Developing divergent, plausible, and relevant climate futures for near- and long-term resource planning

Webinar recording.

It seems the effects of climate change were all too clear in 2021. Yet, we know more change is expected. When trying to adapt to a changing climate, with all the inherent uncertainties about how the future may play out, resource managers often turn to scenario planning as a tool. Managers use scenario planning to explore plausible ways the climate may change, allowing them to work with climate change uncertainty rather than being paralyzed by it. Once identified, scenarios of the future are used to develop proactive measures to prepare for and adapt to scenarios of change.

A key part of scenario planning is generating a list of potential future climates we may deal with. These ‘climate futures’ serve as the foundation of each scenario explored in the planning process. For example, managers consider how they would respond to a warm, wet versus a hot, dry future. This webinar will describe and compare three approaches to generate the climate futures that feed into the scenario planning process. In doing so, this work identifies an approach to developing climate futures that captures a broad range of climate conditions (a key ingredient to developing scenarios) across both near and long-term planning horizons.