Learn more how horizon scanning looks beyond the accustomed sources of evidence on past trends, drivers and change factors.
Stock exchanges go up and down, and the economy and society at large face multiple uncertainties. In geopolitical turmoil, resilience and competitiveness are used as keywords for strategic thinking in Europe – emphasis on green shift to clean industrial transition, security investments and resource self-sufficiency. But did we foresee this coming? After all, in hindsight, very few things come as a total surprise.
Hindsight is no foresight
Explorative scenarios are useful tools for considering possible futures and monitoring multiple outcomes simultaneously. Even if the worst-case scenario did not occur, there would be preparedness for turbulent times, too.
At the beginning of 2020 and in the aftermath of COVID-19, several scenario exercises were carried out to explore possible implications of the pandemic. For example, the insurance company Lloyds published, together with the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, their scenarios for global politics in the era of climate diplomacy. The purpose was to help insurers, risk managers, and contingency planners build models to mitigate transition risks.
‘Green Globalisation’, ‘Climate Anarchy’, and ‘Green Cold War’ scenarios illustrate three profoundly different narratives of cooperation, chaos and competition. The latter was identified as the most likely future: a future characterised by competition between blocs for energy, technology, and market dominance.
Rather than judging past scenario reports on how well they combined signals and emerging trends to foresee where we are in 2025, such work can help us rethink how we got here. Imagination is needed to keep surprises within the analysis of the future. Some signals, called weak signals, make sense only in hindsight, at their best. Unlikely but potentially significant events are the field of horizon scanning.
Horizon scanning can help systematise the work on critical uncertainties
Horizon scanning is a systematic analysis of signs of change, emerging trends and early warnings. It is a typical first step in foresight or scenario analysis. Horizon scanning looks beyond the accustomed sources of evidence on past trends, drivers and change factors. The radars focus on the debatable sphere of already detectable emerging trends and drivers of future conditions – incidents and forces that could change the future into something other than we can foresee.
- Weak signal illustrates an emerging risk or opportunity, which will not necessarily materialise.
- Wild card is a low-probability, high-impact event that drastically changes the course of events.
Horizon scanning builds on methods to collect a wide number of signals (longlist), and then, stepwise distils these data into the most significant signals (shortlist) and assesses their implications for today. Interaction with experts and stakeholders is crucial. Signals are not evidence, but they need interpretation within a specific context:
- How novel is the signal?
- What is the likelihood of the signal becoming pervasive and known to many?
- What would change if the signal materialised? How significant would the change be?
Example of futures wheels: preparedness for the future and innovation with futures
There are several tools to organise signal detection and assessment. The most crucial step in horizon scanning, however, is to think of the potential implications of the short-listed signals.
Futures wheel, impact wheels or implication wheels are examples of simple tools to structure discussions in cross-disciplinary or multi-stakeholder interaction. Starting from a focal issue, such as a trend, event or decision, successive tiers of consequences are visualised into a map of possible developments over time. The purpose is not to model cause-effect chains for fully-fledged scenarios but to support imagination. The consequences explored from one tier to another grow exponentially, and attention becomes drawn to longer-term indirect implications.
For example, the USDA horizon scanning team (Bengston et al. 2020) used the implications wheel to explore abrupt climate change as the focal wild card issue. Direct implications were first defined by a small team, and the successive tiers of implications were then explored in a stakeholder workshop. The exercise resulted in 224 direct and indirect implications, including both positive and negative outcomes. Horizon scanning can be an initial step to strategic foresight and improved preparedness for the future. The USDA team emphasises the educational role of futures methods: they “help individuals and collectives stretch their imaginations and achieve ownership and agency of the complex and wicked problems at hand.”
Other exercises, such as the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) led by the Joint Research Centre and the European Parliamentary Research Service, use a similar method to explore the weak signals collected in their regular horizon scanning. The latest ESPAS newsletter (Issue no.7, March 2025) summarises futures wheels for three emerging issues, namely, neuroethical world, diplomatic non-immunity, and weather manipulation and its conspiracies. For each weak signal, a “what if” question is concluded:
What if the EU were to consider the potential of neurotechnologies specifically in the General Data Protection Regulation?
What if EU shone a light on all those threatening diplomatic immunity and supported the development of an international diplomatic immunity score?
What if the EU were to consider the development of geoengineering know-how as an essential capability to ensure its own long-term resilience?
Thus, these questions seek to widen the radar for possible implications of weak signals for policy making. Asking “what if” challenges the prevalent assumptions and can innovate our thinking about the future.
Curious about horizon scanning?
Horizon scanning is a typical step at the beginning of futures analysis – before delving into cause-effect chains and the quantitative analysis of past trends, drivers and change factors.
How well are we set for analysing the future bioeconomy? What do you consider an early warning or sign of an emerging trend that bioeconomy research and education have not yet paid due attention to explore the critical uncertainties for the future?
This article provides a brief introduction to the horizon scanning workshop that will be organised in collaboration between the European Forest Institute (EFI) and the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) during the European Bioeconomy Scientific Forum (EBSF) in June 2025 in Joensuu, Finland.
To learn more, contact Senior Researcher Päivi Pelli at paivi.pelli @ efi.int And learn more about
References and further reading
Bengston, D.N., Crabtree, J. and Hujala, T. (2020) Abrupt climate change: Exploring the implications of a wild card. Futures 124 (2020) 102641 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102641
Bengston DN, Mauno T, Hujala T. 2024. Horizon Scanning: A Process for Identifying Emerging Signals of Change Shaping the Future of Natural Resources Management. Society & Natural Resources. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2024.2335392
Dufva M and Rowley C (2022) Weak signals – stories about futures. Sitra studies 203, January 2022. See also https://www.sitra.fi/en/topics/weak-signals/ (Update of the Sitra Weak Signals report will be published in May 2025)
ESPAS European Strategy and Policy Analysis System https://espas.eu/horizon.html
ESPAS Horizon Scanning Newsletter (March 2025) https://espas.eu/files/horizon/HorizonScanning_ESPAS_07.pdf
Hines, A., Bengston, D.N., Dockry, M.J., comps. 2019. The Forest Futures Horizon Scanning project. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-187. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station. 81 p. https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-GTR-P-187
Lloyds (2022) Shifting powers: Climate cooperation, chaos or competition? Managing geopolitical risk from the climate transition. Lloyd’s emerging risk report 2022. In association with the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-insights/risk-reports/library/shifting-powers-climate-cooperation-chaos-or-competition
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