Scenarios & Projections
An empirical analysis of different ways to think about Ocean Futures
Fabio Boschetti, Cathy Bulman, Alistair J. Hobday, Joanna Strzelecki, Lucy Robinson, Hector Lozano-Montes, Stephanie Contardo, Ingrid van Putten & Tony Smith
In the Future Studies literature a number of approaches are used to say something meaningful about the future. These include:
- Projections, estimates of the likely or possible future values of one or more indicators of a system’s behaviour (model outcome, plot, trend, growth rate).
- Scenarios, understood as ‘plausible, challenging, and relevant stories about how the future might unfold‘, which often offer alternate visions of the future.
- Forecasts, predictions about a future event, usually next to now.
- Foresighting, informed analysis or speculation about some aspects of a future process or system, which is reasonably far from now.
An important empirical question is the extent to which these alternative ways to think about the future align. Do they suggest similar futures? Can the futures they suggest be compared at all? Is it useful to use more than one of these approaches to address a problem? If so, how?
By analysing the extent to which the futures as imagined by these approaches align and, when they do not, why it is so, we seek to provide a framing for future thinking as applicable to Australia’s oceans which can assist long-term policy and planning integrated across sectors.
Below, you can find projections from a number of sectors which are likely to determine the future of Australian Oceans. A conceptual model of how the Australian Oceans respond to the interaction of these sectors under different scenarios will be uploaded soon.
If you have any question, or more information about any of these sectors please feel free to contact us so that we can improve our understanding on each of these sectors and how they interact.
Numerical projections