Strategic Foresight Report: charting the course towards a more resilient Europe

22.09.2020

Earlier in September, the European Commission adopted its first-ever Strategic Foresight Report, aiming to identify emerging challenges and opportunities to better steer the European Union's strategic choices. Strategic foresight will inform major policy initiatives. It will support the Commission in designing future-proof policies and legislation that serves both the current needs and longer-term aspirations of European citizens.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “In these challenging times, political leaders have to look wide and far ahead. This report shows the importance of resilience for a strong and lasting recovery. We aim to steer the necessary transitions in a sustainable, fair, and democratic manner.”

The central theme of this first report is resilience, which has become a new compass for EU policies with the COVID-19 crisis. Resilience is the ability not only to withstand and cope with challenges but also to undergo transitions in a sustainable, fair, and democratic manner. Resilience is necessary in all policy areas to undergo the green and digital transitions, while maintaining the EU’s core purpose and integrity in a dynamic and at times turbulent environment. A more resilient Europe will recover faster, emerge stronger from current and future crises, and better implement the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The Report analyses the EU's resilience in four interrelated dimensions: social and economic, geopolitical, green and digital.

Social and economic resilience

The pandemic has deepened inequalities, increased demographic imbalances and poverty, accelerated automation, and had a disproportionate impact on service sector jobs. Strategic foresight can be used to identify the skills for the future that we need to invest in now, and for having a larger societal conversation about updating the social and fiscal contract.

Geopolitical resilience

The crisis has highlighted the EU’s over-reliance on third countries for critical raw materials crucial in key technologies needed to achieve a carbon-neutral and digital society. Strategic foresight can help identify possible scenarios and define strategic options to boost the EU’s open strategic autonomy.

Green resilience

A shift to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs globally and its impact in the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis could be significantly larger than previously thought. Strategic foresight can help us explore the drivers of change, understand the future structural shift in the labour market and guide a reskilling of people who have lost their jobs during the crisis or who are likely to in the future due to technological developments and automation.

Digital resilience

The crisis has accelerated hyper-connectivity and the integration of new technologies affecting the human condition and the way we live. Strategic foresight can help us anticipate how key emerging technologies could develop, their impact on all spheres of life, and ways to seize upcoming opportunities.

Background

Foresight is the discipline of exploring, anticipating and shaping the future to help build and use collective intelligence in a structured, systematic and systemic way, so as to anticipate developments. Strategic foresight seeks to embed foresight into European Union policy-making.

Strategic foresight involves exploring scenarios, identifying trends and emerging issues, using them to steer better-informed decisions, build dynamic policy coherence, and to act in the present in order to shape the future. Strategic foresight looks towards the future from the present, and back – towards present actions from the future.

The Commission has relied on foresight for many years; it now aims to embed it into all policy areas, to exploit its strategic value.


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