Blog

Last year when we reviewed the 2025 WEF Global Risk Report , Donald Trump had recently taken office and we were all wondering what came next. Last year, the 10-year view was dominated by environmental risks. Extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems and natural resources shortages led the 10-year risk rankings. This year’s report has the same top three long-term risks, but misinformation and adverse outcomes of AI have

This blog is the third in the SIP blog series, a set of blogs shared among the partners of the Sustainable Innovation Pathways project. This cross-border, collaborative effort brings together foresight, financial forecasting and technology readiness levels to understand where companies, industries, and countries can best decarbonise. In the first two blogs, we argued that net zero has been absorbed into realpolitik and defence strategy. Climate action survives because it now

This blog is the first in the SIP blog series, a set of blogs shared among the partners of the Sustainable Innovation Pathways project. This cross-border, collaborative effort brings together foresight, financial forecasting and technology readiness levels to understand where companies, industries, and countries can best decarbonise. It has become fashionable to say that climate has “slipped down the agenda”. The headlines are about war in Europe and the Middle East, defence

We recently reviewed the ESPAS (European Strategy and Policy Analysis System) Horizon Scanning report, Issue 7 f rom March this year. Issue 8 from July adopts the same approach of looking at 14 or 15 signals of change and focussing on three of them to describe in detail using Futures Wheels: Military-grade society Digital tech giants become state actors Green hype bust.   Military grade society  means advanced security protecting Critical National Infrastructure from both at

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...