Strategic Foresight

Distinguished speakers and participants,

I am very glad to welcome you to this conference on "STRATEGIC FORESIGHT: A VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF EUROPE. The EU as a new global actor and the role of civil society" organised by the European Economic and Social Committee in the framework of the External Relations Section meeting.

I would like to start by warmly thanking all guests who will be sharing their experience in this important and emerging field of activity.

When I say that Strategic Foresight is "emerging", I don't mean that it is new: the idea of working on different possible scenarios about the future, in order to anticipate and better prepare for change, has always been a part of sound policy-making.

However, Strategic Foresight as an organised and well-structured discipline is becoming more and more important in the current fast-changing world, where new challenges appear at an unprecedented pace.

The importance of Strategic Foresight embedded in a global perspective is crucial for a Union which is leading the fight against climate change and which has the ambition to successfully shape the digital transition.

Green and digital transition will open new opportunities for our economy and our citizens: however, wide-ranging plans for a far reaching transformation of our society are highly future-sensitive. We must be aware from the beginning of new elements that might prevent us from reaching our goals. And we must know how to react in case possible dangers actually come up.

The European Union has traditionally had a dependency on external trade partners for oil and gas, which has influenced its relations with foreign countries. With Europe going carbon neutral this will change in 2050 at the latest.

But let's be clear: new dependencies are emerging: We need to be aware about the amount of tungsten needed to make our phone vibrate, the amount of rare earths needed to make wind turbines roll and the extent of lithium needed to ensure a global switch to e-vehicles.

For most of these materials, Europe is heavily dependent on the rest of the world. It is estimated that demand for rare earths could increase tenfold by 2050, and the EU currently imports 98% of these materials from China alone.

Strategic raw materials represent an opportunity for mutually advantageous trade and cooperation with the rest of the world. They also represent an element to be considered by Strategic Foresight, since a conflict in the producing countries might cause a disruption in supply chains.

One major crisis in supply we experienced recently, even without a conflict: COVID-19 has shown how unforeseen events can heavily harm our economy and society. At the beginning of the pandemic, Europe found itself without life-saving medicines, face masks and ventilators.

This experience, for me, underlines the importance of a context favourable to multilateral cooperation and trade as well as the need of modern trade rules.

At the same time, we need to recognise that trade is not the only solution to our strategic needs: there are strategic assets that we must produce in Europe, even in the current context of globalisation and international division of labour.

In this complicated endeavour, I find it very encouraging to know that unforeseen events are not entirely unforeseen, or even unforeseeable. To come back to COVID-19, we all know that a pandemic of its scale and nature had long been predicted.

Different voices had been raised, as early as 2015 at least, to warn that a highly infectious virus could cause the death of millions of people. Attention had been drawn to the fact that the epidemic preparedness plans of many countries, including several EU Member States, had not been updated for decades. So when the virus eventually did come, those plans were not in line with modern medical knowledge, with the rising speed of exchanges between the continents, with the actual availability of scientific data and protective materials.

Strategic Foresight can help us anticipate such problems. We need to take foresight findings seriously, prepare ourselves and–as far as possible- prevent emerging challenges and problems instead of simply curing them.

And, of course, also conflicts cannot be ruled out. Unfortunately, the current world order is under pressure in different regions of the planet, sometimes very close to us. The European Union has been working everywhere for peaceful and cooperative solutions, and this approach has given many fruits over time: the difficult stabilisation of the Western Balkans is helped by the perspective of EU membership, and we have close ties with North Africa and the Middle East.

Sometimes we have been less successful, as in the case of our Eastern borders. In case of problems, we need to see what we do with our energy supply, how a possible destabilisation of one or more countries close to us may affect our security, how we can contribute to a peaceful solution of the existing disagreements.

It is clear to me that, in the efforts to look into the future and prepare viable solutions, democracies have a leading role.

Democratic countries are the only ones to be really committed to transparency, the only ones that have a real debate on the direction to take, the only ones with a public opinion holding governments accountable for the choices they make. And, of course, they are the only ones with an organised civil society enabled to fully participate in the decision-making process.

This element should not be underestimated. Obviously, plans for the future can have a positive impact on citizens' lives if they are designed for them and with them.

The work of the different thematic sections of the European Economic and Social Committee is constantly looking into the future, identifying challenges and proposing solutions in different fields.

In particular, I would like to recall that, through the EESC, European organised civil society can have a direct dialogue with the civil society organisations of many different countries: we have internal bodies taking care of the relations with the Western Balkans, the Southern shore of the Mediterranean, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Japan and many emerging Asian economies, as well as with the United States, Russia and China.

Thanks to these contacts we can help identify emerging problems and propose solutions that are not only the fruit of collective intelligence from European civil society, but also of the exchanges we have with our homologues from other countries.

This is one of the advantages of being a world part with an extremely lively and conscious civil society, and this advantage is at the disposal of European strategic foresight activities.

The EESC has already issued an opinion on strategic foresight, centred on the first Commission report of 2020, and it will soon be adopting a second one, which will look into the second report of 2021.

We will pursue our work in this direction, and are looking forward to an ever closer cooperation with the European institutions on these themes. We really think that a participated, open and democratic Strategic Foresight can make a significant and valuable contribution to the future of our society and of Europe's position in the world.

Dear participants, I am already looking forward to the results of your debates and I wish you all a very interesting meeting.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Downloads

Strategic Foresight

Work organisation