Facing uncertainty around climate change, AI, and job security, youth in Vietnam took part in two foresight workshops where they explored future trends, used strategic tools, and built skills to respond to challenges and shape long-term solutions. 

Why Futures Thinking Skills Matter for the Youth in Vietnam

Young people across Vietnam and Southeast Asia are navigating a future shaped by climate change, environmental degradation, and the rapid rise of automation and AI. Many are concerned about job security and feel uncertain about what lies ahead. There’s also a growing sense of mistrust toward institutions and doubts about whether a sustainable and just future is truly being safeguarded. In the face of these realities, learning how to think strategically about the future - and take action - is becoming an essential skillset for youth.

Exploring the Future Through Youth Collaboration & Foresight

With the support of the European Commission, the EU Delegation in Vietnam organised two online foresight workshops for the Vietnam Youth Advisory Board (VYAB). The sessions were held in September 2024 and each session lasted 1.5 hours, tailored to the participants’ availability across time zones.

The workshops brought together young people from VYAB and participants from neighboring countries to explore how futures thinking could help youth shape Southeast Asia’s future, especially around three EU priorities: the digital and circular economy, responsible entrepreneurship, and governance.

Using the Youth4Foresight toolkit, participants engaged in interactive sessions via Miro, an online collaboration tool that was well received. The energy was high, especially as youth connected across the region and from different professional backgrounds to share ideas and build new perspectives. 

Tools to Shift Mindsets and Spark Ideas

To kick off, participants explored three warm-up exercises: imagining the world in 2050, rating uncertainties about the future, and identifying trends likely to shape the region. These activities encouraged reflection and helped shift thinking from the present to long-term possibilities. The future holds many paths, but once we begin to recognize them and take action, we can shape those possibilities into something better. 

From Trends to Actions

The workshops introduced two main foresight tools: the Futures Wheel and 3 Horizons.

With the Futures Wheel, participa nts mapped the ripple effects of trends like digital transition, shifting global power dynamics, and resource scarcity. This helped them understand how one change could lead to another, revealing both risks and opportunities for regional action.

The 3 Horizons exercise in vited participants to reflect on current realities, imagine more desirable futures, and propose ways to get there. Working in teams based on EU priorities, they turned broad visions into concrete ideas and short-term actions. 

Shared Futures, Shared Responsibility: A Key Takeaway

Futures thinking proved to be a powerful tool in times of uncertainty. It allowed participants to think more strategically, adaptively, and collaboratively. As they described: "It gave structure to our ideas. We felt more in control of shaping what’s next."

One of the strongest takeaways was the value of working together. By sharing ideas across the region and professional backgrounds, participants saw how collective thinking leads to more creative, inclusive, and actionable outcomes. It’s not just about imagining what’s coming - it’s about imagining it together.

Youth left the workshops with stronger skills, renewed motivation, and a clearer sense of how they can lead change in their communities and beyond.

Check out the toolkit and star t building your future-thinking muscles! 

Lesotho faces some of the highest inequality levels in the world, leaving young people vulnerable to poverty, unemployment, and forced migration. Nearly a third of the population is under 24, yet youth voices can stay absent from decision-making. Cultural norms discourage open deliberation between young people and adults, leaving many — especially young herders, returnees from South Africa, and young women and girls — without opportunities to shape their futures.

The European Union, UNICEF, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched the Youth Power Hub Programme in September 2024, with the goal of empowering young people as key players in governance and development at both local and national levels. To make the activities also future facing, the Youth4Foresight toolkit was used at the launch event. 

Training foresight facilitators

The toolkit, produced by European Commission, foresight experts and young people worldwide, offers a set of foresight techniques tailored for young people. Rather than relying on external foresight experts for a one-off workshop at the launch event, the EU and partners focused on embedding foresight within the Youth Power Hub itself. Local youth leaders participated in hybrid training on foresight fundamentals, specific tools, and facilitation skills.

These facilitators then led a futures workshop for 100 participants, exploring ‘The Future of Youth Advocacy in Lesotho.’ A key tool used, part of the Youth4Foresight toolkit, was Three Horizons , a structured approach to understanding systems change and transitions. 

Shifting mindsets, creating space for new ideas

For many participants, this was the first time they had been invited to systematically and critically think about the future — not as something distant and abstract, but as something they could actively shape. One facilitator described the experience as “a permission slip to imagine beyond the immediate struggles we are navigating.” Others found clarity in seeing how interconnected issues like climate resilience, youth unemployment, and political participation required systemic solutions. By framing discussions in terms of possible futures rather than fixed positions, it created space for conversations that might otherwise have been constrained by political or institutional barriers.

