Scenarios of Good Anthropocenes in southern Africa

Hamann, Maike; Biggs, Reinette; Pereira, Laura; Preiser, Rika; Hichert, Tanja; Blanchard, Ryan; Warrington-Coetzee, Hannelie; King, Nicholas; Merrie, Andrew; Nilsson, Warren; Odendaal, Pieter; Poskitt, Sam; Betancourt, Diana; Ziervogel, Gina

doi:10.1016/j.futures.2020.102526

Cited by 30 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…This can help prevent local scenarios from being overly specific and missing larger-scale transformative changes such as the emergence of new technologies or shifting values that can fundamentally reshape local dynamics. For example, the bottom-up Manoa mashup scenarios developed for southern Africa specifically included the potential effects of emerging technologies such as artificial meat production and CRISPR gene editing technology to consider their effects on the regional environment, economy and society (Hamann et al 2020). Comparisons of scenarios developed using similar frameworks or goals can provide useful insights between different places and across scales, and highlight where there are major differences in key driving forces and the ways in which they play out (e.g.…”

Section: Developments That Could Help Address This Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments

Pereira

Kuiper

Selomane

et al. 2021

Ecosystems and People

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Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are in a unique position to influence environmental decision-making in the context of sustainability challenges. To do this effectively, however, new methods are needed to respond to the needs of decision-makers for a more integrated, contextualized and goal-seeking evaluation of different policies, geared for action from global to local. While scenarios are an important tool for GEAs to link short-term decisions and medium and long-term consequences, these current information needs cannot be met only through deductive approaches focused on the global level. In this paper, we argue that a more diverse set of futures tools operating at multiple scales are needed to improve GEA scenario development and analysis to meet the information needs of policymakers and other stakeholders better. Based on the literature, we highlight four challenges that GEAs need to be able to address in order to contribute to global environmental decision-making about the future: 1. anticipate unpredictable future conditions; 2. be relevant at multiple scales, 3. include diverse actors, perspectives and contexts; and 4. leverage the imagination to inspire action. We present a toolbox of future-oriented approaches and methods that can be used to effectively address the four challenges currently faced by GEAs.

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Section: Developments That Could Help Address This Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments

Pereira

Kuiper

Selomane

et al. 2021

Ecosystems and People

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such critiques have spawned calls for mixed-methods approaches that are inclusive of new, and unconventional ways of thinking (Bai et al 2016, Rosa et al 2017, Pereira et al 2019, Yung et al 2019, Hamann et al 2020, Allain et al 2020. This often involves using quantitative and semi-quantitative methods to model or project drivers of change and qualitative methods to gain an understanding of broader decision-making context, or to integrate modelling into participatory processes (Yung et al 2019).…”

Section: The Use Of Futures Thinking In Conservationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engaging with the science and politics of biodiversity futures: a literature review

et al. 2021

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Summary Future global environmental change will have a significant impact on biodiversity through the intersecting forces of climate change, urbanization, human population growth, overexploitation, and pollution. This presents a fundamental challenge to conservation approaches, which seek to conserve past or current assemblages of species or ecosystems in situ. This review canvases diverse approaches to biodiversity futures, including social science scholarship on the Anthropocene and futures thinking alongside models and scenarios from the biophysical science community. It argues that charting biodiversity futures requires processes that must include broad sections of academia and the conservation community to ask what desirable futures look like, and for whom. These efforts confront political and philosophical questions about levels of acceptable loss, and how trade-offs can be made in ways that address the injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits across and within human and non-human life forms. As such, this review proposes that charting biodiversity futures is inherently normative and political. Drawing on diverse scholarship united under a banner of ‘futures thinking’ this review presents an array of methods, approaches and concepts that provide a foundation from which to consider research and decision-making that enables action in the context of contested and uncertain biodiversity futures.

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“…So far, the growing empirical work on future thinking related to sustainability (e.g., Pereira et al, 2018;Hamann et al, 2020) needs further connection with cognitive theory if we are to understand how, for example, rules of emotional coherence within individual minds (Thagard, 2006) play out to enable or constrain visions of the future.…”

Section: Cognition and Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagination and transformations to sustainable and just futures

Moore

Milkoreit

2020

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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The ability of individuals and groups to identify, assess, and pursue alternative possible futures is an essential component of their ability to deliberately and collectively respond to major sustainability challenges rather than experience unguided or forced change. Deliberately engaging in transformation processes inevitably requires imagination. We refer to imagination for transformations as interdependent cognitive and social processes that create representations of present and possible future states of the world that can inform public deliberation, policy, decision making, and behavior from the individual to the global scale. We contend that imagination is an essential capacity for securing ecological, social, economic, and cultural well-being in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change. We sketch an emerging interdisciplinary research agenda on imagination as a transformational capacity and its role in transformation processes, building on contributions to a special issue on this subject. We specifically focus on imagination in relationship to transformative agency, causation, and individual-collective dynamics. Our aim is to identify research questions and challenges that are most pressing with a view to supporting efforts of transformations toward sustainability.

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Scenarios of Good Anthropocenes in southern Africa

Cited by 30 publications

References 41 publications

Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments

Advancing a toolkit of diverse futures approaches for global environmental assessments

Engaging with the science and politics of biodiversity futures: a literature review

Imagination and transformations to sustainable and just futures

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