GINC Trends
DRAFT · Updated 17 October 2026

Change log

The public change record for GINC Trends: the list, its scores, the network and the attention data.

The trend list follows semantic versioning: patch for wording, minor for rescoring or a change of method, major when trends are added, merged or dropped. A trend’s address is permanent; a trend merged or dropped is recorded here.

Site

The GINC design system · 17 October 2026

  • The site now uses the GINC design system: the same typeface, components, header and footer as the other GINC sites, in light and dark.
  • The home page opens with the trends that are moving, in tiles coloured by capability domain, then the list in figures, its themes, its capability domains and the second pass.
  • GINC Share of Attention: each trend’s share of all the attention the list draws, half from Wikipedia reading in every language and half from Google searching (Google Ads monthly counts, timed week by week by Google Trends), combined by a geometric mean, with its weekly figures in the downloads. It takes the place of raw Wikipedia views on the home page, the trend pages and the Outlook.
  • Share of attention by place: for every region and nation but China, from the Wikipedia languages read there and Google searching in its countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, North America, Oceania and Africa are read from Google alone, Russia from Wikipedia alone. Each trend’s page charts it by region and lists every place, with what it is read from. The home tiles can be shown for the world, APAC, Europe, the Americas or Africa, and their lines now show share of attention; small tiles carry a small line of their own.
  • The tiles have four tabs: Top, the largest share of attention over the period; Rising and Declining, the largest gain and fall in attention against the period before; and Volatile, the most up and down within the period.
  • Over the tiles, the period (week, month, quarter or year, each against the one before) and the dimension of national capability (hard, soft or economic) choose what they show. Each tile’s rising, steady or falling follows the period, and its line is a smoothed quarter-long average. All Trends opens the full list.
  • The tiles are laid out by what they show, from a library of twelve layouts: a trend well ahead of the rest takes the large tile, two level leaders share two, and an even field has no lead. Each tab, period and dimension has its own layout.
  • The table of trends has a page of its own at /trends/, filtered by capability domain and theme, and the network at /network/, with every control it had.
  • Public attention is now the Index, with the leaderboard and the scores by scenario beside it. The old address redirects.
  • The bubble view has a page of its own, Outlook in the menu, with a list of views that set its measures in one step.
  • Likelihood and impact are now a weighted average of three readings made separately against the same rubric: Claude Fable 5.1 half, and the first estimate and DeepSeek a quarter each. All three are in the downloads.

Leaderboard, bubble view and downloads · 16 October 2026

  • A new Leaderboard ranks the trends whose attention rose most against the period before, for the world, each region, eight major powers and each capability domain, by week, month or year. The world board sets the largest falls beside the largest rises.
  • The catalogue opens on seven trend tiles, chosen by rising or falling attention, by reading or by rank, and compared week, month, quarter or year on the period before.
  • A new bubble view places every trend on two chosen measures: likelihood and impact to start with, or attention now, its change, Wikipedia reading, sensitivity, the composite score or connectedness.
  • Likelihood and impact are a provisional estimate, out of 100, for every trend, with a reason for each. They are not used in the ranking, the network or the attention data. How they were estimated.
  • The trend network can be downloaded as SVG, or as PNG at three times the size on screen, with its legend and source beneath. The circle size control now enlarges the largest dots and leaves the smallest as they are.
  • Pages are named for what they show: Public attention, Scores by scenario and Downloads.

A site of its own · 11 October 2026

  • The trends, their network and their attention data moved from scenarios.ginc.org to this site. The scenarios the trends are scored against, with their records and tests, stay at scenarios.ginc.org.
  • The catalogue is the home page. Attention has a page of its own, and the trend by scenario matrix is at /matrix/. Trend pages keep the addresses they had, and the old addresses redirect here.
  • Each project keeps a small copy of what it needs from the other: this one holds each scenario’s number, name and family, and the list of regions and nations.

Network Explorer · 10 October 2026

  • The trend network is redrawn by a new component, the Network Explorer: small dots sized to the screen and ringed in a darker shade of their colour, hairline curved links coloured by theme, themes set apart with long bridges between them, and each theme named in its colour with its share of the 250.
  • Two new controls: cluster spread, which sets how far apart the themes are drawn, and link pull, which sets how much tighter strongly similar trends sit. A theme can be shown alone from the legend.
  • Position now comes from each trend’s three strongest links, not all of them, and the hidden anchors that held each theme together are gone. The picture is for reading; the measures are unchanged.
  • Two layout modes. Defined clusters arranges the picture by the ten themes. Organic imposes nothing: each trend keeps its strongest link, the strongest 5, 10, 20 or 50 per cent of links are added, and clusters are found from those links alone.
  • Links now carry their true strength, not only their level, so they can be ranked; the three trends with no link at Moderate similarity keep their single strongest one.
  • The component takes a standard data format and is written to be moved to other GINC sites. The previous view is kept for rollback.

Small screens · 10 October 2026

  • No page scrolls sideways on a phone. Wide tables scroll inside their own box, say when there is more to the side, and keep the column that names each row in view.
  • The theme labels on the trend network are hidden at phone width, where they covered the graph; the legend under it names the colours.

