Has the COVID-19 crisis changed our relationship to the future?

Abstract The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis introduced a sudden discontinuity into the functioning of human societies worldwide by affecting individual habits as well as economic and social life. This paper is a first attempt to investigate whether that discontinuity also altered our relationship to the future, in particular through the production of scenarios of a ?world after? significantly different from the world before. We analyzed the representations of the future produced at the height of the first wave of the crisis, between March and June 2020, through a selective review of these productions. From the 60 sources found, we selected 23 texts yielding 83 scenarios. We used a classic four-category typology (Continued Growth, Discipline, Collapse and Transformation) that allowed us to identify scenarios of continuity and discontinuity. The results show a paradoxical predominance of continuity scenarios, contradicting our hypothesis that the crisis would have fostered creativity regarding the ?world after.? The discussion focuses on potential explanatory elements. These relate essentially to the way the scenarios were produced, notably in terms of time horizon, explanation of the methods and selection of the variables structuring the scenarios. These elements seem to indicate that these scenarios were rather generated from a reactive posture, showing a reluctance to rethink the present as a moment of discontinuity opening up the horizon of possibilities. This initial work paves the way for a more systematic exploration of the practice of anticipation and the capacity to produce creative/imaginative futures in times of crisis.

Exploring the future of land use and food security: A new set of global scenarios.

Facing a growing and more affluent world population, changing climate and finite natural resources, world food systems will have to change in the future. The aim of the Agrimonde-Terra foresight study was to build global scenarios linking land use and food security, with special attention paid to overlooked aspects such as nutrition and health, in order to help explore the possible future of the global food system. In this article, we seek to highlight how the resulting set of scenarios contributes to the debate on land use and food security and enlarges the range of possible futures for the global food system. We highlight four main contributions. Combining a scenario building method based on morphological analysis and quantitative simulations with a tractable and simple biomass balance model, the proposed approach improves transparency and coherence between scenario narratives and quantitative assessment. Agrimonde-Terra's scenarios comprise a wide range of alternative diets, with contrasting underlying nutritional and health issues, which accompany contrasting urbanization and rural transformation processes, both dimensions that are lacking in other sets of global scenarios. Agrimonde-Terra's scenarios share some similarities with existing sets of global scenarios, notably the SSPs, but are usually less optimistic regarding agricultural land expansion up to 2050. Results suggest that changing global diets toward healthier patterns could also help to limit the expansion in agricultural land area. Agrimonde-Terra's scenarios enlarge the scope of possible futures by proposing two pathways that are uncommon in other sets of global scenarios. The first proposes to explore possible reconnection of the food industry and regional production within supranational regional blocs. The second means that we should consider that a 'perfect storm', induced by climate change and an ecological crisis combined with social and economic crises, is still possible. Both scenarios should be part of the debate as the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic shows.