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Horizon 2026–2050

Expected policy trajectories, 2026–2050

Recent government foresight, from the European Commission's “Resilience 2.0” report to Dutch scientific and security assessments and UN negotiations, points to a decisive shift: from defending against shocks to shaping the terms of the future.

Test a policy against these futures
European Commission

From recovery to “Resilience 2.0” and global leverage

Since 2020 the Commission has published an annual Strategic Foresight Report, recalibrating the Union's long-term choices after each wave of shocks.

  1. 2020

    Charting the course towards a more resilient Europe

    Lessons from COVID-19 across social and economic, geopolitical, green and digital dimensions.

    Resilience dashboards; link to the Green Deal's 2050 climate neutrality

  2. 2021

    The EU's capacity and freedom to act

    Trends to 2050: climate change, technological disruption, pressure on democratic values.

    Ten strategic action areas for autonomy and regulatory sovereignty

  3. 2022

    Twinning the green and digital transitions

    Synergies and tensions between digitalisation and decarbonisation in energy, transport, industry, construction and agriculture.

    Action areas so digital footprints do not undermine net-zero

  4. 2023

    Sustainability and well-being at the heart of open strategic autonomy

    Social and economic challenges of the net-zero transition; moving beyond GDP towards inclusive well-being.

    A “Europe of investments”, circularity, right to repair, workforce adaptation

  5. 2025

    Resilience 2.0: thriving amid turbulence

    The first report of the new mandate, building on the Preparedness Strategy to engage with unfamiliar, hard-to-imagine scenarios.

    Security and defence, economic resilience, countering algorithm-driven polarisation, skills, intergenerational fairness

  6. 2026

    Shaping the EU's long-term global role

    Finding new or unexploited areas of strategic leverage and persuasive narratives in a multipolar, low-trust world.

    Hardware-enabled verification, pooled compute, governance of planetary technologies

The second-order finding. Rather than relying on the passive “Brussels effect” of market regulation, blueprints towards 2040 call for hard targets: at least 70% of weaponry produced in and procured from the EU, a single start-up and bankruptcy regime, and using public procurement, about 14% of EU GDP a year, to catalyse deep-tech start-ups in quantum and photonics.[CFG]
Technology governance

Beyond AI ethics: epistemology, verification and planetary technology

7.4/10

Dutch trust in science, 2026

Stable (7.5 in 2025) and above the judiciary (6.4).

Rathenau Instituut
37%

expect AI to help solve big scientific challenges

Rathenau Instituut
≈1/3

distrust medical research

Even though 90% call health research important, citing commercial capture.

Rathenau Instituut

Scientific epistemology. Generative AI is moving towards multimodal research assistants that propose hypotheses on their own. As it disappears into everyday software, the line between “using AI” and ordinary work blurs, which makes regulation harder. Journals see AI-generated fake papers, efficiency gains are overwhelmed by growth in data-centre water and energy use, Global South scholarship is marginalised and universities depend on a handful of US firms. Expect science policy to move ethical risk away from individual researchers and towards parliamentary and university norms.[R]

Hardware-enabled verification. Where major powers want to avoid catastrophic risk but do not trust each other, treaties cannot rely on self-reporting. The Centre for Future Generations points to verification built into hardware, and to pooling compute, supply chains and rapid manufacturing with trusted partners such as the UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea and India, as a way to govern frontier AI and solar radiation modification.[CFG]

Biosecurity, neurotechnology, work

The biological and cognitive boundaries of the body

Singapore's Centre for Strategic Futures speaks of the “digitalisation of the body”: biometrics expanding from fingerprints and faces to gait, micro-gestures and internal physiological data. By 2040, resilience agendas give more weight to neurotechnology regulation and to “mental health in all policies” to counter polarisation and cognitive overload.

At work, the TNO/RIVM technology radar for healthy and safe work (2025), built for the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment and the Labour Authority, uses impact trees to anticipate both fewer physical exposures and more psychosocial workload from algorithmic management and human-robot collaboration.

National security trend analyses warn of converging biological risks: more high-risk pathogen labs, AI-accelerated bioinformatics and avian influenza spill-over. Meanwhile childhood vaccination coverage in the Netherlands fell below 90% for the first time in decades. Expect supply-chain mapping of non-EU dependencies in enzymes and bio-instruments, export controls on dual-use strains and sovereign control of DNA synthesisers, bioreactors and incubators.[NCTV]

Welfare and care

Demographic compression and explicit choices

12.7%

Dutch care spending, share of GDP in 2015

WRR Report 104
20%+

projected share of GDP by 2060

Roughly a tripling of real spending per person.

WRR Report 104
1 in 7

workers already employed in care

WRR Report 104

Ageing, chronic illness and expensive technology mean efficiency alone cannot close the gap. The WRR expects social policy to move from universal expansion to explicit prioritisation by health gain, mandatory cross-ministry prevention and quality floors in less visible sectors such as elderly care, youth care and mental health, so that care does not crowd out education and other public values. To make those choices legitimate, it paired informed citizen panels with budgeting under firm ceilings.[WRR]

Intergenerational fairness

The representation gap for future generations

At the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024, member states adopted the Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. Commitments were diluted, and the proposed Special Envoy for Future Generations was only “taken note of”. With budget cuts shelving the envoy, the Declaration risks becoming an orphan before its review at the 83rd General Assembly in 2028.[S]

Because people not yet born cannot vote, lobby or fund campaigns, closing the gap between 2026 and 2028 may depend on double-hatting an existing UN mandate, a voluntary coalition of the willing, or courts, where climate litigation increasingly uses today's children as proxies for future citizens. Within Europe, the Committee of the Regions and the Commission have made intergenerational equity a core principle of the 2025–2026 cycle.

What this means

Four structural shifts for future-proof policy

From extrapolation to systemic triage

Disciplined weak-signal scanning, the “if this scaled” test, three-signal clustering, cross-impact scenarios and complexity-aware methods.

Modules 1 and 2 →

Full-cycle anticipatory governance

Futures literacy plus mandates that embed wind-tunnelling and integrated impact assessment in agenda-setting, budgeting and evaluation.

Influence the future →

Iterative, experimental regulation

Anticipatory regulation principles, six-month sandboxes, cross-sector testbeds, contingency budgets and hardware-enabled verification.

Module 4 →

Facing the trust-scarcity nexus

Rising care costs, falling immunity and AI scepticism call for fiscal and industrial levers combined with deliberation and enforceable intergenerational advocacy.

Module 3 →

Sources

  1. European Commission, Strategic foresight
  2. European Commission, 2025 Strategic Foresight Report
  3. Call for evidence for the EU's Strategic Foresight Report 2026
  4. Centre for Future Generations, response to the call for evidence and submission to the 2026 report
  5. Rathenau Instituut, Vertrouwen in de wetenschap 2026
  6. Rathenau Instituut, Welke ontwikkeling van AI verwachten experts?
  7. TNO/RIVM, Technologieradar Gezond en Veilig Werken (2025)
  8. NCTV, Trendanalyse Nationale Veiligheid 2024
  9. WRR, Kiezen voor houdbare zorg (Report 104)
  10. Stimson Center, The orphan of the Summit of the Future
  11. European Committee of the Regions, Strategic foresight

Which of these futures would break your policy?

Run it through four curated scenarios, or build your own with cross-impact analysis.

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