The risks and the merits of uncertainty

As a result of the recent pandemic, global value chains have completely transformed. This has raised concerns over the ensuing social, economic and environmental trends and related impact on the way supply chains are organised. In this context, the EU-funded ReSChape project will analyse social, economic and environmental changes and disruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and evaluate their impact on supply chains.New supply chain models will be proposed, aiming towards a more streamlined supply chain process to assure humans (workers, consumers and in general citizens) to be at the center of the business also thanks to new digital technologies. It will be studied how to assure a positive social impact and innovative policy scenarios will be developed with recommendations to support the future supply chains.

Collaborative research on the human capacity to understand, anticipate, prepare for, and embrace the future. About Futures Consciousness The futures consciousness concept and scale has been developed by researchers at the Finland Futures Research Centre (University of Turku) and University of Geneva, with help from other contributors. Teach the Future received a grant from the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) and the Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University (PMU) to adapt the Scale for use by young people, ages 12-18.  The results of that grant are being submitted for publication by the partners. After that, the Scale will be available for use by schools and other organizations that work with youth. The details will be published on this page shortly. Take the test: https://fctest.utu.fi/ The Five Dimensions of Futures Consciousness are: time perspective; the ability to be aware of the past, present and future, as well as the way events follow each other over time agency beliefs; basic sense of confidence that an individual has in their own ability to influence the external world openness to alternatives; abilities used to critically question commonly accepted ideas and influences an individual’s willingness to consider alternative ways of being and doing systems perception; the ability to recognize human and natural systems around us including groups, societies and ecosystems concern for others; relates to the degree to which an individual pursues favourable futures for a group beyond themselves Full article explaining the concept: The Five Dimensions of Futures Consciousness (Ahvenharju et al., 2018) Our partners Teach the Future collaborates with the University of Turku in Finland, the Finland Futures Research Centre and Digital Futures to research and promote the work in the context of education and (young) students. Sanna Ahvenharju, Matti Minkkinen and Fanny Lalot are the research experts that developed the futures consciousness concept and scale.  Our activities Teach the Future supports the development of a scale matching the language and level of young people. This project is in collaboration with schools in the Netherlands, Italy, Turkiye, United States, and United Kingdom. And we thank our sponsor the Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd, Center for Futuristic Studies. Next to this we support the testing. Erica Bol has worked with Martin de Wolf of the Master Learning and Innovation at the Fontys University of Applied Sciene. She designed a futures lesson program supporting the Master program and tested if the students futures consciousness improved. The students did a test before and after the lessons program. A paper on the project and results are published in FUTURES issue 12-2022.

It would be short-sighted to assume that we, as humanity, have reached such a level of maturity that our descendants will not find some aspects of our – apparently civilised – everyday life repulsive and sad. So we asked 60 futurists from around the world:“What will we disgust our descendants with?”Many of the submitted ideas are already present in public discourse and confirm areas in which we need to change. But we were especially interested in novel barbarisms that humanity is still largely oblivious to.That’s why this infographic shows the futurists’ answers grouped into 93 contemporary barbarisms ranked in a public vote according to how eye-opening they are.

The chemical industry is a significant contributor to the EU’s economy. It is simultaneously instrumental to the green and digital transition and exposed to its effects. A steady supply of (green) chemicals is required to deploy renewable energy generators, insulate Europe’s building stock and create reusable and recyclable consumer goods. On the other hand, chemical synthesis is an energy-intensive process inherently dependent on carbon-based feedstock (currently derived almost exclusively from fossil fuels). In addition, chemistry is a global industry with international value chains, where the EU both collaborates and competes with other countries for materials, knowledge and skills. Transforming the European chemical industry into a sustainable motor for the green and digital transition will require investments in infrastructure, assets and skills. Focus should be placed on chemicals that are crucial to this Twin Transition, Europe’s resilience, or both. The long lead time required for the deployment of infrastructure and the development of skills means that such investments must be made now to achieve targets set for 2050. In connection with these issues, the report at hand aims to give insights into a number of value chains that are strategic to EU economy. It considers which chemicals and innovations are vital to transforming these value chains as well as rendering them more resilient and future-fit. To this end, a participatory workshop-based foresight approach was implemented to provide a unique set of insights from stakeholders and translate them into actions and policy recommendations.The project was carried out by a consortium involving Steinbeis 2i GmbH, 4CF and TNO.

