Looking ahead to the Scenarios Forum 2025

From 16-18 July of this year, the University of Leeds’ Priestley Centre for Climate Futures will host the Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures.

Sponsored by the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios (ICONICS), the forum draws experts from around the world to share their insights on the design and use of scenarios to address global challenges.

Scenarios are stories of the future told to inform current decision-making. They usually include a central narrative and may also include quantitative indicators. Scenarios are widely used by businesses and government agencies. Global scenarios are shared narratives and quantifications that are used by governments, non-governmental organisations, researchers, and others for their own purposes. The shared set of assumptions helps to align those diverse exercises.

The prior two Scenarios Forums, in 2019 and 2022, focused almost exclusively on climate. That aligns well with our activities of the Priestley Centre, where we work across disciplines and with external partners to ensure that climate action is informed by the latest research. Next year’s Forum will continue to advance climate scenarios, but the scope will expand to include other scenario activities, particularly to support biodiversity assessments.

The Scenarios Forums are important in part because of who attends them. Beyond the collegial exchange that happens at any gathering of researchers, these events provide an unparalleled opportunity to learn from world-recognized experts and to share new research with them. Some attendees build the databases and tools that inform climate policy around the world. Others are authors of the climate Assessment Reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that summarize the state of climate knowledge.

The Forums are also important because they inform future cycles of global scenario activity. The last round of climate scenario development, which included the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) has been used extensively for policy analysis. However, that framework was developed about a decade ago and is due for an update. The Scenarios Forum 2025 is expected to feature debates on the design and focus of any future scenario framework.

Hosting a Conference as a Living Lab

For the University, the Scenarios Forum provides an opportunity to share and advance our commitment to sustainability, both in our research and our operations. We are using our hosting of the Scenarios Forum as a ‘Living Lab’ to trial and showcase methods for delivering a conference on our campus in the most sustainable manner possible.

The Living Lab brings together operational staff, researchers and students from Conferencing and Events, Catering Service, Residential Services, Sustainability Services and the Priestley Centre to develop plans that trial new ways of aligning key elements of conference delivery with the latest evidence on climate and sustainability. This isn’t about one-off measures for the Scenarios Forum 2025 but about building on our established practises and testing new ones that can be embedded in business as usual and sharing our learning across the University of Leeds and beyond.

While the details of the Forum are still under development, chosen themes include: health scenarios; improving the policy relevance of scenarios; scenarios for ecosystem and biodiversity assessment; governance and political economy; and more.

You can find out more about the Scenarios Forum and register to attend at this website.

Written by Dr Eric Kemp-Benedict, Associate Professor of Ecological Economics, and Dr Shona Smith, Head of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures for the University of Leeds internal Sharepoint site.

University of Leeds staff and students can read the full article, along with others, as part of the Looking ahead to 2025: On campus project.