The workshop also empowered the young participants collectively convey their views on the Lesotho of the future to the decision makers present at the launch event, as a practical example of the dialogue that the Power Hub seeks to encourage.

What’s next for foresight in the Youth Power Hub?

Foresight is not a one-off intervention; it is a capability that grows over time. In a world where youth engagement is often reduced to consultation rather than real agency, the Youth4Foresight Toolkit offers young people a way to navigate uncertainty and define alternative futures they can build towards.

Spanning from 2024 to 2029, the Youth Power Hub in Lesotho will actively involve young people in decision-making to strengthen citizen participation and build stronger, more inclusive communities. The project supports the Youth Action Plan in European Union external action for 2022-2027 , the first ever policy framework for a strategic partnership with young people around the world. 

The Future of Sustainable Fashion event took place on Monday, April 14, 2025, at the MOMus - Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki, Greece. The workshop was implemented surrounded by the relative with the subject exhibition Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory. This initiative was implemented by Helenos Consulting, a partner of the Eye of Europe Project, and aimed at engaging domain professionals, including foresight and fashion experts.

As innovation has a profound impact on many aspects of political, economic, social, and
geostrategic environment worldwide, the Region of Central Macedonia closely follows the
developments, trends and variables that favor and support it or negatively affect its development.
Stakeholders, private and public sector executives and citizens, explored through a
participatory and dynamic process (Thematic Participatory Workshop) the variables that will
affect the innovation and entrepreneurship environment of the region by 2040, identified their
dynamics and evaluated their interaction. The findings were the input of the working group
for the development of five scenarios that will determine the future of innovation in Central
Macedonia over the next fifteen years. Building upon scenario-driven insights, seven strategic
policy recommendations have been formulated to systematically strengthen regional resilience
mechanisms and prepare communities for diverse conditions across different alternative
futures (five scenarios): Development, Collapse, Transformation and Discipline.
The seven examined Megatrends that directly or indirectly affect the region and may affect
innovation developments are Climate Change & Environmental Degradation, Resource
Depletion, the Demographic Problem, Urbanization and Growth of the Middle Class,
Technological Explosion, Hyperconnectivity and Cybersecurity, the Dawn of the Global
South and Polarization. Digital transformation, changes in the employment model, digital
nomads, the rise of populist parties and woke agendas, trust in institutions, urban farming, a
shift in urban agriculture, pressure on social welfare systems and the health sector, geopolitical
turmoil, brain drain, crowdfunding, tightening of the legislative framework for the protection of
intellectual rights and personal data, strict environmental regulations and greenwashing will
be some of the effects of these forces.

In a narrow context, scanning the future identified four Drivers of Change that have a significant
impact on the area of innovation and require the attention of policymakers: (a) Political Unrest
and Confused Democracy, (b) Employment 4.0: Transition to new work conditions, (c) The
Era of Convergence: Digital Superiority and Skills, and finally (d) Social Values as a Lever
for Legislative Change."
However, the innovative environment in the future can be identified through a wide range of
scenarios. The need to develop a set of distinct scenarios led to the study of uncertainties
that affect the environment in an unpredictable way, interact with each other drastically and
play a key role in understanding the conditions that will be created in the future of innovation
in the region, and in choosing five uncertainties that their developments over time define the
futures we chose, as most likely to shape the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in
the region of Central Macedonia. The five Uncertainties highlighted by the working group are:
[1] Political and Geopolitical Uncertainty: Buckle up, turbulence expected
[2] Business Uncertainty: Anticipated Outcomes and Corporate Transformations
[3] Regulatory Frameworks for Innovation: Ethics Considerations, Strategic Directions
and Development
[4] Navigating the Era of Disconnection: Addressing Workplace Loneliness and Social
Uncertainty [5] The Impact of Climate Change on Tourism.

This study was realized for the Region of Central Macedonia, GR and was co-funded from the European Union (ΕΣΠΑ 2021-2027)

EIT Food Consumer Observatory is organising online workshops focusing on the consumer acceptance of functional and processed food and alternative proteins by 2035. The online workshops are organised on September 11 and 18, from 10 to 13 hours CET. This is an open invitation to participate. It is free, just write us to consider your participation and learn more about the process: info@if-institute.org

What to expect in the workshops:
Before the workshops: Read this brief background document to familiarise yourself with the approach and prepare for the workshops.
During the workshops: Discuss and participate by writing your comments via MS Teams chat and the Miro board sticky notes. Note that the workshops will be recorded to enable automated transcription in Teams.
After the workshops: The expert team will develop scenario narratives, which are presented and discussed further in another workshop on November 4th 10-13 CET, which allows the reflection of scenario implications for the current agrifood ecosystem. Finally, a policy brief will be published end of the year.

