Blogs

The concept of the global commons refers to resource domains that fall outside national jurisdiction, to which all have access, including high seas, airspace, outer space and cyberspace. Given the growing significance of these domains and related resources for states and other global and local players across a range of purposes, defining the global commons concept has become more complex. A range of challenges need to be addressed in relation to global commons: - Access to most of the global commons is difficult. S&T advances and increased demand for resources is leading to increased economic and scientific research activity. As a result our planet is facing critical environmental challenges, most importantly climate change and global warming, the depletion of the Ozone layer, and rapid environmental degradation in the Antarctica. If business as usual prevails, these trends will likely worsen and will negatively impact the global commons’ capacity to provide ecosystem services for human well-being. (UN). - The danger is not just of degrading the environment, but of breaching crucial biospheric limits. Resource users need well-defined boundaries (to date 5 of 9 boundaries have been breached : climate, biodiversity, biogeochemical flows (fertilizer use), deforestation and freshwater) - The Global Commons Stewardship Index results suggest that almost all countries and regions are unlikely to achieve the 2030/2050 goals and that drastic socioeconomic system transformation is urgently needed. - To stay within the planetary boundaries, a radical transformation of key economic systems will be required to significantly reduce their environmental footprint. Four systems are of particular importance: the food system, the energy system, the urban system, and the global production/consumption system. Incremental progress will not be enough. Only with disruptive, systems-level change can we hope to get on the right path. Our focus should be a complete overhaul of key economic systems and development pathways. Transition management theories. - Managing the global commons - many gaps and challenges remain since the frameworks covering the global commons are complex and fractured. Their management involves increasingly complex processes to accommodate and integrate the interests and responsibilities of states, international organisations and a host of non-state actors. Drivers and Barriers Changes in the related foresight drivers may influence the global commons in different ways, for example, in terms of perceptions and behaviour in relation to the resource domains. Technological change may make resource domains more accessible, geopolitical change may affect previously agreed regimes of governance, values may change with specific generational concerns, while ecological and economic change has meant that as land resources are depleted, deep sea minerals have gained in importance. A key driver for the global commons is the emergence of global societal challenges, including climate change, polluted atmosphere and oceans and biodiversity loss. Widespread awareness of how these challenges are connected to unregulated, exploitative behaviour, with repercussions for social equity, quality of life and well-being, fuels the demand for climate justice. Indeed, a key driver is the view that markets can be very unfair and destructive, unless they exist within a frame of governance that ensures fairness in the community. Increased citizen discontent is becoming more evident, particularly in the use of social media to shame exploitative market behaviour and through consumer activism, boycotting brands with unethical production processes or marketing. The drive for more equitable economic and social governance frameworks extends to the younger generation with their concern for redressing past exploitative behaviour and what they consider ‘historical injustices’. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals set targets for moving towards more sustainable management of the planet and its resources which has set in motion global, EU and state action. Developments in digital technologies provide the tools enabling such action. For example, ICT enabled mapping and management of global resources means that there is hardly a spot on earth that cannot be assessed and made accessible through sophisticated earth observation systems, including orbit, deep sea, or areas below the ice. The internet, including big data and satellite technology, leads to abundant knowledge. In theory, everyone on earth could access the nearly endless source of knowledge and information. In this context, open-source and open technologies are trends that drive the establishment of global commons. However, as technology allows access to previously non-accessible spaces like the deep sea, space or areas covered by ice, the pressure on raw materials increases. The scarcity of certain materials leads to intensified research for new materials with new characteristics and for a more circular economy, recycling and energy technology. The abundance of resources is an equally important question which needs to be addressed since it can lead to (over-) exploitation of resources which are perceived as abundant. The main barriers relate to the fact that the global governance system is becoming weaker in the face of growing conflicts and crises, as states become more concerned with protecting their interests. A potential barrier in this respect is the growing resurgence of national sovereignty, extending to economic and technological sovereignty, and the related drive to secure critical resources. The rise of new global powers with different world-views and value-systems adds to the complexity together with the growth and (geographical) expansion of global markets (powered by digital advances and competition) and their behaviour in the absence of an effective governance framework and regulation. In the worst scenario, global markets dominated by unethical players can generate unfair and destructive economic behaviour. If unchecked such behaviour can lead to exploitative practices which can set dangerous precedents. While ongoing advances in information and communication technology enhance transparency in global market operations and provide more effective tools for improving governance particularly in the movement of money, however, the spread of virtual currencies and threats to cyber security, highlight the challenges faced in developing a frame of governance which ensures fairness and equitable trading. Whether countries will renew efforts to participate meaningfully in international governance systems – the ‘rules-based order’ – or whether they will continue to shift focus to more unilateral action (UK POST study). The extent to which governments will coordinate to direct and regulate the operations of international corporations. Futures What if knowledge, space, the sun, the sea, energy, oil, lithium, uranium, vaccines, microbes etc., became recognised as “global commons”? How will property rights be affected? What would science look like in an “open source” and “open knowledge” base? What if there is “fair” access to resources (for countries, social groups) and younger generations can influence global governance? What if there will be a return to multilateralism as a global governance principle (a multipolar world without stand-off between the big beasts)?

To be of relevance to energy, green hydrogen and related technologies need to be scaled up hugely. To reach such a mass market, a low-cost clean-hydrogen supply must be available. However, to lower the price of hydrogen, much larger H2-markets and volumes are needed. The scale and the cost (of green hydrogen) go hand in hand. But they also form a classical Chicken and Egg problem, which many now successful clean energy technologies have likewise faced in the past and managed to overcome. What can we learn from the past to accelerate green-hydrogen development? In simple terms, the technology and the hydrogen market must be addressed simultaneously. This can be achieved through a range of ‘technology push and market pull’ actions, for example, increasing research, development, and innovation efforts (RDI) to improve the technology base and reduce its costs. Or, providing financial support to investments of full-scale pilot plants and demonstrations which will increase the volume up-take of the technology and will lead to important learning-by-doing or learning-by-using endogenous learning effects that further reduce the cost of technology. Empirically, we know that for each doubling of the cumulative volume produced, the unit cost may drop by 15 per cent. Naturally, if the technology were still too immature such as in the case of fusion energy, technology-push would be preferred as it would not make sense to start massive industrial efforts yet. For solar photovoltaics (PV), the German feed-in-tariffs opened the market for PV and, together with the Chinese scale-up of industrial production of solar cells, helped photovoltaics to reach a global breakthrough leading to 90 per cent lower prices in just a decade. The same story repeats itself now with batteries and electric vehicles, where the decreasing cost of batteries has been even more fierce than with PV. Could such a development be possible for green hydrogen as well? Green hydrogen is still 2-4 times costlier than traditional fossil-fuel-based hydrogen and is not competitive to form a replacement. A target price of around €2/kgH2 could ensure competitiveness in many applications. However, that cost target is not that far off as a 50-60% drop from the present cost level of producing green-H2 would be required. From a historical perspective, compared to other successful clean energy technologies, it is now the right moment to gear up the efforts to commercialize and scaling-up green hydrogen. The transition is already passing the point where combining stronger push-and-pull measures are justified. Even shifting more towards the market-pull would be motivated as that would create the industrial base for the massive scale-up and economy-of-scale-driven price reduction required for