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Abstract The Anthropocene is the present time of human‐caused accelerating global change, and new forms of Anthropocene risk are emerging that society has hitherto never experienced. Science and policy are grappling with the temporal and spatial magnitude of these changes. However, there is a gap in the transparency—and perhaps even in the awareness—of the profound role that Anthropocene science plays in shaping the structure and possibility of our future world. In this work, we explore three key features of Anthropocene scenarios, including: worlding capacity, values shaping what is possible, and refusal to look. We explore these three features using three cases of Anthropocene science including international energy scenarios, climate change projections, and the possibility of social collapse. We discuss how Anthropocene science modulates new risks and systematically, though perhaps inadvertently, entrains certain social‐ecological futures. We find that clarity in these three attributes of Anthropocene science could enhance its integrity and build trust, not least in the arena of public policy. We conclude with recommendations for improving the interpretability and scope of Anthropocene science in the context of a growing urgency for accurate information to inform our collective future.

Abstract The future of Arctic social systems and natural environments is highly uncertain. Climate change will lead to unprecedented phenomena in the pan‐Arctic region, such as regular shipping traffic through the Arctic Ocean, urban growth, military activity, expanding agricultural frontiers, and transformed Indigenous societies. While intergovernmental to local organizations have produced numerous synthesis‐based visions of the future, a challenge in any scenario exercise is capturing the “possibility” space of change. In this work, we employ a computational text analysis to generate unique thematic input for novel, story‐based visions of the Arctic. Specifically, we develop a corpus of more than 2,000 articles in publicly accessible, English‐language Arctic newspapers that discuss the future in the Arctic. We then perform a latent Dirichlet allocation, resulting in 10 distinct topics and sets of associated keywords. From these topics and keywords, we design ten story‐based scenarios employing the Mānoa mashup, science fiction prototyping, and other methods. Our results demonstrate that computational text analysis can feed directly into a creative futuring process, whereby the output stories can be traced clearly back to the original topics and keywords. We discuss our findings in the context of the broader field of Arctic scenarios and show that the results of this computational text analysis produce complementary stories to the existing scenario literature. We conclude that story‐based scenarios can provide vital texture toward understanding the myriad possible Arctic futures.

It is well known that rivers connect upstream and downstream ecosystems within watersheds. Here we describe the concept of precipitationsheds to show how upwind terrestrial evaporation source areas contribute moisture for precipitation to downwind sink regions. We illustrate the importance of upwind land cover in precipitationsheds to sustain precipitation in critically water stressed downwind areas, specifically dryland agricultural areas. We first identify seven regions where rainfed agriculture is particularly vulnerable to reductions in precipitation, and then map their precipitationsheds. We then develop a framework for qualitatively assessing the vulnerability of precipitation for these seven agricultural regions. We illustrate that the sink regions have varying degrees of vulnerability to changes in upwind evaporation rates depending on the extent of the precipitationshed, source region land use intensity and expected land cover changes in the source region.

Pastoral communities living in the arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya raise livestock herds within highly patchy environments, and experience chronic food insecurity and inter-ethnic conflicts linked to resource access. For these primarily rural communities, livestock are a source of calories and income and are therefore crucial to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) associated with food security (SDG 2). Achieving sustainable improvements in household well-being in this region is contingent on understanding how diverse policy decisions complement or undermine the ability of pastoral households to raise livestock. Of near-term relevance is the question of reconciling food security with biodiversity conservation goals (SDG 15) across Kenya’s drylands, which are also known for their exceptional biodiversity. World over, protected areas are associated with diverse impacts on local communities. However, spatial variation in how these areas contribute to pastoral food security and household well-being across Kenya remain poorly understood. Using our newly developed model SPIRALL, we examined spatial variation in changes in household well-being that result when pastoral households across Kenya lose access to neighboring protected areas. SPIRALL is a country-scale, agent-based pastoral household decision-making model. We joined SPIRALL to L-Range, a model that simulates rangeland ecosystem functioning. The resulting coupled model simulates reciprocal interactions between pastoral households and the environment in Kenya and can be used as a scenario analysis tool to understand impacts of broadly defined policies on food security. Our scenario-based analysis showed that loss of protected-area access caused increases in rates of hunger, debt, and trans-boundary movements, particularly among non-sedentary and agropastoral households. These effects were spatially heterogeneous and influenced by county size and proximity to protected areas. We conclude by outlining the policy-implications result of the interactions between SDG 2 and SDG 15 in Kenya. We also highlight additional uses and avenues for improvement for SPIRALL.

Story-based futures serve an important role in climate change scenario development. Stories are particularly useful in exploring sea level rise possibilities, since we know many coastal areas are specifically vulnerable to accelerating rises in sea level. This discrete change in coastline is different from most other climate change impacts, and offers a clear basis for scientifically informed, future scenarios. We demonstrated this with a creative world-building effort set in Lagos, Nigeria in the year 2199. Further, we employed story-based scenario development, and created a learning-oriented serious game that allows users to experience a future Lagos in an open-ended, text-based adventure style. This collaborative process blended scientific research, story-telling, and artistic co-creation to iteratively construct the game “Lagos2199”. A pilot-use case of Lagos2199 is documented herein, with preliminary survey results from the student users. We present two core insights. First, we demonstrate how scientific projections regarding sea level rise can be leveraged as an entry point for world-building and scenario development of the future. Second, we show that such a scenario can be transformed into an immersive, story-based serious game to creatively communicate possible futures. Providing the next generation of citizens with fluency in both climate change impacts and how society will interact with such impacts is critical for providing adaptive capacity over the coming decades and centuries of accelerating global change.

Amid growing urgency behind the need to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the world into another crisis. Prominent conceptualizations of transformation suggest that crises like the pandemic may create windows of opportunity for transformative change, such as the scope and scale of systemic change required to address the climate crisis. Additionally, envisioning positive futures plays an important role in building shared commitment and inspiration for transformation, particularly if conducted in transformative spaces where actors with diverse framings and vulnerabilities can experiment with new practices and ideas. Emerging research demonstrates the potential for experimental futures methods to create such transformative spaces. In this study, we aimed to create a transformative space that builds inspiration and shared commitment for climate action while exploring the unique inflection point created by the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we constructed a highly creative participatory futuring process for participants involved in climate action in the Kitchener-Waterloo Region (Canada) to imagine desirable futures emerging from the crisis. Because we needed to move quickly and accommodate pandemic-related constraints to explore this unique moment in time, we also aimed to reflect on considerations for an agile futures practice in service of transformative change. Through a virtual workshop and surveys, participants envisioned future worlds in which local “seeds” of positive climate futures emerging during COVID-19 become mainstream. They also wrote science fiction stories of characters navigating those worlds. Observing artists depicted the futures through visual art. Reflections on our experience facilitating the process generated five considerations for a more agile futures practice in service of transformative change: adapt the ideal process to context-specific opportunities and constraints, align with strategic partners while ensuring everyone is in the room, underpin the process with values, treat everyone’s contributions as knowledge, and contextualize the role of inspiration as an outcome.