What will this year bring?

The past 12 months reinforced one lesson about life: its unpredictability.

Who at the beginning of January last year could have foreseen anything like 2020?

Who could have anticipated a pandemic sweeping the world, killing millions and forcing billions into lockdowns?

The experts might not have been shocked that it occurred. A more virulent pandemic than even Covid-19 has been on the horizon, according to those who evaluate risks.

But that is very different from specifying that a pandemic will happen and at a particular time.

Not surprisingly, the course of Covid-19 itself was difficult to predict.

Leaders, scientists and the people everywhere were constantly looking ahead to try to see where the pandemic and the fight against it would go.

The herd immunity strategy of Sweden failed. Elsewhere the second and third waves, surprisingly, seem bigger than the first.

Surprising, as well, has been the breakneck speed at which new vaccines were developed, tested and approved.

What will be the Covid trajectory this year? What difference will the vaccines make? How will economies of the globe fare?

Locally, who expected one party would win an absolute majority in an MMP election?

What Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Party achieved was not supposed to happen. As for National, did it really plummet to just 25% support?

The value of assets, notably shares and homes, around much of the world at the end of 2019 were claimed to be already ridiculously high.

But share prices continued to climb, despite Covid’s ravages.

New Zealand economists at the end of lockdown almost uniformly expected house prices to fall by about 10%. Queenstown prices, with overseas tourists blocked, were expected to really suffer.

And what happened? The average annual national rise was 15%. Queenstown Lakes has held its own. And some areas, like Dunedin, have risen spectacularly.

Similarly, the unemployment rate was plausibly predicted to head to or above 10%. It is nothing like that. The 14% rebound in GDP announced just before Christmas is scarcely believable.

Other trends were not startling. A strong primary sector continued to underpin the South, and Dunedin’s biggest industry, the University of Otago, held its own, even in the absence of overseas students.

Tiwai closure at some point is expected, and that was announced last year. That is a big blow to Invercargill and the South.

Nevertheless, the resilience of many centres continues to surprise.

Meanwhile, Argentina, against all expectations, beat the All Blacks for the first time.

Climate change is the ever-present and relentless threat, in contrast to specific disasters. But it has its unpredictable side. Will something unexpected slow humankind’s heating of the atmosphere? Or, dangerously, has global warming such momentum that the best efforts will be in vain? Might some perilous engineering intervention, if that is possible, have to be attempted in the coming years?

Surely, despite the protestations of President Donald Trump and his hardcore of support, we can rely this month on President-elect Joe Biden officially taking office.

But Mr Trump was never expected to win the Republican nomination yet alone the presidency. How could the mighty United States, the so-called pillar of the free world, have elected a narcissistic and ignorant bully with totalitarian instincts?

The world yearns for normalcy after the Covid storms. Even normalcy, nevertheless, brings a level of unpredictability and various up and downs.

And might there be another earthquake on the Christchurch scale, a sharemarket crash, a housing-bubble burst, a major volcanic eruption and/or tsunami, a life-changing technological development or something else?

Who knows what 2021 will bring?