The robots of tomorrow should be endowed with the ability to adapt to drastic and unpredicted changes in their environment and interactions with humans. Such adaptations, however, cannot be boundless: the robot must stay trustworthy. So, the adaptations should not be just a recovery into a degraded functionality. Instead, they must be true adaptations: the robot must change its behaviour while maintaining or even increasing its expected performance and staying at least as safe and robust as before. The RoboSAPIENS project will focus on autonomous robotic software adaptations and will lay the foundations for ensuring that they are carried out in an intrinsically trustworthy, safe and efficient manner, thereby reconciling open-ended self-adaptation with safety by design. RoboSAPIENS will transform these foundations into ‘first time right’-design tools and platforms and will validate and demonstrate them.

This paper distinguishes news about short-lived events from news about changes in longer term prospects using surveys of expectations. Employing a multivariate GARCH-in-Mean model for the US, the paper illustrates how the different types of news influence business cycle dynamics. The influence of transitory output shocks can be relatively large on impact but gradually diminishes over two to three years. Permanent shocks drive the business cycle, generating immediate stock price reactions and gradually building output effects, although they have more immediate output effects during recessions through the uncertainties they create. Markedly different macroeconomic dynamics are found if these explicitly identified types of news or uncertainty feedbacks are omitted from the analysis.

Drylands provide multiple essential services to human society, and dryland vegetation is one of the foundations of these services. There is a paradox, however, in the vegetation productivity–precipitation relationship in drylands. Although water is the most limiting resource in these systems, a strong relationship between precipitation and productivity does not always occur. Such a paradox affects our understanding of dryland vegetation dynamics and hinders our capacity to predict dryland vegetation responses under future climates. In this perspective, we examine the possible causes of the dryland precipitation–productivity paradox. We argue that the underlying reasons depend on the location and scale of the study. Sometimes multiple factors may interact, resulting in a less significant relationship between vegetation growth and water availability. This means that when we observe a poor correlation between vegetation growth and water availability, there are potentially missing sources of water input or a lack of consideration of other important processes. The paradox could also be related to the inaccurate measurement of vegetation productivity and water availability indicators. Incorporating these complexities into predictive models will help us better understand the complex relationship between water availability and dryland ecosystem processes and improve our ability to predict how these ecosystems will respond to the multiple facets of climate change.

This editorial describes the Cass Review findings and the extraordinary challenge we all face in managing uncertainty amid a toxic and highly polarised debate. Children and young people will only get the best care if patients and professionals join forces to seek answers collaboratively and respectfully.

The integration of sustainability into highly uncertain technology development is key to support manufacturing companies to reduce their environmental impacts. The use of future scenarios to support decision-making in early design for sustainability is promising, but there is a lack of systematic guidelines on how to build them. Through literature review and empirical research scenario-building guidelines were designed. The guidelines are step-by-step activities to be performed in workshops. Results suggest the guidelines were successful in building consistent, plausible, and useful scenarios.

Anticipating all technical requirements that a product must meet throughout its lifespan has become difficult due to a rise in market, regulatory, and technological uncertainty. As a result, the attribute values of these requirements may be highly uncertain at the start of product development. We propose a mathematical model that captures and quantifies this uncertainty in a clear and comprehensive manner. We evaluate the approach by encoding uncertain requirements for an automotive project. Misconceptions regarding probabilities are alleviated and the requirements are unambiguously defined.

As the world deals with climate change, it is crucial that new products are designed to be more sustainable. Product design strategies which conform to the Circular Economy principles have recently gained attention, which promote sustainability and resource efficiency. However, such strategies require careful consideration of uncertainties and the ways to mitigate them, e.g. by using margins. The pursuit of circularity can inadvertently lead to overdesign as designers strive to mitigate elevated risks, thereby making a product less sustainable. In this paper, we explore this balance.

This paper aims to develop a risk assessment framework that addresses both the complexities of the risk landscape that green transition portfolios face, but is recognizable and easily understandable by stakeholders. For this purpose, we build upon the framework of NASA Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). This study analyzes six existing readiness levels framework that are held towards uncertainty factors from the Green Transition. The TRL scale are coupled with Risk, Uncertainty, and Ignorance to score the individual level of uncertainty. The paper ends with suggestion for further studies.

Designers must be equipped with methods to contribute to sustainability transitions. Scenario planning arose as approach to integrate future uncertainties while the low-tech concept promotes technological discernment. This paper looks at how low-tech fuelled scenario planning. Analysing institutional and archetypical scenarios shows a partial integration through high and low-tech extremes. However, more nuanced considerations are lacking. This paper shows that low-tech can bring an interesting dimension to future scenarios and thus contributes to method development for sustainable design.