Scenario Planning

Many ecological and conservation problems are not amenable to conventional scientific or management approaches. Ecological management decisions about how, when and where to act are typically based on our expectations about the future. However when the world is highly unpredictable and we are working from a limited range of expectations, our expectations will frequently be proved wrong. Scenario planning offers a framework for developing more resilient ecological policies in situations in which there is uncontrollable, irreducible uncertainty.

Scenario planning was developed and is used largely by businesses, particullary by companies that have to make expensive long term decisions in uncertain situations. In scenario planning a scenario is an account of a plausible future. Scenario planning uses a set of contrasting scenarios to explore the uncertainty surrounding the future consequences of a decisions. Ideally, scenarios should be constructed by a diverse group of people for a specific purpose.

Scenario planning is appropriate in systems when there is a lot of uncertainty that is not controllable. In other cases optimal control, hedging, or adaptive management may be appropriate responses (Adapted from Peterson, et al 2003).

Scenario planning is able to incorporate a variety of quantitative and qualitative information in the decision-making process. Often, considering this diverse information in a systemic way leads to better decisions. Furthermore, the participation of a diverse group of people in a systemic process of collecting, discussing and analyzing scenarios builds shared understanding.

The robustness provided by the consideration of multiple possible futures has served several groups well. However, scenario planning has not been widely used in ecological or conservation planning. However, it has been used much more frequently in discussions of sustainability. Recently, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a global assessment of the current and future state of the world's ecosystem services, has made scenario planning one of its main working groups.

I have two papers on Scenario Planning:

Scenario Planning: a Tool for Conservation in an Uncertain World. Conservation Biology 17(2):358-366.

Peterson, G.D., D. Beard, B. Beisner, E. Bennett, S. Carpenter, G. Cumming, L. Dent, and T. Havlicek. 2003. Assessing future ecosystem services: a case study of the northern highland lake district, Wisconsin. Conservation Ecology 7(3): 1. [online] URL: http://www.consecol.org/ vol7/iss3/art1.

Below, I've organized some links to web resources on scenario planning:

Scenario Planning Resources

The scenario planning community is quite densely interconnected. Below are a set of links that represent key nodes of this tangeled network. They come from Shell Oil, the Global Business Network (GBN), WIRED magazine, and Whole Earth magazine. While Shell Oil was one of the pioneers of scenario planning, people from Shell and the Whole Earth magainze founded the GBN. While WIRED magazine involved many people from Whole Earth magazine (a descendant of the Whole Earth Catalog via CoEvolution Quarterly).

The Global business network an organization co-founded by former Shell Oil scenario planners, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (and many other things including Whole Earth magazine) Stewart Brand, and others, has a good web site that contains a lot of scenario planning resources. These include:

The GBN's book club suggests books that a diverse set of interesting people think are important.

A brief outline of scenario planning.

WIRED magazine has published a number of articles about scenario planning. These include an article by a GBN co-founder on How to Build Scenarios.

There is also a flattering 1995 WIRED article about the GBN written by GBN member and journalist Joel Garreau (author of the very interesting book Edge City). He wrote another article for WIRED on the future of Edge Cities.

The Spring 1999 issue of Whole Earth magazine had a very good feature on scenario planning featuring brief articles written by many of the leaders of scenario planning. Several of these articles are available online. The online articles include:

An article, Chicken Little, Cassandra, and the Real Wolf, about useful ways of thinking about the future by the late Donella Meadows. The article argues that the future is produced from a complicated mixture of chance, predictable driving forces, and human choice.

Another article, Doing Scenarios, briefly sketches out a methodology for scenario planning. The author of the article, Art Kleiner, has a good personal website that contains some good resources on scenario planning from a course he has taught.

Martin Borjesson, a Swedish scenario consultant, has organized a good set of links to scenario planning resources on the web. These links overlap with the links I present here, but are much more focussed on scenario planning in business.

Scenario Examples

Environmental/Sustainability

Business, Civic, & Other

GEO3, the third Global environmental outlook form UNEP, used a scenario approach to develop an integrated set of global scenarios focussing on sustainable development. The GEO3 scenarios were descended from a set of global sustainability scenarios developed by the Global Scenarios Group at the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI).

Also, the Adaptive collaborative management program at the Center for international forestry research (CIFOR) have written about and provide some tools for using scenario planning in forestry management.

Visions, an EU Integrated Assessment project, created a set of alternative scenarios for future sustainable development paths, up to 2020 and 2050. The scenarios cover Europe as a whole and three selected regions: North West UK, Venice (Italy), and the Green Heart (The Netherlands).

However, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is the first large project, to the best of my knowledge, to use a scenario approach to address ecological uncertainities. Past, present and future perspectives

The Pacific Northwest Ecosystem Research Consortium is a project in Oregeon that seeks to understand the ecological consequences of possible societal decisions related to changes in human populations and ecosystems in the Williamette River Basin in the Pacific Northwest. They have made a variety of maps, which are collected in a beautiful book, of alternative futures, and created some very fancy 3D visualizations.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a group of international companies that share a commitment to sustainable development, have developed a set of global scenarios that are described in an article Greedy Frogs, Balanced Humans, and Improvisational Music from Whole Earth magazine.

Another article in the same issue of Whole Earth magazine, Changing The Winds by Adam Kahane, describes Kahane's experience working with civic scenarios in South Africa.

Shell Oil has been a leader in scenario planning. There scenario planning web site presents a number of scenario planning excercises that Shell has developed for their own use. These include: their most recent scenarios People and Connections - Global scenarios to 2020, and Energy Needs, Choices and Possibilities - scenarios to 2050, Building and Using Scenarios as well as older scenario planning excercises from the 1990s.

However, the Shell website doesn't work with some browsers.