By Abril Chimal & Lena Tünkers
In 2024, the 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent was held to address pressing global humanitarian challenges. As part of this important event, we were honored to be among the four winners of the IFRC Solferino Academy Speculative Competition. Our participation in this competition gave us the opportunity to imagine the products and services humans might create to survive and thrive in a world increasingly impacted by digital risks and autonomous weapons. Through a speculative futures exercise, we unfolded four scenarios of possible futures for humanitarian aid, revealing key issues that might emerge and providing valuable insights to inform and guide decisions today. Our process unfolded in four steps: horizon scanning and analysis, identification of key drivers and signals, development of critical uncertainties, and finally, the creation of speculative scenarios.
Image 1: Lena Tünkers & Abril Chimal amongst the winners of the IFRC Solferino Academy Speculative Competition 2024. Photo: Yann le Floc’h
Why is it important to talk about where humanitarian aid might be headed in the future?
The humanitarian sector has been working to its fullest potential but the outside is changing. The increasing complexity and duration of crises—ranging from armed conflicts to climate-induced disasters, digital divide (Muller & Aguiar, 2022), migration, political crisis, natural resources crisis (especially water), and refugees—have exposed the limitations of traditional humanitarian models (Center for Disaster Philanthropy, n.d.), necessitating urgent structural reforms.
So, how can humanitarian actors move beyond reactive responses to ensure aid remains sustainable and impactful in the face of uncertainty? Taking on a foresight lens and inviting humanitarian aid actors to engage with speculative futures is the pathway we explored.
Scanning the Horizon: Research Approach and Key Drivers of Change
Our speculative futures research process began with horizon scanning (Voros, 2003) to identify weak signals and emerging trends related to digital risk and autonomous weapons. To uncover possible directions for novel conflicts involving NGOs and humanitarian aid, we integrated findings from the Interagency Research and Analysis Network (IARAN) and the Centre for Humanitarian Action. We complemented this with social listening data, applying light grounded theory and in vivo coding (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Saldaña, 2021) to capture contextual nuance.
Drivers of Change
From this initial phase of desk research and analysis, we identified recurring patterns and distilled several overarching drivers of change:
- Climate Change – Escalating ecological shifts drive resource conflicts, systemic instability and migration.
- Migration & Housing Crises – Mass migrations and unaffordability reshape urban and rural communities.
- Political Instability – Nationalism and the rise of authoritarianism challenge global norms and human rights.
- Tech Oligarchy – Power over digital infrastructure increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.
- Work Transformation – From the freedom of remote work to precarity. The digitization of labor fuels alienation, inequality, and backlash.
- Belonging & Identity Struggle – Crises amplify the human need for connection, fueling both division and healing.
- Indigenous Wisdom Revival – Alternative worldviews gain traction in response to ecological and digital dominance.
Image 2: Clustering exercise based on grounded theory and in vivo coding on Miro.
Emerging Signals of Autonomy, Displacement, and Redefined Rights
The following emerging signals were identified based on the research through the grounded theory results shown in Miro. These, together with identified drivers of change, serve as the backbone for the scenario creation.
1. Displacement in a Digital Age
How people, data, and communities are uprooted or excluded in digital environments.
Digital refugees refers to individuals displaced from digital spaces due to censorship, cyber threats, data erasure, or loss of access—forced to navigate new online territories in search of safety, identity, and connection. Countries like Estonia (e-Estonia, n.d.) and Tuvalu (Tuvalu.TV, n.d) (represent two sides of the same digital shift—one driven by development, the other by necessity. But digital displacement goes beyond national strategies. Censorship on platforms (India Times, 2024) like Facebook and WhatsApp forces people to migrate elsewhere. At the time of this exercise, the TikTok ban wasn’t yet a reality, but when it happened, we saw a clear example of digital migration (Plotnick, 2025) as users in the U.S. moved from TikTok to Xiaohongshu. How can protection be ensured when identity, safety, and belonging are increasingly digital—and precarious?
Nostalgia is changing: Nostalgia is shifting from tangible objects (Rennie, 2023) —photo albums, letters, and souvenirs—to the digital realm. Instead of flipping through old albums or rediscovering a mixtape, we scroll through phone galleries and rely on algorithm-generated playlists. Social media, such as the yearly Spotify Wrapped (Spotify, 2024), even curates our nostalgia, resurfacing past moments through automated reminders. While this shift allows us to store and access more memories than ever, it also changes how we experience them.
2. Shifting Ecologies: Nature as Actor
The natural world increasingly influences, resists, or merges with technological systems.