green hydrogen to reach the energy-relevant level. The markets are now clearly starting to pull hydrogen into a larger scale, often helped by the support from national governments. A recent report by McKinsey (2022) shows that some 680 large-scale hydrogen projects have been announced globally, reaffirming the intent to make hydrogen viable for large-scale use (Fig. 1). These projects importantly span the whole supply-chain from production, transport, use to the infrastructure of hydrogen, which supports creating the necessary ecosystems for massive use of hydrogen. Europe has a lead in this development as almost half of the large-scale hydrogen projects are located here, and the EU shows the way forward in several areas, such as using green-hydrogen for steelmaking. The European Union hydrogen strategy, which explores renewable hydrogen to help cost-effectively decarbonize the EU, has played a pivotal role in this development by creating a concerted European action toward scale-up of production and infrastructure for hydrogen. If successful, the global push of emission-free hydrogen could help to cut even up to 20 per cent of the global CO2 emissions by 2050. Figure 1. Large-scale hydrogen projects globally. (Source: Bernd Heid, Alma Sator, Maurits Waardenburg, and Markus Wilthaner (2022). Five charts on hydrogen’s role in a net-zero future. McKinsey Sustainability) Though the market-pull signals for green-hydrogen are very encouraging, the technology-push will still be highly useful and even necessary to reduce the costs and in helping to ‘root’ and integrate hydrogen into energy systems. One key area in this context will be reducing the cost of green-hydrogen production through electrolysis, which is influenced the investment (capex) and the running costs (opex), in particular the price of electricity and efficiency of the H2 system. By 2030, the specific cost of both alkaline and PEM electrolysis could be halved to below €500 per kW through technological advancements, an increase in manufacturing volumes and scaling up to 100 MW-units (source: Cost forecast for low-temperature electrolysis – technology driven bottom-up prognosis for PEM and alkaline water electrolysis systems. Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, October 2021). Combining the above technological achievements within reach with better systems operation, in particular increasing the operation time of hydrogen production plants to at least 40% of full load hours and feeding electrolysis with cheap renewable electricity, could lead to a complete cost breakthrough of green-hydrogen, i.e., meeting the perhaps most crucial prerequisite for full scale-up. Integration of hydrogen production into the energy systems offers further benefits which should neither be overlooked. Production of H2 and its derivates (e.g., synthetic fuels) involves side-products such as heat and oxygen, which create value. For example, a full-scale power-to-gas plant using hydrogen to be built in Vantaa city close to Helsinki, Finland, will integrate a whole hydrogen system into the municipal energy system. The waste heat created will be utilised, thus increasing the hydrogen system's overall energy efficiency to 90 per cent. Technology-push-actions should also address important strategic future issues that could either accelerate or hamper green-hydrogen uptake and scale-up in the long term. Such questions include e.g., the availability of critical materials needed in hydrogen technologies, storage of hydrogen in large-scale, safe use of H2 in civic society, etc. Many of these technology-related questions have been under research and development for several decades. Still, these should now be addressed through adequate RDI resources and coordinated efforts to find satisfactory solutions yet to be developed. Bridging science to innovations will be of utmost importance to feed next-generation solutions and (more effective and cheaper) technologies necessary for the next steps in scaling up. Hydrogen has remained as a vision for half a century from the times of the oil-crises, when it was first identified as a potential mover-and-shaker technology in energy. Hydrogen has undergone many hypes in the past. But this time, turning the promise of green hydrogen into one of the solutions to the climate-energy nexus is closer to reality than ever because scaling matters here, and we now have a more credible pathway for scaling up green hydrogen.

There are an estimated billions of tonnes of strategic minerals such as nickel, cobalt and copper, lying on the ocean’s floor. Technological advance, financial viability, and regulatory frameworks are slowly aligning to permit deep-sea mining (DSM). While many rejoice in these developments, a variety of actors are calling for a moratorium on the nascent industry. Most notably, the European Commission released a Joint Communication stating that not enough knowledge about the risks of DSM is available and that more research is to be conducted to make DSM sustainable[i]. With deep-sea mining closer than ever to becoming a reality on the one hand, and calls for a moratorium on the other hand, it is important to discuss future directions of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) for a flourishing deep-sea ecosystem. The way in which we view the world and how we conceptualise nature shape our attitude towards it and the type of STI to be desired and pursued. The project “S&T&I for 2050” provides a framework to imagine different sustainable futures depending on underlying values and human-nature relations. Three perspectives on ecosystem performance are described: “Protecting and restoring ecosystems”, concerned with preservation of ecosystems by managing the impact from human activities; “Co-shaping socio-ecological systems”, concerned with simultaneous development of social practices and ecological processes towards resilience and sustainability renewal; “Caring within hybrid collectives”, concerned with the establishment of caring relationships in new local collectives with humans and other entities on an equal footing. These three perspectives offer different views on notions of the deep sea and how and why we should promote its flourishing, and therefore delineate different views on deep-sea mining. The first perspective, i.e. protecting and restoring, views the deep sea as natural capital, a sphere that is separated from that of humans. The ecosystem is valued according to cost and benefit analysis (CBA), often based on ecosystem service. DSM would thus proceed when consistent with the findings of CBA and would need to limit as much as possible the effects on the environment. The second perspective, i.e. co-shaping, views the deep sea as a complex and unstable ecosystem that is co-shaped by both humans and non-human deep-sea entities. Ecosystems must flourish to allow for our long-term survival. Finding a governance system that is beneficial for all human and non-human entities part of the socio-ecological system is thus the proposed attitude towards assuring a healthy deep sea. The third perspective, i.e. immersing and caring, does not see a difference between humans and nature, thus also the deep sea. These two elements are one and the same, making humans deeply connected with a pluriverse of other beings. Caring for the deep sea and its health is not a choice, and deep-sea mining can only result from a negotiation between creatures to allow all to flourish on their own terms. Stemming from these perspectives on deep-sea performance, I sketched three 2050 scenarios on the future of deep-sea mining focused on ecosystem performance. P1 scenario: The masters of the deep sea Deep-sea mining is an established industry. A plethora of norms, tribunals and enforcement bodies assure that all contractors operating in national and international waters follow protocols and respect the boundaries and marine protected areas (MPAs). The deep sea has been carefully mapped via satellite imagery and all mineral deposits, before being approved for exploitation, have been studied in all their biological and chemical characteristics. Each operation in international water is to be approved behind closed doors by a board of experts selected by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), of which all countries are member. Meticulous risk assessments and environmental impact assessments are conducted to measure whether the extraction of minerals from a determined area makes economic sense against the loss of other ecosystem services. The “do no significant harm” principle (DNSH) is adopted as a default in deep-sea mining policymaking. The ISA also has the power to set caps to the quantity of minerals extracted each year depending on the indicators of stressors on the deep-sea ecosystem. It has happened in the past that restrictive caps resulted in fierce legal battles between investors and the ISA in a process alike that of the ISDS. Mining operations are required to adopt advanced technologies built on deep-sea robotics and AI to limit their impact in the extraction of minerals. When in 2032 a DSM operation caused a large-scale biodiversity loss that impacted numerous fisheries in the Pacific, controlling or eliminating the plumes of sediment became a priority of new technologies. Sensors are placed all throughout the deep sea to continuously monitor the temperature, the toxicity and water movements. P2 scenario: Embracing deep uncertainty Deep-sea mining has been practiced for 15 years now. The global moratorium put in place in 2025 allowed the international system to adapt and create a suitable regulatory framework to govern deep-sea mining effectively. Uncertainty in conducting mining operations in the deep sea was accepted and embedded in a highly responsive and adaptive governance structure. