Future periscope: Europe in 2030 and beyond

What is our energy system likely to look like in 2030? Will our university sector shrink to a small number of globally dominant winners, while all others disappear in the noise of global, online education marketplace? Will personal transport diminish as society pushes for more environmentally sustainable means of transport, or can technology re-invent how we get around? And amidst all this technological and social change, what will Europe itself be like?

These questions aren’t for science fiction writers. Across the world, many academics now specialize in methodologies to gather trend data and systematically make projections from them. The auto makers do it. Wall Street does it. Even the CIA and MI6 do it. But how do they do it? Are our methods of foresight reliable? As technological change accelerates, are we any good at planning for it?

For this panel, we bring together the views of 3 major views on Europe’s future. One is the Science|Business Network’s ‘Europe 2030’ report, another is the work of the Millennium Project, and the third is the EU-funded VERA project.