The practice of envisioning the future has deep roots in the past. Across the continent of Africa, there are traditions of oral storytelling, griots, folklore, and indigenous speculation that offer guidance on how to live in the present and orient towards better futures. Whilst these traditions can act as navigational compasses, they are not prevalent in conventional futuring methodologies. Rather, we are surrounded by perspectives of thinking about the future as a projection of current trends. In this perspective, we offer a new heuristic, the Entangled Time Tree, to the body of futuring approaches for how to acknowledge multiple pasts and alternative ways of conceptualizing futures. We recognise that in a decolonial approach, it is necessary to consider a multiplicity of pasts that lead to diverse presents and futures; a recognition that we see reflected in Africanfuturism and in traditional storytelling that further offer diverse ways of understanding temporality and futures. We propose that the diverse forms of storytelling across the African continent constitute critically underexplored forms of knowledge for enabling a decolonial approach to futuring through three mechanisms -stories as power, stories as healing, and stories as diversification. We argue that centering these stories will allow the exploration of more just and ecologically sustainable futures. We recognise that this is just a first, but we hope a promising, step towards a longer term commitment of creating more diverse, imaginative visions and pathways of a decolonial future that will be useful not only on the African continent, but globally.

We find ourselves at a critical crossroads for the future governance of the high seas, but the perceived remoteness of the global ocean creates a psychological barrier for people to engage with it. Given challenges of overexploitation, inequitable access and other sustainability and equity concerns, current ocean governance mechanisms are not fit-for-purpose. This decade offers opportunities for direct impact on ocean governance, however, triggering a global transformation on how we use and protect the half of our planet requires a concerted effort that is guided by shared values and principles across regions and sectors. The aim of the series of workshops outlined in this paper, was to undertake a futures thinking process that could use the Nature Futures Framework as a mechanism to bring more transformative energy into how humans conceptualise the high seas and therefore how we aim to govern the ocean. We found that engaging with the future through science fiction narratives allowed a more radical appreciation of what could be and infusing science with artistic elements can inspire audiences beyond academia. Thus, creative endeavours of co-production that promote and encourage imagination to address current challenges should be considered as important tools in the science-policy interface, also as a way to elicit empathetic responses. This workshop series was a first, and hopefully promising, step towards generating a more creative praxis in how we imagine and then act for a better future for the high seas.