The Province of Québec is home to landscapes where nature’s benefits or ecosystem services support not only economically important activities but the overall well-being of human and non-human (e.g., wildlife) communities. Among important landscape elements providing ecosystem services in Québec are wetlands, natural habitats within agricultural landscapes, and greenspaces within cities/urban communities. The future sustainability and resilience of these landscapes will greatly depend on how to approach conservation and ecosystem restoration or rehabilitation amidst the amplitude of emerging sustainability challenges, especially given the impacts of climate change. We conducted a Participatory Scenarios Planning Workshop that engaged key actors working on these landscapes to co-envision environmental futures that may plausibly unfold in 50 years given different pathways in economic growth and development (i.e., green modernization vs. ecological restoration) and pathways in knowledge synthesis (i.e., pluralistic vs. standardized) for decision-making. We co-developed 12 scenarios or “storylines of the futures”, four for each landscape type, that reimagine the landscape’s social and ecological features under each pathway.
We documented significant, longer-term changes among participants’ empathy for future peoples, as well as evidence on changes in systems thinking, trust, and environmental aspirations.
The scenarios were made in: 2023
The scenarios look out to: 2073
