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Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee – Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council – 2025 Strategic Foresight Report – Resilience 2.0: Empowering the EU to thrive amid turbulence and uncertainty (COM(2025) 484 final)

EESC 2025/03385

OJ C, C/2026/3224, 2.7.2026, ELI: http://data.europa.eu/eli/C/2026/3224/oj (BG, ES, CS, DA, DE, ET, EL, EN, FR, GA, HR, IT, LV, LT, HU, MT, NL, PL, PT, RO, SK, SL, FI, SV)

ELI: http://data.europa.eu/eli/C/2026/3224/oj

Date of document:: 18/03/2026; Date of vote
Date of vote:: 18/03/2026
Date lodged:: 14/01/2026

Author:: European Economic and Social Committee
Responsible body:: Section for the Single Market, Production and Consumption, EESC_INT
Rapporteur:: Philip VON BROCKDORFF
Form:: Opinion
Internal reference:: AVIS-SECTION 2025/3385 FIN, INT/1099
Session:: 604

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Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union

Legal basis:

12016E304

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Earlier related instruments:

52025DC0484 ESC Opinion

Instruments cited:

52021DC0102

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Subject matter:

Economic policy

Directory code:

15.10.10.00 Environment, consumers and health protection / Environment / General provisions and programmes

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Official Journal
of the European Union

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C/2026/3224

2.7.2026

Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee

Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council

2025 Strategic Foresight Report

Resilience 2.0: Empowering the EU to thrive amid turbulence and uncertainty

(COM(2025) 484 final)

(C/2026/3224)

Rapporteur:

Philip VON BROCKDORFF

Advisor	Silvan MIFSUD (to the rapporteur)
Referral	European Commission, 14.1.2026
Legal basis	Article 304 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union
Section responsible	Single Market, Production and Consumption
Adopted in section	11.2.2026
Adopted at plenary session	18.3.2026
Plenary session No	604
Outcome of vote (for/against/abstentions)	184/0/3

1. Conclusions and recommendations

1.1.

While the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) welcomes the 2025 Strategic Foresight Report: Resilience 2.0, the report is too close to existing political trajectories. The relevance of future foresight reports would be enhanced if they also addressed radical disruptions, the EU’s innovation gaps and the EU’s internal institutional challenges. It would also be relevant, particularly for strategic foresight, to weigh the costs of non-enlargement in a world where security is becoming a key focus in all policies.

1.2.

The EESC is uniquely placed to detect weak signals and underlying trends in strategic foresight. We therefore propose a permanent, structured mechanism to continuously feed the EESC’s foresight-driven viewpoint into the Commission’s policy cycle, rather than only when drafting the annual strategic foresight report.

1.3.

In this connection, the EESC believes that the systematic use of multiple, divergent scenarios to stress-test existing or proposed strategies would strengthen the strategic foresight process.

1.4.

Where possible, the EESC also calls for common, verifiable EU-wide metrics for socio-economic and institutional resilience. In this regard, the EESC is of the view that strategic foresight should also support sustainable and inclusive well-being as part of the European social model. The European Pillar of Social Rights forms an integral part of this social model.

1.5.

Strategic foresight should also take into account the current fragmentation of European capital markets, which severely constrain the efficient flow of capital to firms of all sizes, limiting innovation for SMEs and microenterprises. The EESC therefore strongly supports the rapid and effective completion of the Savings and Investments Union as a central pillar of the EU’s resilience strategy.

1.6.

The EESC recommends that the strategic foresight process give greater recognition to entrepreneurship, which is essential as traditional employment patterns evolve. Equally, the role of SMEs and microenterprises should also be recognised.

1.7.

Though it is not necessarily the role of strategic foresight to highlight that the EU is falling behind its global competitors in certain areas of technological innovation, the EESC believes it should outline specific pathways to close these gaps.

1.8.

The strategic foresight report also does not sufficiently explore whether certain regulatory approaches unintentionally undermine the competitiveness of European companies and innovators compared with third-country operators, or whether they encourage, at times, innovation to relocate outside Europe.

1.9.

Future reports would also benefit from a more thorough reflection on labour migration, particularly in the light of the projected decline in the EU working-age population by 2040.

1.10.

With regard to environmental considerations, the EESC calls for strategic foresight to be used to integrate a specific analysis of the triple planetary crisis into the report by developing dedicated chapters on the evolution of climate, biodiversity and pollution, across short-, medium- and long-term scenarios.

