Developing scenarios — projections of the future — may help individuals, communities, corporations, and nations develop a capacity for dealing with the future. Scenarios are an important tool for proactively thinking about, and acting in a way that anticipates, things to come.
The ten most popular stories on the Nereus Program website in 2016, including on El Ninos, fishing subsidies, Brexit, science fiction prototyping, the TPP, salps, jellyfish fisheries, vaquita and the South China Sea.
Nereus Program research featured in Wired, NEWS 1130, The Ubyssey, and Conservation magazine.
We know the oceans are quickly changing; we are at a point in time where very different future oceans could be laid out in front of us.
Nereus Program Alumnus Andrew Merrie, Stockholm Resilience Centre, is curious about how those futures might differ. Using an innovative method called science fiction prototyping, he’s devised a set of four radical futures for global oceans and fisheries. Two of the scenarios represent more utopian futures, the other two are more dystopian. They are written as speculative fiction in different, engaging narrative styles: a travel magazine article, an obituary, the transcript of a “TED”-like talk, and a series of recovered journal entries.
“What has been interesting about the Nereus fellowship right from the beginning is that we are all here, all engaged in this monumental challenge of predicting the future of marine fisheries and the global oceans. My whole PhD has been grappling with that question- how do you say something valuable around the future of the oceans from a governance perspective?” says Andrew Merrie, Nereus Fellow at Stockholm University.
