International Project on Ecosystem Change (IPEC) -
Scenarios Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Co-chairs: Prabhu Pingali (Italy), Steve Carpenter (USA)

The International Project on Ecosystem Change (IPEC) was launched in 2001 will terminate in 2005. It is a joint project between SCOPE and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) where it functions as the Scenarios working group.

Rationale and Objectives

Human well-being depends on ecosystem services such as food and clean water. Yet ecosystems and the services they provide are changing, often in ways that we cannot anticipate. How can we cope with surprises and uncertainties when we cannot predict them? One approach is to make decisions that are robust to a number of different futures. Scenarios, sets of stories about the future built from qualitative and quantitative information help bring issues to the discussion and illuminate policy alternatives. To date, most global environmental scenarios have treated ecological dynamics as the product of large-scale anthropogenic drivers, and have not considered ecological feedbacks to these drivers. Global scenarios can benefit from the input of ecologists to incorporate more realistic ecosystem dynamics. Similarly, ecology can benefit from involvement in scenario planning. Unlike many technical models, scenarios serve as good communication and outreach tools that build public appreciation of ecological science and the ecological dilemmas that society faces.

The Scenarios Working Group of the MA developed global scenarios for the flows of ecosystem services from today through 2050 to illustrate the connection between global changes, ecosystem services, and human well-being; highlight interactions among ecosystem services such as trade-offs; illustrate the effectiveness of policy in maintaining or increasing the availability of ecosystem services; and identify critical policy intervention points.

Through this work, the working group developed scenarios for global futures that are linked explicitly to ecosystem services; consider tradeoffs among individual ecosystem; assess the modeling capabilities for linking socio-economic drivers and ecosystems services; and consider ambiguous futures, abrupt and surprising regime shifts, as well as quantifiable uncertainties. The focal questions driving the development of the storyline were:

• Can long-term sustainability of ecosystem services and human well-being be maintained solely through policies to address economic and social issues without regard to the environment?
• Can long-term sustainability of ecosystem services and human well-being be maintained solely through global environmental policies without regard to other scales?
• Are there feasible frameworks for sustaining ecosystem services and human well-being over decadal time scales?

Reports from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, including the Scenarios working group, are being published by Island Press. For further information on the reports, including publication dates, see also www.IslandPress.org.

Last up-dated 29 July 2005