Our Approach

Future Seas uses a strategic technique called ‘foresighting’ to develop interdisciplinary, evidence-informed plausible scenarios of the future by 2030, for each of the key challenges.

The scenarios include what the future would look like if current trends continue, and also what our future could look like if we more effectively used the data and knowledge currently available to us, and pushed as far as possible towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). We then use ‘back-casting’ (i.e. working backwards from the desirable future) to generate a tangible plan for possible actions to undertake at local, regional and global scales, if society chose to work towards the future more in line with the UN SDG’s.

We take a broad and interdisciplinary look at what processes and approaches have been and could be effective for leveraging change. Uniquely, in addition to management, policy and governance actions, our collaboration is exploring what approaches have been used in Psychology, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Public Health for human behavior change across all levels of intervention.

The field of psychology has generated a body of evidence about the design and efficacy of behaviour change interventions for individuals, organisations and communities. This research has mainly been applied to health literacy and health behaviours, however, the principles and mechanisms inform models of change that can be applied to other real-world challenges, such as marine environmental issues. The field of ICT has informed measurement of human behaviour, cognition and environmental psychology perspectives that underpins technology enabled behaviour change. Psychology is also moving increasingly in synergy with the fields of computing and technology to maximise the reach, innovation and sustainability of change interventions, whether they be programs for individuals or whole communities.