On Friday I attended an excellent workshop organised by the University of Cambridge Centre for Sustainable Development to progress some scenario work they are doing for Grosvenor Estates on energy management in the property and development sectors to 2050. They currently have four scenarios mapped out:
- Steady Progress (sort-of business as usual but with stronger green values)
- Comfort withoiut concern (climate change? What climate change?)
- Growing Divide (an apocolyptic future of social inequality and unrest)
- Transformational change (the really green option).
These are arranged about two axes concerning values oriented (or not) towards the collective good and the cost/availability of energy.
Developing these scenarios was great fun but I was reminded again how such scenario work depends on the immediate reactions of those present to quite specific questions, questions which they might not have spent much time thinking about. The process assumes that wisdom will arise from the input of many voices at these workshops. In CLUES we are trying to tackle this issue by using scenarios that have already been developed by such processes of engagement but quantifying them and adding detail through a careful process of interrogation over time, looking at the interconnections and complexities. This will hopefully mean that the narratives of the scenarios will have been tested out by the modelling process and be more robust. The scenario work within CLUES starts in Easter 2011.
Yvonne Rydin
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