Imagining a Warmer World: Using Scenario Planning to Create Fair and Equitable Adaptation Law and Policy

Our proposal is focused on exploring the use of scenario planning in preparing for predicted climate impacts to food and water, health, security, equity, and justice in climate vulnerable communities around the world. We hypothesize that scenario planning is an effective yet underutilized tool for communicating climate impacts to wide audiences, evaluating how communities respond to crisis, identifying the constraints to building adaptive resilience within climate impacted communities living on the margins, and defining the laws and policies that would most effectively eliminate or remove those constraints.

Toward that end, we would like to host a two-day retreat next spring, where we would bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines who focus on issues at the core of climate justice with those who use scenario planning to forecast future responses to global challenges across local, state, and international scales. Our goal is to survey and compare how scenarios are used in different fields in order to establish best practices for applying scenario planning tools to the climate adaptation context. By planning and hosting the retreat, we will create a process for discovering which scenario planning methods best accommodate scientific predictions as well as account for the uncertain futures of a warmer world.

The partnership between the UW atmospheric sciences department and the multidisciplinary Three Degrees Project at UW School of Law combines unique strengths in climate research and law aimed at furthering responsible, equitable adaptation strategies, and this is a powerful collaboration that we hope to expand beyond UW through this grant. Scenarios need to be better understood and evaluated as effective tools for communicating climate impacts and vulnerabilities, across disciplines and within communities, in ways that—by design—can trigger direct and explicit political and legal outcomes for communities predicted to suffer these impacts.