Integrating existing climate adaptation planning into future visions: A strategic scenario for the central Arizona–Phoenix region

Cities face a number of challenges to ensure that people’s well-being and ecosystem integrity are not only maintained but improved for current and future generations. Urban planning must account for the diverse and changing interactions among the social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) of a city. Cities struggle with long-range approaches to explore, anticipate, and plan for sustainability and resilience—and scenario development is one way to address this need. In this paper, we present the framework for developing what we call ‘strategic’ scenarios, which are scenarios or future visions created from governance documents expressing unrealized municipal priorities and goals. While scenario approaches vary based on diverse planning and decision-making objectives, only some offer tangible, systemic representations of existing plans and goals for the future that can be explored as an assessment and planning tool for sustainability and resilience. Indeed, the strategic scenarios approach presented here (1) emphasizes multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary interventions; (2) identifies systemic conflicts, tradeoffs, and synergies among existing planning goals; and (3) incorporates as yet unrealized goals and strategies representative of urban short-term planning initiatives. We present an example strategic scenario for the Central Arizona–Phoenix metropolitan region, and discuss the utility of the strategic scenario in long-term thinking for future sustainability and resilience in urban research and practice. This approach brings together diverse—sometimes competing—strategies and offers the opportunity to explore outcomes by comparing and contrasting their implications and tradeoffs, and evaluating the resulting strategic scenario against scenarios developed through alternative, participatory approaches

Social, Ecological, and Technological Strategies for Climate Adaptation

Resilient cities are able to persist, grow, and even transform while keeping their essential identities in the face of external forces like climate change, which threatens lives, livelihoods, and the structures and processes of the urban environment (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, How to make cities more resilient: a handbook for local government leaders. Switzerland, Geneva, 2017). Scenario development is a novel approach to visioning resilient futures for cities. As an instrument for synthesizing data and envisioning urban futures, scenarios combine diverse datasets such as biophysical models, stakeholder perspectives, and demographic information (Carpenter et al. Ecol Soc 20:10, 2015). As a tool to envision alternative futures, participatory scenario development explores, identifies, and evaluates potential outcomes and tradeoffs associated with the management of social–ecological change, incorporating multiple stakeholder’s collaborative subjectivity (Galafassi et al. Ecol Soc 22:2, 2017). Understanding the current landscape of city planning and governance approaches is important in developing city-specific scenarios. In particular, assessing municipal planning strategies through the lens of interactive social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) provides useful insight into the dynamics and interrelationships of these coupled systems (da Silva et al. Sustain Dev 4(2):125–145, 2012). An assessment of existing municipal strategies can also be used to inform future adaptation scenarios and strategic plans addressing extreme weather events. With the scenario development process guiding stakeholders in generating goals and visions through participatory workshops, the content analysis of governance planning documents from the SETS perspective provides key insight on specific strategies that have been considered (or overlooked) in cities. In this chapter, we (a) demonstrate an approach to examine how cities define and prioritize climate adaptation strategies in their governance planning documents, (b) examine how governance strategies address current and future climate vulnerabilities as exemplified by nine cities in North and Latin America where we conducted a content analysis of municipal planning documents, and (c) suggest a codebook to explore the diverse SETS strategies proposed to address climate challenges—specifically related to extreme weather events such as heat, drought, and flooding

Setting the Stage for Co-Production

Participatory scenario visioning aims to expose, integrate, and reconcile perspectives and expectations about a sustainable, resilient future from a variety of actors and stakeholders. This chapter considers the settings in which transdisciplinary participatory visioning takes place, highlighting lessons learned from the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN). It reflects on the benefits of engaging in the co-production process and the challenges that must be considered amid this process

The UREx Guide to Scenarios

This Scenario Planning Guide outlines how the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) supports ongoing efforts in its nine network cities in conducting participatory workshops. The Scenarios Working Group team, together with students, researchers, and collaborators across the network, have synthesized the co-produced visions from Workshop I. City-leads, practitioners, network participants, and participating institutions are encouraged to use the quantitative and qualitative outputs to further develop resilient, equitable, and sustainable transition pathways to help bring about their envisioned futures. The primer begins with a brief description of the UREx SRN, before introducing the innovative framework applied to participatory scenario workshops. This is followed by an outline of the social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) approach that is applied throughout the project. A general explanation of scenarios is given, and a detailed description is provided of why scenario planning is applied, and the types of scenarios produced. The main portion of the primer focuses on the scenario workshops with detailed information provided on pre-workshop events, workshop activities and post-workshop data analysis and product synthesis