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was joined by a multitude of organisations, such as the Deep Ocean Protection Authority (DOPA), the DSM States Consortium, and Atlantic Fisheries Agency (AFA), in order to assure as much as possible a governance of a global common in the name of resilience of the ecosystem. The precautionary principle is a prerogative for all decisions regarding deep-sea mining activities so that long term flourishing is possible. Feedback loops in this structure have allowed prevention of significant strains on the deep-sea ecosystem and quick interdisciplinary response to rebalance the ecosystem. For this aim, data from indicator species and sensors placed not only in the deep-sea, but also in shallow waters, on coastal land, and in the atmosphere is collected in a central and open-access database and analysed by personnel with the help of AI technologies. Socio-economic factors, such as the high demand of a specific mineral on the market, are also factored in to predict and manage changes in the extraction pace and protection activities. The ISA has remained the main organisation controlling deep-sea mining activities on the seabed beyond national jurisdiction and has undergone deep change in its internal norms allowing for a pervasive transparency and increased flexibility in its activities and regulations. While on the one hand this increased the resilience of the system, financial viability of DSM suffered also due to the volatility of the DSM metals market. In any case, technological developments on land, particularly recycling, and societal change towards circular economies have determined a diminishing need of raw materials, thus alleviating the push for deep sea extraction. Operations in the deep sea are conducted using biomimetic technologies developed by marine engineers in collaboration with biologists to be unintrusive to deep-sea fauna. P3 perspective: Deep-sea connections Deep-sea mining is now old memory. The fermentation around the industry died even before a commercial operation happened in international water. Although it seemed that an energy transition might have been impossible without DSM, the major improvements in recycling and the decoupling of the economy rendered the practice futile. All this was accompanied by a paradigmatic shift in our relationship with Nature. Past extractive industries are unthinkable now due to the enormous harm that they bring to Planet Earth as a whole. Oceans and the deep sea are as close to humans’ conscience and care as the soil on which they walk. Still, when new materials are needed, humans can dive to the deep sea and communicate with its inhabitants to determine together which polymetallic nodule or how much softer sulphide deposit can be harvested. This was enabled by technological breakthroughs in diving equipment and symbiotic robotics amongst others. Knowledge is pursued not with the aim to manage the deep sea but to enhance the whole ecosystem capacity to sustain thriving life and interspecies collaboration. Extensive scientific knowledge of the deep sea and its biogeochemical characteristics is complemented by both human and other creatures’ indigenous knowledge. Cobalt-rich crusts are not mined because the technology currently available would be too invasive and destructive. Nevertheless, as the water levigates the rock and particles of metals are dispersed in the water, some people filter out the water and collect these. The deep sea belongs to no one and every living creature simultaneously – its flourishing cannot be separated from that of all other creatures, including humans. These three scenarios offer a peek into how different views of the world might impact deep-sea mining and Science, Technology, and Innovation directions related to a sustainable deep-sea. There are plenty of questions that the scenarios create and leave unanswered and plenty of open points that will be decided upon in the next years. Many of them are related to STI, including governance innovations, and many others engage with the complex geopolitical arena surrounding deep-sea mining. Will we create technologies to source deep-sea minerals sustainably? How will sustainability be conceptualised for the deep sea? How will developments in AI, big data and robotics impact the deep-sea mining industry? Which governance structure could effectively control extraction of minerals from the deep-sea? Can deep-sea minerals ever be recovered without harming deep-sea life? How will the rising attention to global commons impact activities in the deep sea? Will the DSM international challenge strengthen multilateralism or further break it down? Will deep-sea minerals be part of green transitions? Will the European Union prioritise assuring strategic material flows over environmental protection, or will such a trade-off not be required? How will trade-offs between ecological harm and ecological benefits be addressed? How would commercial DSM impact global trade flows and how would power relations and geopolitical strategies change? What will be the social consequences on land mines areas? Which countries will be the losers and winners at the prospect of DSM? Will deep-sea mining become an environmental taboo, similarly to nuclear energy? What knowledge will the EU require to approve deep-sea mining? [i] Joint Communication on the EU’s International Ocean Governance agenda: https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/publications/setting-course-sustainable-blue-planet-joint-communication-eus-international-ocean-governance-agenda_en

Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research Since hydrogen energy, in particular green hydrogen, is increasingly regarded as an important energy carrier in the EU's transition strategies towards a carbon-neutral future, questions concerning both the shape and size of a hydrogen economy need to be asked now. Green hydrogen, it is assumed, can play a significant role in the de-carbonization of high-energy-intensive industries and (some means of) transport as it can both deliver and store a tremendous amount of energy. For hydrogen energy to be sustainable - in other words, for it to be "green" - it must be produced from renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar. However, since at least in some EU countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands, the potential of renewable energy production is limited in the sense that it won't be able to meet projected green hydrogen demands, policymakers are increasingly looking to establish international partnerships to produce green hydrogen outside the EU and import it for national use - with a particular focus on countries in the Global South. Resource extraction from the Global South for use by populations and industries in the Global North is nothing new and has often been accompanied by maladies such as environmental pollution, poverty, economic decline, elite conflicts, and even civil strife in countries of the Global South (This is often and slightly misleadingly referred to as the "resource curse" as it is not the existence of natural resources per se that results in unstable political regimes and economies but the power relations and political strategies around them). Extracting and using energy from renewable resources, such as solar and wind, to produce and subsequently export green hydrogen might differ from extracting natural gas, oil, minerals and wood and could offer an opportunity to leave carbon-locked pathways and relationships. However, nothing suggests that the current mode of international interactions and the logic of partnership between the Global South and the Global North will change automatically when it comes to hydrogen production and export. Change will require conscious decision-making and actions on behalf of European (import) countries. The goal of a "just" energy transition is more or less explicitly part of the climate and energy transition goals of the EU as well as the UN's SDGs but definitions of what it means to ensure a just hydrogen transition are still subject to perception and negotiation. At its minimum, however, a just hydrogen transition needs to include the principle that the advance of the energy transition in one part of the world (or for a specific group) cannot be to the detriment of another - now and in the future. Specifically, a just hydrogen transition needs to ensure that international hydrogen partnerships will not prioritize hydrogen production and export at the cost of failing to achieve the national climate and energy transition goals of the export countries. The success of a just hydrogen transition can be implemented and assessed along different justice dimensions put forward by scholars of environmental and energy justice over the past two decades. A vast body of literature on distributional, procedural, and recognition justice highlights that justice is not just a matter of institutionalized access points and equal distribution even though these dimensions of justice are not to be neglected (see for example Sovacool 2016 and Sovacool et al. 2017). Particularly scholars of political ecology have brought questions of power and recognition to the debate of just transition: Who has the resources to access the conversation, who has a seat at the table to have their concerns heard, and who has the power to implement decisions? Furthermore, scholarship has pointed to the role of multi-levels and scales when conceptualizing justice in the energy transition (see for example Jenkins et al. 2018). A wind park built on land claimed by customary land rights might have immediate negative effects on the local population while having positive effects on national and regional greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, both the past and the future bring additional dimensions of justice to the table. Europe's history as colonizers puts the responsibility on contemporary European policymakers to not repeat Europe's past mistakes and to - at the same time - avoid replacing current energy transition costs onto future generations. Dimensions of justice are complex and have immediate and visible implications for the everyday lives and bodies of (parts of the) populations in the Global South. The current mode of international interactions and the logic of North-South partnership do nothing to correct longstanding injustices and inequalities. Hydrogen strategies, that take justice seriously, need to address these issues rather immediately.

