WORLD FUTURES DAY - DECEMBER 2, 2022

Event Review

In its inaugural celebration, World Futures Day focused on “Inclusive and Resilient Futures”. Hosted at UNESCO Headquarters, the Day spotlighted efforts from the UN system and its Member States, on new visions for multilateralism and how futures approaches inform inclusive and resilient policy design. The event provided an opportunity for international organizations, Member States, civil society and non-governmental actors alike to celebrate new ways to use the future.

UNESCO encourages the dissemination of futures literacy as a capability-based approach to development – a skill accessible to each and every individual. Finding and implementing more sustainable and participatory approaches to development in this decade will be key to ensuring effective and inclusive decisionmaking worldwide. Taking an interdisciplinary, intergenerational and complex systems approach, themes for WFD 2022 included:

Our Common Future – how and why the UN Common Agenda is focused on futures and anticipatory approaches;

Future Generations – the importance of actively engaging with futures and anticipatory approaches for the resilience of future generations and intergenerational equity;

Planetary Resilience – how futures and anticipatory approaches can enable greater planetary resilience;

Socioeconomic Transformation and Inclusive Societies – how futures and anticipatory approaches can contribute to a more inclusive and equitable world.

The Message from the UNESCO Director-General Ms Audrey Azoulay stated that when the Member States of UNESCO adopted a resolution to establish World Futures Day, they were underscoring the importance of imagining and anticipating what the future could look like in order to build more inclusive and more balanced societies together. This was the case, for example, in 1997, when UNESCO adopted the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, or in

2021, when we adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Most recently, she stated, the Transforming Education Summit, held in New York and based on a Futures of Education report, served as yet another example of such farsighted action. As Canadian novelist Steven Erikson has written, “the future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises”. She notes that is us our responsibility to see to it that these surprises are not unpleasant ones. Thus, to inaugurate World Futures Day, UNESCO calls on all its Member States and all the world’s societies to use their imagination, to explore the possibilities, and so to “free” the present.

“We are living in increasingly complex times marked by profound existential changes. And we have often been late in coming to grips with them. In order to avoid succumbing to a bleak future we must re-examine how we think about the present, unleashing the power of our imagination so that we can seize every opportunity available to us. Futures literacy is entirely in keeping with UNESCO’s role as the United Nations’ laboratory of ideas. Opening our minds and thinking about tomorrow – and both the risk and the promise which come with it – are exactly what the Organization’s futures literacy programme is all about. With futures literacy we are fostering an approach which can serve as a powerful tool for innovation and transformation; we are encouraging a perspective on the future which is rooted in humanity’s diversity of knowledge, humanity’s diverse cultures and humanity’s diverse worldviews. We are working steadily throughout the world, organizing more than 100 workshops – or “laboratories” - and collaborating with the researchers who are part of the 37 UNESCO Chairs which help to develop and spread this approach. We are shaking up – “freeing”, if you will – the future in pursuit of a prime objective: a more effective response to the great challenges of our time. Thinking about the future this way allows us to take anticipatory action with greater clarity.