In October聽2018,聽faculty, postdocs and grad students from across 12 departments came together at Macdonald Campus to develop scenarios in response to the following question: What is the future of agricultural or other natural resource sustainability over the next two decades? The MSSI scenario building workshop, led by Professor Elena Bennett, followed the STEEP method for scenario building.
Participants broke out into groups and analyzed the question across the five STEEP axes 鈥� social, technological, environmental, economic and political 鈥� identifying trends, drivers and the linkages between them. Each group then went through their list of key trends and drivers and classified them as either 鈥減redictable鈥� or 鈥渦ncertain鈥�. Groups identified two unrelated uncertainties that they considered the most important or the most uncertain. These two drivers then became the axes for their scenarios, resulting in four quadrants which each represented a possible future based on the defining uncertainties. Finally, participants then developed a narrative for each quadrant, or scenario, to explore what that future would look like two decades from now.
