Future-proofing Europe’s production and consumption systems: EEA calls for systemic, long-term thinking

The EEA’s new foresight report 'Imagining a sustainable Europe in 2050: exploring implications for core production and consumption systems', looks at how Europe’s food, energy and mobility systems and the built environment could evolve.

These systems, vital for meeting Europeans’ basic needs, also drive significant environmental and climate pressures making it crucial to explore how they might evolve by 2050.

The report comes at a time when the European Union has just launched the Preparedness Union Strategy aiming to enhance Europe's capability to prevent and respond to emerging threats, including climate change and natural disasters. The strategy aims to bolster the use of strategic foresight, anticipation to better understand future risks, threats and their cascading effects.

Imagining a sustainable future in 2050

Four imaginaries by the EEA 

The report takes four imagined futures, or ‘imaginaries’, developed by the EEA and its network – Eionet, and explores how Europe’s key systems might evolve under each possible future. Each imaginary explores a distinct pathway, shaped by different societal drivers, governance models and technological roles. They include: 

• Technocracy for the common good: sustainability is achieved through state control at the national level, which prioritises society’s collective interests. Technology enables unprecedented monitoring and control of social and ecological systems. 

• Unity in adversity: Europeans respond to severe environmental, climate and economic crises by empowering the EU to use stringent, top-down regulatory and market-based measures to set rigorously enforced boundaries for economic activity. 

• The great decoupling: innovative companies are the central actors. They succeed thanks to technological breakthroughs, especially in the bioeconomy, enabling the decoupling of gross domestic product growth from adverse environmental impacts. 

• Ecotopia: stakeholders from civil society have brought about a shift in collective thinking and action. Local communities reconnect to nature while technology is used sparingly to enable sustainable lifestyles. Consumption and resource use are being scaled back markedly. 

The imaginaries offer different pathways for how Europeans might meet their needs. Yet some solutions appear across all four futures. The shift to alternative protein sources, the use of nature-based solutions, the electrification of transport, the repurposing and renovation of existing buildings, and the expansion of renewable energy systems are just a few of the solutions identified in the report as enabling sustainability across all four futures. These common elements provide a set of future-proofed directions for systemic change.  

Stress-testing for disruptions 

To assess the robustness of these futures and identify critical vulnerabilities, the report stress-tested each imaginary against major disruptions, which seem more likely in the current world of increasing uncertainty.  The report takes into consideration disruptions such as a massive breakdown of digital systems, global unrest, climate disasters, or a global financial crisis.  

The exercise helped to identify a set of capacities that could help society navigate systemic change and build resilience. These can be grouped according to the following thematic clusters:  

• collaborative and anticipatory governance; 
• societal engagement and creativity; 
• connection to nature and empathy;  
• spatial planning and multifunctional land use; 
• AI and digitalisation;  
• preparedness for shocks. 

Long-term thinking for building resilience 

This foresight report is published at a time of major position-shifting, when the European Union is rethinking its global role, seeking to foster competitiveness and secure sustainable prosperity. The assessment makes clear that systemic and long-term thinking are crucial for developing policy responses that consider a whole range of possibilities, challenges and opportunities.  

Aimed at policymakers, experts in the four production and consumption systems as well as other societal actors looking for inspiration, the report invites readers to imagine resilient, sustainable futures—and start building them today.