In the April edition of the Scientific American, Steven Popper, Robert Lempert and Steven Bankes discuss a computational approach to assess the impact of crucial uncertainties of future developments on the decisions one has to make to meet desired targets, Scientific American: Shaping the Future.

People have the tendancy to make decisions with a short time horizon. Many developments in social-ecological systems have uncertain long term developments. Popper et al. explicitly focus on the possible consequences of uncertainties and visualize the result of many simulations in to a useful figure of how robust future scenarios are for meeting policy targets.