Africa has experienced unprecedented growth across a range of development indices for decades. However, this growth is often at the expense of Africa’s biodiversity and ecosystems, jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on the goods and services provided by nature. This growth also has broader consequences for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Encouragingly, Africa can still take a more sustainable path.
Here, we report results from a participatory scenario planning process around four collectively-owned scenarios and narratives for the evolution of Africa’s ecological resource base over the next 50 years. These scenarios provided a lens to review pressures on the natural environment, through the drivers, pressures, state, impacts, and responses (DPSIR) framework. Based on the outcomes from each of these steps, we discuss opportunities to reorient Africa’s development trajectories towards a sustainable path.
This work has shown the potential of participatory scenario planning and futures approaches for tackling the dynamic and evolving landscape of development challenges, in particular as a way of engaging key stakeholders in structured debates around the complicated, multidimensional choices to be made on the road to sustainability.
The scenarios were made in: 2014
The scenarios look out to: Medium-term future
