The companion to the research reported here, Global-Change Scenarios: Their Development and Use, explores
the broader strategic frame for developing and utilizing scenarios in support of climate decision making.
STUDY DESIGN
Time horizon
• What could shape the
future: uncertainties
and certainties
• Two certainties:
– Shipping will continue
to be part
of the transportation
matrix
– Fresh that water will
become more
valuable
The Global Scenarios to
2025 are structured around
both pre-determined trends
and critical uncertainties.
The predetermined trends
are common across each of
the three of the scenarios.
The critical uncertainties,
which overlay the relatively
The Global Scenarios to
2025 released in 2005
build on this foundation
to develop an enhanced,
robust methodology that
addresses a broader
range of strategic and
planning needs across
the whole spectrum of
relevant time horizons
Every scenario project has a focal question —
a broad yet strategic query that serves as an
anchor for the scenarios. For this project, the
focal question was:
How might technology affect barriers to
building resilience and equitable growth
Outsights was retained by the UK’s Department for International Development to
develop a number of scenarios for the future of the very poorest, to stimulate new
thinking and to look for ways in which the future can be changed. An implicit
There are, perhaps, three fundamental questions which we believe that we have addressed:
Will the international community address what we have called "systems
issues", and if so how will they do this? By this, we mean all of those concerns that
Two scenarios have been considered
in this briefing :
1. Advanced international
policies scenario (AIP)
The assumptions in this scenario are based on
ambitious growth rates for renewable energy
sources that need additional support measures
WWF has a vision of a world that is
powered by 100 per cent renewable energy
sources by the middle of this century.
Unless we make this transition, the
world is most unlikely to avoid predicted
escalating impacts of climate change.
We construct a public debt risk matrix that
ranks countries with respect to the risks stemming from debt levels
as well as from debt structures. In Chapter 3 we use our new
scenario framework, which explicitly takes a government‟s debt