1 Why Multi-Level Context Scenarios? What types of EU R&I policies would be effective in the years to come? How shall these policies help us explore and respond to the uncertainties of the future? Finding answers to these questions requires first of all imagining the context, in which future EU R&I policies might be situated. For doing this, we need to explore developments both at global level and within the European Union. Several recent developments strongly suggest that a new ‘world order’ is evolving, replacing the relatively short period characterised by US dominance, which, in turn, followed the bipolar world (the cold war between the blocs led by the US and the USSR) that existed for several decades after WW2. This new world order will be a multipolar one, but we cannot know yet how these ‘poles’ would behave. Thus, it is an imperative to consider several options. To do so, we propose exploring three different types of multipolar worlds: A) ‘poles’ genuinely collaborating when tackling global challenges, B) antagonistic groups of countries that are nevertheless willing to engage in limited co-operation, and C) at least one ‘pole’ is openly hostile towards others.1 The EU might also evolve along different paths, and thus we have enriched these multipolar scenarios at global level by also exploring two variants of how the EU might evolve in each of the global scenarios. The two variants of EU development we consider are i) a dynamic and resilient variant and ii) a destabilised and thus vulnerable variant. Preferably, the EU will be strong, dynamic and resilient, but we cannot be sure about this, and thus need to consider a possible weakening of the EU’s position in the world. By considering these two futures for the EU in each of the three global multipolar scenarios, we arrive at a set of six scenarios in total (Table 1). Due to the explicit consideration of multiple development paths at both the global and EU levels, we obtain a multi-level architecture of scenarios. It is certainly more demanding to analyse the six possible futures stemming from our 2x3 structure, but it provides more nuanced insights on the possible contexts for the EU R&I policies, and thus these policies can be underpinned by more relevant analyses, considering several options in a systematic and transparent way. This multi-level nature is what distinguishes our set of scenarios from other recent scenario projects that we have drawn upon as sources of inspiration. The notion of a multi-track scenario, coined by the recent OECD project on Global Scenarios 2035,2 stresses the idea of rather autonomous developments paths of different clusters (groups) of countries. This idea is shared by the EC SAFIRE scenarios,3 which also propose almost autonomous future pathways of different world regions. The global dimension of our scenario matrix further differentiates the multi-track idea into three variants of how groups of countries might relate to each other: genuine collaboration, limited co-operation, or open hostility.4 The JRC’s background report to the EC Strategic Foresight Report 20215 with its emphasis on the concept of open strategic autonomy of the EU emphasises the relationship between the EU and its global context, but it does not distinguish multiple development pathways at both global and EU levels. We argue, however, that this distinction is particularly productive to explore options for future EU R&I policies, because the room – and need – for manoeuvre depends on global opportunities and constraints, as well as on the collaboration and disparities between the national innovation systems of EU Member States. Of course, other factors of relevance to EU R&I policies also influence the EU and the global landscapes, such as the emergence of new types of non-state actors, or growing concerns about global challenges that are shared by all countries. Considering several types of a multipolar world offers an opportunity to think about different types of political and policy stances vis-à-vis Russia, China, and the US, which is important in order to derive future-proof implications and devise a future-proof EU R&I policy strategy. For example, the EU can make cognisant, well-considered preparations for a hostile, as well as a limited or genuinely collaborative relationship with Russia in the coming decades. While the latter may seem difficult to imagine in Spring 2022, it should not be discarded in the longer term. Further, this structure makes it easier to recognise that we need to put more emphasis on the security of the EU, and thus its cohesion. It also implies the need of taking a more pronounced ethical stance by the EU when considering various options, actual and potential internal tensions, as well as external threats and challenges. In view of how the global relations might evolve in the three different world orders, the EU needs to take a position that is both robust with regard to these three possible future worlds and at the same time compatible with the basic values that the EU aspires to defend. These choices are likely to have crucial repercussions on its R&I policies as well. 2 Scenario Descriptions 2.1 Major common features of the three multipolar worlds and general observations The world is running on multiple separate tracks in all the three multipolar worlds, while the level of co-operation and conflict between the poles varies in the different scenarios. Attitudes towards key determinants of well-being (inequality, freedom of expression, surveillance, ...) are highly divergent between the groups of countries, of which the various poles are composed. Thus, social tensions and inequalities might be high in one ‘pole’, while in another one a socially balanced development is of high priority. That would possibly lead to mass migration from one pole to another (unless prevented by force). Planetary boundaries – especially biodiversity, climate change, quality of soil, air, and water – might be either neglected or respected in the different ‘poles’, possibly causing major global challenges – or even disasters – with their further economic, social, and environmental repercussions. These major issues are tackled in markedly different ways in the three types of multipolar worlds, just as access to critical resources. State actors, businesses, NGOs, and newly emerging actors might behave in different ways in the same scenario. Competition and collaboration might occur in parallel (both among and inside the ‘poles’, as well as among the different types of actors). Co-operation in research, technological development and innovation activities (attitudes towards collaboration, as well as its domains, channels and forms, the types of actors engaged) are likely to vary across the scenario sketches. Finally, the actual ways, in which the EU tackles the major challenges and disruptions could vary in the six scenarios, depending on to what extent the various major actors (the EP, the Council, the Commission, big businesses, NGOs, ...) can shape the agenda and control the actions needed to implement the decisions. All these aspects are to be explored during the more detailed scenario building phase of the project. 2.2 A genuinely collaborative multipolar world Given the emerging global challenges, there are strong and successful efforts to set up global governance mechanisms to tackle critical issues (climate, biodiversity, migration, access to energy and other natural resources, regional conflicts, ...). Sustainable development goals (SDGs) are at the top of the agenda. Planetary boundaries are major concerns for all major stakeholders in all (most) poles. Businesses are active partners in global trade, investment, and innovation activities across the poles. A) Thriving in collaboration: A strong, dynamic EU in a genuinely collaborative multipolar world The EU is politically and financially strong enough to tackle the major societal and environmental challenges in its own territory with innovative solutions, supported by effective R&I policies, orchestrated between the EU and member states’ levels, as well as across the relevant policy domains. These strengths and successes make the EU a leading partner – able to co-shape the agenda – in global collaborations, which, in turn, also creates favourable conditions to these efforts. D) Decline, despite collaboration: A destabilised EU in a genuinely collaborative multipolar world Given its decline, the EU can tackle only a few of the major societal and environmental challenges in its own territory. One of the root causes is the poor policy orchestration between the EU and member states’ levels, as well as across the relevant policy domains. The EU is a neglected partner in global collaborations and can take advantage of the favourable global framework conditions to a rather limited extent. 2.3 A multipolar world with limited co-operation Different systems and standards in different parts of the world have solidified, creating several parallel groups of states, which, however, ‘talk to each other’. Leading powers of the poles gradually recognise the need for international co- operation (e.g. given major disasters) in tackling the most urgent (and possibly less demanding) issues. Limited multilateral (global) governance mechanisms are in place to tackle these carefully selected critical issues. Success is achieved in tackling jointly some of these issues, lowering the probability of major conflicts. Some planetary boundaries are respected in most poles. Global trade, investment, and innovation activities across the poles occur, but to a rather limited extent. B) Respected partner: A strong, dynamic EU in a multipolar world with limited co- operation The EU is politically and financially strong enough to tackle the major societal and environmental challenges in its own territory with innovative solutions, supported by effective R&I policies, orchestrated between the EU and member states’ levels, as well as across the relevant policy domains. The outcomes of these efforts, however, are severely constrained by the limited nature of global collaboration. Given its strengths and successes, the EU is a respected partner in global co-operations. Yet, it is not strong enough to extend and intensify global co-operations due to the limited commitments of the other poles. E) Negligible partner: A destabilised EU in a multipolar world with limited co- operation Given its decline, the EU can tackle only a few of the major societal and environmental challenges in its own territory. One of the root causes is the poor policy orchestration between the EU and member states’ levels, as well as across the relevant policy domains. Further, the outcomes of the EU’s weak efforts are severely constrained by the limited nature of global co-operations. Given its weaknesses, the EU is neglected partner even in the limited global co-operations, cannot co-shape the agenda. 2.4) A hostile multipolar world At least 1-2 strong pole/s want/s to impose its values (ideologies), political, and socio-economic structures on other(s). The expansionist pole/s encourage/s their favoured firms to encroach into other pole/s to undermine that/ those. Antagonistic ideologies (political systems) first cripple global co-operation altogether. Simply it is impossible to tackle global critical issues. That triggers ever more severe major conflicts, leading to open hostility (cold and hybrid regional wars; the fatality of an all-out [nuclear] war is understood, though.) C) Deterring fortress: A strong, dynamic EU in a hostile multipolar world The EU is forced to focus on defence and security issues, at the expense of tackling major societal and environmental challenges in its own territory. Given its economic strengths, resources required for significantly improving its defence capabilities might be sufficient, especially if it can form alliances with other pole/s.6 F) Frail fiefdom: A weak, vulnerable EU in a hostile multipolar world The EU is forced to focus on defence and security issues, and thus largely neglects societal and environmental challenges. Given its poor economic performance, resources might not be sufficient even for significantly improving its defence capabilities. 