Regions

Territorial foresight is a structured set of participatory vision building and strategic planning activities that allow regions to think, consider, debate and shape the medium to long-term future of their regions, provinces or cities. Many of the key process elements of foresight are widely used in strategic planning – the formation of expert panels, the use of socio-economic and environmental data consultation, brainstorming, trend and extrapolation and the setting of strategic goals. Foresight, unlike most approaches to strategic planning, deals with long-term prospects, and draws upon the views of multiple stakeholders.
This report analyses the interactions between European strategies and policies, and the activities of the analysed territorial foresights, in order to assess the potential opportunity to create a territorial foresight network or platform at the European level.

As strategic territories for the future of countries and continents, cities and urban or rurban regions appear to be in the front line as areas of tension and as agents of intervention concerning the major challenges facing the planet. Our so-called "welfare" societies in Europe cannot escape these global processes. Initially, this report will attempt to establish a diagnosis of urban realities in Europe by exposing certain methodological difficulties and issues. In part two, it will address the theme of integrated strategies for the sustainable development of territories and ways of regulating them within cities and rurban regions. The third part will cover the role of the European Union and Member States in building the urban field. Finally, it will discuss the perspectives opened by the Europe 2020 strategy for cities and rurban regions, as well as some proposals.

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.

For many years now the Committee of the Regions has been building a reputation of being "the EU's Assembly of Regional and Local Representatives".
It decided to contribute to the debate on metropolitan governance by pulling resources together with a long-standing international partner like the Forum of Federations (FoF). The going together with such a renowned global academic network on federalism in this project, provided the CoR with an unprecedented mix of analytical and policy expertise on urban and metropolitan issues to be able to offer to our members and the rest of the EU institutions.

Good governance is based upon foresight that allows decision makers to highlight their choices under a new perspective. The Committee of the Regions (CoR) has turned to forward planning and foresight to react to new political and socioeconomic developments in Europe.
The aim of this report is to identify the future challenges that confront the CoR and the European local and regional authorities (LRAs) at the horizon in 2025. It draws up three possible scenarios with predictions about the future evolution of European integration and the implications for the LRAs and the CoR.
The future evolution of European integration necessarily involves an identification of a number of trends, challenges and opportunities over the coming decades. Subsequently, the report formulates key questions for debate and provides practical options and suggestions on how LRAs can make progress.

This publication is the second in a series dedicated to raising awareness of global trends analysis and how future scenarios will affect Latin America. In the Question and Answer section, experts from throughout the region examine the most important global trends for Latin America and how policymakers should address them. In the second section, Program Director Sergio Bitar discusses the need for a stronger relationship between global trends analysis and education policy. The final section offers a summary of Bitar’s recently published book, Why and How Latin America Should Think about the Future.

By 2033, the global geopolitical scene will have radically changed. Both economically and politically, western powers will have lost their prominence in favour of new regional blocks. These rising poles will compete among themselves and are likely to protect their own markets; after a while they will become sources of direct investment.

The European Union is concerned by the competitiveness, security and sustainability of its energy system. This publication presents the main results of the ENCOURAGED project that assessed the potential energy corridors between the EU and its neighbouring countries addressing in particular the issues on natural gas, electricity and hydrogen. The EU neighbouring countries are the main suppliers and transit countries of oil and natural gas. The dependency of the EU on imported gas supplies is largely increasing in the next years. Therefore, the role of neighbouring countries will grow significantly in the next decades and will probably extend to electricity exchanges and perhaps, in the next decades, to hydrogen supply. Three main points are of particular importance for the integration of the energy markets of the EU and neighbouring countries: to get compatible interconnections, compatible market framework and compatible environmental policies.

