Welcome to "Global Futures of Climate”, the first Course in our series on Global Systems designed for individuals and organisations committed to facing global challenges and finding solutions.

This self-paced, online Climate Education Course is scientifically-based, and incredibly well researched to give you a deep understanding of our emerging world, providing a solid basis for you to build your personal, professional, and family futures. The innovative solutions offered align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Course Content includes 12 Lessons across 3 Modules: Climate Change, Energy Systems, and Ecosystem. There are two lessons in each, examining the challenges, and addressing the alternatives. 

The Course Content incorporates over 100 learning resources, including:

• 12 Lessons over 3 Modules: Climate Change, Energy Systems, Ecosystem.
• 12 Lessons over 3 Modules: Climate Change, Energy Systems, Ecosystem.
• Four lessons per Module, two on the challenges, two addressing the solutions.
• 12 Instructor videos (one per Lesson) to guide you through the Course Content and Resources .
• Over 40 expert videos (climate and ocean scientists, EC, UN, OECD, European Parliament, Carbon Brief, WWF, World Bank, Universities)
• Over 50 expert articles/reports (NASA, UN, IPCC, UNFCC, UNSDGs, State of the Planet, Blue Carbon Initiative, Greenpeace,
• Universities, UNDP, Global Commission for Adaptation, to name a few).
• 36 reflection questions to journal your progress.
• 60 fun quiz Qs to test knowledge gained.
• Certificate of Completion.

Climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to the European Union and to the world. As a response, among other things, the European Green Deal aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, boost the economy through green technology, create sustainable industry and transport, and cut pollution. The transition towards greener and more sustainable economies is a game changer in the EU labour market alongside digitalisation and automation. Skill needs will change with impacts far beyond the key occupations driving them, affecting all economic sectors.

Europe needs to promote and support green employment, address the skilling and reskilling of workers, and anticipate changes in workplaces of the future. In order to get a better grasp on potential future outcomes, and better anticipate their potential policy implications, a foresight Deep Dive has been carried out. The Deep Dive uses a broad conceptualization of skills that encompasses the full palette from scientific and engineering skills to vocational and crafts-like skills. All are needed in the green labour market, although the scenario-led focus here for the most part is on skills of vocational professions. This policy brief presents the main findings.

A set of four different scenarios for the futures of green skills and jobs in Europe in 2050 were crafted:

• Scenario A: Green technology-intensive Europe: Struggling to fill all the green jobs
• Scenario B: Apocalypse Soon: Fighting skills mismatches in a degraded environment
• Scenario C: Feeling the pain: A workforce left behind in a non-green world
• Scenario D: Green leapfrogging: Old, mismatched Europe surrounded by new green giants

Climate change impacts are one of the main threats to human society and natural ecosystems. Even though natural dynamics also have a substantial effect on climate, there is no doubt that current alterations of climate with the correlated impacts are manmade. Alongside continuing efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change, there may be possibilities to geoengineer climate systems to reduce or mask the impacts of climate change. There are also strong arguments for large-scale changes in social practices for adapting to and mitigating climate change. The big challenge comes with the necessary scale of interventions as those changes need to be large-scale and global, putting new challenges to all levels of governance from local to global.

Many present drivers seem to indicate a gloomy future for the climate. The current individualistic mindsets drive overconsumption and overproduction. The offsetting of carbon emissions is sometimes used to compensate for dirty activities. Intense competition for natural resources is not safeguarding their sustainability. Bio-holistic worldviews confront anthropocentric views, but climate delay has emerged as the new denial and the lack of courage to address climate supremacists, i.e. the global wealthy, shows little change of direction. According to a 2020 report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the wealthiest top 1% were responsible for 15% of global emissions, nearly twice as much as the world’s poorest 50%, who were responsible for just 7%. Overly optimistic beliefs in tech or social transformation to solve it prevail, and there is a wide reluctance to consider broad system change.

There are also drivers towards desired futures. Improved understanding of climate and global change and the capacity and knowledge to purposefully shape nature and society provide better means to address climate change. Climate anxiety and perception of government inaction have triggered, for instance, the ‘Fridays for future’ movement, which contributes to the emergence of global conscience on the climate and biodiversity crisis and the need for justice. New understandings of human purpose and fairness also encourage the development of a wider range of responses like de-desertification, seaweed permaculture, ocean fertilization, carbon capture and storage, and solar radiation management. We may learn to protect the global commons, including indigenous cultures and atmospheric commons.

