Imagining long-term futures is hard, but it is more necessary than ever, as we wrestle with decisions about how best to adapt to the long-term effects of climate change. It is hard because significant change tends to happen on generational timescales, and long term futures can easily unfold over multiple generations. At the same time, decisions we need to take need to be taken now.
This was the challenge of a piece of work that SOIF did for the National Infrastructure Commission of Wales [NICW]. It has a remit to consider infrastructure decisions over 5-80 years. The NICW chair, David Clubb, will start presentations with a picture of a baby born in 2105, and a reminder that this is who they are building infrastructure for.
The brief was to build a set of scenarios that looked out to 2100–just because it is a round number—and then develop implications for decisions that would be taken between now and 2045.
There are creative ways to imagine long-term scenarios, but when designing futures processes that are to be used to inform policy it is better to be a little more formal. In this case, we built the 2100 scenarios in two stages, starting with a set of 2050s scenarios adapted from a set by the UK Government Office for Science, and then gave workshop groups a set of prompts to help them imagine how these might evolve over the following 40 years.
Any set of scenarios should fulfil a set of core criteria. Each individual scenario needs to be coherent; as a set they need to be distinctively different. And they also need to raise worthwhile strategic questions.
Long-term scenarios need to do a bit more. As we write in the report,
75 years is a long enough period of time for the world to change in ways that are unanticipated. For this reason, scenarios that take a longer term view should have within them elements that are genuinely discomfiting.
The four 2100 scenarios each take an aspect of a possible future and stretch it. ‘This Land Is Your Land’ has radical forms of democracy; ‘Living in a Materials World’ involves innovative lightweight materials; ’Creature of Love’ has new forms of the sacred; and ‘High Water Blues’ is a world assaulted by extreme weather.
The second workshop tested these scenarios against a set of existing places, drawn from Understanding Welsh Places, representing a cross-section of Welsh towns. From this, participants were invited to think what needed to happen in the next two decades to mitigate adverse outcomes or amplify good ones.
Among the implication from the scenarios, for transport planning and policy:
- Assumptions about transport growth and our ability to maintain infrastructure may no longer hold;
- Climate change will make transport more inconvenient and more difficult;
- Digital infrastructure is likely to become less reliable;
- We will need to think about infrastructure in a different way, making it more repairable and even ‘demountable’ and rebuildable;
- Communities will need more capability and capacity to cope with climate shocks.
The project report is due to be published by NICW in due course, and SOIF will be publishing a guide to the place-based methodology used in the second workshop. If you are interested in developing long-term futures for your organisation, please contact our Director of Futures, Andrew Curry.