Seeds of good anthropocenes: developing sustainability scenarios for Northern Europe

Abstract

Scenario development helps people think about a broad variety of possible futures; however, the global environmental change community has thus far developed few positive scenarios for the future of the planet and humanity. Those that have been developed tend to focus on the role of a few common, large-scale external drivers, such as technology or environmental policy, even though pathways of positive change are often driven by surprising or bottom-up initiatives that most scenarios assume are unchanging. We describe an approach, pioneered in Southern Africa and tested here in a new context in Northern Europe, to developing scenarios using existing bottom-up transformative initiatives to examine plausible transitions towards positive, sustainable futures. By starting from existing, but marginal initiatives, as well as current trends, we were able to identify system characteristics that may play a key role in sustainability transitions (e.g., gender issues, inequity, governance, behavioral change) that are currently under-explored in global environmental scenarios. We suggest that this approach could be applied in other places to experiment further with the methodology and its potential applications, and to explore what transitions to desirables futures might be like in different places.

The voices of youth in envisioning positive futures for nature and people

“…The hyper-connectivity proposed in some of the visions is currently manifesting in various forms facilitated by the internet and other platforms and is already affecting different cultures and languages in ways that may not be obvious right now. Therefore, it is an open question whether it would be possible to have connectivity as global citizens and also maintain local biocultural diversity (Pereira et al 2018;Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2019). The complex analysis of telecoupling-for example how demand in one part of the world drives environmental degradation in another part-is a cutting-edge area of sustainability science research (Liu et al 2013).…”

“…This methodological approach allowed the workshop participants to focus and discuss certain aspects of the positive futures more in-depth, but it did lead the final narratives in a particular direction. With not enough focus given on capturing tensions and feedbacks in many scenario approaches (van Vuuren et al 2012;Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2019;Hamann et al 2020), we attempted to include them in this exercise.…”

How to run a sustainability science research group sustainably?

“…A next step focuses on the development of positive visions of our future and pathways towards them, acting as shared counter-narratives to images of inescapable destruction and despair that are dominating in the current debate. Examples such as thousands of landscape-level sustainability initiatives (Carmenta et al 2020 ), ‘bright spots’ (Cinner et al 2016 ), or ‘seeds of good anthropocenes’ (Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2019 ) help us to develop hope and imagine positive futures of a sustainable and good life as something achievable, although it will not come without backlashes and frustrations.…”

“…To guide society toward sustainability is a most central characteristic of sustainability science (Horcea-Milcu et al 2019 ). Correspondingly, identifying, conceptualizing, and supporting seeds (Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2019 ), leverage points (Abson et al 2017 ), scenarios (Kishita et al 2016 ), visions (Wiek and Iwaniec 2014 ), and pathways (Luederitz et al 2017 ) towards sustainable development are overarching features of the field (Miller et al 2014 ).…”

Who gets to imagine transformative change? Participation and representation in biodiversity assessments

“…One key way has been through scenario planning as a means of providing plausible descriptions of the potential future trajectories of a system (Heugens & van Oosterhout 2001, IPBES 2016, which can provide a more analytical approach to future targets than modelling alone (Pereira et al 2019). Scenarios such as these can project and help implement transformative change (Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2020).…”