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We recently reviewed the EC Strategic Foresight Report , entitled Resilience 2.0, but ESPAS (the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System) also produces frequent Horizon Scanning reports. Their most recent reports from 2025 (Issues 7 and 8 – earlier Issues do not appear to be easily accessible) identify 14 or 15 signals of change. In each they have focussed on describing the details of three of them. They seem to have deliberately looked for “weak signals”, some very unce

What happens to climate action when the political weather turns populist: more inward-looking, more suspicious of experts, more focused on growth and national pride than on multilateral promises? That’s no longer an abstract question. Across the West, parties and leaders with nativist or “majoritarian” instincts are either in office or within reach of it. Meanwhile, China is doubling down on renewables and exporting the kit to the rest of the world. If you work in energy, ind

The Government Office for Science has produced an updated report on the technology mix needed in key emitting sectors to reach net zero...

Introduction It has become a fashionable provocation to assert that "China is going to win, so the question is how America is going to...

Introduction   Not nearly enough attention is paid today to H.G. Wells , one of the giants of foresight. What is distinctive about his...

This is an edited version of the presentation which Jonathan Blanchard Smith delivered to the Futures4Europe Conference 2025, held in...

Back in February, the National Preparedness Commi ssion published a report on the resilience of the UK’s food system . It is a...

One of the challenges of Futures thinking is the way that trends and drivers interact with each other in complex ways, creating...

SAMI continues to maintain and track key drivers of change through ongoing horizon scanning, and we noted a couple of years ago that the...

For the past many years, future and foresight practitioners have been able to base their work on ground that is stable enough to support...

In our blog of November last year, we said, “Facilitation is a skill. It can be learned”. In that blog, we offered some thoughts about...

In the Futures Toolkit , which was developed by SAMI Consulting in coordination with the Government Office for Science, we included a...