shared infrastructure and information.

The scenario’s earliest indicator is quite telling: Israel and Jordan renew a water-sharing agreement despite deep political tension. The core arrangement, the 1994 peace treaty, obligates Israel to supply Jordan 50 million cubic meters of water annually, and that baseline has held for three decades. This is the scenario’s thesis: even hostile neighbors will choose mutual benefit over zero-sum control of a scarce resource. 

This instinct scales up fast. In this imagined future, by 2026, a global consortium launches the Earth Resilience Exchange, a blockchain-based database that matches climate solutions to funders across every continent. Citizen scientists build sensing networks dense enough to track biodiversity in real time. In one of the scenario’s most striking details, humans start to coordinate across borders to protect species’ migration corridors, having only realized the value of “unacknowledged collaborations” with the natural world after a mass vulture die-off caused numerous preventable human deaths.

This definition of security optimizes for resilience through interdependence. But horizon scanning and tools like the Foresight Radar also make clear that the same systems that indicate positive development can shift at a moment’s notice. This envisioned future is honest about that ambiguity. Collaboration, in other words, is not automatically benevolent—it is only as stable as the trust and incentives that sustain it. 

Security as Advantage

Race for Resilience tells a very different story. In this scenario, security means getting ahead—militarily, technologically, and economically.

It opens with familiar 2024 binaries (Russia vs. Ukraine, democracy vs. autocracy, AI vs. humans), and the underlying stressors continue to develop into policy: nearly all NATO members hit the 2%-of-GDP defense spending benchmark by 2026, a new space race pulls in 130 countries competing for off-planet water and helium, and “AI nationalism” spreads around the world as everyone races to avoid being left behind.

This version of security is productive in certain spaces. Competitive pressure accelerates breakthroughs in renewable storage, desalination technology, lab-grown meat, and personalized cancer vaccines. As the scenario suggests, advantage-seeking can be an engine for innovation. However, it is a less effective mechanism for anything that doesn’t respond to competitive incentives, including the “messier human issues”. The scenario tells the story of climate migration exploding, refugees being turned away almost everywhere, and eco-anxiety becoming entrenched among the younger generations. Security-as-advantage may create and defend efficient borders, but it is far less equipped to protect the people crossing them.

Security as Adaptive Capacity

The Longsight Paradigm proposes something more unusual: security as the willingness to transform before circumstances force change. This is security oriented toward the future rather than the present threat. It assumes that today’s systems are less trustworthy than the world’s capacity to rebuild them.

Disasters catalyze this future—Jakarta underwater, insurers abandoning California and Florida, and mass bushfires overwhelming Australia—but the deeper point is that these types of shocks are already pushing institutions toward anticipatory action. Horizon 2045’s work sits in that space: its Foresight Radar tracks signals of change across seven security domains, while the Anticipatory Philanthropy efforts help institutions act earlier rather than wait for crisis. It is a practical example of the shift this scenario describes, where the answer to systemic fragility is to develop new structures that can adapt faster than a crisis unfolds. 

This model of security optimizes for adaptability rather than deterrence, but comes with a difficult political cost: it requires a collective willingness to take a risk before success is visible. That is exactly why Horizon 2045’s work matters now—it is trying to make that leap more feasible by turning abstract futures into concrete tools and partnerships.

Three Definitions

Of course, these scenarios are not mutually exclusive, and none represents the “correct” answer. Each reveals what a society chooses to prioritize when resources are scarce and time is short. Just as importantly, each scenario draws from the depths of the Foresight Radar: Border Crossing leans on Governance & Politics and Environment signals; Race for Resilience pulls from Infrastructure and Technology; and The Longsight Paradigm draws heavily on Society & Culture and Health & Well-Being. The domains a scenario emphasizes say as much about its worldview and priorities as its plot does. Taken together, the three scenarios suggest that “security” was never a fixed target to begin with; it is a reflection of what a society has decided is most worth protecting, prompting us to consider what future historians will have to say about the values and priorities expressed by security decisions being made today.

As we prepare to welcome a new cohort of Nuclear Futures Fellows, we expect to revisit these scenarios, which were developed during the 2024 “Security & the Future” symposium Horizon 2045 co-hosted with Ploughshares in Washington, DC.

Author: Ava Lee-Green, Horizon 2045 Intern