Global top emerging technologies: recent qualitative assessment

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Recent 14th edition of the World Economic Forum’s report “Top 10 Emerging Technologies-2026” identifies major scientific advances able to “change the world”. The technologies are selected for their novelty, development progress and potential impact by a group of world-leading scientists, technologists and innovation leaders, through a rigorous process of expert analysis. 

Background
The report’s 2026 edition features 10 technologies spanning energy, materials, health and computing, thus, presently moving from research into real-world deployment. For each technology, the report examines the science, the breakthroughs bringing it within reach and why this is the moment to pay attention. The report’s strategic outlook has been developed with the cooperation with the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) aimed to explore the conditions, investments and decisions needed to bring the advanced technologies “to scale responsibly”.
The Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) is a government organization in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, established to shape the city’s long-term economic and technological future; it is led by Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and it manages major innovation hubs like the Museum of the Future and spearheads emerging technology strategies.
Reference to: https://www.dubaifuture.ae/10-years-ahead/

For example, by 2030, the idea is to transform Dubai into an ultra-modern, green and autonomous smart city with the major urban and economic frameworks, featuring driverless public transport, expanded public beaches and green spaces, massive aviation upgrades and a significantly diversified non-oil economy. For example, the urban designs are focused on ensuring most residents live within a short walk or sustainable transit trip from essential daily services. More in: https://www.napster.com/blog/dubai-vision-2030

Taken together, the ten major technologies “illuminate where the frontier is moving” as well as what breakthroughs could define the decade ahead, and what, actually, “will take to navigate them well”. Source and citations from: https://intelligence.weforum.org/collection/1dab1cea-5173-4fdf-8a36-4ceaed589159

The annual emerging technologies report highlights the technologies set to positively impact socio-economic development within the next three-five years. The report provides a qualitative assessment of each technology’s potential impact on people and the planet.
General reference and source: https://www.weforum.org/publications/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2026/digest/

Key report’s findings
There are the following ten top emerging technologies depicted in 2026:
1. Everything-to-grid energy. The “everything-to-grid” energy concept transforms buildings, vehicles and devices from passive electricity consumers into active grid resources, storing and returning power in real-time. New battery chemistries, smarter coordination software and updated compensation models are making this possible at scale. The central challenge is whether these distributed assets develop into a shared resilience system or remain fragmented across competing interests.
As the JC STEM Lab of Future Energy Systems confirms: rather than functioning only as electricity consumers, electric assets can adjust their consumption or even send electricity back to the grid in response to system needs. Collectively, these represent a vast source of distributed flexibility that could help absorb surplus renewable energy, reduce peak demand and support grid stability.
Source and citation from: https://www.weforum.org/publications/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2026/in-full/1-everything-to-grid-energy/

Turning ‘everything-to-grid’ through storing and returning power to the grid is the vision that in WEF terminology “closes the gap” to help balance supply and demand in real time in an increasingly decentralised and unpredictable energy system. While the concept is still evolving, in WEF’s view it is where it – and similarly the other selected technologies – has reached the point of being “ready to change the world”.
Source: https://www.enlit.world/library/wef-says-everything-to-grid-could-change-the-world

2. Direct lithium extraction (DLE). The direct lithium extraction processes used to pull lithium directly from salty underground water (called brines), without using slow sun evaporation ponds. DLE cuts production time from over a year to just hours, raises lithium recovery above 80% and uses a much smaller land space. Thus, brine directly recovers lithium in hours rather than months, without the land and water demands of conventional evaporation ponds. Early industrial operations in Argentina and the US have proved that the technology works at scale and in challenging environments. The key strategic question is whether new integrated extraction and refining hubs emerge in geographies previously excluded from the lithium supply chain.
More in: https://lithiumharvest.com/knowledge/lithium-extraction/what-is-direct-lithium-extraction-dle/

3. Passive radiative cooling materials. These radiative cooling materials emit heat through the atmospheric window into space, allowing surfaces to cool below ambient temperature without consuming any electricity. The leading materials include specialized nanocomposite paints, polymer films and photonic metamaterials. Embedded into paints, films, roof tiles and fabrics, they are already being written into building codes in the US/California and China. Wider adoption depends on standardised testing, integration into green building rating systems and sustained regulatory momentum in high-heat regions.
The interplay of spectral selectivity, angle-dependent emissivity and durability under real-world conditions defines performance. Beyond energy savings in air-conditioning and refrigeration, passive radiative cooling offers pathways to mitigate urban heat island effects, improve photovoltaic efficiency and enable novel wearable thermal-management textiles.
More in: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/topics/l4/passive-radiative-cooling-technologies-and-materials

4. PFAS destruction. PFAS – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances- destruction technologies break the carbon–fluorine bond at the heart of forever chemicals through supercritical water, electrochemical treatment and UV photocatalysis. Leading destructive methods include Supercritical Water Oxidation, Electrochemical Oxidation, Non-Thermal Plasma and Hydrothermal Alkaline Treatment which mineralize contaminants into harmless fluoride salts, water and carbon dioxide
Commercial-scale operations are now running for both municipal groundwater contamination and industrial waste streams. Turning this technical capability into widespread deployment requires verified destruction mandates, harmonised liability frameworks and investment in localised treatment infrastructure.
More in: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9778349/

5. Precision fermentation. Thise modern biotechnology process can “program” micro-organisms like yeast or bacteria to produce specific, targeted molecules, such as proteins, fats or vitamins, etc. acting as microscopic factories to create pure, sustainable alternatives to animal-derived and plant-derived ingredients at industrial scale, independent of the land, climate and livestock that conventional agriculture requires.
Companies around the world are already supplying fermentation-derived dairy and egg proteins to major food brands.
The bio-process works in through the following ways: a) programming – scientists give microbes specific DNA instructions to manufacture a targeted compound; b) cultivation – microorganisms go into large steel tanks (bioreactors) and receive simple feeds like sugars and nutrients; c) extraction – the desired product is separated from the microbes and purified into an exact molecular match.
More in: https://gfieurope.org/precision-fermentation/
However, whether this technology is able secure shifts in food security from geography to infrastructure on a larger scale will depend on capital access, regulatory harmonisation and how such technology’s transition affects agricultural livelihoods.

