Reference foresight scenarios on the global standing of the European Union in 2040

The European Commission’s 2020 Strategic Foresight Report announced that a set of reference foresight scenarios would be developed with the main objectives of informing future policy debates, providing tools for building more coherence among policies, and ensuring that policies are appropriate for the future (European Commission, 2020a). With these objectives in mind, the Joint Research Centre EU Policy Lab developed a set of four scenarios regarding the EU’s global standing in 2040 and the conditions in which Europe could operate in the longer-term future. In 2020, the process was begun to support the development of a report on Shaping and Securing the EU’s Open Strategic Autonomy by 2040 and Beyond (Cagnin et al., 2021), which includes first versions of the scenarios. Since then, the scenarios have been enriched and refined through several iterations.
They were further validated through participatory workshops and interviews. This report presents the
final versions of the scenarios and explains their development in detail. These scenarios are aimed at facilitating discussions about the challenges, opportunities, priorities, capacities, and vulnerabilities the EU
might face in the future. The four scenarios cover the main uncertainties regarding the EU’s future.
Therefore, in principle, all four scenarios should be used as a set. Hence, in examining a range of different future contexts, we are able to uncover the most challenging questions and challenge our assumptions about the world we currently live in and the future we would like to shape.

source:
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/773aa7a0-47a6-11ee-bbdc-01aa75ed71a1/