18 Chapter 1 replaced the single line forecast by a probabilistic assessment of alternative futures to determine a “most likely” projection (Van Der Heijden, 2005). Soon, this probabilistic assessment was considered less advantageous and accurate over forecasting approaches and a more intuitive plausibility approach was developed relying on causality (Van Der Heijden, 2005) but this still incorporated a belief that planning must be based on at least some predictability, otherwise it would be a waste of time (Andersson, 2018). Pierre Wack, a planner at Shell, brought scenarios to the company (Bradfield et al., 2005; Van Der Heijden, 2005; Wack, 1985). These developments (most prominently but not exclusively) laid the foundation for futures studies, with scenarios, Delphi panels, and other foresight methods as tools for market making and management of the future in the present (Bradfield et al., 2005). Futures work stepped into the domain of environmental governance when a diverse group of academics and decision-makers came together in Rome in the late 1960s to discuss global future challenges and formed the Club of Rome. Their 1972 publication ‘Limits to Growth’ was an important milestone for thinking about environmental futures. It argued that pollution, population growth, industrialization, food production and resource depletion will reach the limits to growth on the planet (Meadows et al., 1972) and thus called for global action. The first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held the same year and also advocated global action to protect the environment and advocated global environmental assessments and management (United Nations, 1972); this constituted another major signpost of growing calls for more sustainable futures. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988 to synthesize existing climate change science in its five/six yearly synthesis reports and special reports as important tools for the UN’s climate negations (IPCC, n.d.). Scenarios that have been created under the auspices of the IPCC (but not part of its publication cycles) include the Representative Concentration Pathways (van Vuuren et al., 2011) and the more recent Shared Socio-economic Pathways (Riahi et al., 2017). These scenarios explore how developments such as technological innovation and climate policy affect emission levels by combining narratives, climate models and integrated assessment models (IAMs) (Alcamo, 2008; Moss et al., 2010). Other major environmental assessments include UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook and the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment (van Vuuren et al., 2012). Futures work and environmental science have increasingly cross-fertilized over the last decade to explore environmental futures in norm-setting global institutes and informed global and national decision-making. They can thus be considered to serve as spaces of connectivity through which ideas about pasts, presents and futures flow and materialize (Urry, 2016), but little research has been done into the ways in
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