Scientific paper
Title: Radical ocean futures-scenario development using science fiction prototyping
Author team: Andrew Merrie, Patrick Keys, Marc Metian and, Henrik Österblom
Journal: Futures - The journal of policy, planning and futures studies
highlights
Applies the method of science fiction prototyping to the future of fisheries.
Presents four ‘radical’ and compelling narrative scenarios.
Each scenario is supported by a strong scientific evidence base.
The scenarios account for complexity and non-linear change.
Scenarios reflect interaction of ecological, technological & socio-economic change.
ARTICLE ABSTRACT
Scenarios can help individuals, communities, corporations and nations to develop a capacity for dealing with the unknown and unpredictable, or the unlikely but possible. A range of scientific methods for developing scenarios is available, but we argue that they have limited capacity to investigate complex social-ecological futures because: 1) non-linear change is rarely incorporated and: 2) they rarely involve co-evolutionary dynamics of integrated social-ecological systems. This manuscript intends to address these two concerns by applying the method of science fiction prototyping to developing scenarios for the future of global fisheries in a changing global ocean. We used an empirically informed background on existing and emerging trends in marine natural resource use and dynamics to develop four ‘radical ocean futures,' incorporating and extrapolating from existing environmental, technological, social and economic trends. We argue that the distinctive method as applied here can complement existing scenario methodologies and assist scientists in developing a holistic understanding of complex systems dynamics. The approach holds promise for making scenarios more accessible and interesting to non-academics and can be useful for developing proactive governance mechanisms.
The scenario space. Narrative scenarios are represented in a two dimensional space and each illustration is a representation of a key defining element for each of the four ‘radical ocean futures’. These four ‘radical ocean futures’ do not represent ‘the’ future but four possible futures. The ‘collapsed to sustained’ on the horizontal axis refers to the ecological dimension and the ‘fragmented to connected’ on the vertical access refers to the societal dimension.
If you would like to read the full article (published open access under a creative commons licence) please head over to the Futures website.