Transnature is the evolution of nature beyond its traditional limits—blurring the lines between the organic and synthetic, the human and non-human. Although this is not new—we’ve seen it before in movies and TV series—the natural world is reclaiming its space. At the same time, humans are playing God— the idea of living forever (Vinokour, 2024), and enhancing our capabilities (Mesko, 2025) through tech—and also enhancing nature’s capabilities, engineering ecosystems, and reshaping its course. Some of these practices are resurfacing, such as using animals as weapons (Sitwell, 2022), leveraging technology to manipulate nature for human advantage (Archer-Boydon 2014), and, in the face of climate change, creating artificial “natural” phenomena (Anderson, 2024) .
3. Control vs. Complexity
The tension between efforts to impose order and the messy, adaptive nature of human and ecological systems.
Sterile utopia: Human civilization increasingly pursues artificial environments stripped of nature’s chaos. Cities like Dubai and Singapore’s Wolbachia mosquito trials (reducing dengue 57%) showcase extreme control prioritizing safety over wildness. But do sterile utopias truly offer paradise? These sterile, high-control environments raise humanitarian concerns: Who gets access to safety? What happens to those excluded from engineered stability—whether human or more-than-human?
A new secret language is forming—one that blends AI and nature in ways we don’t fully understand yet. It’s not about control or conflict but about systems adapting, evolving, and reclaiming space in their own way. As autonomous intelligence and the natural world intertwine, they’re shaping a reality that no longer fits human-made definitions, challenging us to listen, interpret (Savage, 2024), and rethink our place in it all.
4. Erosion of Trust & Truth
The rise of manipulation, disinformation, and the breakdown of shared realities.
Misinformation & digital threats: Misinformation and digital threats are redefining trust and security. Deepfakes (Dalugdug, 2025), AI-driven manipulation, and doxxing (UC Berkeley, n.d) expose individuals to new risks, while cyberattacks threaten data and infrastructure. Even blockchain, often seen as secure, isn’t foolproof. As reality becomes easier to distort, stronger cybersecurity, media literacy, and global safeguards are more critical than ever.
5. Belonging Beyond Borders
Redefinitions of identity, community, and care in increasingly fluid, hybrid environments.
Inclusive aid ensures that humans and animals receive support during crises, recognizing their shared displacement. Whether fleeing war, natural disasters, or forced migration (Garcí Fuentes, 2023), people do not leave alone—wild, farm and home animals move with them. From shelters to medical care and legal protections, Inclusive Aid acknowledges this bond, advocating for a humanitarian system that leaves no one behind. Lately, this phenomena has become increasingly common, whether in Brazil (Ionova & Carrasco, 2024), the U.S., Ukraine (FOURPAWS, n.d), Russia, Palestine, or Australia (Readfearn, 2020) etc where shared assistance is needed and given.
Cultural shifts: Digital threats and misinformation are reshaping how we navigate the world, while cultural shifts challenge traditional notions of belonging (Otero, 2023). As mobility increases, geography and identity become fluid. Remote work and nomad visas enable professionals to live between places rather than within them. Co-living spaces offer connection but often detach from local traditions. As culture shifts from shared history and place toward experience, will belonging remain rooted to a territory or become globally fluid?
From Signals to Uncertainties: Why Rights and Power Matter in the Age of Autonomous Systems
Future humanitarian realities will be shaped beyond technological innovation alone. Research revealed recurring concerns: who receives aid, whose safety matters, and who gains agency in crises. Human-technology tensions around control and surveillance are amplified by political biases in funding and distribution (Center for Disaster Philanthropy, n.d.), often reinforcing existing power asymmetries.
Social listening revealed a deeper shift: nature emerges as an unpredictable actor—from Tulum’s mosquitoes to LA’s wildfires—shaping digital infrastructures as disruptor, victim, and co-creator. This points toward restructured humanitarian systems defined by changing relationships between humans, technologies, and ecological actors, where digital risks become instruments in broader struggles over rights and power.
- Who holds rights? — Are rights exclusive to humans, or do they extend to more-than-human entities such as autonomous and digital systems or ecological actors?
- How is power distributed? — Are decisions and control centralized and imposed, or decentralized and emergent from the bottom up?
These tensions became central to our scenario development. They are not just about tools or policies, but about competing worldviews and values. They shape how digital risks and autonomous weapons might transform humanitarian action. Using these two tensions as critical uncertainties, we developed a 2×2 scenario matrix (Rhydderch, 2017) outlining four distinct future trajectories. Each quadrant reflects a unique combination of rights recognition and power distribution and formed the basis for a preliminary scenario narrative.
In response to the competition’s focus on digital risk and autonomous weapons, we selected the scenario that engaged most provocatively with this theme. The result was The Tiniest Soul—a narrative situated at the intersection of Only Human Rights and Bottom-Up Power. It was brought to life through an immersive installation designed to engage audiences with a provocative vision of a possible future.
