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.
Nereus Fellow at Duke University Daniel Dunn will be attending a workshop on developing draft scenarios for developing Areas of Particular Environmental Interest on the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
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.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released their Methodological Assessment of Scenarios & Models of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, for which Nereus Director of Science William Cheung was a coordinating lead author, as well as a contributing author for Chapter 5 “Modelling consequences of change in biodiversity for nature’s benefits to people” (200-243).
