Summary: Envisioning the future for ecosystems and people. Carpenter et al. 2005.

Human use of ecosystem services have resulted in rapid changes to ecosystems, reducing the resilience, and increasing the uncertainty about future change. Scenario planning involves the use of plausible, provocative, and relevant stories about what may happen in the future. This technique explores the consequences of current and future actions, assumptions and policy choices based on current knowledge. Based on the Millenium Assessment’s Current State and Trends volume, scenarios explore three pathways involving a positive commitment towards sustainable development, and another without such commitment.

The scenarios designed explore two transitions; increasing globalization or regionalism, and reactive environmental policies and proactive environmental policy. Based on these choices, the authors came up with four choices; Global Orchestration (globalization, equity, economic growth, and reactive approach), Order from Strength (regionalism, emphasizing economic growth and reactive approach), Adapting Mosaic (regionalism with a proactive approach), and Technogarden (globalism with emphasis of proactive technological approach). All of these approaches are based on processes that are occurring today, and scenarios explore the tradeoffs involved in the different combinations of approaches.

Based on these four types of approaches, scenarios were constructed through applying qualitative and quantitative analyses to the MA framework, including feedbacks from ecosystems and well-being. Additionally, interviewing was done to determine the benefits, risks and opportunities from differing paths of globalization, governance, and ecosystem management. Economic growth and expansion of education and access to technology increases the ability to respond to environmental problems, but does not sufficiently deal with the potentially severe and irreversible effects of ecosystem degradation. An approach that emphasizes national security, and protectionism combined with reactive ecosystem

management may allow conservation in wealthy areas (wilderness), there would be a rapid loss of biodiversity in low-income areas. Proactive regional ecosystem management may help social-ecological systems to be more resilient, but regional a regional focus may affect the potential for global commons management. Technological ecosystem engineering and economic incentives may lead to highly efficient delivery of ecosystem services, but may create new environmental problems and may lead to greater demands for these services.

A comparison of proactive and reactive approaches revealed that a proactive approach would significantly reduce the probability of extreme events affecting more than 1 million people. The authors argue that proactive approach is particularly important under rapid change or novel conditions. Land use change will continue to drive changes in ecosystem services provisioning, biodiversity conservation goals will be difficult to achieve due to habitat loss, ecosystem services will decline, fertilizers will affect nutrient flows, and the focus on provisioning services will reduce the provision of supporting, regulating and cultural ecosystem services. Each scenario has different consequences for material well being, health, freedom, security, and social relations.