ALBERT

Description: The climate is already changing, making climate change adaptation (CCA) an essential component of any sustainable development strategy. Similarly, the capacities of different actors to adapt to climate change are significantly affected by social and economic factors including nutrition, health, and employment. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) characterize progress toward the aforementioned factors as well as CCA through targets under SDG 13 (Climate Action). More recently, the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) illustrates the interactions within and between SDGs, showing how many other SDGs influence progress toward CCA and vice versa. Businesses need to be mindful of these complex interdependencies when developing risk management, supply chain management, and sustainability strategies to make effective contributions to CCA while avoiding ineffective or maladaptive strategies. In this chapter, we demonstrate these interdependencies by modeling the interactions defined in the 2019 GSDR using the cross-impact balances (CIB) method, which identifies self-reinforcing scenarios and traces the systemic effects of interventions. We focus our analysis on how existing global business priorities may push the system toward certain scenarios over others, centering the implications for CCA. Through our analysis, we find six self-reinforcing scenarios for global SDGs, half of which indicate progress in CCA. We also identify six SDGs that appear critical to achieving all SDGs, highlighting gaps in current business efforts and areas for additional focus. Among these critical SDGs is SDG 13 (Climate Action), reaffirming the importance of CCA in progress toward sustainable development.

Description: This Perspective article presents a novel, participatory scenario development method for studying the energy transition. It shows how moving towards transdisciplinarity can inform formal scenario analysis and enhance modelling by engaging stakeholders and scientific communities to co-develop energy transition scenarios. The innovative approach combines participatory elements of morphological analysis with formal cross-impact balance analysis (CIB), and it was tested at a series of energy transition scenario workshops held in 2021 both virtually and in person. Focusing on the first workshop of the series, we present the resulting data collection strategy and critically reflect on the analytical potential of the approach. We highlight the advantage of CIB in grasping the complexity and the multi-scale nature of the energy transition, as it enables computing of how different driving forces interact. We also demonstrate that leveraging morphological analysis for data collection in participatory scenario workshops yields a more participatory approach to CIB. Some limitations notwithstanding, the insights from the scenario workshops following the novel approach suggest further avenues for improving the process of online participatory scenario methods. This holds significant potential for empirical research under the conditions of a global pandemic and for scenario analysis more generally.