UNDP Embeds Foresight Into a 5-Year Green Transition Programme in 6 Weeks

UNDP's five-year programme "Catalysing the Green Transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina" aims to enable a just shift to a green, zero-carbon economy. It runs as a portfolio across five pillars — decarbonisation, depollution, nature and biodiversity, circularity, and environmental justice — underpinned by continuous learning through Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and Dynamic Portfolio Management (DPM).

The team needed a horizon scanning capability that could surface signals of change across all five pillars and feed them into regular sensemaking and programming decisions, without becoming a one-off report that aged out before the next portfolio review.

Envisioning used the Signals platform to establish a lightweight, repeatable foresight-to-MEL workflow: surface signals, organise them around the portfolio's pillars, and feed the intelligence into quarterly reviews.

• Built two purpose-built interactive radars (Green Transition and Circular Economy) containing citation-backed signals of change.
• Applied a six-stage AI-enhanced methodology: ensemble generation across five frontier models, semantic deduplication, impact assessment, narrative synthesis, source verification, and interactive visualisation.
• Orchestrated five AI models in parallel (Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5 Mini, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Mistral Large, Sonar Pro) to increase signal diversity and reduce single-model bias.
• Integrated a five-level verification system (Grounded → Fabricated) with linked external sources for every signal.
• Delivered full downloadable datasets and an AI assistant for natural-language exploration of the signal data.
• Ran a series of working sessions with UNDP to configure the scans and plug the workflow directly into their existing MEL and DPM processes.

• A repeatable foresight-to-MEL workflow embedded in a five-year programme: foresight outputs feed directly into quarterly portfolio reviews and programming decisions.
• All five portfolio pillars covered in a single scanning engagement.
• Delivered within a six-week timeline, including model configuration, results refinement, and two stakeholder webinars.
• Six months of hosted access to the interactive radars for ongoing use.
• The delivery is designed to outlast the engagement: UNDP teams can reuse the datasets, run follow-up scans at set intervals, and embed the radar in portfolio reviews, closing the loop between foresight and action.