3.5: Strategic Futures
To help expand strategic decision-making among EEA's major clients and partners by further developing scenario-based assessments
in specific areas, such as the forward looking component of major EEA assessments, promoting capacity building actions and
by making better use of existing processes, information and methods to provide user-tailored options for the future.
Other Information:
Analysis - The importance of future studies and especially scenarios in decision-making, are becoming increasingly recognised
as the complexity, increased risk and uncertainty of environmental problems are themselves becoming increasingly apparent.
In its first years of operation the EEA concentrated its effort in this area on integrating the forward look into its main
assessments covering the EU (SOER) and looking into the implementation of Community environmental policy through distance‑to-target
analysis. Following the analysis presented in the 1999 five-year state and outlook report, and the amended Regulation, the
EEA was requested to integrate a forward-looking component into its assessments. Consequently, the EEA work was expanded beyond
the SOER reports, into thematic areas and beyond existing legislation and the borders of the Europe. During the last strategy
period, the main bulk of work consisted of the wide assessment processes involved in the 2005 five-year state and outlook
report and for the 2007 'Environment for Europe' Belgrade Conference. In addition, contributions were made to the UNEP Global
Environmental Outlook process. Furthermore, through the highly acclaimed scenarios work PRELUDE, the potential of scenarios
for framing issues in the early stages of the policy cycle, and a way of inducing strategic thinking in policy-making has
been widely demonstrated. Action - We will achieve our objective by: • continuing to support on-going EEA assessment processes
and especially the future analysis for the SOER 2010,and for the European Ecosystem Assessment (Eureca 2012); • fostering
the use of scenarios and nowcasting techniques in strategic decision-making by developing guidelines, best-practice and web‑based
training tools; • initiating new forward looking/scenario assessments in specific areas, regions and topics; • further exploring
the current use impacts and effectiveness of scenarios in strategic environmental decision-making; • further developing information
systems via SEIS for forward looking information and developing better tailored tools to manage forward-looking information;
and • strengthening cooperation with countries and other major players in the field (i.e. DG ENV, JRC, Eurostat) with the
aim to form strategic partnerships with relevant knowledge centres and research programmes in order to promote capacity building,
improve methodological approaches and extend them to business and NGOs when relevant.
Indicator(s):
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