Longhorizon

Longhorizon is a term used across disciplines to describe decisions, forecasts, and investments conducted over extended future timeframes. It emphasizes the scale and durability of outcomes, as well as the increased uncertainty that accompanies longer time horizons.

In finance and investing, a long-horizon approach targets horizons of ten years or more, and is often appropriate for pension funds, endowments, and savers with long liquidity needs. Investors with a long horizon may accept higher short-term volatility in exchange for potential compounding, growth in real terms, and the ability to ride secular trends. Asset allocations may favor equities and real assets, while liability-driven strategies help curb risk relative to objectives.

In planning and forecasting, the length of the forecast horizon guides model selection and risk assessment. Longer horizons require scenarios, stress testing, and robust decision frameworks such as adaptive planning, investment in resilience, and flexible pathways.

In policy and climate contexts, long-horizon planning informs infrastructure, energy, and climate policy, where decisions made now affect outcomes across decades. Integrated assessment models and scenario analyses explore potential futures to guide mitigation and adaptation strategies.

In technology and AI, long-horizon planning refers to producing actions with consequences far ahead in time, posing challenges for credit assignment, exploration, and computational tractability. Research areas include hierarchical planning and planning under uncertainty.

See also: time horizon, long-term, scenario planning, forecasting.