Scenarios
Drawing from the previously identified signals and drivers, the scenarios explore how shifting constellations of rights and power could shape humanitarian futures in unexpected and provocative ways. The 2×2 matrix served as a logic framework, structured around two critical uncertainties: Who holds rights (only humans vs. nature and humans) and How is power distributed (top-down vs. bottom-up).
We followed a hybrid scenario development approach. In a co-creative brainstorming session, each quadrant of the matrix was translated into a distinct future world through storytelling and light storyboarding. Signals and drivers were allocated across the four configurations to guide tone, themes, and narrative depth—particularly where humanitarian action intersects with more-than-human perspectives.
To test narrative cohesion and emotional resonance, we used generative AI tools to visualize speculative elements and scenes. This helped us craft scenarios that are not only analytically grounded but also imaginative, unsettling, and reflective.
The following section briefly presents the four scenarios, each situated in the year 2087.
Image 3: Axis 1: Nature has rights vs. only humans have rights. Axis 2 : Power from bottom-up vs power from top-down.
Scenario 1: Axis Nature has rights x Power from Bottom-Up
[Signals: Transnature, Inclusive Aid, Misinformation & Digital Threats]
Nature’s Revenge: The Rise of Invisible Warfare
By 2080, nature was granted equal rights with humans, reshaping society and forcing industries, cities, and nations to comply. Despite the known environmental harm of war, conflicts persisted, leading to the development of eco-friendly weapons with Earth Aid International’s support. Biomimicry and genetic modifications enabled soldiers, machinery, and tech weapons to blend seamlessly with nature, becoming nearly undetectable and target-free.
As the boundaries between human, nature, and technology blur, what ethical frameworks will guide the future of international aid?
Scenario 2: Axis Nature has rights x Power from Top-Down
[Signals: Transnature, Sterile Utopia, Inclusive Aid, Cultural Shift]
The perfect human – Protector of Nature
Human civilization has evolved into a symbiosis of technology and nature, governed by the Global Council – an elite group of experts in environmental science, cybernetics, and ethics. Eco-cyborgs with photosynthetic skin, symbiotic implants, and neural interfaces embody a new era of environmental stewardship and are raised as protectors of Planet Earth’s natural balance. Tensions arise, however, as resistance movements challenge centralized control, and the very nanotechnology that makes up eco-cyborgs is used to turn them into weapons of destruction.
In a future where technology and biology merge to protect the planet, how can humanitarian aid evolve to protect both human dignity and ecological harmony in times of crisis?
Scenario 3: Axis Only Humans have rights x Power from Top-Down
[Signals: Transnature, Sterile Utopia, New secret language]
Life Inside the Perception Controller
After years of relentless battles against unseen natural threats, humanity has reached the peak of its quest for a perfectly curated and predictable life—the Perception Controller Home. This sleek, cubic device grants users total control over their environment, shielding them from the chaos of the outside world. News cycles amplify fears of invisible mutations and rogue biological anomalies, reinforcing the illusion of control—one that society clings to desperately. Yet, despite this technological mastery, nature begins to push through the cracks, infiltrating the artificial world.
As nature is reclaiming space, will humanity wage war against the invisible wild? What part might humanitarian aid play?
Deep Dive: Scenario 4 “Tiniest Souls”
Scenario 4: Axis Only Humans have rights x Power from Buttom-Up
[Signals: Nostalgia is changing, Digital Refugees, Cultural shifts, Misinformation & digital threats]
What if a nation’s cultural survival relied on tiny artifacts held by its citizens – what happens if one is lost?
While the other three scenarios explore tensions between human and ecological forces, this fourth scenario most directly engages with the IFRC Solferino Academy Speculative Competition’s core theme digital risk and autonomous weapons. For this reason, it was selected for a deep dive and translated into the final physical installation, presented at the 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
Welcome to the year 2087. You carry a fragment of your digital nation with you, safely stored in the “Tiniest Soul” ring worn on your finger.
Over the past decades, much of Earth’s land was heavily reshaped by changing climates and mass displacement. Our countries and cultural identities could no longer survive solely by claiming physical land and building borders. Climate-induced displacements left citizens vulnerable to the loss of their identities, histories, and cultures—treasures that could be lost forever.
To safeguard our nation’s essence, we began capturing and storing it digitally as we sought refuge in safer lands, leaving our homelands behind. However, the centralized nature of these digital storage systems, where vast amounts of personal and cultural information were held in a few vulnerable locations, made them prime targets for attacks. History could be easily manipulated by simply erasing or editing data, causing profound disruptions to our collective memory.
Moreover, the growing reliance on digital identities revealed a critical flaw: they were fragile and easily compromised by technical failures, cyber-attacks, or systemic changes. As data leaks, loss, and misuse escalated, a new era emerged—the era of Digital Refugees. This brought forth a new humanitarian challenge, where the survival of digital identity and culture became a matter of life or death.
