Scenario Building and its Application

Assessing uncertain futures Perceived uncertainties and risks can be considered to be the main motivation behind ‘Futures Thinking’ or ‘Futures Studies’ to assess potential economic, environmental, social or technical developments and their expected consequences on society and environment (or from a systems perspective – feedbacks between the components of complex social-ecological systems, e.g. Liu et al., 2007). A broad range of approaches such as Forecasting, Predictions, Trend Analysis, Visions, Collages or Mental Models is used to assess future developments and their consequences on the economy, society or the biophysical environment, of which scenarios are just one, though frequently applied method of ‘Futures Thinking’ (see: Audience Dialogue, 2014 for a glossary or World Futures Studies Federation, 2015). Many of the approaches and methods can be combined, which is frequently done in practice e.g. (participatory) scenarios and mathematical models. In the context of ‘global change – policy – impact assessment’ studies (OpenNESS belongs to this category), scenarios are one of the dominant approaches for assessing uncertain futures, for example the IPCC SRES scenarios, the scenarios of the Millennium Ecosystem assessment or UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook.