Multi-factor, multi-state, multi-model scenarios: Exploring food and climate futures for Southeast Asia

Decision-makers aiming to improve food security, livelihoods and resilience are faced with an uncertain future. To develop robust policies they need tools to explore the potential effects of uncertain climatic, socioeconomic, and environmental changes. Methods have been developed to use scenarios to present alternative futures to inform policy. Nevertheless, many of these can limit the possibility space with which decision-makers engage. This paper will present a participatory scenario process that maintains a large possibility space through the use of multiple factors and factor-states and a multi-model ensemble to create and quantify four regional scenarios for Southeast Asia. To do this we will explain 1) the process of multi-factor, multi-state building was done in a stakeholder workshop in Vietnam, 2) the scenario quantification and model results from GLOBIOM and IMPACT, two economic models, and 3) how the scenarios have already been applied to diverse policy processes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). son-D'Croz), joost.vervoort@ zo), [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] (R. Peou), [email protected] (M. Veeger), sbergen), Andy.Arnell@unepch), [email protected] r Ltd. This is an open access article Software and data availability The following models were used in this study. The table below lists the institutions and co-author who should be contacted with respect to the specific model. Models Cited. under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Model Supporting Institution Author to contact for more information Email GLOBIOM IIASA Amanda Palazzo [email protected] IMPACT 3 IFPRI Daniel Mason-D'Croz [email protected] OLDFAR Steven Lord [email protected] LANDSHIFT University of Kassel Benjamin Stuch [email protected] D. Mason-D'Croz et al. / Environmental Modelling & Software 83 (2016) 255e270 256 GLOBIOM and IMPACT 3 are described in some detail in the paper. Full documentation for both models is available online. GLOBIOM (Havlik et al., 2014): www.pnas.org/content/suppl/ 2014/02/19/1308044111.DCSupplemental IMPACT 3 (Robinson et al., 2015): http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/129825 OLDFAR is available upon request in English and Spanish for Windows (32 and 64 bit), MacOS, and Linux. A description of the LANDSHIFT model is provided in Appendix A of the Supplement.