In response, “Tiniest Soul” rings were created as a decentralized solution to preserve and protect a nation’s cultural essence across its citizens. When brought into proximity with one another, these rings could restore lost data within safeguarded spaces, ensuring the survival of shared heritage.
These rings symbolize the fragility of the digital age, where the preservation of a nation’s soul relies on the smallest, most precious artifact—just a byte of information.
To encourage light role-play and deeper reflection on the scenario’s impacts and meanings, we created a series of prompt questions.
- What if, in a world without physical borders, the concept of “possessions” shifted from tangible objects to cultural narratives and digital heritage — who would have the power to control them?
- What if the global community, facing existential threats, had to decide which aspects of their culture and identity to preserve in a digital vault — and which to leave behind? Who gets to make those decisions, and what does it mean for future generations?
- What if a digital vault for preserving a nation’s culture wasn’t just about storage, but about creating a living, breathing connection between its citizens worldwide? How might this shift the way we see belonging to and with others?
- What if being part of a global community wasn’t about geography but about what you chose to safeguard in a digital vault — could this become a new form of citizenship?
Engagement during 34th ICRC Conference
During the 34th ICRC Conference (2024), the Tiniest Soul speculative future was presented as one of four winning future narratives from the IFRC Solferino Academy Speculative Competition. Visitors encountered a physical representation of the Tiniest Soul ring, with a digital animation with images simulating “memories” creating the illusion of hovering over the ring.
Image 5: Prototype set-up. Photo: Lena Tünkers
Each visitor received a letter from their government, marking their 16th birthday and welcoming them as a new Nation Keeper of their digital country. This letter served as their first introduction to the role and its responsibilities within this speculative scenario.
After reading the letter, visitors approached one of us, and through simple role play, we guided them deeper into the mechanics of this future narrative. Finally, we posed a question: If you could store one element of your culture in a Tiniest Soul ring, what would it be?
Visitors took their time to reflect on this, writing down their most cherished cultural elements on cards and leaving them in a card box.
Image 5: Participants reading their invitation letter to be Nation Keepers @ the 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Geneva, Switzerland, October, 2024. Photo: Yann le Floc’h
Key Learnings
Throughout this engagement with a speculative future, several insights and reflections emerged.
One key takeaway was the realization that many visitors had not deeply considered the endangerment of cultural heritage, its ties to physical land, and the humanitarian impacts of climate change. Similarly, concepts such as digital refugees and digital countries had not been widely explored in their thinking. The engagement sparked many discussions, with visitors drawing connections between the future narrative and their own interests—such as blockchain—revealing the emotional depth of the topic.
From a design perspective, a powerful realization was how personal the scenario became when visitors were asked to choose and write down an element from their culture. This simple act required them to make a decision, reflect on their values, and consider the significance of their cultural heritage. All visitors engaged with the speculative future to some degree, and nearly all left behind a note with a cherished cultural element. However, many found it challenging to fully imagine this future, highlighting the difficulty of conceptualizing such a scenario (Candy & Dunagan 2016).
The light role-playing aspect, particularly the letter given to visitors at the start, played a crucial role in making the experience immersive (Bontoux et. all 2016). Our presence and interactions helped guide them deeper into the narrative, making the engagement more tangible and thought-provoking.
Image 6: Answers from visitors to the question “What would save you from your culture?”
Conclusion
As we reflect on the speculative futures exercise at the 34th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent and our prior foresight process that enabled us to explore digital risks and autonomous weapons, it becomes clear how vital it is to move beyond traditional ideas of how our world (—and especially humanitarian aid—might evolve.
Change can happen faster than we expect, and developments often take unforeseen directions. Engaging in foresight processes and speculative futures exercises helps us expand our horizons, think beyond the obvious, and anticipate the potential consequences of today’s decisions.
The four futures we brought to life are just a few of many possible paths. A continuous dialogue on the future of humanitarian aid, along with ongoing sense-making of weak signals emerging at the periphery, is essential.
Implications and Limitations of the Research
This speculative futures exercise on humanitarian aid and digital risks, including autonomous weapons, was developed specifically for the open call. It highlights the growing relevance of more-than-human perspectives and seeks to capture overlooked narratives in the sector. Limitations include potential authors’ bias, reliance on secondary sources influenced by funding agendas, and data drawn from platforms that may not reflect diverse regional or cultural contexts.
Special thanks to: Ben Holt, Shaun Hazeldine, Yann le Floc’h and Heather Leason for all the support and the rest of ICRC team.
Want to explore further? Contact us! If you’re interested in deep diving futures narratives, drivers of change or emerging signals.
Abril Chimal: abrilchimal4@gmail.com
Lena Tünkers: hi@lenatuenkers.com
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