Why local realities are crucial to global environmental assessments

CONSIDER WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THE GROUND: The latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been described as the “definitive word on climate science” as it makes the latest cutting edge knowledge on the state of our planet publicly available and useful for decision makers.

But as they stand, global environmental assessments, or GEAs, primarily rely on global-scale quantitative scenarios, leaving little room for on-the-ground realities and innovative, potentially game-changing local developments.

With this in mind, centre researcher Laura Pereira together with an international team of researchers, have pioneered a process for synthesizing insights from a wide range of local practices and perspectives into global future scenarios used in GEAs.

Published in Sustainability Science, the authors applied their method to the UN's Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) 6, a major example of a GEA.

Not always fit for local contexts

The models used in developing GEAs are useful for exploring the global changes in social, environmental and economic conditions needed to reach sustainability goals.

However, these do not always fit local contexts. For example, global recommendations for healthy diets do not always align with regional suitability for recommended crops.

“If global futures lack connections to on-the-ground realities, they may be deemed too theoretical and too generic to inform decision making,” say the authors.

In their paper the authors used two distinct participatory methodologies to generate local data on stakeholders’ perspectives:

• A ‘Seeds’ approach, based on the Seeds of Good Anthropocene project, a science intitiative designed to identify visions of positive futures for people and the planet.
• An approach based on the Climate Co-lab platform, an online contest platform and community run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Game-changing concepts

Such bottom-up approaches can be used to identify game-changing concepts that fundamentally restructure our assumptions about how the future might look.

One tangible example is the development of small-scale, decentralized renewable energy systems, which have already become a reality in Kenya.

These technologies and the public demand to embrace them demonstrate that the type of energy transitions of the past (coal to oil, oil to gas, gas to large-scale renewables) may not be representative of what is to come in the future.

“The process outlined in our paper demonstrates the potential for future assessments to take some of these approaches on board in order to situate their findings more readily in what is already happening on the ground, and to make the outcome of GEAs more useful and actionable for decision makers and practitioners,” conclude the authors.