Author, Educator, Futures Researcher, Psychologist, Adjunct Professor: Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS)

Hello. Welcome to Global Futures Education! I'm Jennifer Gidley.

After fifty years of professional and academic experience as an innovative educator, psychologist, and international futures researcher, the most important task I see is providing an up-to-the-minute series of courses to help people face the grand global futures challenges and find solutions to them.

My concern. I'm concerned that we live in a world where the escalating climate crisis has become very frightening for many young people. Even climate scientists are beginning to say they are frightened by the intensity and acceleration of heat domes, rain bombs, unprecedented floods and wildfires, and slowing ocean currents.

My motivation. I'm motivated by the urgency with which we must act to implement the solutions at hand if we are to regenerate a habitable planet. My commitment is to use my decades-long experience and knowledge to offer the “Global Futures of Climate” Online Course to start my Global Futures Series.

My inspiration. As a mother of two adult children, and three grandchildren, I'm inspired to ensure they have a liveable, equitable and safe world in which to grow up. I want to know that I have done everything I possibly can to protect their vulnerable futures.

My hope. My most earnest hope is that there is still time to turn the climate crisis around, and that we all act with knowledge, integrity and speed. I offer my online climate education program in this hope.

As the longest-serving President (2009-2017) of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) I gained valuable insights from the highest levels of global thinking into the complexity and wide impacts of climate crisis and other pressing global challenges. WFSF is the global peak body for futures studies scholarship and a key partner of UNESCO and UN-ECOSOC.

During this engagement I was fortunate to be immersed in the critical new thinking that futures researchers bring to the world, as I led an Executive Board drawn from eleven countries, and a network of 300 futures scholars from over 60 countries. Thanks to acquiring UNESCO funding my team pioneered the development of futures empowerment leadership programs for young future leaders in several developing countries. I actively promoted talented young women futurists, many of whom have become leading professional academics and corporate advisors.

Through my consulting, research and speaking with think tanks from the UAE to Iran, from London to Washington DC, my global networks give me access to experts, including world-leading scientists, thought leaders, academic institutions, and high-level global organisations. My international engagements have included futures-focused projects in Europe (Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, Spain & Sweden), Asia (Malaysia, Shanghai & Taiwan), Latin America, the Middle East (Egypt, UAE and Iran), the UK and the USA.

I am an advocate for human-centred, participatory futures approaches that foster human agency, empowerment and individual engagement in long-term thinking, sustainability, and regeneration.

My book ‘The Future: A Very Short Introduction' is the first Oxford University Press book on futures thinking. It is now used in futures studies programs in Universities around the world, and is translated into Arabic, Turkish, Italian and Greek, with several other translations now in progress.

My experience in developing online courses in futures thinking and foresight includes two Australian universities, an online American university, an Iranian Think Tank in Tehran, and most recently the European Commission Future Forward project in collaboration with TED-Ed. All this informs the Global Futures Education programs.

I am currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, in The Institute for Sustainable Futures.

Read more HERE about my academic and professional credentials, services and publications.