A Vision for Resilient Urban Futures

A fundamental systems approach is essential to advancing our understanding of how to address critical challenges caused by the intersection of urbanization and climate change. The social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) conceptual framework brings forward a systems perspective that considers the reality of cities as complex systems and provides a baseline for developing a science of, and practice for, cities. Given the urgency of issues we collectively face to improve livability, justice, sustainability, and resilience in cities, bringing a systems approach to resilience planning and policymaking is critical, as is development of positive visions and scenarios that can provide more realistic and systemic solutions. We provide a vision for more resilient urban futures that learns from coproduced scenario development work in nine US and Latin American cities in the URExSRN. We find that developing an urban systems science that can provide actionable knowledge for decision-making is an emerging, and much needed, transdisciplinary research agenda. It will require true boundary-crossing to bring the knowledge, skills, tools, and ideas together in ways that can help achieve the normative goals and visions we have for our shared urban future

Beyond bouncing back? Comparing and contesting urban resilience frames in US and Latin American contexts

Urban resilience has gained considerable popularity in planning and policy to address cities’ capacity to cope with climate change. While many studies discuss the different ways that academics define resilience, little attention has been given to how resilience is conceptualized across different urban contexts and among the actors that engage in building resilience ‘on the ground’. Given the implications that resilience frames can have for the solutions that are pursued (and who benefits from them), it is important to examine how transformative definitions of urban resilience are in practice. In this paper, we use data from a survey of nine US and Latin American and Caribbean cities to explore how the concept is framed across multiple governance sectors, including governmental, non-governmental, business, research, and hybrid organizations. We examine these framings in light of recent conceptual developments and tensions found in the literature. The results highlight that, in general across the nine cities, framings converge with definitions of resilience as the ability to resist, cope with, or bounce back to previous conditions, whereas sustainability, equity, and social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) perspectives are rarely associated with resilience. There are noticeable differences across cities and governance actors that point to geographic and political variation in the way resilience is conceptualized. We unpack these differences and discuss their implications for resilience research and practice moving forward. We argue that if resilience is going to remain a major goal for city policies into the future, it needs to be conceived in a more transformative, anticipatory, and equitable way, and acknowledge interconnected SETS

Exploring Alternative Futures in the Anthropocene

Many challenges posed by the current Anthropocene epoch require fundamental transformations to humanity’s relationships with the rest of the planet. Achieving such transformations requires that humanity improve its understanding of the current situation and enhance its ability to imagine pathways toward alternative, preferable futures. We review advances in addressing these challenges that employ systematic and structured thinking about multiple possible futures (futures-thinking). Over seven decades, especially the past two, approaches to futures-thinking have helped people from diverse backgrounds reach a common understanding of important issues, underlying causes, and pathways toward optimistic futures. A recent focus has been the stimulation of imagination to produce new options. The roles of futures-thinking in breaking unhelpful social addictions and in conflict resolution are key emerging topics. We summarize cognitive, cultural, and institutional constraints on the societal uptake of futures-thinking, concluding that none are insurmountable once understood

A social-ecological-technological systems framework for urban ecosystem services

As rates of urbanization and climatic change soar, decision-makers are increasingly challenged to provide innovative solutions that simultaneously address climate change impacts and risks and inclusively ensure quality of life for urban residents. Cities have turned to nature-based solutions to help address these challenges. Nature-based solutions, through the provision of ecosystem services, can yield numerous benefits for people and address multiple challenges simultaneously. Yet, efforts to mainstream nature-based solutions are impaired by the complexity of the interacting social, ecological, and technological dimensions of urban systems. This complexity must be understood and managed to ensure ecosystem-service provisioning is effective, equitable, and resilient. Here, we provide a social-ecological-technological system (SETS) framework that builds on decades of urban ecosystem services research to better understand four core challenges associated with urban nature-based solutions: multi-functionality, systemic valuation, scale mismatch of ecosystem services, and inequity and injustice. The framework illustrates the importance of coordinating natural, technological, and socio-economic systems when designing, planning, and managing urban nature-based solutions to enable optimal social-ecological outcomes