1.11.

Finally, the EU could benefit from a joint foresight exercise to develop strategic visions for future reports embraced by all EU institutions. Such an approach would help align strategic priorities and commit the institutions to a common long-term vision, rather than allowing parallel or competing strategic narratives to emerge.

2. Background

2.1.

The European Commission’s 2025 Strategic Foresight Report: Resilience 2.0 is a high-level policy document that builds on key megatrends and explores the Commission’s priority areas for action to be carried out by 2040, such as addressing a ‘changing global order’ and a ‘changing security paradigm’. The SFR is effectively a vision for helping the EU navigate future challenges and seize emerging opportunities. It highlights major global shifts, like climate change, rising security threats, and economic transformation, and calls for more innovative, forward-looking policymaking. From 2026, annual foresight reports will explore possible future scenarios to guide decisions. The report outlines eight key areas for action (see point 2.2).

2.2.

The key themes and objectives of the report include the following.

—	Resilience and proactivity: The report advocates a transformative and anticipatory approach to resilience, preparing for both familiar and unfamiliar challenges that may arise in the future.

—	Strategic autonomy and competitiveness: It highlights the importance of balancing economic competitiveness with strategic autonomy, ensuring that the EU can operate independently while remaining competitive on the global stage.

—	Technological and environmental transitions: The report addresses the accelerating pace of technological change and the urgent need for environmental sustainability, urging the EU to lead in the ethical governance of high-impact technologies.

—	Social cohesion and well-being: It emphasises the need to support social cohesion and well-being, addressing demographic trends and regional disparities that affect citizens’ quality of life.

—	Democracy and fundamental values: The report stresses the importance of protecting democracy and fundamental values against both internal and external pressures, including countering disinformation and polarisation.

2.3.

The 2025 SFR stresses the need for ‘whole-of-society preparedness’ and mentions the importance of civil society organisations in reinforcing democracy and social cohesion.

2.4.

The 2025 SFR is also linked to the EU preparedness union strategy.

2.5.

The 2025 SFR primarily addresses resilience at the national, EU and large-corporate levels, focusing on macro-economic shocks and global supply chains.

2.6.

The 2025 SFR identifies demographic change and a shrinking labour force as challenges, with solutions revolving around intergenerational equity and retaining talent. It also identifies accelerating climate change and environmental degradation as key challenges, but offers limited solutions for this megatrend.

2.7.

The SFR acknowledges threats to democracy without necessarily looking inward at the long-term viability of the EU’s own democratic and governance ecosystem.

3. The 2025 SFR: A critical analysis

3.1.

The SFR provides an overview of the key megatrends and broad areas for action by 2040. However, the EESC believes that in its 2025 format, the report does not sufficiently address disruptions to linear trends, the EU’s global innovation gaps and the internal challenges that prevent a unified European voice.

3.2.

A more strategic edge. While the SFR identifies key areas for action by 2040, a more strategic approach is recommended. The EESC notes in particular the following:

—	Strategic edge: The report is largely non-disruptive and would benefit from a more critical analysis of the ‘status quo’ to provide a stronger strategic edge for policy-makers.

—

Scenario rigour: Future reports must explicitly present alternative scenarios – optimistic, pessimistic, and highly disruptive – rather than just arguing current political priorities. They should also be anchored in a clear and transparent methodology. In addition, the scenarios laid out should further take into consideration diverse potential societal impacts.

—	Stress-testing: Proposed actions, such as technology sovereignty, must be stress-tested against low-probability, high-impact disruptions like ‘climate despair’ and ‘tech titan’ emergence.

3.3.

The Commission report is presented as the output of foresight. However, the EESC notes that it is also necessary to document the journey. In other words, further explanations are recommended as to:

—	how the core policy assumptions were identified and challenged;

—	the specific tools used to analyse interactions between trends and emerging risks and opportunities;

—	how the major scenarios were constructed; and

—	how the policy options were stress-tested against these scenarios.

This would help verify the rigour and replicability of the process.

3.4.