"In the framework of both the Lisbon Strategy and the Sustainable Development Strategy, European institutions agreed on the necessity to modernise and develop the European social model in the light of slowing growth, persistent structural unemployment, rising inequalities.
In recent years along with the persistence of the main risks of the industrial society (illness, disability, old age) new social risks are brought about by economic and demographic developments; main factors are: a higher probability of job loss for larger parts of society and different age cohorts; changes in size and composition of families with reduction of the capacity to provide “in house” care; limited capacity of welfare systems to deal with these risks due to financial constraints and difficulty in updating welfare arrangements; cultural and education gaps. These transformations pose a serious problem of adequacy of the European welfare states. The present patterns may reveal not as successful as they used to be in protecting all against poverty, in guaranteeing social cohesion and in responding to citizens’ aspirations in modern democracies.
Social challenge is common to all EU Member States, but exposure to old and new social risks largely varies across regions. In this paper, the assessment of regional sensitivity is based on a summary index of social risk which combines several indicators of drivers referring to three relevant dimensions: family, labour market, and welfare. With more detail, the following indicators have been used:
• the share of poor at regional level, as a proxy of the size of the social risk in terms of income;
• the rate of employment calculated on total population, that embodies the social impact of both demographic trends (share of population in working age) and of labour market factors (activity rate on working age population and rate of unemployment);
• the educational attainment of working people, as a proxy of the regional share of low-skilled workers with higher probability of experiencing unemployment or of receiving a low wage;
• an index of efficacy, adequacy and sustainability of the welfare states at national level
According to the level of social risks measured by the summary index, regions have been classified in five typologies which have been displayed in a map. More than one half of European regions show a low or very low sensitivity to social risks. These top class regions are concentrated in Northern (especially low risk regions) and Central Europe along with United Kingdom. On the opposite side, about one quarter of European regions have a high or very high sensitivity confirming the existence of great disparities among countries and regions. Generally speaking, the two most critical areas are individuated in the Mediterranean countries –Portugal, Southern Spain, Greece, Italian Mezzogiorno- and in the Eastern area of new Member States with the exception of Estonia. Comparison with maps of European cohesion policy is interesting. All the regions with high and very high exposure to social risk are regions of Convergence or phasing-out area, with few exceptions. In the other direction, most of the regions of Convergence area show a high and very high social risk exposure. This is especially true for Southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania (and would be true also for Bulgaria and Romania not included in summary index). There are however important exceptions regarding some of the new Member States (Czech Republic, Slovenia and Estonia), Eastern Germany and Convergence regions in the United Kingdom showing an intermediate or low social risk sensitivity.
In neighbour countries the picture is more concerning. Fight against poverty and promotion of employment are priorities in each country. Most of them are still faced with a number of challenges such as high unemployment, which particularly affects young people and women, the prevalence of an informal economy, leaving workers without social rights and social protection, as well as the mismatch between education and labour market needs. Most countries lack an integrated approach combining economic, employment and social objectives. They also suffer from poor administrative capacity in this area. Significant efforts are needed to implement effective labour market policies, to promote decent work and guarantee productive employment, rights at work, social protection and equal opportunities for men and women.
As far as challenge intensity is concerned, the European Union is in a favourable condition with regard to social risks in a broader OECD perspective; in fact, all countries with income inequality below OECD average level are European. Nevertheless there are various factors which may increase the intensity of the challenge on Europe.
The number of Europeans living under the poverty line has increased in the last decades. Around 100 million Europeans in 2004 (22.5% of the total population) had less than 60% of the EU median income, but the situation is widely differentiated across countries and within them.
Although social benefits reduce the percentage of people at risk of poverty, serious holes exist in the social protection policies in several countries. In addition there are doubts on the financial sustainability of the present model in the next decades and on its adequacy to deal with new social risks.
The employment and participation rates remain below the targets set within the Lisbon Strategy, especially for women and old workers. Data on educational attainment show that the share of population with secondary and tertiary education is lower than other large OECD countries.
Impacts of social challenge on disparities depend on the relation between regional sensitivity and challenge intensity and they are assessed in a qualitative manner through construction of two scenarios corresponding to the two extremes of the expected range of variation of challenge intensity. A pessimistic scenario is characterised by a decrease in the number of double wage households and an increase in the number of people living in working-poor families or depending on social transfers. In a context of slow growth and of tightening financial constraints, new demand for welfare do not find adequate coverage. The target set by Lisbon Strategy in terms education and of employment rates are only partially achieved. This pessimistic scenario is likely to lead to increasing regional inequalities.
In an optimistic scenario, greater labour demand driven by economic expansion, and more effective policies allow an increase in participation rates and in the number of double wage earner households. In addition investments in education and life long learning increase average skill levels of both local and immigrant workers, reducing the proportion of low skilled low-income workers. Effective reforms of the welfare states, made easier by loosening financial constraints, ensure greater coverage for old and new social risks. This optimistic scenario is likely to be linked to a process of convergence."

"The energy challenge is a challenge with many dimensions. At the broad level there are issues like sustainability of energy use, security and competitiveness of supply. These broad issues themselves can be broken down to many smaller but no less important issues as e.g. global and European energy demand and supply, the availability of fossil fuel resources, renewable energy, energy transmission networks, prices for oil, gas and electricity to cite only a few of them. All these issues can be further broken down from a geographical point of view, from the global to the European, to the national and potentially to the regional level.
This large number of dimensions makes it difficult to get hold of all the issues involved in the energy challenge at the same time, nevertheless this paper aims at providing an overview of the energy challenge and its dimension. At the same time it is clear that this overview can only be the start of a much more detailed analysis, hence it is considered to be a more or less suitable basis for further research. After all this seems highly necessary in order to develop a clear view on what the effects of the energy challenge on the European regions will be.
The present paper, which intends to cover most of the dimension of the energy challenge, develops a specific structure of analysis in order to present the results in a coherent way. Amongst the many possibilities our structure splits the energy dimensions according to whether they pertain to the supply or the demand side of energy or whether they pertain to the transaction from the supply to the demand side. Thus on the supply side we analyse: Global and European energy supply, renewables and technology. With respect to energy transaction issues we focus on pipelines and LNG, energy (electricity) networks, oil prices, electricity and gas prices (incl. environmental taxes). On the demand side we analyse: global and European energy demand, GHG emissions, energy efficiency, economic effects, emission trading and finally carbon storage.
Given the number of raised issues the intention of the analysis if to provide an overview of, while an in depth analysis of each point would be far beyond the scope of the paper.
Given this the paper finally attempts to analyse the potential negative and positive impacts these dimension could have on regional disparities. Given the severe data and information limitations at the regional level and, given the fact that the energy challenge as such is a complex issue, it is extremely difficult to define two clear scenarios, as many assumptions have to be made about potential positive and negative developments in each of these challenges. Therefore, the scenario analysis is a highly speculative exercise that goes most of the components of the energy challenge and analysing them whether on to what extent they might affect the EU regions. All components are analysed with respect to their potential positive and negative impacts on regional disparities as well as with respect to the data available to investigate this issue further. As such the analysis below provides modules for scenario building, allowing to chose for each component of the energy challenge whether it is assumed to apply until 2020 or not."