Exploring future trends in ecosystem services

Collecting information on the current condition and trends of ecosystem services and identifying the drivers that affect human well-being results in an understanding of current changes to ecosystem services, as discussed in chapter 3. Decision makers also need to look into the future to assess the effectiveness of policy options for addressing ecosystem change. For complex systems like ecosystems, gauging future outcomes comes with high uncertainty. Much of what is observed in ecosystems is poorly understood, and trends in ecosystem services might change in unexpected ways as people continue to use and affect the environment. In addition, different stakeholder groups may hold very different views about what constitute appropriate strategies for managing ecosystems. This chapter introduces scenario planning as one tool for thinking creatively about possible future outcomes of a decision and discusses how it can be used in conjunction with an Ecosystem Services Approach to strengthen decision making. Scenario planning explicitly considers alternative future pathways and the relationship between today’s decisions and the future. The chapter first explains the importance of exploring uncertainties about future trends and assumptions about the future. The second section describes the scenarios approach as one way of thinking through possible future developments, and describes the basic steps of a scenarios exercise. The last section describes some of the outcomes of scenario planning.

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