Economic growth in societies based on individual material gain, here-and-now-thinking, short political cycles, and lack of broad political agreement on alternative paths seem to keep us on the path to the climate crisis. Furthermore, exacerbated social inequalities may lead many to have no willingness or ability to participate in transitions. While we are overconfident with systems’ design, we underestimate natural forces and ecosystems. Emerging options for large-scale ‘geoengineering’ interventions in the climate system promise new opportunities and new risks, including novel geopolitical tensions.There are diverse perceptions on geoengineering and possible social change towards potential acceptance or societal rejection. The planet lacks a fair and appropriate governance structure providing a framework on who might be entitled to carry out geoengineering projects in the name of the planet and what their responsibility is. There is no sufficient dialogue on what it means to be a responsible company, researcher, research organisation, or policy-maker in this context.

This deep dive is part of the Foresight towards the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe project.

The CROSSEU project was launched in response to growing societal needs for effective climate action and stronger socio-economic resilience. As climate change continues to impact our world, it becomes crucial to understand and manage its complex effects. 

Objective(s)
CROSSEU aims to respond to increasing societal needs to reduce climate-damaging actions, adapt to the expected consequences, and increase socio-economic resilience.

The main ambition of the project is to provide a science based and ready to use decision support system built on enhanced understanding of the biogeophysical risks from climate change, and their socioeconomic impacts in Europe, fully co-produced and implemented with practice stakeholders to ensure its uptake, and support effective coping with sectoral and cross sectoral climate risks within the context of the European green transition.

It will do this by delivering a climate-sensitive framework, including a ready-to-use decision support system platform and technical recommendations, to inform investment decisions, cost-effective adaptation and mitigation options and policy response to climate change.

The project will contribute to advancing the understanding of the socio-economic risks and response options associated with climate change impact in Europe in different timeframes, including the post-COVID-19 societal-environmental transformation, and derive practical recommendations for political and societal action.

The solutions proposed are based on an extensive assessment of the socio-economic risks of climate change in a cross-sectoral hierarchical approach, based on storylines addressing key categories of climate hazards in different socio-economic sectors and climate change-sensitive areas across countries and European regions.

The project will offer a ready-to-use solution that integrates complex information from available climate risk data sets and non-climatic sectoral data collected during the project implementation and derived through modelling based on demand-driven climate-socio-economic pathways.

CROSSEU is designed to bridge the science-based information about the economic impacts of climate change, and the unique contributions of the project will be:

1. the quantification of costs of existent and emergent socio-economic risks and opportunities at NUTS3 level
2. an improved representation of adaptation within biogeophysical climate change risk
3. a better consideration of modelling uncertainties by identifying their nature, assessing their characteristics in
a systematic way to determine a better informed and robust decision-making. 

The project's foresight component is crucial for projecting how various climate impacts will unfold under different global pathways (RCP-SSP). By examining future scenarios, it allows decision-makers to anticipate and plan for the most critical challenges, helping societies prepare for the compounded effects of climate change across sectors. The focus on cross-sectoral linkages emphasizes the need for integrated, multi-dimensional strategies to address both immediate and long-term climate risks, while ensuring social equity and resilience.
Future scenarios involve identifying and evaluating highly vulnerable areas across Europe in terms of their exposure to climate change, sensitivity to its impacts, and adaptive capacity. It focuses on key sectors—such as biodiversity, health, agriculture, forests, and water—and examines how these areas are likely to experience intense climate changes, particularly extreme events, in the future (2030, 2050, 2100).

Outputs

• Enhance the modelling of mitigation and adaptation strategies in relation to projected bio-geo-physical processes and socioeconomic risks to different sectors for different time horizons (i.e. 2030, 2050 and 2100) considering both the individual characteristics and interactions between the various sectors
• Co-assess synergies conflicts and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation strategies across different sectors regions
• Co-produce ready to use tools integrated in a science based decision support system for assessing the social and economic impacts of climate change, and support mitigation and adaptation options towards a climate resilient Europe
• Consolidate the European union's response to climate change challenges and social and economic impacts in the context of the transformation related to the post COVID-19 crisis and geopolitical challenges

Expected outcomes
1. the project delivers a science based and ready to use decision support system built on enhanced understanding of the biogeophysical risks from climate change, and their socioeconomic impacts in Europe, fully co-produced and implemented with practice stakeholders to ensure its uptake.
2. the project consistently contributes to enhancing the overall impact of the destination climate across the EU
3. the project facilitates an improved understanding of the nature and extent of physical risks climate change driven hazards and their socio economic impacts at different levels of warming with or without adaptation
4. CrossEU integrates social sciences and humanities perspectives and insights throughout its entire workflow, engaging stakeholders including representatives of communities or citizen groups, sectoral policymakers, businesses, the scientific community, and civil society, through the entire project cycle.

