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A deeper understanding of future patterns of change -and potential disruptions- is enabled by futures studies and strategic foresight. The future of future studies, foresight, and longer term thinking is to invite people and organizations to make more informed and imaginative decisions in the present in the face of new challenges and complex dilemmas, and ultimately, to facilitate better futures for all. The challenges of population growth, disruptive environmental and ecological jolts, widening socioeconomic inequalities, and tension between mainstream populations and extremists are complex, immense, frightening and urgent. The effective and efficient delivery of innovations to tackle these and other…

I grew up in the time of the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Watching the first step on the moon with my father at our small black and white TV. Gazing upon in The Netherlands was the same moon on which  American astronauts had just landed. The path I’ve traveled side by side with so many other people inspired by science and technology has been enormously enlightening and rewarding. But there’s still far to go. The future looms. We will face daunting challenges in coming decades, and to overcome them we will need to summon up a…

INTRODUCTION In policy-and decision-making multifaceted phenomena have to be tackled; conflicts of interests, migration, climate change, the automation of professions, economic and financial aspects (crises), healthcare, education, international trade, social integration, disruptive technologies, etc. The degree of uncertainty present is enormous and increases with rising interconnectedness. Denser interaction which complexifies causality chains. Efforts in research and practice have led to approaches and processes to analyze these phenomena and make decisions under uncertainty. International commitment to the appropriately ambitious Paris climate agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 has pulled into the limelight the urgent need for major…

We are facing an existential crisis. The anticipated global population of more than 9.7 billion by 2050 poses daunting challenges from providing sufficient energy, food, and water, as well as health care more accurately and at lower cost, to trespassing biogeophysical boundaries. These challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet them successfully. In the first convergence revolution the atomic parts list discovered by physicists sparked a first bringing us radar, television, computers, and the internet, just to start. Radically changing our conception of what is possible…

Science and technology allow us to understand our environment as well as manipulate it and create new environments and new systems. This led humans to emerge out of nature, and recently to create new complex worlds that highly resemble natural systems. Human-made systems often follow the same design principles governing natural systems. The most important of these design principles is evolution by natural selection. However, human-made systems are not exactly the same as those created by nature. We are gaining an increasing ability to create new complex environments and new technologies that perform as well as, or even better than,…

The loss of Earth’s biodiversity is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and proceeding at all levels: ecosystems, species and genes. No corner of the Earth, no matter how remote, is today free from human influence, whether in the form of the altered atmosphere, expanding cities, ubiquitous pollution and invasive species, conversion of wildlands and loss of once fertile farmland, or expanding exploitation and trade of wild species. The loss of biodiversity continues despite the growing sophistication of conservation activity and conservation science; and the understanding among governments at all levels as well as civil society that human wellbeing depends on…

JUST CLIMATE CHANGE? The Anthropocene is a widely proposed name for the geological epoch that covers human impact on our planet. But it is not synonymous with climate change, nor can it covered by environmental problems. The Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence of human hyper-dominance that have shifted all existing life forms on Earth in an unforeseen and alternate evolutionary paths caused by indirect or direct anthropogenic pressures. Largely driven by chance, and by constant human-induced modifications. But humans are also one of the main species affected by Anthropocene changes, transforming and simultaneously being transformed. The Earth System refers to the…

NATURAL INTELLIGENT We live in a world where we can either choose to live by technology to escape nature or escape technology to live by nature. ‘Modernization’ is leading to dramatic changes in how we regarded the natural world and the perception of our role in it. Our time enables us to have domination over nature and this behavior undermines the relationship of unity we should have with our surroundings, and with other living forms. The interconnectedness between human beings and nature illustrates a theory that human evolution has been dependent on the natural environment for a sense of overall…

CHANGING THE GAME It becomes clear that human activity shapes the earth’s systems. On the one hand this leaves us with a very dark viewpoint on humanity as we seem to blindly move down a path of destruction. This raises the question ‘responsibility’ and is accompanied by a sense of taking action. On the other hand the Anthropocene signals a sense of recognition and moral ownership of our transformative power. The Anthropocene not only reflects our influence on the ecological systems of the earth but more so serves as a metaphor for the way we see our human-nature relationship. The…

The 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear that, to achieve the international goal of holding the average surface temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, global emissions of greenhouse gases must be halved by 2030, and reach net zero by around the middle of the century. That is a transformative task of unprecedented proportions. It is made even greater by the need to tackle simultaneously a series of other worsening – and inter-related – global environmental problems, including biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and air and marine pollution, as documented in the 2019 reports of the…