Category Archives: Scenarios

Scenarios, Tools

Reporting Futures

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Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging, has an good post on his weblog Open the Future on what journalists need to know to report on studies of the future.

1. Nobody can predict the future. This should go without saying, but too often, reports about trends or emerging science and technology tell us what will happen instead of what could happen. In fact, most futurists and foresight consultants will avoid making any predictive claims, and you should take them at their word; any futurist who tells you that something is inevitable probably has something to sell.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. The corollary to #1, be on the lookout for people who saw early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an “overnight success” worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and “bolt from the blue” changes have been on someone’s foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that “nobody expected,” look for the people who actually did expect it — chances are, they’ll be able to tell you quite a bit about why and how it took place.

3. Even when it’s fast, change feels slow. It’s tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel “shocked” or “overwhelmed.” In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren’t thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

4. Most trends die out. Just because something is popular or ubiquitous today doesn’t mean it will be so in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There’s every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon — and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

5. The future is usually the present, only moreso. Conversely, don’t expect changes to happen quickly and universally. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work — even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

6. There are always options. We may not like the choices we have, but the future is not written in stone. Don’t let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking about what might prevent it from happening.

7. Dinosaurs lived for over 200 million years. A favorite pundit cliche is the “dinosaurs vs. mammals” comparison, where dinosaurs are big, lumbering and doomed, while mammals are small, clever and poised for success. In reality, dinosaurs ruled the world for much, much longer than have mammals, and even managed to survive a planetary disaster by evolving into birds. When a futurist uses the dinosaurs/mammals cliche, that’s your sign to investigate why the “dinosaur” company/ organization/ institution may have far greater resources and flexibility than you’re being led to believe.

8. Gadgets are not futurism.Don’t get too enamored of “technology” as the sole driver of change. What’s important is how we use technology to engage in other (social, political, cultural, economic) activities. Don’t be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays — ask why people would want it and what they’d do with it.

9. “Sports scores and stock quotes” was 1990s futurist-ese for “I have no idea;” “social networking and tagging” looks to be the 2000s version. Technology developers, industry analysts and foresight consultants rarely want to tell you that they don’t know how or why a new invention will be used. As a result, they’ll often fall back on claims about utility that are easily understood, familiar to the journalist, and almost certainly wrong.

10. “Technology” is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. This means that, very often, the real utility of a new technology won’t emerge for a few years after it’s introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a “new technology.” Those real uses will often surprise — and sometimes upset — the creators of the technology.

11. The future belongs to the curious. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don’t just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don’t just ask their competitors; their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers, the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

12. “The future is process, not a destination.” — Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story — people won’t reach the “future” and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

When talking with a futurist, then, don’t just ask what could happen. The right question is always “…and what happens then?”

Bruce Sterling follows up in the comments with his revisions:

1. The future belongs to the open-minded. If you want to find out why a new development is important, don’t just ask the people who brought it about; their agenda is to emphasize the benefits and ignore the drawbacks. Don’t just ask their competitors (((social opponents))); their agenda is the opposite. Always ask the hackers (((academics, regulators))), the people who love to take things apart and figure out how they work, love to figure out better ways of using a system, love to look for how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.

2. Not everyone is surprised by surprises. Be on the lookout for the people who saw (((and published))) early indicators of surprises before they happened. Just like an “overnight success” worked for years to get there, the vast majority of wildcards and “bolt from the blue” changes have been on someone’s foresight radar for quite awhile. When something happens that “nobody expected,” look for the people who actually did expect it — they didn’t “predict the future,” because that’s impossible, but they will be able to tell you many useful and cogent things about why and how it took place.

3. The future is usually the present, only more so. The details will vary, but most of the time, the underlying behaviors and practices will remain consistent. Most people (in the US, at least) watch TV, drive a car, and go to work — even if the TV is high definition satellite, the car is a hybrid, and work is web programming.

4. There will always be avant-gardes and backwaters. Important changes can’t happen quickly and universally. Any important social change will create at least some reactionary counterforce.