Over-reliance on linear megatrends over non-linear disruptions: The Commission report primarily focuses on megatrends, which are essentially extrapolations of existing, long-term developments (e.g. demographic shifts, climate change). While important, this approach can miss high-impact, non-linear possibilities, which the EESC deems very important. The report should also devote more attention to the EU’s internal challenges, including developments that affect internal cohesion, decision-making capacity and institutional effectiveness. This should include a reflection on the potential consequences if the EU fails to act externally with a unified voice. In this context, the EU could benefit from a joint foresight visioning exercise to set strategic visions for future reports embraced by all EU institutions.

3.5.

Scenario development and stress-testing: The EESC is of the view that the systematic use of multiple, divergent scenarios to stress-test existing or proposed strategies would strengthen the strategic foresight process. The Commission report refers to desirable outcomes for 2040 and this could have been further explored by presenting a set of distinct, well-developed alternative futures that challenge its policy direction.

3.6.

To achieve completeness therefore, the EESC recommends that the Commission report:

—	present alternative scenarios, detailing a small set of divergent scenarios (e.g. one optimistic, one pessimistic and one highly disruptive) constructed by combining various disruptions; and

—	document stress-testing, detailing how its proposed areas of action – such as strengthening technology sovereignty or supporting inclusive well-being – were subjected to the stress of these worst-case or high-impact alternative futures.

3.7.

Extending the scope of disruptive domains: While the Commission report touches on important domains like geopolitical and security challenges, the EESC recommends that extreme disruptions across all categories mentioned in the report be taken into consideration – for instance, detailing specific policy responses to social and economic disruptions caused by climate change or an extreme technology disruption beyond those anticipated. As regards technology, the EESC notes that the report does not explicitly acknowledge that the EU is falling behind its global competitors in certain areas of technological innovation, nor does it explore the consequences of the fallout. While risks related to new technologies are mentioned, the report does not adequately address the risks for the EU of failing to develop and scale these technologies. Also relevant to strategic foresight from an EU perspective is weighing the costs of non-enlargement in a world where security is becoming a key focus in all policies.

3.8.

The SFR correctly notes the fragmentation of EU technology governance between EU and Member State levels. However, it does not sufficiently explore whether certain regulatory approaches and the simplification agenda proposed as a response unintentionally undermine the competitiveness of European companies and innovators compared with third-country operators, sometimes encouraging innovation to relocate outside Europe.

3.9.

Strengthening the role of organised civil society in ‘Resilience 2.0’: The EESC is also of the view that it is essential to include substantive policy feedback, which aligns with the EESC’s role as the voice of organised civil society and its cross-sectional remit among EESC thematic sections. The 2025 SFR in fact stresses the need for ‘whole-of-society preparedness’ and mentions the importance of civil society organisations in reinforcing democracy and social cohesion. The EESC is of the view that the feedback requires a more structured, permanent and institutionalised role for civil society organisations in the foresight cycle, including integrating ‘weak signals’ on a continuous basis. The EESC, through its networks and with representatives from younger generations, is uniquely placed to detect weak signals and underlying trends. The feedback should propose a permanent, structured mechanism to continuously feed the EESC’s foresight-driven information and analyses into the Commission’s policy cycle, rather than only when drafting the annual strategic foresight report opinion.

3.10.

The EESC feedback should urge the Commission to explicitly document ‘Module One: How core policy assumptions were identified and challenged’ by detailing how input from organised civil society and social partners was systematically gathered and integrated. This transparency is essential for demonstrating that the report is based on real-world weak signals and underlying trends, which is the EESC’s key contribution to EU foresight.

3.11.

The critical link to the EU preparedness union strategy: Though the 2025 SFR is linked to the EU preparedness union strategy, the EESC is of the view that the report would be further improved if its long-term foresight insights were to be integrated into short- and medium-term preparedness planning.

3.12.

In this context, the EESC recommends that the Commission develop a ‘preparedness foresight nexus’ that explicitly links the strategic opportunities identified (e.g. in green technology) and the high-impact risks (e.g. resource scarcity) stress-tested against the funding and programming cycles of the Preparedness Union. This would ensure that current investments are genuinely future-proofed and not reactive to the latest crisis.

3.13.

Where possible, the EESC also calls for common, verifiable EU-wide metrics for socio-economic and institutional resilience. Where relevant, this would allow the Commission to benchmark Member States’ progress against the SFR’s goals (e.g. preparedness levels, social cohesion index, digital skills gap index), turning the broad ‘areas of action’ into measurable targets that can inform the European Semester and the Preparedness Union framework. Above all, the EESC is of the view that strategic foresight should also support sustainable and inclusive well-being (with a focus on the European Pillar of Social Rights), and intergenerational fairness.