6. Exosome drug delivery. Exosomes are the body’s own molecular couriers; hence, the process of their “engineering” carries therapeutic cargo enables and targeted drug delivery across biological barriers, including the blood–brain barrier, that synthetic carriers cannot reliably cross. Over 200 clinical trials have launched since 2022 across cancer, neurological disease and the long-term effects of the last COVID-pandemic.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773041723000112
An exosome drug delivery system utilizes natural extracellular vesicles (30–150 nm) secreted by cells to transport therapeutic cargo like small-molecule drugs, proteins and RNA safely through the body. These lipid-bilayer carriers offer high biocompatibility, low immunogenicity and the rare ability to cross complex biological barriers like the blood-brain barrier.
More in: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10459753/
Manufacturing scale, quality control and regulatory frameworks for this new category of biological medicine remain the primary bottlenecks to clinical adoption.

7. Personalized mRNA (messenger RNA) cancer vaccines. Cancer vaccines are a class of immunotherapy that is still in development; they are designed to teach and activate the body’s immune system to recognise, hunt down and attack cancer cells. However, no cancer vaccines are currently licensed for use in standard cancer care – patients can only access them through clinical trials.
More in: https://cancertrials.co.uk/en/home/treatments/personalised-mrna-cancer-vaccines.html
Unlike traditional vaccines, cancer vaccines are not designed to prevent the disease: they are being designed and tested as a potential new way to treat cancer. These vaccines are synthesized from a patient’s own tumor mutations, training the immune system to recognise and respond to cells it had previously missed. Trials in pancreatic cancer and melanoma have produced results significant enough to advance into the practical phase. Whether these vaccines become a standard of care or remain a privilege of well-resourced health systems depends on cost, manufacturing capacity and equitable access to sequencing infrastructure.

8. Quantum simulation for drug discovery. Quantum simulation uses principles of quantum mechanics to model molecular behavior, drug-target interactions and reaction pathways at an electronic level. By directly handling quantum states, superposition and electron correlations, these simulations bypass the approximations of classical computers, offering a more precise way to design and optimize therapeutics.
More in: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40873222/
Quantum simulation can “model molecular behavior” directly from physical principles, enabling a level of fidelity in predicting how drug candidates fold, bind and interact that classical computing cannot match. The quantum drug discovery market has roughly doubled in value in five years, with major pharmaceutical partnerships now generating early deployment data. Shared validation standards and regulatory frameworks for simulation-derived evidence are the critical prerequisites for the field to move from partnership to pipeline.

9. World’s digital models. A “world model” in AI is a machine-learning system that builds an internal simulation of a “real environment”: i.e. it learns physical laws, time and space to predict how “future states” change based on actions, allowing AI to plan and reason without trial and error. World models understand the basic dynamics of physical (i.e. real and spatial worlds) from multimodal data, enabling AI systems to “reason” about situations they have never directly encountered, and predict what happens next.
Traditional approaches relied on engineers explicitly programming physical rules. They were precise in narrow conditions and useless outside them. They worked well inside controlled environments like game engines and early robotics simulators, but fell apart the moment the real world threw something unexpected at them. Modern world models learn those rules from data.
With generative AI, approaches transformed entirely: instead of hard coding rules, developers trained models with internet-scale datasets; when prompted, these models can generate synthetic high-fidelity worlds.
A new generation of world foundation models are now pretrained on massive real-world and infinite synthetic data, not just to generate but also reason and predict based on physics laws. A pretrained foundation model handles the “heavy lifting”: e.g. targeted post-training on proprietary data handles the rest by cutting development from years to months.
For example, NVIDIA’s Cosmos platform is applying world-model approaches to climate simulation, which represent the first wave of real-world AI deployments. As these systems move from controlled environments into consequential operational settings, governance frameworks for accountability, audit and assumption-testing must keep pace with the AI adoption.
Source and citations from: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/glossary/world-models/

10. Lattice-based cryptography. The lattice-based post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has attracted significant attention as a promising solution to the security challenges posed by quantum computing. Unlike traditional cryptographic algorithms, the PQCs are expected to remain secure even in the presence of quantum attacks, making them essential for securing future data. Despite their strong theoretical foundations, the PQCs face several practical challenges, particularly in optimizing performance and scalability for real-world applications.
More in: https://experts.nau.edu/en/publications/security-in-post-quantum-era-a-comprehensive-survey-on-lattice-ba/
Post-quantum cryptography builds public-key cryptosystems on the hardness of high-dimensional geometric lattice problems. It offers strong candidate security against quantum computer attacks and forms the basis for modern post-quantum standards. Lattice-based cryptography encodes information inside high-dimensional geometric structures that are computationally intractable for both classical and quantum machines to reverse.
Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Lattice-Based-Cryptography%3A-A-Survey-Wang-Xu/23ecaf2974ed1a57e0d3a033e00a53ba3f188f83#citing-papers
Presently, the main idea is analysing the critical systems before quantum computers are capable of decrypting the encrypted data already being “harvested”.