Earth4All

This foresight study aimed at supporting the development of the Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe (2025-2027), by providing early-stage strategic intelligence and sense-making that could contribute novel elements to the processes of strategic planning. The study, which was launched in mid-2021 and lasted almost two years, has been the most widely engaging foresight exercise yet aiming to support EU R&I policy. Through this broad engagement, the study did not only develop intelligence for the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe but also contributed to the development of an EU R&I foresight community hosted by futures4europe.eu, one that is an asset for future R&I policies across Europe. The detailed description of the foresight work and the resulting outputs are available in the final report of the project.  The foresight process in support of the 2nd Strategic Plan comprised a wide spectrum of activities: As a reference point for the exploratory work, the explicit and implicit impact assumptions of the 1st Strategic Plan were identified and visualised with the help of a qualitative system analysis and modelling tool for causal loop analysis. An exploratory analysis of forward-looking sources (e.g. foresight reports, web-based horizon scanning) was conducted to identify relevant trends and signals of unexpected developments. These were discussed in online workshops and on the online platform www.futures4europe.eu. An outlook on emerging developments in the global and European context of EU R&I policy was developed drawing on a major online workshop in autumn 2021 with some 60 participants, experts and policy makers, who worked with multi-level context scenarios and specific context narratives about emerging disruptions. On that basis and in close consultation with the European Commission involving another major workshop in February 2022 which brought together 80 participants, Expert Teams were set up to develop disruptive scenarios in five areas of major interest. Each team ran several internal workshops but also involved further experts and Commission staff in their work, both through the online platform and through a final policy-oriented workshop. The foresight work within the five areas of interest resulted in deep dives on the following topics:                                               > Climate change, Research, and Innovation: Radical Options from Social Change to Geoengineering                       > Hydrogen Economy – A radical alternative                       > The EU in a Volatile New World - The challenge of global leadership                         > Global Commons                         > Transhumanist Revolutions Further areas of interest identified were explored through review papers aiming to capture major trends, developments and scenario sketches in relation to further disruptive developments:                       > Social Confrontations                         > Artificial General Intelligence: Issues and Opportunities                       > The Interpenetration of Criminal and Lawful Economic Activities                       > The Future of Health A third major workshop took place in October 2022 bringing together all the thematic strands of work and addressing possible R&I policy implications from this work. Participation in this workshop reached 250 individuals over 2 days. Building on the workshop, the online Dynamic Argumentative Delphi survey Research4Futures collected suggestions from almost 950 contributors from Europe and beyond about the implications of this foresight work for the priorities of EU R&I policy. This foresight study has been implemented through the Foresight on Demand framework contract, by a team of 40 experts. Partner organizations: Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) Institutul de Prospectiva (IP) Istituto di Studi per l’Integrazione dei Sistemi (ISINNOVA) Technopolis Group 4strat   Insight Foresight Institute (IFI) Arctik Fraunhofer ISI  About 300 additional experts contributed to the project through its numerous workshops that helped shape the scenarios and their policy implications. 

4Growth will showcase the uptake of digital technologies and data through the “4Growth Visualisation Platform” that will combine powerful storytelling with advanced visualisations of the market. This 3-year Horizon Europe project, funded by the European Commission, brings together 13 partners with the aim of understanding where, how and to what extent digital technologies and data are being adopted within the agricultural and forestry sectors. The project started in January 2024 and will end in December 2026. Consortium members: 1 Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands (Coordinator) 2 EVENFLOW, Belgium (Technical Managers) 3 GEOPONIKO PANEPISTIMION ATHINON, Greece 4 FOODSCALE HUB GREECE, Greece 5 LE EUROPE LIMITED, Ireland 6 FUTURE IMPACTS, Germany 7 SIMBIOTICA SL, Spain 8 EV ILVO: EIGEN VERMOGEN VAN HET INSTITUUT VOOR LANDBOUW- EN VISSERIJONDERZOEK, Belgium 9 INSTITUTO NAVARRO DE TECNOLOGIAS E INFRAESTRUCTURAS AGROALIMENTRIAS, Spain 10 CENTRE TECHNIQUE INTERPROFESSIONNEL DES FRUITS ET LEGUMES, France 11 TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT OY, Finland 12 AgriFood Lithuania DIH, Lithuania 13 ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS, Greece

The Reference Foresight Scenarios report summarizes the results of a foresight process that started at the end of 2020 with the goal to develop a set of reference foresight scenarios to support policymakers. Foresight scenarios are a tool to improve strategy development and decision making in a context of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. Recent events, such as the COVID pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, made clear that being prepared for the unknown and unexpected becomes increasingly important. The reference scenarios presented in this report aim to help decision makers to increase the preparedness of their organisations under increasingly unpredictable circumstances. The scenarios are four plausible versions of how the world may look like in 2040 and what this would mean for Europe’s global standing. They are called Storms, End game, Struggling synergies, and Opposing views. They do not claim to predict or project how the future may look like but offer strategic reflections, which can serve as a compass for policymakers for navigating through unchartered territories of turbulence, uncertainty, ambiguity and novelty. These four geopolitical scenarios are called ‘Reference’ Foresight Scenarios because they represent a forward-looking framework that provides a reference for use in policymakers’ debates about potential futures. Read the report Read the blog and learn more about the process and how these scenarios can be used in future oriented policy making.  Stress-testing policy options with the scenarios The work with the reference foresight scenarios continued as a pilot process of stress-testing some policy options against a set of Reference foresight scenarios. The process was led by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and applied to a specific EU policy proposal on Standard Essential Patents. The process ran during the initial stage of the impact assessment process, but it was not an official part of it. The results of this pilot helped to understand which policy options are more or less robust and how they can be made more future-proof. The process also provided rich insights into what the challenges and opportunities of this approach are, and into how stress-testing can be further incorporated into EU policymaking. The report provides an example and serve as a guide for any future process of stress-testing policy options against foresight scenarios. Read the report: Stress-testing of policy options using foresight scenarios: a pilot case

FAO’s Office of Innovation worked with partners on an FAO Chief Scientist initiative on Foresight on emerging agrifood technologies and innovations, aligned with the UN 2.0 process and the FOFA 2022: engaging all key actors of agricultural innovation systems in the foresight on emerging technologies and innovations to better prepare for alternative futures, feeding it into anticipatory action, and convening the global community for constructive dialogue and knowledge exchange. The aim was to support policymakers, investors and innovation actors in their approaches and decision-making.   The study assesses a selection of technologies and innovations, which potentially could be of paramount importance in addressing agrifood challenges until 2050, as well as the most important trends and drivers that will influence the emergence of agrifood technologies and innovations and their triggers of change, including some regional aspects. The goal is also to build plausible future scenarios for the evolvement of the emerging technologies and innovations in the future with the time horizon of 2050 to inform future-oriented policymaking.   The report is built with inputs from a multistakeholder Delphi survey and online workshops with experts.   Alexandrova-Stefanova, N., Nosarzewski, K., Mroczek, Z.K., Audouin, S., Djamen, P., Kolos, N. & Wan, J. 2023. Harvesting change: Harnessing emerging technologies and innovations for agrifood system transformation – Global foresight synthesis report. Rome. FAO and Cirad.