Detect → Assess → Decide → Act

The decision at stake

The Director of the UNFCCC's Adaptation Division, Dr Youssef Nassef, faced a question conventional analysis could not answer: how to move as many communities as possible onto genuinely transformative resilience pathways — and to do it fast. Incremental, status-quo approaches to community development would not deliver resilience at the pace climate impacts demanded. The Division needed to see beyond current practice: to detect disruptive innovations early enough to act on them.

What we delivered

Resilience Frontiers was created by the UNFCCC as a programme of work deliberately unconstrained by present-day practice, running in parallel to traditional nation-state processes. Shaping Tomorrow provided the detection and assessment layer of that programme: continuous scanning of a broad global evidence base to surface weak signals of disruptive innovation in climate adaptation, with structured analysis converting those signals into decision-relevant insight for the programme's leadership.

The engagement produced three published intelligence reports: Adaptation to Climate Change, Building Community Resilience and Disruptive Adaptation Strategies.

The outcome

The adoption of foresight methodology — anchored by continuous detection — systematically challenged established thinking within the programme. On the strength of this work, Resilience Frontiers moved into a new phase focused on scaling its efforts and demonstrating them on the ground.

The decision at stake

For the UK Government, early identification of developing science and technology is essential to avoiding technological surprise and acting on future risks and opportunities before adversaries or competitors do. But global S&T development is accelerating, and an increasing share of frontier research now happens outside government organisations and programmes — beyond the reach of traditional monitoring. Dstl's Knowledge, Innovation and Futures Enterprise (KnIFE) required an external intelligence capability to underpin its Futures activity.

What we delivered

Shaping Tomorrow was commissioned to detect and assess global developments across all S&T disciplines — natural, physical, social and behavioural — with a focus on potential benefits for the UK Defence and Security community.

Detected trends were projected using structured forecasting principles and assessed against explicit selection criteria: whether a development could lead to significant change, challenge accepted norms, amplify existing signals, impact multiple fields, test the UK's existing capabilities, or carry disruptive potential. The result was a source-referenced, confidence-assessed evidence base supporting KnIFE's futures analysis.

The outcome

Over a sustained 24-month engagement, Shaping Tomorrow delivered 20–40 specific, assessed findings every month — more than 700 concise intelligence reports in total — spanning weak signals, emerging trends and breakthrough developments across the full breadth of global science and technology. Each finding was presented as a decision-ready report, giving KnIFE's Futures activity a continuous, curated evidence base at a scale and cadence no internal team could sustain alone.