Abstract
The United Nations 2030 Agenda catalysed the development of global target-seeking sustainability-oriented scenarios representing alternative pathways to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Implementing the SDGs requires connected actions across local, national, regional, and global levels; thus, target-seeking scenarios need to reflect alternative options and tensions across those scales. We argue that the design of global sustainability-oriented target-seeking scenarios requires a consistent process for capturing multiple and contrasting perspectives on how to reach the goals, including the perspectives from multiple scales (e.g. local, national, regional) and geographic regions (e.g. the Global South). Here we propose a novel approach to co-design global target-seeking scenarios, consisting of (a) capturing global perspectives on pathways to the SDGs through a review of existing global scenarios; (b) a multi-stakeholder process to obtain multiple sub-global perspectives on pathways to sustainability; (c) an analysis of convergences, and crucially, divergences between global and regional perspectives on pathways to reach the SDGs, feeding into the design of new target-seeking scenario narratives. As a case study, we use the results of the 2018 African Dialogue on The World in 2050, discussing the future of agriculture and food systems. The identified divergent themes emerging from our analysis included urbanization, population growth, agricultural practices, and the roles of different actors in the future of agriculture. The results challenge some of the existing underlying assumptions of the current sustainability-oriented global scenarios (e.g. population growth, urbanisation, agricultural practices), indicating the relevance and timeliness of the proposed approach. We suggest that similar approaches can be replicated in other contexts to better inform the process of sustainability-oriented scenario co-design across scales, regions and cultures. In addition, we highlight the implications of the approach for scenario quantification and the evolution of modeling tools.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 102198 |
| Journal | Global Environmental Change |
| Volume | 65 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Funding
The 2018 African Dialogue on The World in 2050, held in Kigali in October 2018, was a two-day multi-stakeholder workshop discussing how transforming agriculture and food systems can contribute to reaching the SDGs in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Dialogue was organized with financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), through SwedBio at Stockholm Resilience Centre ( https://swed.bio/ ). Its participatory process was designed to provide insights to practitioners, policymakers, and scenario builders about alternative pathways to sustainable futures, capturing convergences and divergences across different groups of actors and scales. The Dialogue was organised in the context of “The World in 2050” (TWI2050) - an initiative bringing together a large network of researchers to develop a new generation of target-seeking scenarios designed to represent multiple pathways for achieving the SDGs within the planetary boundaries ( TWI, 2019, 2018 ). Ana Paula D. Aguiar, Zuzana V. Harmáčková and Odirilwe Selomane have been supported by the GRAID programme at Stockholm Resilience Centre, funded by the Swedish International Development Agency ( SIDA ). Zuzana Harmáčková's work was supported by Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. David Collste has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 675153 (ITN JD AdaptEconII). The 2 nd African Dialogue on TWI2050 was funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) through SwedBio.
Keywords
- Cross-scale analysis
- Food system transformation
- Pathways
- Sustainable Development Goals
- Target-seeking scenarios
- Three Horizons