3 The Added Value of Multi-level Context Scenarios Multi-level scenarios offer the possibility of capturing the complexity of contexts for policies in a systematic, structured, and thus transparent way. By definition, though, they are complex and more demanding than those that consider only a single governance level. Hence, multi-level scenarios are built and used far less frequently than single-level scenarios. Yet, for EU R&I policies both levels of contexts are of paramount importance: i) how global issues might unfold (what major issues, in need of global responses, would evolve and what types of global responses can be expected from various poles); and ii) in what EU context the EU R&I policies should be devised and implemented (especially the position of the EU vis-à-vis other major global players; the decision-making mechanism inside the EU, e.g. orchestration of policies across policy domains and governance levels; available resources for R&I policies). To start with the global level, the three multipolar world scenarios highlight that the global co-ordination mechanisms, including global markets, do not work satisfactorily for actors having a decisive power to shape political, economic, societal, and environmental developments, and thus they opt for following their own track. This basic feature is not a speculation; it is the reality to be faced by all actors. Only one of these scenarios depicts a world order, in which the poles are willing to collaborate when tackling global challenges, notably security and peace; access to energy, other critical resources, and food; environment (climate, soil, air, water, biodiversity), and migration, to mention just the most fundamental ones. These imply a strong need for effective orchestration of policies and other actors’ steps at the global level. Yet, in the other two multipolar worlds co-operation is either limited among the poles, or it is not only missing, but open hostility is the context. In a bit simplified way, we can claim that the EU had been created assuming the first type of world order: global co- ordination mechanisms, especially global markets work for all major actors in an acceptable way. Now it finds itself exposed to the realities of a multi-track world, at best with limited co-operation – but currently ‘tainted’ by open hostility as well, right at its Eastern borders. Depending on its own path, the EU can react to these new realities in different ways in the various multipolar scenarios. R&I activities must play a major role in finding relevant answers to these challenges, and thus R&I policies should deal with these issues. Just to illustrate it with the energy issue, in scenario A) the EU has access to energy sources globally. Further, it can collaborate with all major global actors in shaping and pursuing an energy R&I agenda7 at a relatively leisurely way and speed – and as a strong partner. Besides the global collaborative project, the EU can – and need to – still pursue its own energy R&I agenda. In scenario D) the EU can still collaborate on these issues with the other major partners, but given its weak position, would not be able to influence the agenda: it can only play a role decided by the major global players. In both cases the energy R&I agenda for collaboration would be mainly shaped by climate and economic considerations. Collaborations are likely to beneficial in either case, although to a significantly different extent, depending on the EU’s ability to shape the agenda. In scenario B) the EU ́s access to energy sources is more limited geographically. It can still co-operate with some major global actors in shaping and pursuing an energy R&I agenda, but the scope of these co-operations is narrower, and co- operation is less intense, compared to scenario A). In scenario E), the EU ́s role, and thus the benefits it can gain, are more limited than in scenarios B) and D). In scenarios B) and E) the energy R&I agenda would be mainly shaped also by climate and economic considerations. The weight of these factors would be defined by the nature of the limited co-operations, in which the global partners are willing to enter. A ‘variable geometry’ of co-operations is likely to emerge; different combinations of poles would agree on different types of co-operations (e.g., in terms of themes, intensity, and forms of co-operation) and these are likely to change over time. In scenario C), the EU has access to energy sources only in territory of those poles that are not hostile to it. It can only co-operate with its allies in this openly hostile world order. The scope and intensity of energy R&I co-operations would be determined by the nature and territorial aspects of hostility. Given its strengths, the EU can co-shape the co-operative energy R&I agenda with its allies. In scenario F), the EU ́s role, and thus the benefits it can gain, are more limited than in scenario C). In scenarios C) and F) the energy R&I agenda would be mainly shaped by security considerations, eclipsing climate and economic ones. Moreover, R&D results and the impacts of innovations would be requested more urgently by all stakeholders. That implies significantly stronger pressures on R&I actors than in scenarios A), B), D), and E), on the one hand, but also larger funds would be made available for these activities, on the other, at the expense of financing some other R&I activities. Although we have only hinted at some important implications of the energy issue given space limits, it needs to be stressed that the critical issues identified above are strongly interrelated. Just to illustrate the importance of their co-evolution – their impacts on each other –, let’s start again from the energy angle. The available energy sources (their types) and our way to use energy has major impacts on the environment (climate change, quality of soil, air, and water, as well as on biodiversity, e.g., insects pollinating plants), and thus on food security (quantity and quality of food supply). Security (geopolitical) issues would determine access to natural gas. As natural gas is a major input for fertilisers, there will be major implications for food security through this chain of impacts, too. Another example is that security (geopolitical) issues have direct impacts on food supply e.g., from Russia and Ukraine,8 and thus on food security in the EU and elsewhere. Climate change, security in its strict sense, and food security in other continents can easily trigger mass migration. Clearly, implications for R&I policies, stemming from these cross-impacts, need to be considered as well. More generally, the EU can use its R&I policies for science diplomacy in different ways and to different extent in the six scenarios sketched above. For example, in scenario A) it can initiate global R&I alliances for the pursuit of solutions to global problems (e.g., energy, climate, food security, new pandemics, digital safety and security). It can also promote global science as a ‘world public good’ and use its higher education systems to attract global talent to work in the EU or collaborate with EU partners upon return to their home countries. These opportunities would be significantly more limited in all the other scenarios (in terms of thematic and geographical scope, as well as intensity) given the EU’s own strengths, on the one hand, and the basic features of the world order, on the other. Further, the EU’s own interests would also differ significantly in the six scenarios, and thus it would – need to – put different emphasis on building its own strengths in isolation vs. seeking different types of co-operation. Considering multiple futures is a necessary precondition to devise ‘future-proof’ R&I policy strategies (including priorities, relevant policy tools, as well as governance structures and methods), that is, strategies that would be effective in most of the plausible futures. Our intention with this blog post is not to offer strategic advice, not even to identify a set of the most relevant and pressing strategic issues; rather, we would like to ignite a heated, but thorough, systematic, and transparent discussion on the possible future contexts for the EU R&I policies as a starting point for strategy setting, and thus invite the visitors – contributors – of this platform to consider the proposed set of scenarios, identify decisive issues that require close attention of decision-makers and consider the R&I policy implications of these issues. References and examples for multi-level scenarios Havas A. (2008): Devising futures for universities in a multi-level structure: a methodological experiment, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 75 (4): 558–582, https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.techfore.2008.02.001 OECD (2021): Global Scenarios 2035: Exploring Implications for the Future of Global Collaboration and the OECD, Paris: OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/df7ebc33-en Lebel L. (2006): Multi-level Scenarios for Exploring Alternative Futures for Upper Tributary Watersheds in Mainland Southeast Asia, Mountain Research and Development, 26 (3): 263–273, https://doi.org/10.1659/0276- 4741(2006)26[263:MSFEAF]2.0.CO;2 * All views presented in this site are the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of national and EU bodies nor engage those in any manner. Footnotes: 1 The OECD considers just one type of multi-track world, composed of several “clusters” that is, groups – of countries, which follow their own track (path of development). These countries are not necessarily located in the same region, that is why they compose clusters, as opposed to world regions. 2 https://search.oecd.org/economy/global-scenarios-2035-df7ebc33-en.htm We use ‘multipolar’ and ‘multi-track’ scenarios as synonyms in this post. 3 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/e436b4b6-fa50-11eb-b520-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-222702137 4 We could consider a fourth type of multipolar world, between limited co-operation and open hostility, when the “polars” – the various groups of countries – operate in a splendid isolation. In that world there is hardly any global trade, international co-operation in investment, and RTDI activities. There are no efforts to set up global governance mechanisms to tackle critical issues, and thus ‘luck’ is needed to avoid major conflicts. To keep the number of scenarios lower, however, we do not elaborate on those scenarios here. 5 https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC125994 6 For a recent report on RTDI activities’ contribution to EU defence, see, e.g., https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/fs_22_1045 7 The major objective would include to explore and extract new energy sources; develop new energy production (conversion) technologies and new ways to transport and store energy; enhance energy efficiency in all user sectors; better understand the behaviour and attitudes of various types of energy users, as well as the impact pathways of different policy tools, including regulations, to better steer and nudge their energy consumption patterns. 8 We can also think of other major food exporters in other countries and continents, depending on the food items in question.

