Future Trends for Scotland: findings from the 2024-2025 horizon scanning project

1. Introduction

Context

Over the course of 2024-25, the Scottish Government led a Horizon Scanning project seeking to understand key trends, risks and opportunities that could be important for Scotland over the next 10-20 years. More than 180 stakeholders representing government, the wider public sector, third sector organisations, academia and business have contributed their insights during different phases of the project, offering direction and constructive challenge to help refine the findings. This report and the accompanying trend pack set out the 60 key trends identified as part of this Horizon Scanning project. This is a key part of a wider programme of work to embed foresight into strategic decision making across government, and the wider public sector, in order to improve resilience in Scotland and make the most of future opportunities.

Foresight is a systematic approach to thinking about the future and understanding the forces shaping the longer term, with the aim of exploring and anticipating different alternatives of the future. It uses trends and other dynamic sources of evidence to arrive at insights which can then be taken into account in policy formulation, planning and decision making.^[1] As such, it is different to forecasting, which makes predictions about what the future will look like based on static, historical data.^[2] Trends are the patterns of events that suggest change over time and they are essential in helping us understand how things might evolve over a longer-term horizon.

There is a growing acknowledgement internationally of the value that improving foresight and transparency adds to decision making. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is supporting governments not only to respond to present challenges but also to anticipate and shape future possibilities by proactively integrating foresight, innovation and continuous learning into the heart of public governance.^[3] The United Nations Futures Lab aims to enable policymaking and programming to transition from short-term reactions to long-term sustainable choices.^[4] Other countries have similar programmes of work, with Finland, the United Kingdom, Wales, New Zealand, Canada and Singapore amongst some of the world leaders in foresight. Lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic have played a significant role in increasing understanding of the importance of anticipating issues to make the most of opportunities and mitigate risks: In Scotland the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Post-Covid-19 Futures Commission recommended that: “We need to put the necessary infrastructure in place to support better preparedness for future challenges”.^[5]

In 2023, the Scottish Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee (FPAC) recommended that “Scottish Ministers and the Permanent Secretary consider whether civil servants working for the Scottish Government should provide long-term insight briefings on the challenges Scotland faces over the next 50 years”.^[6] This is an approach that is already in place in the Welsh Government – their longer-term trends reports support the Welsh public sector in making better decisions for the long term.^[7] In response to the recommendations of the FPAC report, the Permanent Secretary highlighted that the Scottish Government would begin publishing reports of longer-term insights and that this would “create a new resource for public bodies and partners in the third and private sectors to support their own planning and preparedness”.^[8] This publication responds to that commitment to FPAC.

This Report

This report is supported by a trend pack articulating the evidence and interview insights that informed each trend presented in this report. The trends are summarised in the thematic sections in Section Two of this report. Stakeholders were invited to participate in two workshops to help shape our understanding of the long-term risks and opportunities relating to each of the identified trends for Scotland, and key findings from these workshops are summarised in Section Three of this report. Details of the project methodology can be found in ‘Future Trends for Scotland: Project Methodology’.

This report does not cover any potential policy or strategy implications, and it is not a statement of government policy. By publishing the findings from the 2024-25 Horizon Scanning project, the Scottish Government seeks to make a contribution to a wider debate about future trends affecting Scotland, and to support other organisations in their own work in planning for the opportunities and plausible future risks that may lie ahead.

Understanding public views about future trends, risks and opportunities is essential: integrating diverse perspectives can enhance the robustness and inclusiveness of foresight exercises, uncovering gaps and blind spots and challenging assumptions about what is important. It has not been possible to undertake full-scale public engagement within the scope of this project. Instead, a strategic focus on small-scale direct engagement with young people was adopted to explore their views of the future. This work was undertaken in partnership with the UK Government Office for Science, Demos Helsinki and the Scottish Youth Parliament, and it is described in more detail in Section Four and in ‘Young People and the Future of Scotland: A Participatory Horizon Scanning Engagement’. In addition, in July 2024 a series of questions on views of the future were integrated into a wider Scottish Government public insights survey with a representative sample of the Scottish public. The results of this are provided in Section Five of this report.

Project Limitations

In developing the trends material, the 2024-25 Horizon Scanning project team has made decisions on which trends to include, how broad or specific the trends are, how to reflect published literature, and interview responses and what to exclude. These decisions have been based on comprehensive research and analysis, interviews and workshops. While the project team has confidence that the trends identified are important, it is likely that the list of 60 trends presented in this report does not represent all possible trends that could impact Scotland over the next 10-to-20-year period. The trend pack presents key evidence about likely future trends based on publicly-available evidence. Although data may have been drawn from projections, forecasts or models, the trend descriptions are not predictions, forecasts or models.

The trend pack accompanying this report was developed as a resource to be used in workshops and engagements. It presents very concise summaries of a few key findings for each trend. These are not comprehensive summaries of all available published evidence or data for each trend. The ways in which these trends develop and the impacts they have may differ between urban and rural areas, or across different parts of Scotland. It has not been possible to include extensive data on subnational differences within these summaries.

The majority of the trend material was pulled together in October 2024 as an input to the Horizon Scanning project workshops that took place in November 2024. In an era of increasing global uncertainty, the evidence that shaped this understanding of future trends is constantly changing. While a few necessary updates have been made to the trends based on stakeholder feedback and to reflect key new evidence that affects their conclusions, the majority of this material has not been updated since October 2024.

The project team has made a conscious choice to present material on trends for which there is evidence that the trend is already occurring, rather than potential new trends that may develop in the future. This means that the analysis is rooted in today’s world and may not reflect more unknown or unexpected possibilities. The project team also acknowledges that many of the trends identified in the trend pack are negative, and this may reflect a wider ‘negativity bias’ arising from the literature on risk that has informed this work.

Despite the inherent limitations of this type of work, the findings highlight the need for public organisations in Scotland to focus on resilience, preparedness and adaptive policymaking. This includes using existing processes and systems to align near-term policy investments with a long-term vision for environmental, economic and social sustainability (for example, through the National Performance Framework).