Scenarios NZ

Working Paper 2023/01 – List of publicly available national and local scenarios as at 31 December 2022

October 2023
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Table 1: International good practice scenarios [3]

Table 1 below lists 3 documents which the Institute has identified to be good practice examples of scenario documents.

Table 2: All potential scenarios that are published and found in the public domain (last updated 31 Dec 2023) [288]

Working Paper 2023/01: List of publicly available national and local scenarios as at 31 December 2022 identifies as many scenario documents as the Institute could find, and in doing so, aims to enable better understanding of the current state of institutional capacity and capability regarding scenario development. The initial stages of this work involved creating a list of all potential scenario documents that were publically available and could be found online by the Institute (the full methodology can be found within the working paper).

Table 2 below lists all of the potential scenario documents that were collected.

Please email any additions to us at enquiries@mcguinnessinstitute.org with the subject heading ‘Aotearoa New Zealand Scenarios’. We are keen to bring together as many scenarios as possible to help shape and inform both our thinking and that of those interested in foresight work.

Table 3: All national and local scenarios that meet the Institute’s assessment criteria as at 31 December 2023 [71]

The full list of potential scenario documents was subsequently assessed against the Institute’s criteria of a scenario document. This requires a document to: be publicly available, include a set of scenarios (i.e. comparing two or more future worlds), explore two or more variables within each scenario (analysis that examines the effect of changing just one variable at a time is called a sensitivity analysis, not a scenario), explore a timeframe of at least two years, and include a method explaining how the scenarios were developed.

Table 3 below lists the 71 documents that were aligned to the Institute’s criteria of a scenario document. The table can be searched to filter by specific types of scenarios or publishers. For example, to view only scenarios relating to climate change, enter ‘climate change’ into the search box.

*17 scenario documents have been included despite not including a method explaining how the scenarios were developed. These documents instead used representative concentration pathways (RCPs) to describe different future worlds without explanation on how the RCP scenarios were specifically developed. For more context see Working Paper 2023/01: List of publicly available national and local scenarios as at 31 December 2022.

Table 4: List of references for climate change scenarios (as at 15 December 2022)