The year 2016 is historic in being the hottest year one record (Carrington 2016) and as the world continues to experience unprecedented temperature increases, many ask, 'what kind of future are we heading for?' Indeed, the ability to “think and act in a forward-looking manner” (de Haan, 2010, p. 321) is often promoted as a key aspect of sustainability competence. Competence here is described as successful action owing to an  “interplay of knowledge, capacities and skills, motives and affective dispositions” (Rieckmann, 2012). The competence to engage with the future or as Wiek et al. (2011) define it, “to analyse, evaluate and craft rich pictures of the future”, is called anticipatory competence.

In order to teach for anticipatory competence (AC) it is important to teach anticpatory methods such as managing uncertainty or risk, crafting different types of futures (possible, plausible, preferable, preposterous) and developing scenarios (Wiek et al., 2016; Withycombe, 2010). Others feel that AC should include a broader view of futures such as the way they make us negotiate our own value frameworks and help groups promote change (Dator, 2002; Wayman, 2009). While there is an increasing body of work on cognitive aspects of this competence (Wiek et al., 2016), the motivational and affective aspects of this competence remain undefined.

In modeling general competences and our abilities to foster its development in a higher education setting, there is also a strong bias toward measurement and assessment of the cognitive aspects of domain competencies (Tremblay 2013). In Higher Education fo Sustainable Development (HESD), many question the neglected role of emotion in anticipation and posit that HESD can leave one in a frozen "prognosis state" unaware of whether one should be mourning a lost future, or emboldened to salvage what might yet be (Szerszynski 2015, Ojala 2013, Gardiner 2017). In this paper the researcher sets out to clarify the links between emotional and anticipatory competence and make recommendations on how to accommodate both in HESD.

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