Attention

Attention refresh · 16 October 2026

  • The window moved on one week, to the 156 weeks from 15 October 2023 to the week of 4 October 2026, and both sources were harvested again in full.
  • Wikipedia counts for weeks already held came back the same. Google’s are re-scaled each time they are asked for, so past weeks moved by about 2 per cent and the published score by about 1 per cent. What a refresh changes.
  • Over the last year 15 trends are surging, 55 rising, 132 steady, 42 easing and 6 fading.

Trend attention index v1.1.0 · 10 October 2026

  • Attention is now followed by place as well as for the world: for each of the nine regions and each member of the G20. A place is read from Google searches made in its countries and from Wikipedia reading in the languages mostly read there, averaged where both exist.
  • Google searching is harvested for 48 countries, trend by trend, with each query asked in English and in the country’s own language. Russia and Iran are not served by the data service used; Russia rests on Russian-language Wikipedia reading.
  • Wikipedia reading now covers 28 languages, up from 12. Which language stands for which place is worked out from where its readers are. Russian, Turkish, Persian, Vietnamese and Arabic are placed by where they are spoken, because their readers’ locations are masked or spread.
  • The heatmap on the trend network takes a place as well as a period.
  • Google searching is now complete for all 250 trends and is in the world score. It is bought from a commercial data service, since Google turns away direct queries after a few dozen.
  • The methodology sets out how places are read and what is left unread: mainland China, and many trends in small or less connected countries.

Trend attention index v1.0.0 · 10 October 2026

  • Every trend now carries a weekly score of public attention over three years, from 8 October 2023 to 3 October 2026. It is built from Wikipedia reading and Google searching worldwide.
  • Each trend is mapped to between four and eight weighted Wikipedia pages and to two to five Google search terms. The mapping is published with the data.
  • Both sources are set against the typical trend each week, which removes drift common to all: the fall in Wikipedia reading of reference pages and step changes in Google’s index. The score shows which trends are gaining or losing attention against the list.
  • The trends page gains an attention column, a list of the trends rising and falling most, and attention as a way to size the network. Each trend page gains a three-year chart with its language and country breakdowns.
  • The trend network can be coloured as a heatmap of the change in attention over 90 days, 180 days, one, two or three years, from blue for a fall to red for a rise. Heatmaps are now part of the Network Explorer and its data format.
  • The score measures attention, not strength, and is not used in any scenario score or test. The methodology sets out how it is built and what it cannot say.

Second pass · 9 October 2026

The list and its scores were put through a second pass with a panel of three AI models, each working first separately and then with sight of the others, and a fourth making the final cut. The methodology sets out how, and the record is on the data page. The scenarios were rebuilt in the same pass, which is recorded at scenarios.ginc.org.

  • GINC 250 v2.0.0. 119 trends carried forward unchanged, 106 under a more exact name, 15 merged into another, 9 dropped and 24 added. The domains now hold 27 to 29 trends each. The home page lists every change.
  • Scores. Every trend rescored against each of the twenty second-pass scenarios by all three models; the median is kept.
  • Recalculated. Trend similarity, the network and the themes, which were renamed where the clusters had moved.

The list

Themes from the network · 4 October 2026

  • The sector themes carried over from the starting list are replaced by ten themes found from the trend network itself, by community detection, and named by GINC.
  • Theme no longer feeds the similarity formula; likeness of wording takes its weight. Similarity, sensitivity and network measures recomputed.
  • The network view names each theme beside its cluster.

GINC 250 v1.0.0 · 3 October 2026

  • The trend list was reviewed as a whole and re-cut as the GINC 250. Individual trends no longer carry a source.
  • Cut 12 trends too narrow to bear on national capability, among them pet economy, cannabis, hyperloop and supersonic travel.
  • Merged near-duplicates: 100 earlier trends folded into 43, for example 5G with 6G, four alternative-protein trends into one, and blockchain, digital assets and cryptocurrencies into crypto-assets and tokenisation.
  • Added 69 trends, weighted to the thinner capability domains: information and influence, governance and integrity, trade and investment, and national security.
  • Every trend’s primary capability domain reviewed. Domains now hold between 25 and 34 trends each.
  • Similarity recalculated with a new component for likeness of names and descriptions, and stricter levels. Sensitivity and network measures recomputed.
  • Starting lists drawn on: the Barclays 2035 Thematic Roadmap, the WEF Global Risks Report 2026, and themes from schools of government and international affairs institutes.

v0.4.0 · 3 October 2026

  • GINC Trends list extended from 183 to 250 trends: 11 chronic risks from the WEF Global Risks Report, 29 themes from schools of government and international affairs institutes, and 27 further trends from the scenarios.
  • Eighteen of the new trends are broken out from broader ones, among them artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, deglobalisation, ageing population and renewable energy.
  • Every trend assigned to one of the nine domains of the National Capability Framework.
  • Similarity formula now counts a shared capability domain. Sensitivity and network measures recomputed.