WHO Foresight: Monitoring emerging technologies and building futures-thinking

What is foresight?

Foresight is the process of systematically surveying developments in science and technology that are likely to lead to the greatest health, social, and economic benefits.

The objective is to understand areas of research and emerging technologies and identify their potential implications and opportunities in order to draw useful insights for strategic planning, policy-making, and preparedness.

Foresight aims to explore and shape the future, to build and use collective intelligence in a structured, systematic, and systemic way to anticipate developments and is guided by the following questions:

• What are the most impactful, plausible, and novel issues in global health and healthcare over the next two decades?

• How do these issues interrelate and how can global health governance respond to scenarios emerging from them?

• What are the potential risks arising from these developments?

Emerging technologies may both offer great health opportunities but also pose significant challenges.

The WHO Global Health Foresight function will provide ongoing monitoring of emerging technologies to understand potential risks and proactively consider preventative and mitigating actions.

One of the goals of the WHO Global Foresight function is to strengthen capabilities for the early identification of trends or advances in science and technology that could have notable impacts on public health. Here are some resources, developed by WHO Global Health Foresight, that offer training and guidance for integration of Foresight approaches into practice.

The responsible science and emerging technologies newsletter will provide regular relevant updates, including:

• recent developments, tools, publications, and documents;
• implementation of project activities at the global, regional, and national level;
• sharing of experiences from countries, experts and other stakeholders; lessons learned and good practices;
• recent and upcoming events;
• opportunities for network building

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