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MSSI newsletter

MSSI Visioning Workshop

What is the future of agricultural or other natural resource sustainability over the next two decades? The MSSI scenario building workshop, led by Professor Elena Bennett, followed the STEEP method for scenario building.

In October 2018, faculty, postdocs and grad students from across 12 departments came together at Macdonald Campus to develop scenarios in response to the following question: What is the future of agricultural or other natural resource sustainability over the next two decades? The MSSI scenario building workshop, led by Professor Elena Bennett, followed the STEEP method for scenario building.

Participants discuss around tables in a classroom

Participants broke out into groups and analyzed the question across the five STEEP axes – social, technological, environmental, economic and political – identifying trends, drivers and the linkages between them. Each group then went through their list of key trends and drivers and classified them as either “predictable” or “uncertain”. Groups identified two unrelated uncertainties that they considered the most important or the most uncertain. These two drivers then became the axes for their scenarios, resulting in four quadrants which each represented a possible future based on the defining uncertainties. Finally, participants then developed a narrative for each quadrant, or scenario, to explore what that future would look like two decades from now.

Word cloud of STEEP trends and drivers identified by all groups.

Collection of charts showing possible future quadrants,
Key axes of uncertainty defining the future of agriculture and natural resource sustainability over the next two decades identified by each group. Axes are identified in italics, while axis extremes are identified in bold.

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