Politics

This report provides a new detailed quantitative assessment of the consequences of climate change on economic growth through to 2060 and beyond. It focuses on how climate change affects different drivers of growth, including labour productivity and capital supply, in different sectors across the world. The sectoral and regional analysis shows that while the impacts of climate change spread across all sectors and all regions, the largest negative consequences are projected to be found in the health and agricultural sectors, with damages especially strong in Africa and Asia.

Good governance is based upon foresight that allows decision makers to make informed choices. The Committee of the Regions (CoR) has turned to strategic foresight to anticipate the forthcoming changes within the EU political system. The exercise is a second step in strategic foresight at the horizon of 2025, which follows the report on the future challenges facing the CoR and European local and regional authorities (LRAs).
The aim of this second report is to address the CoR’s future role and institutional positioning within the European political architecture. It draws up five future-based scenarios with predictions about the evolution of the CoR's institutional and political role, its associated powers and relations with other EU institutions and stakeholders. For each scenario, the report analyses the consequences for the overall EU institutional setup, the evolution of parliamentarism, the supranational decision-making process and the CoR mandate.

In September 2015, the heads of state and government of the United Nations Member States are scheduled to decide on the Post-2015 agenda. This is to include not only a list of universal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but also a mechanism for monitoring and review. The High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) was launched in July 2013 to provide political leadership and guidance, and to work towards a global transformation to sustainable development. An important element of its work will be the review mechanism envisioned under the HLPF mandate, which is set to replace the Annual Ministerial Review (AMR) starting in 2016. What would the review mechanism have to look like to contribute to the implementation of sustainable development at all levels?

A review process builds on and goes beyond monitoring and data collection. In this framework, the governments are asked critical, analytical questions to determine the reasons for their successes and failures, and to recommend measures needed to further improve goal attainment in the future. The present study examines the debate taking place over the review process, highlights the positions of selected key actors, discusses criteria for designing a review, and applies these to analyze and assess existing review systems. Finally, it develops specific proposals for a universal, state-led, participatory, multi-level "Commit and Review" process that could serve as a central component of the follow-up process for the Post-2015 agenda and goals.

The Strategic Foresight Analysis (SFA) identified five themes: Political, Human, Technology, Economics/Resources and Environment. Under these themes 15 trends were identified that are expected to shape the future security environment out to 2030 and beyond. From these 15 trends, one trend was analysed in more depth - Demographics.

Project PREDICT (Projections and Relevant Effects of Demographic Implications, Changes, and Trends), was launched at the end of 2013 as a follow-up study to the SFA. Building on long-term cooperation between ACT and the University of Bologna (Italy), the PREDICT project also involved the active participation of the University of Warwick (UK), Sabanci University (Turkey), Johns Hopkins University – SAIS (US/Italy) and the Bruno Kessler Foundation (Italy).

SFA was designed as an iterative process and one which NATO intends to update regularly to provide NATO, national leaders and defence planners with a perspective of the challenges facing the Alliance in the decades to come. Within this framework, the PREDICT goal has been to further develop the research of the “human theme”, focusing on human demographics as the main forecasting variable employed to build different scenarios for NATO in 2035. PREDICT provides an analysis of demographic trends such as population growth, aging, and population composition all of which play a fundamental role in the current and foreseeable shifting distribution of international power. The report also provides security challenges which largely depend on the broader socio-political context in which demographic trends interact with economic, environmental, energy, health and technological trends.

This second report is designed to feed into the on-going discussions about the Union’s future as the new EU leadership team takes charge. It aspires to contribute to the debate on how to introduce ambitious while at the same time workable and realistic reforms to make the EU more effective in responding to the challenges Europeans are facing.
The report will be discussed again in a majority of Member States with policy-makers, EU experts, stakeholders and citizens (Phase IV), and the outcome of this process will impact the future progress of the New Pact for Europe initiative.

The British government’s approach since 2010 of seeking to enhance the UK's relations with the world’s emerging powers while balancing these with relationships with the United States and Europe has had only limited success. With constrained resources, and in the face of intense global economic competition, mounting security challenges and decaying international institutions, trying to commit the UK equally on all three fronts will not succeed in the future.

This paper calls for a different mindset and strategy towards the UK’s place in the world – one in which Britain is surrounded by three concentric circles of influence:

- The first or ‘inner circle’ is the EU, the region with which the UK’s relationships need to be strongest and most active.
- The ‘second circle’ consists of the protective and enabling set of economic and security relationships with the US.
- Finally, an ‘outer circle’ comprises the UK’s other key bilateral and institutional relationships.

The approach advocated by this paper is not the so-called ‘economic peace’. Economic development is not a substitute for political rights. As an educated and entrepreneurial people, Palestinians are capable of creating a viable economy that would support a sovereign state unreliant on foreign aid.
The EU policy shift would have to entail effective engagement of Israelis and Palestinians to address each other’s security requirements in accordance with international standards. This includes addressing Israel’s occupation and its ‘layering’ of measures under the name of security that undermine Palestinian economic development. A crippled Palestinian economy does not make Israel safer, but it meanwhile diminishes Palestinian dignity and hope for the future.
Such a shift in policy on the part of the EU would better align Europe with its own ENP objectives, and would be a critical positive response to political factors at play in the Middle East. It would fill the void arising from the reduced US focus on Israel and Palestine. However, this policy shift would be enhanced if it were fortified with a degree of US acceptance – if not support.

The futures (in the plural) that we focus on uncovering are the ones that people are not thinking enough about. Our role is not to predict, but to signal to decision-makers new opportunities and new risks that they might not otherwise be alert to.

Built on the previous reports drawn up under the ESPAS project to date, this study seeks to map more comprehensively the five major trends that are likely to shape the future and will need to be taken into account by the Union as it defines coherent strategic options for the next governance cycle. They include:
- A richer and older human race characterised by an expanding global middle class and greater inequalities
- A more vulnerable process of globalisation led by and economic G3
- A transformative industrial and technological revolution
- A growing nexus of climate change, energy and the competition for resources
- Changing power, increased interdependence and fragile multilateralism

The quality of territorial foresight and, in particular, of urban foresight, is nowadays measured not so much in terms of the ability to anticipate possible futures, always challenged by the increasing uncertainty and the exponential rate of change, as in terms of the ability to construct collective visions of the future that are ambitious, proactive and engaging for stakeholders and citizens.
What foresight has to offer is its capacity to approach both long-term challenges, perceived in the present, as well as shared aims and values in a distant horizon. This publication attempts to address these challenges by ‘imagineering’ the future of cities though the application of methods and techniques drawn from the strategic foresight and prediction fields in a systematic, rigorous and holistic way.