##### *The Horizon Scanning Tournament, with ARIA, Renaissance Philanthropy, & Metaculus.*

[<u>**Join the tournament and start forecasting**</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/horizons/)

Figuring out which research bets will matter most over the next decade is one of the hardest problems in science funding. The [<u>Horizon Scanning Tournament</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/horizons/) is our attempt to bring real probabilities to that question. It’s part of the Horizon Scanning Study Group (HSSG), a collaboration between [<u>Renaissance Philanthropy</u>](https://www.renaissancephilanthropy.org), the UK’s [<u>Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)</u>](https://www.aria.org.uk/), and Metaculus.

ARIA empowers scientists and engineers to pursue breakthroughs at the edge of the possible. Renaissance Philanthropy and Metaculus have worked together to convene and facilitate the HSSG: assembling 25 cross-disciplinary experts, running study group workshops, and developing the forecasting questions you see here. Those questions span ARIA's current and emerging programme areas, mapping bottlenecks, surfacing underestimated research avenues, and identifying where new investment could accelerate scientific progress most.

Your forecasts and the reasoning behind them will feed directly into that work, helping quantify uncertainty and inform where ARIA focuses next.

This is a chance to engage with frontier science across areas like biomanufacturing, ecosystems, and biodefense, and to have your thinking shape the decisions of one of the world's most ambitious research agencies.

### The Horizon Scanning Study Group (HSSG)

The idea for the HSSG draws on a long-running model at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): every year, DARPA assembles a group of experts who spend months doing deep dives on emerging research areas and surface what they think the agency should be paying attention to. It's one of the more reliable methods for importing outside intelligence into a funding institution.

The problem with that model: the output is typically a static report. The reasoning behind it (e.g., what the experts were uncertain about, what they disagreed on, where the real cruxes are) mostly disappears.

The HSSG seeks to fix that. Before producing program recommendations, the group builds a shared model of how a field actually works: the dependencies between scientific problems, the bottlenecks, and the underestimated pathways. Those models surface the questions where uncertainty is highest and where new evidence would most change where you'd invest. The forecasting tournament is how we make that uncertainty legible.

Beginning in September 2025, approximately 25 cross-disciplinary experts convened across several working groups, each focused on one of ARIA's current or emerging programme areas. They ran workshops, built causal models of their fields, and designed the forecasting questions you see in this tournament.

### Focus Areas

The working groups span several domains:

* **Biomanufacturing**. The central question: how much of global chemical production can shift away from petroleum feedstocks by 2050? The group is developing two proposed programme tracks: a scattershot approach for radical new technologies, and a lab-to-industry bridge for de-risking scale-up infrastructure.&nbsp;
* **Plant genomics and biotech**. Plant transformation pipelines, genome annotation, and precision breeding regulation. The UK's regulatory environment for precision-bred organisms is a particular focus; it sits at the intersection of policy and science in ways that could reshape agricultural biotech incentives.
* **Biodefense**. Questions bearing on biological risk, detection, and response capacity.
* **Engineering ecosystem resilience**. Non-traditional sensing signals for ecosystem modeling, including potential collaboration with ARIA's Hypersensory Intelligence Programme on olfactory perception and volatile organic compound (VOC) sensing.

### Why your forecast is useful here

The forecasters who typically engage with frontier science questions in areas like biomanufacturing or genomics are a small group. Domain experts bring tacit knowledge that doesn't show up in the published literature. Pro forecasters bring calibration and the discipline to actually commit to a probability rather than hedge.

Both are valuable. Even a well-reasoned 60% that reflects genuine uncertainty is more useful to ARIA's programme directors than a vague "probably, but it depends."

The rationales matter as much as the numbers. If you forecast on one of these questions, say why. What's the bottleneck you see? What would have to change for your probability to shift?

A few example questions:

* [Will thale cress, maize, and soybean achieve 50% faster transformation-to-T1 seed timelines before 2030?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/42268/half-transform-to-t1-time-for-arabidopsis-maize-and-soybean-by-2030/)
* [How many seed plant species will have structurally annotated genomes before 2030?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/42229/seed-plant-species-with-genome-structurally-annotated-before-2030/)
* [When will the first precision-bred organism be commercially authorised in the UK?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/42149/when-will-the-first-pbo-be-commercially-authorised-in-the-uk/)
* [What percentage of survey respondents in the 2031 Eurobarometer on Food Safety will say they are concerned about GMOs?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/42263/what-of-eu-citizens-will-say-that-food-gmos-concern-them-in-2031/)
* [What percentage of carbon embodied in global chemical products will be derived from non-petroleum sources in 2035?](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/42664/of-non-petroleum-carbon-in-chemical-in-2035/)

If you work in any of the relevant domains, such as plant biotech, genomics, regulatory science, biosecurity, biomanufacturing, or ecosystems —&nbsp;we want your takes. And bring in your colleagues! Quick gut forecasts from domain experts can be very valuable.

Find the full tournament [here](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/horizons/).