We are living in uncertain times. The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its third year, continues to spin off new variants. The war in Ukraine is reverberating throughout the world, causing immense human suffering, including a cost-of-living crisis, while climate and ecological disasters threaten the world daily.

So where do we go from here for a more hopeful future? How do we find new paths? And what is standing in the way of us moving there? The Human Development Report 2021/2022, Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World, seeks to address these questions.

We live in a world of worry and uncertainty but there is also hope. A chance to rethink our future, renew and adapt our institutions, and create new stories about who we are and what we value. Feelings of insecurity are on the rise nearly everywhere—a trend at least a decade in the making. That trend began well before the Covid-19 pandemic, which for first the first time ever, sent global human development in reverse—for two years straight.

The central message of this year’s Report is straightforward: to turn new uncertainties from a threat to an opportunity, we must double down on human development to unleash our creative and cooperative capacities.

To do so we must:

• Expand human agency and freedoms, in addition to wellbeing achievements.
• Widen the vista on human behaviour, going beyond models of rational self-interest to include emotions, cognitive biases and the critical roles of culture.
• Implement smart, practical policies that focus on the three I’s:

1. Investment: to form the capabilities people will need in the future and enable socioeconomic and planetary conditions for human flourishing
2. Insurance: to protect people from the unavoidable contingencies of uncertain times and safeguard people’s capabilities, including their fundamental freedoms (human security).
3. Innovation: to generate capabilities that might not exist today.

The path we choose is up to us.