EESC urges EU to sharpen strategic foresight and prepare for disruptive futures

The EU should take a bolder approach to long‑term planning, with stress‑tested scenarios and a stronger role for civil society, EESC says

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has welcomed the European Commission’s 2025 Strategic Foresight Report (SFR) but is urging the EU to take a far more ambitious approach to long-term preparedness.

In its opinion on the SFR, adopted at its March plenary session, the EESC warns that the report remains too close to existing political trajectories and does not sufficiently consider possible external disruptions, the EU’s innovation gaps, internal institutional challenges and the costs of delaying EU enlargement, which could all potentially reshape Europe’s future. 

‘Strategic foresight should primarily support sustainable and inclusive well-being as part of the European social model. At the same time, it should take into account the current fragmentation of European capital markets, which severely constrains the efficient flow of capital to firms of all sizes, limiting innovation for SMEs and microenterprises’, rapporteur Philip von Brockdorff said.

The EESC also calls for a more structured role for organised civil society in the EU’s foresight cycle. 

‘The EESC is uniquely positioned to detect weak signals and underlying trends in strategic foresight. Through a permanent and structured mechanism, the EESC could contribute to the Commission’s strategic foresight cycle at all stages, rather than only at the end,’ Mr von Brockdorff said.

In its opinion, the EESC has called for a much sharper strategic edge and has issued several specific recommendations:

• Foresight cannot remain an extrapolation of current trends but must explore alternative futures, including pessimistic and highly disruptive ones. Proposed policies should be tested against these scenarios and the methods behind the Commission’s foresight work should be more transparent, explaining how assumptions were chosen, how trends interact and how scenarios were constructed.
• The Strategic Foresight Report should pay more attention to areas where the EU is falling behind global competitors and where regulation may unintentionally drive innovation abroad. Europe risks losing the competition race if these issues are not openly acknowledged and tackled.
• A fully developed Savings and Investments Union should be a central pillar of the EU’s resilience strategy.  Europe’s fragmented capital markets continue to block the efficient flow of investment to companies, particularly to SMEs, and weaken the EU’s competitiveness and capacity to finance strategic transitions.  The Savings and Investment Union should therefore be rapidly completed.
• The EU should put in place EU-wide resilience metrics. It should develop common, verifiable indicators on socio-economic and institutional resilience to support evidence-based policy-making.
• The report focuses mainly on national‑level and large‑corporate resilience, overlooking the vulnerabilities of SMEs, micro‑enterprises, family businesses and smaller or peripheral Member States. There should be a deeper analysis of how disruptions and regulatory changes affect smaller actors, which often lack the resources needed to absorb shocks.
• The Commission should treat labour migration as a strategic necessity rather than a politically sensitive afterthought. With Europe’s working‑age population set to shrink by 2040, the EESC recommends a dedicated foresight analysis of managed, ethical labour migration and the EU’s capacity to integrate newcomers.
• The EU should examine its own institutional future. The EESC calls for a foresight exercise on the Union’s administrative and governance systems, including how they will cope with technological transformation, such as AI in public administration, and with the political and administrative implications of future enlargement.
• Future reports should include fully developed scenarios on the triple planetary crisis ─ climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution ─ and these should be linked to possible regulatory reforms and the economic and social costs of inaction.

The Strategic Foresight Report is the EU’s annual examination of global megatrends and long-term developments likely to influence the EU up to 2040. It looks at issues such as demographic shifts, climate change, technological acceleration, global power dynamics and threats to democracy, and is meant to guide future policymaking. From 2026 onwards, the report will include specific scenarios to help policymakers stress test strategies.