Henrik Carlsen

Tailor-made scenario planning for local adaptation to climate change

This paper presents a tailor-made scenario approach for climate change adaptation planning, which emphasises involvement of stakeholders in the development of socioeconomic scenarios and relates to the planning situation and interest of the planning entity. The method was developed and tested in case studies in three different sectors in Sweden (the health sector, the tourism sector and water resource management). The result of the case studies is that the tailor-made scenario approach facilitated the engagement of the local planning body in climate change adaptation and helped them to analyse consequences and possible solutions in a structured way. However, the scenarios that emerged mainly focused on socioeconomic drivers on which the planning body had a large impact or drivers that can be influenced through cooperation with other actors at the local or regional level. While this result underlines the need for local stakeholder involvement in scenario processes, it also indicates a local bias that could be remedied by a stronger representation of national and global perspectives in the scenario development process. Finally, we discuss how a “bottom-up” approach could be combined with a “consistency” approach, which points towards a possible way forward to a hybrid methodology that is compatible with the scenario framework currently being developed in connection to the fifth assessment report of the IPCC.

Scenarios and sustainability: tools for alleviating the gap between municipal means and responsibilities in adaptation planning

Adaptation to climate change often involves long-time frames and uncertainties over the consequences of chosen adaptation measures. In this study, two tools designed for assisting local decision-makers in adaptation planning were tested: socio-economic scenarios and sustainability analysis. The objective was to study whether these tools could be of practical relevance to Swedish municipalities and facilitate local-level climate change adaptation. We found that the municipal planners who participated in the testing generally considered the tools useful and of high relevance, but that more time was needed to use the tools than was provided during the test process.

Systematic exploration of scenario spaces

Purpose – Scenarios have become a vital methodological approach in business as well as in public policy. When scenarios are used to guide analysis and decision-making, the aim is typically robustness and in this context we argue that two main problems at scenario set level is conservatism, i.e. all scenarios are close to a perceived business-as-usual trajectory and lack of balance in the sense of arbitrarily mixing some conservative and some extreme scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to address these shortcomings by proposing a methodology for generating sets of scenarios which are in a mathematical sense maximally diverse. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, we develop a systematic methodology, Scenario Diversity Analysis (SDA), which addresses the problems of broad span vs conservatism and imbalance. From a given set of variables with associated states, SDA generates scenario sets where the scenarios are in a quantifiable sense maximally different and therefore best span the whole set of f...

Towards systemic and contextual priority setting for implementing the 2030 Agenda

How the sustainable development goals (SDGs) interact with each other has emerged as a key question in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, as it has potentially strong implications for prioritization of actions and their effectiveness. So far, analysis of interactions has been very basic, typically starting from one SDG, counting the number of interactions, and discussing synergies and trade-offs from the perspective of that issue area. This paper pushes the frontier of how interactions amongst SDG targets can be understood and taken into account in policy and planning. It presents an approach to assessing systemic and contextual interactions of SDG targets, using a typology for scoring interactions in a cross-impact matrix and using network analysis techniques to explore the data. By considering how a target interacts with another target and how that target in turn interacts with other targets, results provide a more robust basis for priority setting of SDG efforts. The analysis identifies which targets have the most and least positive influence on the network and thus guides, where efforts may be directed (and not); where strong positive and negative links sit, raising warning flags to areas requiring extra attention; and how targets that reinforce each others’ progress cluster, suggesting where important cross-sectoral collaboration between actors is merited. How interactions play out is context specific and the approach is tested on the case of Sweden to illustrate how priority setting, with the objective to enhance progress across all 17 SDGs, might change if systemic impacts are taken into consideration.

Choosing small sets of policy-relevant scenarios by combining vulnerability and diversity approaches

Computer simulation models can generate large numbers of scenarios, far more than can be effectively utilized in most decision support applications. How can one best select a small number of scenarios to consider? One approach calls for choosing scenarios that illuminate vulnerabilities of proposed policies. Another calls for choosing scenarios that span a diverse range of futures. This paper joins these two approaches for the first time, proposing an optimization-based method for choosing a small number of relevant scenarios that combine both vulnerability and diversity. The paper applies the method to a real case involving climate resilient infrastructure for three African river basins (Volta, Orange and Zambezi). Introducing selection criteria in a stepwise manner helps examine how different criteria influence the choice of scenarios. The results suggest that combining vulnerability- and diversity-based criteria can provide a systematic and transparent method for scenario selection. Describes an optimization-based method for choosing a small number of scenarios.A combination of criteria related to vulnerability and diversity is used.The method is applied to a real case involving climate resilient infrastructure.