5. There are always options. We may not like the choices we (((seem to have now, but new situations create new choices.))) The future is not written in stone. Don’t let a futurist get away with solemn pronouncements of doom without pressing for ways to avoid disaster, or get away with enthusiastic claims of nirvana without asking (((what people would do next after utopia arrives.)))

6. “Technology” is anything invented since you turned 13. What seems weird and confusing will become familiar and obvious, especially to people who grow up with it. (((The most important technologies are the huge, old, taken-for-granted technologies already massively integrated into everyday life.))) The real utility of a new technology won’t emerge for a few years after it’s introduced, once people get used to its existence, and it stops being thought of as a “new technology.” Those real uses will often surprise — and sometimes upset — the creators of the technology.

7. Even when it’s fast, change feels slow. It’s tempting to assume that, because a possible change would make the world a decade from now very different from the world today, that the people ten years hence will feel “shocked” or “overwhelmed.” In reality, the people living in our future are living in their own present. That is, they weren’t thrust from today to the future in one leap, they lived through the increments and dead-ends and passing surprises. Their present will feel normal to them, just as our present feels normal to us. Be skeptical of claims of imminent future shock.

8. Gadgets are not futurism. Don’t be hypnotized by blinking lights and shiny displays just because they make such good copy. (((Ask the full set of journalistic questions of a gizmo: who, what, when, where, how, why? Why would people would want such a thing? Which people, which demographic? What do they plan to do with it? What’s the killer application? Where’s the revenue stream? What’s the track record of the people introducing this innovation? Does it do anything genuinely novel?)))

9. Most trends die out. (((No tree grows to the sky.))) Just because some trend is (((sexy))) today doesn’t mean it will stay sexy in a few years. Be cautious about pronouncements that a given fashion or gadget is here to stay. There’s every chance that it will be overtaken by something new all too soon — and this includes trends and technologies that have had some staying power.

10. “The future is a process, not a destination.” — Bruce Sterling The future is not the end of the story — people won’t reach the “future” and declare victory. Ten years from now has its own ten years out, and so on; people of tomorrow will be looking at their own tomorrows. The picture of the future offered by foresight consultants, scenario planners, and futurists of all stripes should never be a snapshot, but a frame from a movie, with connections to the present and pathways to the days and years to come.

Big Back Loop, Ideas, Reorganization, Scenarios

Ecology for Transformation

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David Zaks and Chad Monfreda write on Worldchanging on Steve Carpenter and Carl Folke‘s 2006 paper in Ecology for Transformation (doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2006.02.007):

Ecology has long been a descriptive science with real but limited links to the policy community. A new science of ecology, however, is emerging to forge the collaborations with social scientists and decision makers needed for a bright green future. Stephen Carpenter and Carl Folke outline a vision for the future of ecology in their recent article, Ecology for Transformation. You need a subscription to access the full article, so we’ll quote them at length:

“Scenarios with positive visions are quite different from projections of environmental disaster. Doom-and-gloom predictions are sometimes needed, and they might sell newspapers, but they do little to inspire people or to evoke proactive forward-looking steps toward a better world. Transformation requires evocative visions of better worlds to compare and evaluate the diverse alternatives available to us … Although we cannot predict the future, we have much to decide. Better decisions start from better visions, and such visions need ecological perspectives.”

Ecology for Transformation offers the perspective of resilient social-ecological systems. Simply put, it recognizes that ecosystems and human society are interdependent, and that they need the capacity to withstand and adapt to an increasingly bumpy future.

Examples of resilient social-ecological systems abound in all kinds of notoriously difficult to manage areas, like natural disaster response and rangeland management. Resilience sounds great, but how do we get there? Fortunately Carpenter and Folke offer a theoretically robust three-part transformative framework:

1. Diversity
2. Environmentally sound technology
3. Adaptive governance

Diversity constitutes the raw material we can draw from to create effective technologies and institutions. It reflects the wealth of genetic and memetic resources at our disposal, in the form of biodiversity, landscapes, cultures, ideas, and economic livelihoods. We need to foster diversity as an insurance package for hard times because…

“…crisis can create opportunities for reorganizing the relationships of society to ecosystems. At such times, barriers to action might break down, if only for a short time, and new approaches have a chance to change the direction of ecosystem management. To succeed, a particular approach or vision must be well-formed by the time the crisis arises, because the opportunity for change might be short-lived.”

