Natur a Ni / Nature and Us: A vision for the environment in 2050: Scenarios and Visioning
Published 29 August 2024
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Natural Resources Wales
What was the challenge?
Natural Resources Wales (NRW) set out to support the creation of a collaborative vision for the environment in Wales in 2050. The goal was to provide a shared direction for collaborative action in response to the climate and nature emergencies. Although led by NRW, this Vision is for the people of Wales, including the public, as well as key stakeholders, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public sector partners. One of our key goals was to enable participants to make an informed decision on the future they’d like to see, and to make the connection between the way we live and our impact on our environment.
What was the approach?
The Vision project followed 4 steps based on the Government Office for Science Futures Toolkit: 1) gathering Intelligence about the future; 2) exploring possible futures; 3) visioning; and 4) presenting the vision back. This case study will focus on Step 2, where we used scenarios to enable participants to explore how future trends will shape our environment and the way we live.
As we were under time pressure (around two months for scenario development), we chose to build on a set of existing scenarios, the UK National Ecosystem Assessment scenarios, rather than start from scratch. To refresh the scenarios, and make them Wales-specific, we ran workshops with expert groups, and held semi-structured 1-2-1 interviews with specialists across several different areas, such as agriculture, forestry, flood and urban environments. The output was a set of four high-level, Welsh-relevant narratives that provided a clear set of possible futures to be explored with the wider Natur a Ni audience. This allowed us to consider a wide range of issues, such as where our food comes from and how our imports impact habitats abroad. Some themes ran through all the scenarios – trends that are already ‘baked in’ to our future, regardless of whether net zero will be achieved, such as climate change causing flooding and heatwaves.
As we needed to reach our audience virtually, we chose to present the scenarios as short films, which were used in workshops and webinars to prompt discussion. We asked questions such as: “What is desirable about this future?”, “What concerns you about this future?” and encouraged discussion on who and what benefited or was harmed in each version of the future. The responses then went towards building consensus for the vision.
One of the greatest challenges of the projects was scale. Creating a vision that is representative of a whole country was very difficult, and the ‘environment’ covers many contentious topics. The scenarios enabled us to explore these topics in a way that encouraged open discussion. We engaged with seldom heard groups through partner organisations and involved a citizens’ assembly in the visioning stages of the project. Though despite best efforts, it is very difficult to make this type of work truly representative and inclusive.
What was the impact?
The outcomes of the scenarios helped to shape the development of the Natur a Ni (Nature and Us) Vision. We played back the results gained during the online sessions, surveys and scenario workshops to a representative citizens’ assembly based on the process developed by “Sortition”, to help alleviate some of the representation issues previously mentioned. During these citizens’ assemblies, a range of different perspectives on the nature and climate emergency and what it means for nature and people were explored.
Participants were very active in exploring the evidence presented around alternative futures – looking at examples of how communities are working together towards those futures, exploring their own connections with nature, and hearing from the voices and viewpoints we collected as part of Natur a Ni. The outcomes of the scenarios discussion were instrumental in helping us shape the final Vision for Natur a Ni. The findings can be viewed here: Natural Resources Wales / Nature and Us – a national initiative on the future of the Welsh natural environment.
Written in 2023.