RAND Europe’s inaugural ‘Trends in Focus’ report highlights nine trends organised into three thematic clusters that are shaping the United Kingdom and Europe more broadly. Prepared for the 2025 RAND Europe Foresight Forum, the report is intended to encourage reflection on trends that could have a significant impact within the next five years but might currently be overlooked outside their respective expert communities.

Trends in Focus 2025

Erik Silfversten, Artur Honich, Zsofia Wolford, Fook Nederveen

ResearchPublished Oct 13, 2025

RAND Europe’s inaugural ‘Trends in Focus’ report highlights nine trends organised into three thematic clusters that are shaping the United Kingdom and Europe more broadly. Prepared for the RAND Europe Foresight Forum, the report is intended to encourage reflection on trends that could have a significant impact within the next five years but might currently be overlooked outside their respective expert communities.

The three themes analysed in the report are the following:

  1. Facing an increasingly hostile security environment, European NATO Allies decided to significantly increase national defence expenditures. But can Europe bolster defence spending without exacerbating other major economic, environmental and social trends?
  2. Adolescents in the UK and in many European countries face a stark set of challenges that include declining school attendance, increasing mental health difficulties, economic inactivity and youth violence.
  3. Despite the importance of resilience at the planetary, community and individual levels, it is becoming increasingly challenging to identify effective and practical policy mechanisms to address these complex issues. Policy makers often grapple with the paradox that they understand the risks yet find it challenging to take early and decisive action.

The findings presented in this report are based on desk research and a crowdsourced process for identifying and shortlisting trends that involved over two dozen senior experts from RAND Europe’s four research groups.

Key Findings

  • The commitment by European governments to increase defence spending will face difficult economic and societal decisions. Complicating this situation is the rapid transformation in military technologies, alongside persistent structural issues across the defence-industrial base and the acquisition system. Together, these factors create a complex scenario that could hinder rearmament efforts and exacerbate societal divides regarding defence. A significant part of the solution lies in European allies collaborating more effectively, leveraging their respective industrial strengths and enhancing cross-border cooperation.
  • The challenges facing today’s young people are not isolated problems but interconnected issues that will have lasting effects on society as a whole. Declining school attendance, increasing mental health difficulties, economic inactivity and youth violence are not only limiting young people’s opportunities to flourish, but also worsening existing inequalities and weakening the resilience of our society and economy. The gap between the needs of young people and the support available to them is widening.
  • National governments often struggle to address systemic resilience challenges such as the climate crisis, pandemic preparedness and the increasing burden of mental health. The core difficulty lies not in a lack of awareness but a short-term focus: even when the facts are clear, priorities change slowly, and the full costs – such as those associated with untreated mental health problems – are often underestimated. Preventing crises is almost always less expensive and more effective than responding to them. However, the benefits and savings associated with prevention are often less tangible than the immediate, visible impact of reactive measures.

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Silfversten, Erik, Artur Honich, Zsofia Wolford, and Fook Nederveen, Trends in Focus 2025. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4298-1.html.
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This work was conducted within the Defence, Security, and Justice Program within RAND Europe.

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