Sundeep Waslekar, President of Strategic Foresight Group, delivered a keynote address at a special benefit event for Nelson Mandela Foundation at Dubai on 16 December 2005. This is an edited text of the speech.

What separates man from other primates, or indeed other animals? Jacob Bronowski, a mathematician trained in physics, examines the scientific and intellectual history of humankind in his book The Ascent of Man. Though the book is based on the television series aired on BBC in the 1970s, it is far from outdated. Over 30 years after it was first published; The Ascent of Man still invokes pride in our past and instils hope for our future in the reader.

While the world is impressed by China's industrial progress, it may be in for a shock in the rising Asian power's countryside. China might be able to manage its much-feared banking crisis and might even tide over the disharmony between political autocracy and economic liberalism. However, despite the best intensions of the new team led by Hu and Wen, it may experience a rebellion in its farmlands in the next decade.

I was recently at Waterloo, a small university town about an hour's drive from Toronto, Canada where my friend John English has recently established the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) with support from Jim Balsillie, founder of the Blackberry communication system. The occasion was a CIGI conference on emerging powers.

Strategic Foresight Group uses the 4-G framework to analyse the future of countries. Three of the 4 Gs Growth, Governance and Geopolitics represent traditional drivers that determine the destiny of a nation. Increasingly we are finding that the 4th G God is assuming importance in our calculations.

Wright's premise starts at the works of Paul Gauguin. A 19th century painter, Gauguin's mural asks three questions that are vital to the understanding of our own environmental dilemmas of today: Where do we come from? Where are we? Where are we going? For Wright, it is the third question, which intrigues him. Where are we going? Wright believes that careful reflection on the first two questions can ultimately answer where our species is headed.