Future Health Scenario Platform - Informing Policy Choice Through Quantitative Modeling

The decisions made today will determine the health of billions by 2050 — but which choices carry the greatest leverage? This workshop brings together the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) forecasting framework and the analytic lens of The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health to answer that question with rigor and urgency.

The session explains the framework behind the most recent GBD forecasts: a reference scenario representing the most likely future for mortality, disability, and life expectancy across 204 countries to 2050 if recent trends and key drivers continue, alongside alternative scenarios that reveal how profoundly today's choices can shift that trajectory. The reference scenario forecast signals the rising importance in the globe of what happens in Sub Saharan Africa reshaping the global burden in ways that demand new policy thinking.

The Lancet Commission's approach to threat prioritization cuts through the noise of today's headlines by assessing threats according to amenable disease burden: the difference between the best and worst futures societies can plausibly reach. By this measure, there are many more major catastrophic threats than some have assumed.
Policymakers and frontline voices will put this framework to use, covering a case study from Indonesia on the use of long-range forecasts in national human resources for health planning, and examining two contrasting threats, obesity and pandemics.

Participants will leave with a shared, evidence-based method for comparing global threats and translating long-range forecasts into concrete national investment priorities.