National governments and multi-lateral organizations like the European Union, OECD, and UNESCO have identified values and principles for artificial narrow intelligence and national strategies for its development. But little attention has been given to identifying the beneficial initial conditions for future Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The initial conditions for AGI will determine if Artificial Super Intelligence will evolve to benefit humanity or not. Even if international agreements are reached on the beneficial initial conditions for AGI, a global governance system will still be needed to enforce them and oversee the development and management of AGI. Since it may take ten, twenty, or more years to create and ratify an international AGI treaty and establish a global AGI governance system, and since some experts believe it is possible to have AGI within ten to twenty years, it is therefore important to work on these issues as soon as possible. The most critical AGI issues are its initial conditions and global governance. These issues are important for governments to get right from the outset. The Millennium Project is currently exploring these issues. https://www.millennium-project.org/transition-from-artificial-narrow-to-artificial-general-intelligence-governance/ Definitions AI is advancing so rapidly, that some experts believe that AGI could occur before the end of this decade (1); hence, it is time to begin serious deliberations about AGI. There are three categories of Artificial Intelligence (AI): narrow, general, and super. I define AGI as a general-purpose AI that can learn, edit its code, act autonomously to address novel and complex problems with novel and complex strategies similar to or better than humans, as distinct from Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) that has a more narrow purpose. Artificial Super Intelligence is AGI that has become independent of humans, developing its own purposes, goals, and strategies without human understanding, awareness, or control and continually increasing its intelligence beyond humanity as-a-whole. A gray area between Narrow and General is developing now. Large planforms are being created of many ANIs such as Gato (2) by DeepMind of Alphabet which is a deep neural network that can perform 604 different tasks from managing a robot to recognizing images and playing games – it is not AGI, but Gato is more than the usual ANI: “The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens (3). Also the Wu Dao 2.0 by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (4) has 1.75 trillion parameters (5) trained from both text and graphic data. This allows it to generate new text and images on command and has its virtual student (Hua Zhibing) that learns from WuDwo 2.0 (6). AGI should not be confused with General Purpose AI Systems (GPAIS) (7) which is defined as an AI system “able to perform generally applicable functions such as image/speech recognition, audio/video generation, pattern detection, question answering, translation etc. These systems rely on “transfer learning” applying knowledge from one task to another. ChatGPT (8) is an upgrade from GPT-3 to GPT-3.5 that can generate human-like text and perform a wide range of language tasks such as translation, summarization, and question answering. (GPT-3 uses 175 billion machine learning parameters.) ChatGPT interacts with the user to produce sophisticated text from simple instructions or questions. See Appendix for an example of how it answered the first question in the second section below. It can also write and correct code, write music in different styles, organize information, and other uses being invented now. SingularityNet is also in this gray area. It brings together AI developers who want to create AGI and share code such that AGI might emerge from many interactions. The Athens Roundtable held at the European Parliament on 1-2 December 2022 did discuss General Purpose AI, but not AGI. The Future of Life Institute has assessed General Purpose AI and the AI Act (9), but not AGI. The Global AGI Race AGI does not exist. President Putin has said whoever leads AI will rule the world. China plans to lead international competition by 2030 (10). Although “AGI” or “Artificial General Intelligence” does not appear in the State Council Notice on the Issuance of the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan: A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (Released: July 20, 2017), terms such as “strong generalization capabilities…AI key general technology system…cross-medium analytical reasoning technology” does seem like AGI and the plan states that China will be “occupying the commanding heights of AI technology.” Since ANI is with us now, one can assume that President Putin and the Chinese Plan were referring to AGI. Therefore, it is also reasonable to assume that the “Great AGI Race” is on with both governments and corporations. In such a race, Deep Mind Co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said people may cut corners making future AGI less safe. Adding to this race are the Brain Projects (11) in the EU, USA, China and Japan, and other neuroscience advances. Will AGI create more jobs than it replaces? What is different this time? Previous technological revolutions from the agricultural age to industrial age and on to the information age created more jobs than each age replaced. But the advent of AGI and its impacts on employment will be different this time because of: 1) the acceleration of technological change; 2) the globalization, interactions, and synergies among NTs (Next Technologies such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, 3D/4D printing, robots, drones, computational science, as well as both ANI and especially AGI; 3) the existence of a global platform—the Internet—for simultaneous technology transfer with far fewer errors in the transfer; 4) standardization of data bases and protocols; 5) few plateaus or pauses of change allowing time for individuals andcultures to adjust to the changes; 6) billions of empowered people in relatively democratic free markets able to initiate activities; and 7) machines that can learn how you do what you do, and then do it better than you. Anticipating the possible impacts of AGI and preparing for the impacts prior to the advent of AGI could prevent social and political instability (12), as well as facilitate it broader acceptance. Some Current Questions About Future AGI AGI is expected to address novel and extremely complex problems by initiating research strategies from exploring the Internet of Things (IoT), interviewing experts, making logical deductions, learning from experience and reinforcement without the need for its own massive databases, and continually editing and re-writing its own code to continually improve its own intelligence. An AGI might be tasked to create plans and strategies to avoid war, protect democracy and human rights, manage complex urban infrastructures, meet climate change goals, counter transnational organized crime, and manage water-energy-food availability. To achieve such abilities without the future nightmares of science fiction, global agreements with all relevant countries and corporations will be needed. To achieve such an agreement or set of agreements, many questions should be addressed. Here are just two: How to manage the international cooperation necessary to build international agreements and a governance system while nations and corporations are in an intellectual “arms race” for global leadership. (IAEA and nuclear weapon treaties did create governance systems during the Cold War arms race.) And related: How can international agreements and a governance system prevent an AGI “arms race” and escalation from going faster than expected, getting out of control and leading to war, be it kinetic, algorithmic, cyber, or information warfare? Since the EC has led on some complex multilateral agreements, it could perform a great service by addressing some of these questions. Read more on the research on General Artificial Intelligence here or download the full report below. References When will singularity happy? 995 experts’ options on AGI (updated September 26, 2022) https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intelligence-singularity-timing/ https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent Overview AI values, principle, an ethics https://openreview.net/forum?id=1ikK0kHjvj Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence https://www.baai.ac.cn/english.html Beijing-funded AI language model tops Google and OpenAI in raw numbers https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3135764/us-china-tech-war-beijing-funded-ai-researchers-surpass-google-and China unveils first domestically developed virtual studenthttp://en.people.cn/n3/2021/0604/c90000-9857985.html Council of the European Union General Purpose AI Systems (GPAIS) https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-14278-2021-INIT/en/pdf ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialoguehttps://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/ General Pupose AI and the AI Act, an assessment by the Future of Life Institute https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/General-Purpose-AI-and-the-AI-Act.pdf State Council Notice on the Issuance of the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan Released: July 20, 2017 https://d1y8sb8igg2f8e.cloudfront.net/documents/translation-fulltext-8.1.17.pdf Inventory of Brain Projects Working Group https://www.internationalbraininitiative.org/inventory-brain-projects-working-group Glenn, Jerome and the Millennium Project team, Work/Technology 2050: Scenarios and Actions, The Millennium Project, Washington, DC, 2020.