Environmentally sound technology ranges from incremental advancements in energy efficiency to innovative economic tools like natural capital valuation and markets for ecosystem services. Diversity and technology should sound familiar enough to WorldChanging readers. Ecology for transformation, however, goes on, to challenge us to engage in adaptive governance that recognizes the reality of constant change. The authors define adaptive governance as:

“Institutional and political frameworks designed to adapt to changing relationships between society and ecosystems in ways that sustain ecosystem services; expands the focus from adaptive management of ecosystems to address the broader social contexts that enable ecosystem based management.”

Governance is much broader than what we normally think of as government and encompasses all of the actors who shape the way we work, live, and interact. Communication across various scales, from individuals to institutions, is vital for effective governance. Many of the management and governance structures currently in place are static, but an ‘adaptive’ approach promises more sustainable outcomes by negotiating uncertainty and change.

Steve Carpenter, WA Brock, and I addressed the issue of how scientists can encourage transformations by creating new management models in our 2003 paper Uncertainty and the management of multistate ecosystems: an apparently rational route to collapse (Ecology. 84(6) 1403-1411). We wrote:

…scientists can contribute to broadening the worldview of ecosystem management in at least three ways.

(1) Scientists can point out that uncertainty is a property of the set of models under consideration. This set of models is a mental construct (even if it depends in part on prior observation of the ecosystem). It therefore depends on attitudes and beliefs that are unrelated to putatively objective information about the ecosystem. Despite this discomforting aspect of uncertainty, it cannot be ignored.

(2) Scientists can help to imagine novel models for how the system might change in the future. There will be cases where such novel models carry non-negligible weight in decision, for example when the costs of collapse are high. The consequences of candidate policies can be examined under models with very different implications for ecosystem behavior. Such explorations of the robustness of policies can be carried out when model uncertainty is quite high or even unknown, for example in scenario analysis.

(3) Scientists can point out the value of safe, informative experiments to test models beyond the range of available data. In the model presented here, fossilization of beliefs follows from fixation on policies that do not reveal the full dynamic potential of the ecosystem, leading to the underestimation of model uncertainty. Experimentation at scales appropriate for testing alternative models for ecosystem behavior is one way out the trap. Of course, largescale experiments on ecosystems that support human well being must be approached with caution. Nevertheless, in situations where surprising and unfavorable ecosystem dynamics are possible, it may be valuable to experiment with innovative practices that could reinforce desirable ecosystem states.

I think our second point, the need for creative synthesis, is not emphasized enough in science, which tends to focus on testing existing models. Ecological governance needs new ways of thinking about nature that are useful in governance situations. The creation of novel, practical models is a vital part of connecting science to policy and action. Without practical models, people are unable to develop desirable policy or effective actions.

Big Back Loop, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

MA: Putting a Price Tag on the Planet

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Putting a Price Tag on the Planet is a long article by Lila Guterman on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the April 7, 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article describes the history, funding, and operation of the MA as well as its findings.

As the 20th century drew to a close, leaders in the field of ecology decided they were failing at one of their primary goals. They had presented sign after sign that people were harming the environment — killing off species, destroying rain forests, polluting the air and water — but the warnings had little effect. So, to encourage conservation, they decided to appeal to humanity’s baser instincts.

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Big Back Loop, Ideas, Scenarios, Vulnerability

Planet of Slums

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The prolific and controversial urban critic, Mike Davis, has a new book Planet of Slums. It is based upon his article Planet of Slums in New Left Review (March-April 2004). In Planet of Slums he writes:

There may be more than quarter of a million slums on earth. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities with a total population of more than 20 million. An even larger slum population crowds the urbanizing littoral of West Africa, while other huge conurbations of poverty sprawl across Anatolia and the Ethiopian highlands; hug the base of the Andes and the Himalayas; explode outward from the skyscraper cores of Mexico, Jo-burg, Manila and São Paulo; and, of course, line the banks of the rivers Amazon, Niger, Congo, Nile, Tigris, Ganges, Irrawaddy and Mekong. The building blocks of this slum planet, paradoxically, are both utterly interchangeable and spontaneously unique: including the bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City. They are the gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential themeparks—Philip K. Dick’s bourgeois ‘Offworlds’—in which the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves.

