Scenarios overview

Recovery turns on accountability: whether anyone trusts the numbers the state publishes.

The quarter's output is down 4 per cent and the fiscal cost is 2 per cent of GDP before reconstruction. The port closes for a month.

The district hospital is evacuated by boat. In the earthquake variant, two million are homeless.

The alert system depends on a tower that loses power. Basement data centres flood before the first alert arrives.

Thirty years of building-code enforcement failures are visible from the air. A quarter of damaged homes have no cover.

A year's rain falls in eight hours. Flood, storm, fire, heatwave or earthquake, assessed at one common intensity.

Allies consult under Article 4 and agree a statement. The public argues over whether government is doing too little or exaggerating.

Costs are diffuse: insurance and risk premia, disrupted logistics, a subcontractor's inventory destroyed by arson.

Each incident is converted into political division. The point is to show the state cannot protect ordinary life.

GPS fails for days at a time. Cables are cut, drones close airports and cyber intrusions run alongside.

Attribution comes weeks later, 'with high confidence', and is answered with a sanctions designation.

Sabotage reaches subsea cables and energy assets; pipelines and the grid are targets.

Rents in border cities rise 20 per cent by summer; a party built on that number polls third by autumn.

The fiscal cost lands first. Pledges arrive, in part, the following year; later the economy turns out to have needed the arrivals.

Sports halls, schools and a disused airport become shelters. Municipalities register 4,000 children in a month.

Registration and identity systems carry the load, with payments and connectivity for arrivals.

Work permits are fast-tracked; credential recognition takes nine months.

Utility demand rises in receiving regions. Disaster and climate are among the origins.

The cause is debated for months. Public order depends on telling people what to do when no screen works.

Card payments stop and the cash machines are already empty. Under rationing, industry runs three days a week.

Water pressure fails on the third day. Hospitals on diesel find their fuel contracts assumed a 24-hour outage.

Protective relays shed everything. Mobile networks last four hours on batteries; black-start capacity had been retired to save money.

The government publishes a rationing calendar; rationing law and backup-power standards are tested.

Sixty million people lose power in five seconds. The generation shortfall cannot be closed before winter.

Governments that asked for a seat at the table are offered an API key. A summit agrees a compute registry nobody can inspect.

Growth in the host economies runs at 9 per cent. Profits migrate to three jurisdictions and services exports are repriced to the cost of inference.

Hospitals feel the benefit first. Knowledge work is repriced and the question becomes who shares in the gain.

Research agents improve their own training for eleven months. A year produces more patents than the previous twenty.

Liability and control are settled after the fact; no human fully understands the newest system's results.

Host-economy electricity demand grows at twice the rate of output; new reactor designs pass review in weeks.

Exporter leverage drains away. Governments without buffers cut salaries, then subsidies, then the peg.

Wholesale power costs halve. Crude stays below US$45; a smelter closes in Europe and reopens in a desert.

Bills fall for a fourth year. Coal regions and refinery towns get their transition funds a decade late.

Geothermal wells are drilled like shale, forty at a time; round-the-clock solar and storage undercut gas.

Permitting is the constraint: the queue for a grid connection is four years.

Fossil plant is retired on cost. The cheapest power in history is curtailed at noon for want of wires.

The retirement age is back in parliament. Next door, a government is asked why its citizens die of what the neighbours no longer catch.

Life expectancy at 65 is up two years in five and the pension deficit has doubled. A dialysis chain files for protection.

Heart attack and stroke admissions fall by a fifth. The children's ward that filled every rainy season has empty beds.

A cancer vaccine is made to order in six weeks; the first drug designed end to end by a model is on the shelves.

The medicines are licensed everywhere; price, patents and generic entry decide who gets them.

Food demand shifts as appetite-suppressing drugs scale; snack and sugar makers issue profit warnings.

The communiqué runs to nine pages. Taipei, Kyiv and Warsaw study the annexes for what was promised about them without them.

Freight rates fall by a third and tariffs return to 2017 levels over three years. Plants financed on tariff walls are stranded.

Prices ease. Jobs go in protected industries and domestic opponents contest the settlement.

Licences for rare earths and most chips give way to a shared list; inspectors sit in each other's AI evaluation centres.

Four hundred pages of annexes: staged sanctions relief, tariff schedules and a verification regime.

Sanctioned energy and grain return to market; war-risk premiums in the Black Sea and the Gulf fall.

China's policy banks sign on the same terms as the Paris Club. A neighbour that stayed current gets nothing and says so.

Debt service falls by half. Applicants are downgraded to selective default on signing and most are upgraded within eighteen months.

The interest line was larger than health and education together. The saving goes to teachers' salaries and a vaccine cold chain.

Public investment restarts; otherwise the technology load is low.

Holdouts are bound by majority vote, written into law in New York and London. Two asset managers sue.

Capital spending resumes on water, power and climate resilience where the saving is used well.

Income tax receipts exceed aid for the first time. Economic weight moves south and voice in global institutions follows.

A dozen economies grow at 6 to 8 per cent for five years. Firms that called these markets optional report them as a third of revenue.

Wages double and rents triple in the growing cities. Bypassed nations watch their graduates leave.

The phone assembler, the battery maker and the pharmaceutical packer arrive within eighteen months and run their own training colleges.

Permitting and customs decide the list: a port that clears a container in a day.

Copper, cement and LNG are dear; power is the binding constraint in every growing city.

The signing is in Muscat. In every capital that signed, a faction calls it a surrender and waits for the first incident.

War-risk premiums fall to a tenth of their 2026 peak. Tehran's exchange rises 60 per cent.

Reconstruction begins in Gaza, southern Lebanon and northern Yemen, and contractors can get insurance.

A rail and cable corridor from Mumbai to Haifa breaks ground; inspectors are in residence.

Sanctions relief is tied to each inspection report; a joint centre with officers from six navies polices the straits.

Oil settles at US$58: comfortable for the Gulf's low-cost producers, painful for higher-cost exporters.

The grain reserve is full from the country's own harvest. On the prairies the farm lobby wants export credits.

Wheat and rice are a fifth cheaper for three seasons. The food import line and the subsidy line are cut in one budget.

Stunting falls by a third in the districts where yields rose first.

Maize edited to keep its leaves open in a dry spell yields twice as much; advice arrives by phone.

One regulator takes four years over varieties its neighbours approved in one; its farmers buy seed across the border.

Fertiliser is made with cheap power two hundred kilometres away; marginal land leaves production.

The interior ministry asks for the payment data 'for security'. The countries that avoid the damage wrote the law before the code.

Tax collection rises from 11 to 15 per cent of GDP; card networks lose their 2 per cent.

A drought payment reaches four million households in a morning. A widow whose fingerprints no longer read is refused her ration.

Identity, instant payments and data exchange are built as public goods on open standards.

The data protection authority has eleven staff.

The rails need power and signal; an outage stops pensions, pharmacies and SIM sales for nine hours.

The alert is not a press conference; it is a notice to forty manufacturing sites. A country that left the network waits five months longer.

A pandemic priced at 3 per cent of world output is revised to a few tenths.

Schools close for two weeks in three provinces and nowhere else. One public has learned not to believe its health ministry.

The vaccine design takes six days; authorisation comes on day 94; four continents fill vials by day 130.

Pathogen sharing and access rules agreed in advance mean no one can corner the supply.

A spillover from animals is caught by wastewater surveillance in eleven countries by week five.