Elizabeth M Cook - Envisioning future urban sustainability and resilience through co-developed social-ecological-technological scenarios

Authors

Elizabeth M Cook - Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Evolutivas - Universidad Austral de Chile - Valdivia - Chile, Olga Barbosa - Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Evolutivas - Universidad Austral de Chile - Valdivia - Chile, Melissa J Davidson - Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability - Arizona State University - Tempe - AZ, Nancy B Grimm - School of Life Sciences - Arizona State University - Tempe - AZ, David M Iwaniec - Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability - Arizona State University - Tempe - AZ

Body

Urban sustainability and resilience are useful frameworks for guiding future visions and urban development. Yet, local municipalities often lack the capacity to plan for long-term sustainability and resilience to complex future challenges. We present a framework for co-developing scenarios to explore social-ecological-technological futures and demonstrate how scenario co-development can enhance urban decision-making capacity. We engage with local stakeholders in cities across North and Latin America to envision alternative desirable, plausible, and resilient future urban scenarios. Through a series of workshops with local partners, we co-develop scenarios to explore urban sustainability and resilience solutions and challenges, such as extreme climatic events, population growth, and changing resource availability. We then evaluate tradeoffs among scenarios with sustainability and resilience assessments and modeled outputs of future regional climate, micro-climate, population, land use, spatial distributions of resources and infrastructure, and changes in water availability and demand. For example, in Phoenix AZ, we worked with municipal, county, state, federal, tribal, and community decision-makers to co-develop and assess six distinct scenarios. Three sustainability scenarios highlight large transformational changes for equitable redistribution of services, and three resilience scenarios emphasize adaptive changes in built and green infrastructure to address extreme heat, drought, and flood events. Since engaging in scenario workshops, city practitioners in Phoenix have incorporated co-developed ideas and social-ecological-technological futures into their new Sustainability Plan. We demonstrate that the transdisciplinary co-production of scenarios and visioning of future pathways can improve capacity for long-term sustainability and resilience planning in cities.

Sessions