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Ecological Economics, Scenarios

Evaluation of ecosystem services provided by multifunctional agriculture in the USA

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George Boody and colleagues used a scenario-development exercise to discover that some types of changes in agricultural management can lead to economic benefits as well as improvements in the delivery of multiple ecosystem services.(Boody et al. 2005. Multifunctional agrcitulture in the United States. BioScience 55: 27 – 38.)

The team of 17 members (including farmers, government agency workers, and acadmics from several disciplines) worked with stakeholders in 2 southern Minnesota (USA) watersheds to develop 4 scenarios evaluating the future of agricultural management in the area.

These two watersheds face many of the same issues found in other agricultural regions of the United States: there are fewer farms now than in past decades; farms are growing in size as farmers buy out their neighbors; more land is leased; the diversity of crops is declining; and more land is managed by large companies working on non-contiguous areas, necessitating transport of manure and other items around the region.

The 4 scenarios they developed were (click for maps of landcover in one of the watersheds):

A) continuation of current trends
B) Implementation of BMPs (best management practices)
C) Maximizing diversity and profitability
D) Increased vegetative cover

The team estimated changes in fish populations in each watershed’s streams, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and carbon sequestration in each watershed under the conditions of each scenario. In one watershed, Scenarios B, C, and D all reduced N loading to the Mississippi River by at least 30% (a goal set by the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Nutrient Task Force). In the other watershed, simply implementing BMPs (Scenario B)was not enough to reach this reduction goal.

In addition, the team estimated the short-term economic effects of each of the 4 scenarios, including net farm income, farm production costs, and commodity and CRP payments. Net farm income was greatest in Scenario C or D, depending on the watershed, despite declines in CRP and commodity payments in those scenarios. The authors also estimated externality cost savings due to reduced sedimentation and flooding.

In their conclusions, the authors state (p. 35):

Our analysis indicates that diversifying agriculture on actively
farmed land could provide environmental, social, and
economic benefits.Citizens would be willing to pay for these
benefits.

They also point out the importance of social capital and changes in agricultural policy to the ability to achieve the transitions required to enter Scenario B, C, or D.

More detail about this project can be found in the report here, and more information on other projects related to stewardship of farmland, sustainable agriculture and sustainable communities can be found at the web site of the Land Stewardship Project.

Design, Ideas, Scenarios, Visualization

Bruce Mau @ McGill

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Bruce Mau, a Canadian designer, recently gave the McGill School of the Environment‘s annual Environment Public Lecture at McGill University, on the ‘Future of Environmental Design,’ based upon the Massive Change exhibit developed for the Vancouver Art Gallery. The show was at the Art Gallery on Ontario in 2005, and will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in the fall of 2006.

The Massive Change project takes an optimistic, design oriented look at global social and environmental problems and suggests there are many existing resources and abilities that can be mobilized to improve the global human well-being, in areas such as transportation, cities, and manufacturing. My favourite part of the Massive Change exhibit was the visualization room – which filled the walls and floor of a room:

Visual Room VAG

The room is set up like a three-dimensional electromagnetic spectrum. The images made from low frequency waves (radio waves) are near the entrance, images made with visible light (red, orange, yellow…) are in the middle of the room, and images made using high frequency waves (gamma waves) are near the exit of the room.

Massive Change is oriented towards market based technological solutions to environmental problems and therefore in the language of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, it fits withthe TechnoGarden scenario, and indeed addresses many of the same issues, such as bus-rapid transit systems.

The exhbit/book/radio show/website were developed by Bruce Mau and a group of design students.

After hearing from Bruce Mau about the what the students did in these project I was inspired to try and build on our project courses in the McGill School of the Environment.
I think it would be great if we could run a similar type of workshop course here at McGill. That is a course that would encourage a team of students (somewhere between 7-25) to imagine what a sustainable McGill or Montreal could look like, and how we could get there over the next (5 – 25 years) and make there visions/proposal/syntheses into a series of public products such as an exhibit (ideally on the streets of Montreal), lecture series, a book, and website. I think they could build upon lots of work in synthesis and communication done by Massive Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, WorldChanging, and many others, to develop practical proposals for McGill and Montreal.

