Signal KISTEP's data-driven scan confirms 5 megatrends, 16 trends and 59 issues for 2050

Summary

For its first-year trend analysis, KISTEP gathered global policy and outlook reports, science and social science papers, global news and science fiction novels and films published between January 2020 and April 2025. Documents were summarised hierarchically into standardised topic blocks, clustered into topics and linked by shared source documents, yielding 54 themes. Regrouping the keywords of those themes produced a draft of five candidate megatrends and 58 candidate issues. The foresight committee then adjusted names and scope to confirm a three-tier structure of five megatrends, 16 trends and 59 issues. A parallel science and technology trend analysis across 14 fields found 362 topic communities, of which 218 remained valid after excluding isolated ones, for use in the second-year technology forecast.