The transition to renewable energy in Europe has evolved dynamically since the turn of the century. The share of renewable energy in the European Union more than doubled between 2004 and 2022. Nevertheless, renewable energy represents only 22 percent of overall energy consumption and 37 percent of electricity generation in the EU. In other words, Europe still has a long way to go, even when it comes to the relatively easy task of converting its electricity production to renewables. In the meantime, Europe’s goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, as enshrined in the European Climate Law, has shifted attention to more challenging tasks: the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions from so-called hard-to-abate sectors, such as energy-intensive industries and long-distance transport. These sectors have in common that the direct use of renewable electricity does not offer a comparatively easy pathway for the elimination of greenhouse gases in these sectors. Instead, climate-neutral hydrogen - as feedstock for the production of basic chemicals and synthetic fuels or as a reduction agent in low-carbon steel making, to name a few applications - offers a promising pathway for many of these hard-to-abate sectors. This has raised the important question of where this hydrogen will come from in the future. The EU Hydrogen Strategy and the REPower plan envision the rapid ramp-up of renewable electricity-based hydrogen, the only climate neutral avenue for producing hydrogen. It has targeted the development of 10 million tons of renewable hydrogen in the EU and an equivalent amount of hydrogen to be imported from partner countries by 2030. These ambitious targets translate into additional renewable electricity generation of approximately 500 TWh, both in the EU and in partner countries. This is also roughly the amount needed to meet the EU’s pre-existing 2030 targets for renewable energy. Together, this means the EU would have to approximately double its renewable energy generation from 1000 TWh to around 2000 TWh per year by 2030. (A further increase of the EU’s renewable energy target has recently been proposed by the EU parliament.) Meeting these targets will have major implications for the future energy geography in Europe. While analysts have pointed to the economic and technical challenges of these goals, the spatial dimension of these developments is not explicitly addressed in the EU strategy and rarely features in policy discussions. The main responsibility for reaching these goals sits with the member states. However, the most ambitious strategies do not necessarily correspond to the geographies with the greatest potential to produce a surplus of renewable energy. For instance, Germany has one of the most ambitious hydrogen strategies, targeting 5 GW of electrolyzer capacity by 2030. However, among EU member states it has some of the lowest renewable energy potential relative to its existing electricity consumption (see figure 1 below). Spain is among the member states with one of the largest potential renewable energy surplus, and it has an estimated onshore wind power potential that is more than six times that of Germany. However, it is only targeting 4 GW of electrolyzer capacity by 2030. Greece, with onshore wind power potential that surpasses Germany’s by more than 70 percent, is targeting electrolyzer capacity of 750 MW by 2030. Similarly, Romania has about 50 percent more potential for wind power production than Germany but has yet to launch a national hydrogen strateg (for wind power potentials see JRC (2018) report on Wind energy potentials for EU and neighboring countries, especially page 38). Solar potential relative to its electricity consumption also vastly surpasses relative potential in Germany (see figure 2 below). Figure 1: Potential for wind power production in EU member states relative to 2016 power production (Source: IASS Potsdam, based on JRC, 2018) Figure 2: Solar energy potential in the European Union, by region (Source: JRC Energy and Industry Geography Lab, ENSPRESO dataset) This is partly offset by significant offshore potential in the North Sea, which will play an important role not only in meeting German hydrogen targets but also those of Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. These four countries have jointly declared their intention to build 20 GW of electrolyzer capacity by 2030, underpinned by 65 GW of offshore wind capacity. Beyond this targeted effort to exploit the potential of the North Sea, hydrogen ambitions in Europe do not correspond primarily to future renewable energy potential but governments’ financial capacity to invest in climate-friendly innovation and industrial development. Apart from the renewable-rich Nordics, Germany and Italy have the most ambitious targets for renewable-based electrolyzer capacity, despite comparatively low levels of renewable energy potential relative to their power demand. France has also formulated ambitious hydrogen targets. However, it represents a special case, given the high share of nuclear energy in its energy mix. It targets 6,5 GW of electricity-based hydrogen, the highest among member states, powered by either renewable or nuclear energy. The German strategy also places a strong emphasis on developing supply chains for the import of hydrogen to meet its future hydrogen demand. While these efforts address Germany’s expected gap in meeting its hydrogen demand, unlocking intra-European hydrogen trade is not the main priority. It also not explicitly tackled in the EU hydrogen strategy. Although the EU strategy acknowledges the need for imports from non-EU countries, the strategy does not propose any approach for aligning renewable potential among the member states with their hydrogen ambitions, leaving this to the member states. Neither Germany nor the EU engage actively with the question of future geographies of hydrogen demand. Rather, the implicit assumption is that existing demand centers, mainly located in Northern European countries, will largely remain in place, with hydrogen flows developing to satisfy this demand. To date, only Spain has formulated a vision that diverges from this conception, targeting hydrogen development both for export to Northern European demand centers and for the development of new, climate-neutral industrial supply chains in Spain. It is hoping to leverage its renewable energy potential to attract investment. Such a development has clear analogies in history. The availability of energy resources was instrumental in shaping Europe’s existing industrial geographies, located near centers of coal extraction or along waterways enabling their transportation. While current infrastructure and know-how located in existing industrial regions will no doubt also play an important role, renewable resources are likely to emerge as an important additional factor. To date European policy is largely blind to Europe’s renewable energy geography, presumably relegating this to the market forces driving investment decisions. However, in contrast to past energy transitions, current developments are not merely accompanied by governments. Rather policy is the central driver of these changes. Against this background, an engagement with these geographic dimensions and how they might influence the future of energy and industry in Europe could offer important new insights for European policy makers. Spelling out differing scenarios for Europe’s future energy geography and their implications for aspects such as energy security, industrial competitiveness as well as the environmental and social sustainability of hydrogen development could yield important insights for better positioning Europe and its Green Deal internationally. As Europe’s current energy crisis has revealed energy geographies - and how they are shaped by infrastructure decisions - matter.

Sharing lessons learned in foresight practices and experiences is important for the exchange for an impactful foresight community. The Mutual Learning Exercise can help foster community building and foresight capacities in different member states. Foresight studies, previously known as future studies or futures research, have a rich history dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Over the years, these studies have expanded significantly in many countries, especially in the field of research and innovation (R&I). As we face rapid changes and uncertainty in today's world, there is a growing demand for policymakers to incorporate systematic foresight into their decision-making processes. By providing strategic intelligence and a long-term perspective, foresight can help governments better anticipate future opportunities and challenges. The OECD has emphasized the need for all governments to build greater anticipatory capacity and stresses the importance of institutionalizing the use of strategic foresight in R&I policy. Indeed, foresight has proven instrumental in informing the design and implementation of R&I policy through three distinctive roles linked to targeted impacts: corrective (addressing systemic failure and policy lock-ins), disruptive (focus on crisis and transition), creative (stimulating enabling conditions for new structures) The EU's response to ongoing crises and future challenges involves addressing this growing demand for strategic foresight. This includes efforts to create a European foresight community by connecting national institutionalized foresight. This strategy is notably being developed in the context of the European Commission-funded Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) on research and innovation foresight (R&I foresight). The MLE aims to create a platform for the exchange of valuable information, experiences, and innovative practices in the field of research and innovation (R&I) foresight across EU and associated countries. By fostering collaboration between different groups, the MLE seeks to inspire the development of impactful R&I foresight communities as an important element of the European Research Area (ERA). The MLE is focussing on 5 topics that have led or will lead to the publication of thematic papers: Overview of R&I foresight. Institutionalising foresight capability creating wide foresight communities in the R&I system. Citizens’ engagement approaches and methods. Foresight, the twin transition, and potential disruptions. From foresight for Smart Specialisation to engagement in EU Research Programmes, Missions, and Partnerships. The first thematic paper examines the current state of foresight in the EU, including practices at the national level in both public and private sectors, success factors and challenge to future foresight practices. The second thematic paper, published in March 2023, delves deeper into the challenges and success factors for research and innovation (R&I) foresight. The paper explores how government foresight plays a role in various countries, the foresight community building process across Europe, and the main findings of a dedicated survey conducted as part of the Mutual Learning Exercise on foresight between October and November 2022. The first part highlights the diverse approaches and experiences of Member States and other advanced countries that have contributed to an expanding role for government foresight. The paper identifies parameters that significantly influence the extent to which foresight plays a role in government, such as the country's size and location, the maturity of policy context, the level of internationalization, and the success of institutionalizing foresight. In the second part, the focus shifts to the European level, highlighting opportunities to create a European foresight community, building on existing institutionalized foresight at the national level. It also discusses recent strategies put in place such as the EU-wide Foresight Network, EU Foresight-on-Demand, or the Foresight Europe Network of the Millennium Project. The final part of the paper covers the key findings of a dedicated survey conducted as part of the Mutual Learning Exercise on foresight between October and November 2022. These thematic papers as well as those still forthcoming share the goal of advancing the development of a community and enhancing the capacity of member states to take part in foresight and R&I policy planning through enhanced knowledge-sharing, cooperation, and active learning. This is an article from the Horizon Future Watch Newsletter (Issue 1, May 2023), presented by Foresight on Demand

