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Scenarios that illuminate vulnerabilities and robust responses

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Abstract

Scenarios exist so that decision makers and those who provide them with information can make statements about the future that claim less confidence than do predictions, projections, and forecasts. Despite their prevalence, fundamental questions remain about how scenarios should best be developed and used. This paper proposes a particular conceptualization of scenarios that aims to address many of the challenges faced when using scenarios to inform contentious policy debates. The concept envisions scenarios as illuminating the vulnerabilities of proposed policies, that is, as concise summaries of the future states of the world in which a proposed policy would fail to meet its goals. Such scenarios emerge from a decision support process that begins with a proposed policy, seeks to understand the conditions under which it would fail, and then uses this information to identify and evaluate potential alternative policies that are robust over a wide range of future conditions. Statistical cluster analyses applied to databases of simulation model results can help identify scenarios as part of this process. Drawing on themes from the decision support literature, this paper first reviews difficulties faced when using scenarios to inform climate-related decisions, describes the proposed approach to address these challenges, illustrates the approach with applications for three different types of users, and concludes with some thoughts on implications for the provision of climate information and for future scenario processes.

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Notes

  1. Rozenberg et al. (2012) does use scenario discovery to consider a wide range of such factors in an analysis aimed at national government level decision makers.

  2. Available from www.weap21.org. Accessed Sept 4, 2012

  3. Our group conducted several versions of the IEUA analysis, each reflecting a different iteration of the process shown in Fig. 1 and considering different strategies and performance measures. This example derives from the first iteration.

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Acknowledgments

The ideas expressed in this essay emerged from fruitful discussions, collaborations, and debates with numerous wonderful colleagues. I owe particular thanks to Andy Parker for comments on this manuscript and to Chris Weaver for encouragement and funding of several earlier versions. Comments from two anonymous reviewers played a key role in shaping the essay you see here. I thank the National Science Foundation for its support through grant SES‐0345925 and the center for Climate and Energy Decision Making (SES‐0949710) for its support through a cooperative agreement between the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University.

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    Robert Lempert

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Lempert, R. Scenarios that illuminate vulnerabilities and robust responses. Climatic Change 117, 627–646 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0574-6

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