Governments have always planned for the future, with varying degrees of success. However, the State’s efforts to anticipate the needs of future generations rarely capture the imagination of populations more focused on current economic conditions, access to public services, and social stability. The events of 2020/2021 may signal a shift in the priorities of electorates. There has been a move towards climate realism in wealthier countries and a recognition of the need to prepare for the next pandemic. Making changes now to avert possible catastrophes decades in the future is no longer seen as a distraction from current policy concerns, but as an inevitable and core part of the State’s responsibilities to its present and future citizens.

These are global concerns and the response will have to be based on multilateralism and compromise, and the policies of individual nation states will largely be defined by goals set at an international level. Of course, individual states make detailed projections and decisions now that will have economic, social, and environmental impacts far into the future. But the idea of imagining the full range of possible scenarios across all policy areas, and developing the capacity to decide how these may impact resource allocation, is a relatively new one.

This is the aim of strategic forecasting. It is an approach to policymaking that attempts to manage uncertainty by identifying a number of possibilities. Governments, institutions, non-governmental organisations, and other national and international collective entities can develop anticipatory capacity by making better use of what is known already. Naturally, data are important but just as important is the wisdom of those who have spent many years learning about and working with current social and environmental problems. The discipline of strategic foresight puts particular emphasis on harnessing existing knowledge, not just from datasets but also from the minds of those most active, committed, and thoughtful.

The current European Commission has accorded strategic foresight an important position in the management of European Union (EU) policy implementation, which is evident in the recently published EU Drugs Strategy 2021–2025, the topic of two articles in this issue. Other international institutions, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have embraced strategic foresight. There is, as yet, no evidence of this approach in Irish strategies or policy documents, but it is likely to become more important to policymakers in the next few years. Strategic foresight does not involve attempting to predict the future, but rather systematically examining current sources of information to imagine possible developments and consider what this means for current policymaking. Methods include horizon scanning to identify weak signals of change; megatrends analysis to explore global changes and their implications for local policy; and scenario planning and working back from an image of the future to decide the steps to achieve or avoid such an outcome.

Drug use patterns can alter rapidly in response to societal change or movements in popular culture. In the past, governments have used emergency measures with unpredictable outcomes to deal with this. Strategic forecasting, building on careful analysis of emerging trends data, may provide the opportunity to ensure society is better prepared when sudden change happens in the future.