It is also interesting to think about what type of resilience oriented course with a larger international vision could be developed as a Resilience Alliance project. In either case, there are many details of time, money, and credit to work. But I think, there is a lot of potential for learning and innovation in real world, positive, synthetic courses.
—–

Some other articles on Bruce Mau and Massive Change:
From architecture/design magazine MetropolisMag.com – At the Parsons Table with Bruce Mau, and from the business magazine Fast Company, Making a Map to a New World.

Scenarios

Climate change fiction – news and interviews

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Book reviewer Rick Kleffel has an audio report on US National Public Radio (NPR) on how science fiction writers, such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Crichton, address global warming.

Kleffel also has an interview will Bill McKibben (author of the End of Nature) about science fiction and climate change.

There is another recent podcast interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on his climate change books and science on IT converations.

Also see earlier Art of Climate Change: telling stories to understand the future.

Big Back Loop, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

Re-Orient: world economic production in MA scenarios

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Scenario Share of World Econ

Proportion of World Economy projected in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios (Tg – TechnoGarden, go-Global Orchestration, am- Adapting Mosaic, and OS-Order From Strength). Compared to yesterday’s post of Maddison’s data, which is in Purchasing Power Parity, this graph estimates the size of the world economy using 1995 exchange rates, which under estimates the purchasing power of poor countries – particularly the Chinese economy. Consquently, this graph and yesterday’s graph do not match in 2000.

This graph shows Asia passing Western Europe + North America & Oceania in about 75 years, later in the slow economic growth world of Order From Strength. If purchasing power is used then crossing date would be earlier.

Big Back Loop, Ecological Management, Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports Released

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ma scenarios coverThe four main reports of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment were released yesterday (Jan 19, 2006). The reports are the detailed scientific assessment (including literature citations) on which the MA synthesis reports are based. These large reports (500-800 page) are the products of the four MA working groups:

  • Current State and Trends
  • Scenarios
  • Policy Responses
  • Multi-Scale Assessments.

These reports are published by Island Press or chapters can be downloaded from the MA web site.
The press coverage of the release of the technical reports has been more balanced than the press coverage of the synthesis volumes. The Christian Science Monitor reports, quoting Steve Carpenter (his post on the scenarios):

When researchers scan the global horizon, overfishing, loss of species habitat, nutrient run-off, climate change, and invasive species look to be the biggest threats to the ability of land, oceans, and water to support human well-being.

Yet “there is significant reason for hope. We have the tools we need” to chart a course that safeguards the planet’s ecological foundation, says Stephen Carpenter, a zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “We don’t have to accept the doom-and-gloom trends.”

That’s the general take-home message in an assessment of the state of the globe’s ecosystems and the impact Earth’s ecological condition has on humans.

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Big Back Loop, Ideas, Scenarios

Terrorism, State Failure, and Reorganization

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Science fiction writer, journalist, and green design professor, Bruce Sterling writes about the shadow of globalization and Global Guerrillas John Robb’s weblog about – “Networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. An open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.” His analysis is fairly similar to what the MA scenarios group thought about state breakdown. Sterling writes on a 2005/2006 state of the world web discussion:

There’s a lot of meritorious analysis going on [Global Guerrillas], and it’s very counterintuitive by 20th century standards, and that’s a good thing, because this isn’t the 20th century. It’s not about state-on-state violence any more; it’s about the emergent global order versus failed states. The victory condition for global guerrillas is a failed state. And there are lots of global guerrillas and huge scary patches of failed and failing state right nows. And the Disorder and the Order physically interpenetrate; globalization melts the map; there are physical patches of state-failure even inside the most advanced states.

However, there is a nascent order inside the failure, too. People who live in conditions of failure can see what justice, law, and order look like. They see that on those satellite dishes, they get news about that every day from the many, many people who flee the Disorder and become new global diasporas.

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