40 Chapter 2 Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, envisioning environmental futures have been a matter of global concern, due to publications such as Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome in 1972 (Meadows et al., 1972) and the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (Granjou et al., 2017). The growing concern with long-term thinking and assessments of futures has also been taken up in fora such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports, including its Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (Riahi et al., 2017), as well as in integrated assessment models (O’Neill et al., 2014), UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook, the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment and other assessments (Bell, 2001; Kok et al., 2007; van Vuuren et al., 2012). As a result of decades of such global scientific assessment work, of which scenarios are a key component (Loveridge & Street, 2005; van Notten et al., 2003; Vervoort et al., 2015), futures studies offer extensive research and insights on anticipatory methods to explore climate-impacted futures (Swart et al., 2004). It focuses on imagining and representing multiple alternative climate futures to guide climate mitigation and adaptation decisionmaking, under conditions of complexity and uncertainty (Sova et al., 2015; Vervoort et al., 2015). All strands of futures studies include anticipatory objectives (Rossel, 2010) but they are characterized by different epistemologies (Ramírez & Selin, 2014; Wilkinson & Eidinow, 2008). Some strands of futures studies are concerned with probabilistic foresight, which assumes that probabilities can be assigned to multiple futures. In this view, by analyzing how present-day driving forces steer future outcomes, one can guide policy planning and determine policy measures and investments. Other strands of futures studies are more concerned with viewing futures and the plausibility assigned to them as socially constructed (Ramírez & Selin, 2014; Wilkinson & Eidinow, 2008). A second research field can be broadly defined as focusing on transformations and systems resilience (Feola, 2015; Folke, 2006). Within this diverse and interdisciplinary space, anticipation is often seen as a way to advance the transition of complex systems towards more sustainable trajectories (Loorbach et al., 2017; Rotmans & Loorbach, 2009). Here, anticipatory engagement with potential futures is seen as essential to support sustainability transitions and transformations (Hansen & Coenen, 2014; Mok & Hyysalo, 2018), where processes of anticipation “act as harbingers of the future” to support proactive, long-term planning of societal innovation, including through deliberation (Loorbach, 2010; Rotmans & Loorbach, 2009, p. 190). Related literature on resilience sees anticipation as part of proactively governing social-ecological systems towards sustainability (for a review of conceptual approaches to transformations, (Chaffin et al., 2016; see Feola, 2015; Patterson et al., 2017). Also here, anticipation is seen as a prerequisite for transformations. This includes both anticipation of the unintended
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