Resilience and preparedness relate both to coping with the immediate and gradually developing threats, hence contributing also to the transition towards ecological and resilient deliberative communities and society. For instance, we consider personal and community survival skills (both mental and physical wellbeing), deliberative policy and civic skills to avoid polarization and confrontations and sustainable lifestyles based on self-reliance and autonomy. While the challenges considered are global, policy implications are addressed especially from the European research and innovation policy perspective. This project targets toward 2040 exploring the civic (both individual and community level) resilience and preparedness in Europe. We develop scenarios to consider alternative plausible futures characterized by societal uncertainties caused by major disruptions (wars, upheavals, wildfires, floods, etc.) in different hypothetical contexts of reference (where possible changes induced by trends and weak signals are also considered) and try to imagine how Europeans could be prepared at the individual and community level, especially from the perspective of relying less on the external services provided by the public and private sectors. This deep dive is part of the "European R&I foresight and public engagement for Horizon Europe" project which aims to help valorise foresight elements from R&I projects of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe by increasing their visibility and the potential uptake of their results in EC R&I policy planning. 

From October 2022 to March 2023, we ran a forecasting tournament with a total of 54 questions. Almost all of our forecasting questions were developed in cooperation with 16 different public institutions and ministerial departments. Each institution or department defined its most useful forecasting topics, participated in a workshop to define specific questions with us, and was later provided with the results. This was intended as a proof of concept of one possible approach to incorporating forecasting in public decision-making. Once defined, our forecasting questions were then posted on a private Metaculus sub-domain (in Czech), where an average of 72 forecasters had the opportunity to address them as they would any other question on Metaculus (median of 18 predictions per user). Throughout the tournament, we produced 16 reports detailing the rationales and forecasts, to be used by the cooperating institutions. A handful of our partners have already reported acting on the information/judgment presented in our reports. This has concerned, for example, the national foreclosure issue (some 6% of the total population have debts in arrears) where the debt relief process is being redesigned midst strong lobbying and insufficient personal capacities; or the probabilities of outlier scenarios for European macroeconomic development, which was requested by the Slovak Ministry of Finance to help calibrate their existing judgements. It also seems useful to explore various approaches to grow the number of policymakers with personal experience & skills in forecasting. In our case, we found curiosity and willingness to try forecasting even in unexpected institutional locations (i.e. the Czech R&I funding body). This makes us more confident that the “external forecasts” approach (as compared to building internal prediction tournaments or focusing on advancing forecasting skills of public servants) is worth investigating further precisely because it allows us to detect and draw on this interest irrespective of institutional and seniority distinctions and resource constraints. While we hope that any readers with an interest in forecasting may find our experience useful, we expect that both this and any future projects of ours make it easier for other teams to work towards similar goals. To that effect, the write-up also contains an Annex of “Methodological Guidelines,” where we outline in more explicit terms the questions and decisions that we found were important to tackle when running the project, and what they may entail.

The aim of this study was to serve as one of the inputs to the update and to initiate a discussion on the possibilities of updating the Czech republic 2030 strategy. In order to ensure that this strategic document reflects the dynamic developments on the global and domestic scene, mechanisms for regular reviews and updates of the objectives and measures have been proposed. Given the events of the last 3 years (especially the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine), it is relevant to review the relevance of the assumptions regarding the long-term development of the Czech Republic, which served as the basis for the original wording of the strategic objectives and targeting of the document. The role of České priority was to provide foresight exercises in order to reach two goals: Assess the relevance of existing goals: the problems and challenges facing society are changing and so are the definition of objectives for further development. The task of this section is therefore also to determine whether the original ČR 2030 goals are still relevant in the context of change and respond to the major challenges that society is facing and will continue to face in the coming decades. Identify blind spots: there may be issues or opportunities that the document does not cover - i.e. blind spots. The next task of this part of the update is to identify such gaps to increase the comprehensiveness of the document. The project was implemented in the form of workshops, which were attended by experts and representatives of public institutions and ministries. On the basis of pre-prepared scenarios of development, the participants had to identify the resulting challenges, opportunities and areas that have not yet been covered in the CR 2030. The list of these areas was subsequently consulted with representatives of public institutions. These expert consultations were complemented by input from the general public through a creative competition held in September 2022.

We implemented the ForSI (Foresight for Social Innovation) project with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, with the Unit of Social Innovation. The aim of this collaboration was to identify so-called social time bombs - in our definition, problems that will be significant in the future or are already known today, but not yet sufficiently addressed by the state administration. The learning process itself was also a framing goal of this collaboration, where the unit team wanted to learn some foresight methods and implement them into certain processes of the department's work. The project involved desk research, two expert workshops, expert interviews, and also working closely with leading experts on social issues to develop a set of social issue cards. The final list of social time bombs was used by the unit to define calls for grant programs for nonprofits seeking to address diverse problems through social innovation. Foresight was thus used in this case to direct public funds more effectively, thereby addressing the problems that need to be focused on with an eye to the future.

