Using transformative scenarios to face a changing world
This innovative planning process helped emergency management leaders stress-test their existing strategies against future scenarios.
When representatives of four South Australian emergency management agencies spent the day entering different imaginary worlds, they weren’t playing a game – they were embarking on a serious journey towards stress-testing and adapting their existing strategies in the face of more frequent and intense natural hazard events brought about by climate change.
The Transformative Scenarios project developed resources to guide the sector to think beyond the present and to reimagine worlds of varying degrees of governance and social cohesion, overlaid with climate impacts, and how these worlds would test agency capability, capacity and strategy.
In a pilot workshop, representatives of the South Australian Fire and Emergency Services Commission (SAFECOM), Country Fire Service (SA CFS), State Emergency Service (SA SES) and Metropolitan Fire Service (SA MFS) were invited to enter four differently themed rooms, each providing an evidence-based, plausible scenario for how the world might look.
One room imagined a world where reliance on technology has eroded social connectedness and created distrust. In another world, an absence of long-term governance resulted in corporations, rather than governments, setting direction and policy. In the third world, society was fragmented and an ‘everyone for themselves’ mentality dominated. The final world had strong social cohesion and people worked collectively together to respond to climate change.
The participants were asked to consider how their work would be impacted in each of these worlds and whether their current assumptions and strategies would be relevant and effective.
Daniel Willetts, SAFECOM Acting Director of Emergency Management, Resilience and Risk Reduction, says the impact of the workshop was to highlight the need for emergency management agencies to develop multiple and adaptable strategies that allow agencies to shift between emerging worlds, or commit to re-evaluating strategies on a more regular basis.
“As a result of technological advances, climate change and geopolitics, the world around us is changing more often and at a far greater pace. Setting a single five-year strategy and expecting it to still be 100% relevant and effective several years later is no longer realistic,” Mr Willetts says.
“This process helped us understand that we need strategies for today’s world as well as the world that we believe is on our doorstep, whilst at least considering those worlds that we believe are less likely, along with some lead indicators that point towards their arrival.”
The Transformative Scenarios resources were developed in collaboration with Reos Partners and RMIT University, supported by the AFAC Climate Change group.
Further Centre-funded research is now underway to develop the translation, use and application of the resources.
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