Last year, we did a similar process focusing on the future of new food products and experiences and One Health. More information here:
https://if-institute.org/futures-of-food-consumption-in-2035-in-europe-on-sustainability-health-and-technology 

What if we could test-drive our future selves?

Most scenario workshops stay in the head. The Resonant Future Self Framework flips that script by letting participants embody possible futures through immersive narrative experiences - while their brains and bodies react in real time. Peaks of coherence in EEG and heart-rate variability become “north-star signals” that guide purpose discovery. The method weaves together generative AI, emotional storytelling, and biometric sensing to open a new path toward deeply felt, personal foresight.

First public presentation – Vienna, May 2025
The framework was introduced at the Futures4Europe Conference 2025 – Exploring Future-Oriented Collective Intelligence (Vienna, 15–16 May), organised by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as part of the Eye of Europe flagship initiative. The presentation focused on the conceptual foundations of the method, shared results from the first single-participant pilot study, and outlined how emotional resonance - measured through real-time physiological signals - can enrich scenario work with an embodied, intuitive layer of decision-making.

Next stop – AIMEDIA, Venice, July 2025
From 6–10 July, the project will be featured in the AI in Immersive Media track at the First International Conference on AI-based Media Innovation (AIMEDIA 2025) in Venice.

The presentation will cover the generative narrative pipeline that produces the six personalised future-self videos, share expanded pilot-study findings (including EEG and HRV analysis), and preview ongoing efforts to partially automate the scripting, visual generation, and video assembly process using tailored AI workflows.

While human editing and quality control remain essential, these steps point toward a future in which the method becomes faster, more scalable, and easier to adapt across educational, coaching, and wellbeing contexts.

Read more
To explore more about the method, goals, and future plans, visit the dedicated project page (link below).

To help navigate current and future uncertainty and disruptive change, while effectively delivering on its mandate, UNEP has been implementing an institutionalized approach to strategic foresight and horizon scanning with the view to developing an anticipatory and future-oriented culture. This mirrors the growing interest and demand for foresight that is also reinforced by the United Nations reform agenda and the Secretary-General’s report on ‘Our Common Agenda’, which calls for all UN agencies, as well as all UN member states, to engage foresight practices more deeply and apply the derived insights to address global systemic risks. This process has culminated in the development of the present report “Navigating New Horizons – A Global Foresight Report on Planetary Health and Human Wellbeing”, produced by UNEP in collaboration with the International Science Council. The report calls for the world to pay heed and respond to a range of emerging challenges that could disrupt planetary health and wellbeing. It presents insights on eight critical global shifts that are accelerating the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity and nature loss and pollution and waste. Eighteen signals of change – identified by hundreds of global experts and distilled through regional and stakeholder consultations that included youth – offer a glimpse into potential disruptions, both positive and negative, that the world needs to keep a watching brief on. 

The report outlines how to create an enabling environment for better decision-making by creating a new social contract, embracing agile and adaptive governance, and increasing integrated accessible data and knowledge. The report offers a stark reminder of the interconnectedness and fragility of our systems in the 21st Century and warns that prioritizing short-term gains over anticipatory action and preparedness jeopardizes long-term prosperity and planetary health. However, it also points to the tremendous potential and human ingenuity that can be leveraged in the spirit of discovery and cooperation to deliver solutions across the triple crisis. The outcomes of the report will be integrated into UNEP’s strategic planning, potentially influencing the next UNEP Medium-Term Strategy, presenting an opportunity to consider expanding programmes in areas like artificial intelligence, new technology, and robotics in agriculture, prompting discussions on the level of engagement in these issues. This will ultimately serve UNEP in adopting a proactive posture and modernize tools for efficiency and cost savings.

Source: UN Environment - Document Repository - Knowledge Repository - UNEP Publications - Technical Reports  

📣 YouthDecide 2040 is looking for participants to join our regional workshops and co-create the future of European democracy!

Be part of a one-and-a-half-day immersive workshop where diverse voices come together to imagine and shape resilient, thriving European democracies.

🗣️💬 Through creative, participatory foresight activities, we will explore different visions of democracy in 2040—your perspective matters!

🧭 The wider, the better
Are you a European resident over 18? This call is for you!
We're fostering intergenerational discussions on the future of European democracy, centring youth voices (18-34).

🔓 The call for applications will remain open through May 2025.