March 30, 2007  The Watson Institute’s Global Environment Program is becoming a nexus for social and natural scientists to work together on future scenarios for climate change. The program is launching a new Global Environmental Change Scenarios Project on the heels of its recent Global Environmental Futures workshop, which last week brought together 50 scenarios scholars and practitioners to lay the groundwork for a multi-year research effort designed to advance debate and methods for improving scenario analysis.

The project will bring new perspectives to bear on the practice and politics of scenarios in environmental governance. The initial output of the new Scenarios Project will include published commentary and research on the next generation of global change scenarios and on the social process dimensions of scenarios. Faculty members Simone Pulver and Stacy VanDeveer will present a scenarios research agenda  in May at the Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change in Amsterdam. A longer-range research project is also being formulated.

Meantime, Watson Associate Professor Brian O’Neill has acted as lead author on the soon-to-be-released “New Assessment Methodologies and the Characterisation of Future Conditions” chapter of the influential Climate Change 2007 report.  Produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the report is the fourth in the series of IPCC assessments that are the principal source of research input to the international climate change policy process. The next volume of the report is being released on April 6.

Scenarios have become a standard tool in the portfolio of techniques that scientists and policymakers use to envision and plan for the future. Defined as plausible, challenging, and relevant stories about how the future might unfold – and integrating quantitative models with qualitative assessments of social and political trends – scenarios are a central component in both the international climate change and ecosystem assessment processes.

Despite their prevalence, systematic analysis of scenarios as scientific and social processes is in its beginning stages. Questions remain about the scientific credibility of scenarios, the relevance of scenario outputs to various user groups, and the most effective role of scenarios in future global environmental assessment processes.
The new Scenarios Project aims to address this need.

Read the workshop papers here.