In the land use and land cover (LULC) literature, narrative scenarios are qualitative descriptions of plausible futures associated with a combination of socioeconomic , policy, technological, and climate changes. LULC models are then often used to translate these narrative descriptions into quantitative characterizations of possible future societal and ecological impacts and conditions. To respect the intent of the underlying scenario descriptions, this process of translation needs to be thoughtful, transparent, and reproducible. This paper evaluates the current state of the art in scenario translation methods and outlines their relative advantages and disadvantages, as well as the respective roles of stakeholders and subject matter experts. We summarize our findings in the form of a decision matrix that can assist land use planners, scientists, and modelers in choosing a translation method appropriate to their situation.

ABSTRACT. Deliberative methods for valuing ecosystem services are hypothesized to yield group preferences that differ systematically from those that would be obtained through calculative aggregation of the preferences of participating individuals. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the group consensus results of structured deliberations against a variety of aggregation methods applied to individual participant preferences that were elicited both before and after the deliberations. Participants were also asked about their perceptions of the deliberative process, which we used to assess their ability to detect preference changes and identify the causes of any changes. For five of the seven groups tested, the group consensus results could not have been predicted from individual predeliberation preferences using any of the aggregation rules. However, individual postdeliberation preferences could be used to reconstruct the group preferences using consensual and rank-based aggregation rules. These results imply that the preferences of participants changed over the course of the deliberation and that the group preferences reflected a broad consensus on overall rankings rather than simply the pairwise preferences of the majority. Changes in individual preferences seem to have gone largely unnoticed by participants, as most stated that they did not believe their preferences had substantially changed. Most participants were satisfied with the outcome of the deliberation, and their degree of satisfaction was correlated with the feeling that their opinion was heard and that they had an influence on the outcome. Based on our results, group deliberation shows promise as a means of generating ecosystem service valuations that reflect a consensus opinion rather than simply a collection of personal preferences.

Governments and social benefit organizations are expected to consider evidence in decisionmaking. In development and sustainability, evidence spans disciplines and methodological traditions and is often inconclusive. Graphical models are widely promoted to organize interdisciplinary evidence and improve decision-making by considering mediating variables. However, the reproducibility, objectivity and benefits for decision-making of graphical models have not been studied. We evaluate these considerations in the setting of energy services in the developing world, a contemporary development and sustainability imperative. We develop a database of relevant causal relations (331 concepts, 1,355 relationships) asserted in the literature (561 peer-reviewed articles). We demonstrate that high-level relationships of interest to practitioners feature less consistent evidence than the causal relationships that underpin them, supporting increased use of problem decomposition through graphical modelling approaches. However, adding such detail increases complexity exponentially, introducing a hazard of overparameterization if evidence is not available to match the level of mechanistic detail.

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