Himalayan Futures Lab cultivates youth foresight for resilient mountain futures

The Himalayan Futures Lab brings foresight and storytelling together, enabling youth across the Himalayas to anticipate climate risks, envision regenerative economies, and spark collective resilience. As a Bright Spot, it shows how futures literacy strengthens frontline climate adaptation.

The Himalayas are both cradle and frontline; a cultural lifeline and a climate hotspot. The Himalayan Hub by motorcycle manufacturer Royal Enfield’s Social Mission positions Himalayan youth and communities as storytellers, researchers and stewards, equipping them to document change, seed livelihoods and strengthen climate resilience.

Against this backdrop, the Himalayan Futures Lab, a collaboration between Royal Enfield, environmental conservation organisation Green Hub India and Forum for the Future places these young fellows at the heart of understanding cascading risks and imagining responses. Building on Green Hub’s pioneering fellowship model of training youth as conservation filmmakers, the Lab introduces futures thinking and systems approaches: tools to help fellows not only document change but also ask “what if?” and “what next?” questions.

In doing so, the Lab transforms storytelling and youth foresight into a vehicle for resilience and anticipatory planning.

"Royal Enfield Social Mission is working towards strengthening adaptive capacities for climate resilience across 100 Himalayan communities and landscapes. Through the Himalayan Hub project, we are nurturing a network of changemakers via fellowships and grant programs—many of whom go on to work directly with local communities.

We believe that the Future’s Lab enables fellows to explore climate change vulnerabilities within their communities and apply future thinking methodologies to better anticipate and understand systemic, interconnected risks and possible responses. These insights often find expression in the films and projects they create. Our hope is that fellows first strengthen their own capacity, and then pass on these anticipatory approaches to communities and local ecosystems, helping enhance resilience in the face of climate change."

— Bidisha Dey, Executive Director, Eicher Group Foundation, the CSR arm of Royal Enfield

How is the Himalayan Futures Lab different from more conventional climate adaptation and resilience approaches?

Climate adaptation and resilience in the Himalayas is often framed in terms of crisis response: disaster relief after floods or infrastructure repair after landslides. The Lab takes a different stance — it is proactive, participatory, context-specific and youth-led. Fellows learn to observe climate vulnerabilities in their own valleys, map patterns across ecosystems and livelihoods, and use creative methods to imagine alternative futures. They then go on to various regions in the Himalayas and make these observations as they film, noting connections along the way through integrating on-ground fieldwork with storytelling.

Image: The Himalayan Futures Lab takes a proactive, participatory, context-specific and youth-led approach to climate adaptation and resilience.

Why does the Himalayan Futures Lab’s approach matter?

The Himalayas are South Asia’s water tower, sustaining over a billion people. Yet, the communities who live here are often excluded from national policy debates on adaptation and resilience. The Himalayan Futures Lab bridges that gap by expanding on the question, “What if resilience is not only about infrastructure or action plans, but also about culture, practice, and memory?”

Fellows have begun surfacing insights from everyday life, festivals, clothing, farming rituals, even the way people talk about weather and time. These observations are by no means minute: they are clues to anticipatory capacity, showing how communities are already adapting in their own ways. By weaving community stories and practices into the practice of strategic foresight, the Lab expands on what climate resilience and adaptation means, transforming it from a technical agenda into a living, cultural process.

“When children turn waste into eco-bricks, they are not just building benches but building awareness. Their small steps inspire the community, and even I learnt from them how true resilience is built together, hand in hand.” — Yameen Nazir (Ganderbal, Jammu & Kashmir), GreenHub Western Himalayas Fellowship (Batch 2)

What could the future look like if the Himalayan Futures Lab scales?

Imagine an arch of foresight nodes stretching across the mountains from Ladakh to Arunachal, from Nepal to Bhutan, powered by the Himalayan Futures Lab. Each node would be a space where youth use filmmaking, climate mapping and participatory dialogue to anticipate risks, from glacial floods, water scarcity, to shifting tourism economies.

Collectively, these nodes could form a distributed source of scenarios and solutions, informing district-level planning, cross-border dialogues and regional adaptation strategies. Communities would be equipped not only with stories of change, but with the tools to shape the narratives that drive investment, tourism, and policy.

In this vision, the Himalayas are not just depicted as fragile landscapes under threat — they are living laboratories of resilience, where youth foresight shapes anticipatory governance for an entire region.

Image: Eco-brick building by children, observed by Yameen Nazir, a youth fellow of the GreenHub Western Himalayas Fellowship.

“After the [2024 pilot], I learned to see that climate change hides in daily life like the changpas giving up their yak wool rebo tents because it’s now too warm to live inside them. And I realised that climate change is not abstract science — it seeps into daily rhythms of water, food, movement, and survival.”
— Jaideep Singh Kanyal (Pithoragarh, Uttarakhand), GreenHub Western Himalayas Fellowship (Batch 2)

Questions to consider

What shifts when frontline communities are not just subjects of climate stories but authors of their own futures?

How might foresight literacy become as essential as disaster preparedness in fragile ecosystems?

What if every Himalayan village became a node in a resilience foresight network?

Meet the Bright Spots

A Forum for the Future initiative, in partnership with The Earthshot Prize, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Trane Technologies, the Future of Sustainability: Reimagining the Way the World Works is showcasing the social and climate initiatives shaping a better future, today.

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