How can you use scenario planning to prepare your organization for the future of climate change?

One way to understand climate change uncertainly is by using a process called Scenario Planning that incorporates weather/climate. Scenario Planning incorporates social, technological, environmental, economic and political aspects into understanding plausible futures. These futures are not forecasts but they give insight as to what could occur. With this type of insight people and organizations can determine strategies now to optimize the opportunities and challenges down the line. Scenario Planning can help organizations develop better resilient plans, prepare for change and become more innovative. Scenario Planning is a process that requires some time and interaction, but can be very rewarding.

The traditional risk identification and mitigation limits the abilities of an organisation to respond to the increasingly unpredictable events and circumstances caused by climate change. Scenario planning assists organisations go beyond the traditional and tap into the unexpected, the uncertain. The success of scenario planning is not about the same scenario becoming a reality, but in fact it provides the organisation a possible set of impacts to plan for, which could be caused by a number of other possible scenarios and events.

Scenario planning helps in rethinking the future. For climate change related decision-making, the first step is to acknowledge that future is not going to be the same as the past. So relying on past assumptions is no longer feasible. For many, this is somewhat terrifying. But scenario planning helps in starting to think how you would manage uncertainty and unexpected changes in your strategic and operational environment, what strategies you would put now in place to deal with some of that, and how you are going to track changes in those sectors or metrics that are most important to you. That in essence is what climate adaptation is about.

Start with Assessing the impact of each scenario on your organization's operations, supply chain, and overall resilience. Formulate adaptive strategies that address challenges and capitalize on opportunities presented by different climate scenarios. Regularly revisit and adjust your plans as the climate landscape evolves.

There is a tendency to strive for certainty when it comes to uncertainty. Many people just want to know THE scenario and get on with it. But the painful thing is that there is no one scenario but rather a range of potential futures. Some of these are worst case scenarios, some not so bad but still bad, and some have potential opportunities. But it comes down to our values and what our vision looks like as to how we approach and create scenarios. I particularly like the Heath Brothers approach (which is not climate change specific but more generic) on bookending scenarios: identifying worst case, best case and somewhere in the middle and then tracing what particular assumptions we have about the future.

You can find a lot of resources for such scenario planning. What most resources miss is that they will fail if you do not pick the right people to work on them. The initial team must have diverse backgrounds and thought process. Pick individuals from different departments, generations, ethnicity, educational backgrounds, and especially different levels of the organisational hierarchy. Then hire a professional facilitator, not a climate change expert, that can bring everyone's voice forward, and drive the conversation structurally towards the end goal. Once developed bring in the experts to help you assess the impact of each of the scenarios on your organisation. Don't forget to select positive scenarios, it does not have to be all negative!

Scenarios: Navigating Climate Change. Organizations need scenario planning to tackle climate change. At our University, we use it to improve decision making. Scenarios test the resilience of our strategies against possible climate futures, showing risks and opportunities. They encourage creative thinking for future plans by questioning our presumptions and mindsets. We create a common comprehension of future prospects and promote cooperation and consistency by involving different stakeholders in hypothetical situations. Hypothetical scenarios guide us in the unpredictable environment of climate change.

In most cases, you need to consider the impact of each of the scenario on your: - staff - customers and use cases of your products - supply chain - broader stakeholders - costs, both fixed and variable - competitors - environment (water, air, soil, recycling) and above all, health and safety of those that interact with your business in any way possible

Benefits of using scenarios are that they let you play with assumptions about the future and also help to open up new conversations that might not otherwise unfold. They are useful tools in unpacking what we assume we want to achieve, what threats and risks we assume might arise, and then discuss and make decisions on how we would deal with those. Scenarios also enforce long-term thinking about the future and can help us to shift the timeframes that we have in mind and assist in prioritising actions. They can also assist in asking new types of questions that we might not have thought of before.

What is challenging with scenarios is to know which ones to pick, how to evaluate their reliability, and how to then use them in decision-making. A lot of people don't know where to start. The key is looking at other organisations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and how others are using scenarios in their decision-making. Scenarios are generic so the key is to understand what you need to achieve, and how a particular scenario would fit in and/or inform your decision-making context.

You do not have to reinvent the wheel. If faced with limited scenarios, do not feel ashamed, borrow scenarios from publicly available sources. Do not forget to credit the original authors.