A journey in participatory democracy through challenges (and opportunities) of future-thinking approaches. What if people from all walks of life were given space to envision the democracy they would choose for themselves? What if political representation went beyond voting rights, encouraging experience-sharing and storytelling to come up with solutions for a better future? This is where the power of foresight comes in handy. The belief in foresight’s flexibility, reaching beyond its narrow, business-driven trajectory, is a major component of EUARENAS, a Horizon 2020-funded project investigating cities in 4 European countries (Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Estonia) as arenas for strengthening engagement and participation in democracy whilst creating momentum for political change through more inclusive and participatory forms of governance. The project stretches foresight techniques beyond their official settings to involve various actors active within cities, including local politicians, civil servants, NGOs, activists, grassroots communities, citizen power advocacy groups for underrepresented citizens and citizens themselves, with particular attention to marginalized groups. Hayley Trowbridge is the CEO at People’s Voice Media, the UK-based civil society charity leading the foresight work package in the EUARENAS project. In her words, “EUARENAS stretched and ‘innovated’ foresight techniques and future thinking tools to blend them with participatory and collaborative research methods.” The overarching goal of this approach is to bring citizens and decision-makers together to identify problems (and solutions) concerning shared futures. Foresight approaches can support this aim, nurturing active citizenship in defining social agendas and shaping political life. Foresight can become both a tool for understanding emerging democratic innovations and for engaging citizens and other actors in such innovations. EUARENAS’ foresight ‘blend’ EUARENAS’ employment of foresight follows three main methodological streams: media discourse analysis (considering traditional media); Community Reporting from scenarios of lived experience (peer-to-peer storytelling), and exploration of signals coming from social media. Results collected from these three methodologies contribute to ‘sense-making’ on the subject. Firstly, the project team looked at how media discourse analysis can be used within future thinking frameworks by scanning relevant national and pan-European traditional media (TV, radio or print) products and identifying, within them, the discourses of change happening in society regarding democracy. Items (articles or broadcasts) gathered were shared in a series of local participatory workshops, organized with citizen groups that have the least voice in democracy, to support the identification of the discourses and ‘make sense’ of signals of change in society about democracy: “What made this go beyond the ‘standard’ horizon scanning techniques or discourse analysis in the traditional sense”, considered Trowbridge, “was that it was framed around involving marginalized citizen groups within sense-making efforts.”[1] Subsequently, the EUARENAS team tested the lived experience of citizens in thinking about the future via guided peer-to-peer storytelling about their engagement in democracy and decision-making within the cities of Gdansk, Voru and Reggio Emilia. The storytelling set the basis for mapping seeds of change into possible horizons that stimulated conversations about the future[2] using the Three Horizons framework. The project’s third foresight angle, perhaps the most innovative one, looked at social media as a window into current debates, social issues, and trending community topics. Social media accounts, particularly those associated with civil society and social movements showcase what issues and debates matter to people the most and offer a glimpse of emerging trends in the social sphere mediated by collective intelligence. Such content can help to hypothesise about our future, combining signals from social media with future-thinking activities by engaging experts from across policy, practice, research and academia in co-analysing conversations about the future. The approach[3] was initially devised to examine the topic of ‘the future of democracy’, but it can easily be adapted to support future-thinking activities on a range of topics, using social media as the core source material. Challenges and opportunities facing EUARENAS One of the trickiest challenges identified by Trowbridge is the difficulty in recruiting people, allowing for equitable participation by overcoming barriers preventing people from physically ‘taking part’, such as work constraints, childcare needs, language barriers, technology competence, etc. Although EUARENAS put in place strategies to overcome these obstacles in its workshops, Trowbridge saves the story of the problematic role of financial participation incentives for another day. Another big challenge to involving citizens is that dreaming about the future can sound like a privilege to people who are living a bleak present: “When you're not comfortable and don’t have a ‘good’ place within society, the ability to dream and hope for better is hard without it being linked to tangible change,” Trowbridge says. Foresight can become a space in which ‘dreaming’ is not a privilege of think tanks and researchers. Geoff Mulgan (2020) defined ‘social immagination’ as, a space in which “communities can, once again, become heroes of their own history”[4]. In this sense, Trowbridge believes foresight has a role to play in achieving social, epistemic and economic justice, also by “enabling people to go beyond ‘democracy equals electoral representation’ and thrive in true democratic engagement.” Fast-forwarding democracy: weak signals and desiderata When asked to reach for her crystal ball, Trowbridge has a clear picture in mind: “It’s clear that the ‘business as usual’ attitude won’t suffice to face matters such as climate change and planetary health. However, we are reassured by some weak signals for change we have observed from our research in and beyond this project.” Above all, people are acknowledging the complex and uncertain times we are living in and there is a shift to increased involvement in civic life. “To embrace and address this uncertainty” - Trowbridge observes – “we need our services, institutions and policies to be suitable for that adaptable and uncertain environment; this means promoting a more nuanced approach to politics and deliberation…Coming to terms with the shades of grey within consensus building that allow for multiple perspectives in understanding the way(s) forward.” We couldn’t leave Trowbridge without asking her our 1-million-dollar foresight question: If things go well, how do you expect democracy and citizen engagement to develop in the next 20 years? “I would expect us to move away from our current rigid, hierarchical system to a more networked democracy that devolves and disperses decision-making so that decision-making happens closer to whom that decision affects.” [1] EUARENAS’ Media Discourse Foresight Guide is available here [2] EUARENAS’ Lived Experience Foresight Guide is available here [3] EUARENAS’ Social Media Foresight Guide is available here [4] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/steapp/sites/steapp/files/2020_04_geoff_mulgan_swp.pdf This is an article from the Horizon Futures Watch Newsletter (Issue I, May 2023) presented by Foresight on Demand

How important is the EU Framework Programme for Europe’s ability to respond effectively to potential future disruptions that could unfold from now to 2040? What are the implications of those disruptions for the directions of EU research & innovation in the period 2025-2027? These are the questions posed by the Research4Futures Dynamic Argumentative Delphi survey, carried out between 6th – 18th of December 2022 by Institutul de Prospectiva, which engaged almost 950 contributors from Europe and beyond. The disruptions explored in the survey were drawn from recent foresight work performed by the Foresight on Demand consortium on behalf of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD), namely two projects: Foresight towards the 2nd Strategic Plan for Horizon Europe, and project S&T&I FOR 2050. Science, Technology and Innovation for Ecosystem Performance – Accelerating Sustainability Transitions. These projects delivered so-called foresight scenarios at the time horizon of 2040, but the scope, methodologies and final results were different. The case studies developed in the two projects are rather extensive texts, so for a better user experience in the Research4Futures survey, these contents were clustered and significantly condensed, resulting in eleven domains, each presented in a one-page text. In the survey, each domain page was structured under three sections: i) a brief description of the disruption(s) in the respective domain; where the disruptions encompass both crises and opportunities, hopes and fears; ii) a set of brief future scenarios that explore different ways the disruptions might unfold and their consequences, iii) a final section on implications for R&I, in light of the disruptions. The figure below showcases the way respondents assessed the importance of the EU Framework Programme for Europe’s ability to respond effectively to the potential future disruptions within each of the domains explored in the survey. Notably, respondents regard the EU Framework Programme as an important vector of the EU in addressing challenges and opportunities brought forth by future disruptions, casting an average score between 4 and 5 (on the scale from 1 to 5) with regards to all domains, with a minor exception. Second, contributors to the survey view the EU Framework Programme to be of utmost relevance and importance in connection to the future of Artificial intelligence; suggesting a significant role of research and innovation in improving AI applications and establishing ethical frameworks for AI developments, in shaping the nature of human–AI collaboration. The top R&I directions stemming from the survey are: AI improvements for specific applications The nature of AI and human intelligence AI in medical applications Understanding cooperation between humans and AGI systems Ethical standards, AI regulatory sandboxes To explore the full results of the Research4Futures survey we warmly invite you to consult the report below.