Dr. Hines and alumni Johann Schutte and Maria Romero co-authored a piece in the Journal of Futures Studies about Transition Scenarios via Backcasting. The three futurists were presented with three scenarios developed for the USDA Forest Service, Strategic Foresight Group (the Forest Group) set in 2090. Although the long forecast is entirely appropriate for this domain (given the forestry’s slow clock speed), the Forest Group was interested in identifying emerging issues that would be influential closer to the present than 2090. Our group of futurists decided to try a Backcasting approach to transition these 2090 scenarios back to 2035.

 
At a high-level, our futurists took the following steps:

  1. Identified 12 categories/drivers present in the 2090 scenarios
  2. Backcast this 2090 category back to 2060 (split the difference and find our mid-point), under the scenario archetype approach
  3. Backcast 2060 back to 2035
  4. Forecast 2035 – 2090 and compared forecasts for plausibility
  5. If plausible, used the drivers as of 2035 to create transition scenarios.

The new scenarios, along with backcasted / forecasted drivers are all laid out in the journal.
 
https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/01-Hines-Transition-Scenarios-via-Backcasting.pdf
 
Check it out and let us know what you think!