CROSSEU is an EU funded project, with UK partners funded by UKRI.

This foresight study aimed at supporting the development of the Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe (2025-2027), by providing early-stage strategic intelligence and sense-making that could contribute novel elements to the processes of strategic planning.

The study, which was launched in mid-2021 and lasted almost two years, has been the most widely engaging foresight exercise yet aiming to support EU R&I policy. Through this broad engagement, the study did not only develop intelligence for the 2nd Strategic Plan of Horizon Europe but also contributed to the development of an EU R&I foresight community hosted by futures4europe.eu, one that is an asset for future R&I policies across Europe.

The foresight process in support of the 2nd Strategic Plan comprised a wide spectrum of activities:

• As a reference point for the exploratory work, the explicit and implicit impact assumptions of the 1st Strategic Plan were identified and visualised with the help of a qualitative system analysis and modelling tool for causal loop analysis.
  
  
• An exploratory analysis of forward-looking sources (e.g. foresight reports, web-based horizon scanning) was conducted to identify relevant trends and signals of unexpected developments. These were discussed in online workshops and on the online platform futures4europe.eu.
  
  
• An outlook on emerging developments in the global and European context of EU R&I policy was developed drawing on a major online workshop in autumn 2021 with some 60 participants, experts and policy makers, who worked with multi-level context scenarios and specific context narratives about emerging disruptions.
  
  
• On that basis and in close consultation with the European Commission involving another major workshop in February 2022 which brought together 80 participants, Expert Teams were set up to develop disruptive scenarios in five areas of major interest. Each team ran several internal workshops but also involved further experts and Commission staff in their work, both through the online platform and through a final policy-oriented workshop. The foresight work within the five areas of interest resulted in deep dives on the following topics:
  > Climate change, Research, and Innovation: Radical Options from Social Change to Geoengineering
  > Hydrogen Economy – A radical alternative
  > The EU in a Volatile New World - The challenge of global leadership
  > Global Commons
  > Transhumanist Revolutions
  
  
• Further areas of interest identified were explored through review papers aiming to capture major trends, developments and scenario sketches in relation to further disruptive developments:
  > Social Confrontations
  > Artificial General Intelligence: Issues and Opportunities
  > The Interpenetration of Criminal and Lawful Economic Activities
  > The Future of Health
  
  
• A third major workshop took place in October 2022 bringing together all the thematic strands of work and addressing possible R&I policy implications from this work. Participation in this workshop reached 250 individuals over 2 days.
  
  
• Building on the workshop, the online Dynamic Argumentative Delphi survey Research4Futures collected suggestions from almost 950 contributors from Europe and beyond about the implications of this foresight work for the priorities of EU R&I policy.

The detailed description of the foresight work and the resulting outputs are available in the final report of the project. 

This foresight study has been implemented through the Foresight on Demand framework contract, by a team of 40 experts. About 300 additional experts contributed to the project through its numerous workshops that helped shape the scenarios and their policy implications. 

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One Day in 2050 is a collaborative project for climate change activation, made by 365 fictional news from 2050 (one for each day) written by 365 voices from the future to teach us how CC will reshape our society. A 365 degrees unique vision on the future of our planet. Open Call for Contributions.

Earth4All is an international initiative to accelerate the systems-change we need for an equitable future on a finite planet. Our analysis combines the best available science with new economic thinking. We found that the next ten years must see the fastest economic transformation in history if we want to steer humanity away from social and ecological catastrophe. 

Earth4All started as a vibrant collective of leading economic thinkers, scientists, policy leaders, and advocates, convened by The Club of Rome, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Norwegian Business School.

Building on the legacies of The Limits to Growth and the Planetary Boundaries frameworks, science is at the heart of our work. Leading scientists have developed state of the art systems dynamic models and run different scenarios for possible plausible futures.

Earth4All is guided by a Transformational Economics Commission, made up of economic thinkers from across the globe to explore new economic thinking and test the model outcomes.

The third pillar is a global campaign that aims to make the Earth4All vision a reality, advocating for governments to adopt policies that will enable resilient and healthy societies.

We are providing a platform to connect and amplify the voices of people and organisations who want to upgrade our economies. The momentum is growing, with communities and policy makers around the world pushing for economic systems change.