The weight of time

For over two decades, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has sought to identify
and draw attention to emerging issues of environmental concern. Together with the international
scientific community, UNEP is on the frontline of assessing emerging threats and ensuring that
potential disruptions to planetary health and innovative solutions to environmental challenges are
kept high on the international radar.

The Frontiers Reports are important contributions for delivering scientific insight on emerging issues
of concern to policy-makers with the intention of fostering actionable and timely responses. Some
issues may be local or relatively small-scale issues today but have potential to become issues of
regional or global concern if not addressed early. This latest iteration of the Frontiers report offers
an insight into four emerging issues identified through surveys with stakeholders in recent years.

UNEP’s Foresight Trajectory
During the development of the latest edition of the Frontiers report, UNEP also embarked on a
new Foresight Trajectory initiative. It advances the work on emerging issues, by expanding our
collective capacity to anticipate the future, embed futures thinking in the culture of the organization,
and, crucially, deliver a proactive and continuous reading on potential disruptions and untapped
opportunities to enable better decisions, preparedness and anticipatory action. Launched in
2024, UNEP undertook an 18-month strategic foresight process culminated in eight critical shifts
(emerging phenomena) and 18 signals of change which are presented in an inaugural Global Foresight
Report – Navigating New Horizons. These signals of change are a small subset of the 280 signals
identified in the broader Foresight Trajectory process. Likewise, the emerging issues addressed in
this Frontiers report edition are relevant to many identified among the 280 signals. The connections
between the topics discussed in this publication and those signals presented in the Global Foresight
Report are summarized at the beginning of each chapter.

This collective intelligence process draws on a range of tools and methods to identify signals of
change and emerging issues. Building on UNEP’s history of emerging issues and early warning, the
foresight process responds to the need to enhance the use of scientific evidence in environmental
decision-making and strengthens the backbone of UNEP’s efforts to anticipate change and provide
forward-facing insights for a range of publications, assessments and strategic priorities and hence
the backbone to the Frontievrs Series of Reports.

source:
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