Future Care Force (https://futurecareforce.org/) is a role-based futures game grounded in global climate-health research, designed to help build resilient and equitable health systems in a climate-impacted future. The premise is urgent and real: changing weather patterns, extreme events, and environmental crises are driving increased rates of heat-related illness, vector-borne disease, and mental health challenges — and these impacts fall disproportionately on the world’s most vulnerable communities.
Rather than treating this as a problem for experts alone, Future Care Force summons players into a global think tank — a circle of visionaries whose mission is to gather, decode, imagine, and co-design a new future for the care of human life.
The game emerged from a multiyear project carried out by Action Foresight, supported and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), exploring how health systems can become inclusive, responsive, and resilient over the long term. In partnership with the ARCH Initiative (Advancing Research for Climate and Health), the game draws on global expertise to address critical knowledge gaps where climate meets health. It is grounded in real research: its core mechanics and scenario cards are built from ethnographic and futures research across multiple countries, alongside a survey and analysis with 29 ARCH climate and health experts, who helped identify and rank over 100 trends and emerging issues facing health systems.
In play, participants step into the shoes of key stakeholders — doctors, nurses, policy makers — who hold the keys to a better future. They decode messages to piece together fragments of possible futures, and design powerful interventions to safeguard health in a climate-impacted world. The game weaves together role playing, collective sensemaking, and pathway thinking, organised through the World Health Organization’s health systems framework — making it both imaginatively engaging and analytically rigorous. It was first used by the ARCH regional hubs at their inaugural gathering in Kuala Lumpur in June 2025 to generate climate and health scenarios, and the hubs continue to use it to connect local knowledge to global futures learning.
Future Care Force is also a demonstration of what participatory futures can do: translating serious research into an experience that communities, health workers, and policy makers can actually use. True to the open ethos behind it, the game is highly accessible — available in multiple language editions, easy to download and print, and released under Creative Commons, free for anyone to adapt to their needs. Whether you’re a health professional, researcher, educator, or community organiser, Future Care Force offers a way to think seriously and creatively about the futures of care — and to start designing them together.
Futures Lab 