Comprehensive and internationally peer-reviewed handbook on tools and methods for forecasting and analysis of global change.

Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques – forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production– to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.

This insightful Handbook emphasizes the unique contribution that Futures Studies offers when understanding and managing current situations. Contributing authors argue that by learning to examine the future in the present, individuals and organizations can expand their abilities to analyze, assess and ultimately make better decisions. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

Cross-cutting analytical chapters explore the emergence and positioning of foresight, approaches and methods, organisational issues, policy transfer and evaluation.

"The World Scientific Handbook of Futures Markets serves as a definitive source for comprehensive and accessible information in futures markets. The emphasis is on the unique characteristics of futures markets that make them worthy of a special volume. In our judgment, futures markets are currently undergoing remarkable changes as trading is shifting from open outcry to electronic and as the traditional functions of hedging and speculation are extended to include futures as an alternative investment vehicle in traditional portfolios. The unique feature of this volume is the selection of five classic papers that lay the foundations of the futures markets and the invitation to the leading academics who do work in the area to write critical surveys in a dozen important topics."--$cProvided by publisher.

Forbes Magazine called the 1,600-page, original Handbook of Futures Markets ``an exceptionally fine collection of work on every phase of the futures market.'' Now in paperback (and weighing much less than the six-and-a-half pound hardcover edition), this concise version covers the essential principles and methods in the encyclopedic original in 800 pages. Comprising all the material in Parts I through V of the original handbook, this edition brings together the know-how of the markets' foremost authorities. It covers futures markets and their operation; factors that influence the markets; uses of the markets, including hedging, managing interest rate risk, commodity spreads and options; forecasting methods and tools; and risk and money management.