Prospects for Children in 2022: A Global Outlook

Our 2022 outlook draws on the reflections and analysis of staff from
UNICEF’s Global Insight team, supported by the Atlantic Council and the Pardee Center for International Futures, two organizations with long track records and formidable reputations in risk analysis and foresight. Jointly, we revisited the longer-term trends examined in ‘Prospects for children’, identified those that we considered to be most relevant for children in 2022, and highlighted new trends or events to be brought to the attention of our readership. Our initial findings were debated and refined during a virtual consultation held with 18 experts, leaders and young activists from around the world on 16 November 2021.

The resulting analysis is organized around ten trends (Figure 1). Annual trends, such as the ten highlighted in this report, are inevitably highly interconnected. They emerge, in part, from megatrends such as
demographics, climate change, biodiversity loss and rapid technological changes, which will shape the world in which children live over the course of the next 30 to 50 years.