Democracy across Europe has experienced immense challenge, change and uncertainty in recent years (Canal 2014; European Commission & Merkel; 2019) - from the rise of populism to decreasing levels of public trust in governance institutions and processes, to the war in Ukraine. Set against the backdrop of these issues, EUARENAS has been investigating how cities and urban spaces can strengthen legitimacy, identification and engagement within the democratic public sphere. Specifically, EUARENAS has been exploring how participation and deliberation in democracy and decision-making can be increased, and how voices and communities who are excluded from such arenas can be more actively involved. Foresight is one of the research strands present in EUARENAS. In this project, foresight is both a tool for understanding democratic innovations as they emerge, and for engaging citizens and other actors in such innovations within the participatory and deliberative realms. Mixed method approaches to foresight that incorporate a diversity of activities such as media discourse analysis, lived experience storytelling, social media analysis, three horizons mapping, driver-mapping, scenario and visioning exercises and policy stress- testing have been used in EUARENAS to investigate and hypothesise over future trends and scenarios in participatory democracies. From this work, we propose the following recommendations for Cities wanting to strive towards more equitable local democracies:Address structural barriers to participation Build relationships of trustInvest in formal and civic educationMake decisions for the long-termA more equitable, inclusive local democracy landscape is not too far in the distance for us to conceive it being possible. In fact, the future is now – the seeds to create it are already being planted, they just need nurturing by:Scaling and mainstreaming existing pilot or niche practices that are working locally – whether that beparticipatory budgeting, citizen assemblies or other smaller-scale projects – so that these become thenew ‘status quo’Adopting test and learn approaches to promote experimentation and on-going learning – this will enableongoing innovation and be responsive to society's needsFinding ways to celebrate and connect-up the small changes that are taking place - this will help peoplesee that progress is being made, even when it feels like things are changing too slow

Large R&D-based companies (Big Tech) have risen as major institutions driving technology, defining networks, shaping markets and influencing the ways we live. These companies are heavily concen-trated in some parts of the world, most of them within the West Coast of the United States, with a few emerging challengers in Mainland China, Taiwan and elsewhere. Other continents, including Europe, participate marginally in the development of the knowledge-bases which, apparently, may well come to dominate the future. Societies have come to rely on Big Tech from how we do business to how we consume and connect with others. And decision-makers, regulators and stakeholders grapple with breakthrough innovations, enhanced connectivity, lopsided competition and a number of ethical and political implications for how societies govern themselves. Organised societies face difficult choices. Should Big Tech be let free to carry on unimpeded? Should government break them up or try to tame them by imposing detailed standards of conduct? Should national and supra-national authorities aim at giving rise to new and alternative undertakings able to develop at far-reaching scale and scope? Or should policy actors give priority to an economic fabric full of smaller-sized enterprises that are alive and adaptive at the local level?  As with many times in the past, the configuration of the present seems stiff and self-reinforcing. But a foresight perspective invites an awareness of the possibility of disruptions or genuine novelty in things to come. It is uncertain if current trends will be sustained over time or how they will be accommodated. Probing into the unknown can be inspiring and increase panoramic awareness. It also sets a base for being pro-active about destiny. Thus, studying the future(s) is a deliberation to be already being on the move. That is a productive, non-neutral and liberating attitude. A chance for aligning the possible with the desirable. This policy brief addresses the challenge of anticipating of what “Big Tech” will imply for the future of Europe. In our deep dive we project towards 2040 and explore the implications to Europe emphasising research and innovation policy.  The scenario work, that comprises the bulk of this report, frames debates about industrial change and international political economy with the overarching vector of high-tech activities and offers a balancing, hopefully also piercing, view. We derive policy options for each scenario but also draw cross-cut-ting implications. Could tech-driven large companies be instruments for the European Union (EU) to respond effectively to the challenges of the future economy? Is this a viable, feasible option? Conversely, have foreign-owned Big Tech already won and will the EU be hostage to the tentacles of such sprawling giants? Can it adapt through bottom-up economic action? For all this, it was about time to tackle these pressing issues. The project is one of eight foresight deep dives of the project 'European R&I foresight and public engagement for Horizon Europe' carried out by the Foresight on Demand consortium.