3.14.

Granularity of resilience: Smaller States, entrepreneurship, SMEs and micro-enterprises: The 2025 SFR primarily addresses resilience at the national, EU and large-corporate levels, focusing on macro-economic shocks and global supply chains. This overlooks the need for resilience at the foundation levels of the economy. In addition, the EESC recommends that the strategic foresight process give greater recognition to entrepreneurship, which is essential as traditional employment patterns evolve. This should be integrated into Key Area 6 (Education) and Key Area 4 (Economic Resilience).

—	Family businesses and SMEs: Given that family-run businesses are crucial for regional stability, foresight must analyse how digital disruptions and succession planning affect their long-term viability.

—	Simplification: The EESC warns against developing too stringent ‘common, verifiable EU-wide metrics’ for resilience, where these would create additional reporting burdens and run counter to the goal of simplifying EU governance.

3.15.

The EESC recommends that the next foresight iteration include a specific set of scenarios focused on the cascading effects of geopolitical and green transition policies (e.g. new energy standards, supply chain fragmentation) on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and micro-enterprises. These actors lack the internal resources to manage complexity and regulatory costs.

3.16.

Strategic foresight should also take into account the fragmentation of European capital markets, which severely constrain the efficient flow of capital to firms of all sizes, limiting innovation. This fragmentation weakens the EU’s resilience, competitiveness and capacity to finance strategic transitions. The EESC therefore strongly supports the rapid and effective completion of the Savings and Investments Union as a central pillar of the EU’s resilience strategy, which aims to remove internal market barriers that prevent capital from being mobilised and allocated seamlessly across borders.

3.17.

Given the high percentage of family-run businesses in Europe (and in smaller Member States), the EESC also calls for an analysis of how current geopolitical, demographic and digital disruptions (e.g. succession planning, digital upskilling) impact the long-term viability and intergenerational transfer of these enterprises, as they are crucial for regional economic stability.

3.18.

The report’s recommendations – especially those on strengthening economic resilience, technology and security – must explicitly address the unique vulnerabilities and opportunities of smaller, island or peripheral Member States. This is crucial for ensuring the ‘whole EU geography is connected’ to the Union’s security and defence needs.

3.19.

Foresight into migration as a strategic asset: With the EU projected to have fewer working-age people in an increasingly aging population by 2040, labour migration is a fundamental economic necessity. This should be framed as a proactive tool for securing key sectors such as health and food security, coupled with rigorous modules on social integration capacity. The EESC therefore recommends that the Commission conduct a dedicated, stress-tested foresight analysis that takes into consideration the strategic need for managed, targeted and ethical labour migration across all skills levels (including essential and care-sector workers) to counteract the demographic and labour shortages predicted for the 2040 time horizon.

3.20.

Any such analysis must be coupled with an equally rigorous foresight module on social resilience and integration capacity (SFR Objective 3: Ensuring people’s well-being) to anticipate and mitigate the social and political strains that large-scale demographic shifts may entail, ensuring cohesion is maintained.

3.21.

Institutional and democratic resilience: While the SFR acknowledges threats to democracy, this foresight should also look inward at the long-term viability of the EU’s own democratic and governance ecosystem. The EESC therefore calls for a foresight exercise on the future of the EU’s public administration itself. This includes stress-testing its capacity to absorb massive technological changes (e.g. the integration of AI in regulatory and executive functions) and its ability to manage the political complexities of a potentially enlarged Union already by 2030.

3.22.

Finally, the EESC calls for efforts to integrate the triple planetary crisis into the report by developing dedicated chapters on the evolution of climate, biodiversity and pollution, across short-, medium- and long-term scenarios (optimistic, pessimistic and highly disruptive), and linking this analysis to our international commitments. This would also include linking environmental foresight with regulations using the report’s scenarios to propose specific reforms to the regulatory framework (emission standards, environmental impact standards, habitat protection, etc.), as well as combining foresight with estimated impacts (economic and social costs/benefits) to demonstrate the advantages of robust policies.

Brussels, 18 March 2026.

The President

of the European Economic and Social Committee

Séamus BOLAND

ELI: http://data.europa.eu/eli/C/2026/3224/oj

ISSN 1977-091X (electronic edition)

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