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The overall goal of this project is to support the further development of the vision of a Clean Planet 2050 and the implementation of the European Green Deal by creating and harvesting stories.

‘Stories from 2050’ is an exploratory project with the primary goal to enable its readers and policy-makers to imagine futures beyond the usual thinking. Through a series of participatory futures workshops and an open engagement platform at www.storiesfrom2050.com, we aimed to collect what activist communities, stakeholders, and citizens think, feel and say about our shared futures, with a focus on sustainability opportunities and challenges associated with the European Green Deal. The project aims to develop challenging stories that depict drivers of change, future challenges, consequences of failure and low-likelihood, high-impact 'wild card' events and present them in a form that will ease their use in policy-making processes.

The first set of stories was developed during a six-month process where we invited individuals and communities from all over the world to imagine alternative futures of 2050. Therefore, we made a jump into 2050, unfolding a narrative of a fictional Space Mission. We’ve told the participants that our Earth had become uninhabitable and sent them on a journey to explore new planets. We defined those planets with particular terrains based on the elements of nature such as ‘Earth’, ‘Fire’, ‘Air’, ‘Water’ and ‘Life’ (knowing that life is an extension of the term ‘elements’). With a guided process, we’ve let participants imagine the systems and worldviews existing on those planets.

From this first input, the project team created the Enriched Planet Narratives (see below). They were the guiding stories for the second workshop series, which were split into two parts. The first one was an expert session focusing on the transitional state between today and 2050. For the second one, we took a community-based approach of imagining fictional characters that would live on the imagined planets, and participants had to describe how they interacted with each other. To complete the stories, the project team then selected professional and creative story-writers who used the storylines built by the community as a source of inspiration. However, each writer had the freedom to interpret them and create their own version. The results of this process are the stories in our booklet. Moreover, the detailed approach of the complete development process and outputs of all workshops can be viewed here.