Workshop Offers Scenarios for Sustainable Development

Spring sessions feature Dr. Barbara Heinzen, geographer
1/26/2010

• Barbara Heinzen's Website

The SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry will offer a short course in March on the use of strategic scenarios to illustrate and communicate possible and plausible futures integrating quantitative and qualitative methods.

Scenarios integrate and synthesize information about socio-political and biophysical trends and limitations to help characterize alternative futures. They are used for decision support in a variety of environmental contexts, perhaps most notably as part of the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Scenarios are designed to reveal possible strategies for sustaining system integrity, advancing sustainable development toward social and ecological flourishing and avoiding foreseeable system impoverishment or disintegration. Building meaningful and user-friendly scenarios requires skills of interdisciplinary systems analysis, creative and plausible narrative communication, cross-cultural collaboration and practical policy knowledge and experience. It is an intensely collaborative project.

This one credit seminar will have a brief introductory session Friday, March 5, and five sessions during the week of March 8. The seminar will be taught by Dr. Barbara Heinzen, with Dr. Jack Manno and Susana Del Granado of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). Dr. Heinzen has a Ph.D. in geography from the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of London and has been working as a consultant - for government, corporations, civil society, and non-governmental organizations - designing and planning scenarios for more than 20 years.

For further information about the seminar, contact Dr. Jack Manno at jpmanno@esf.edu, or 315.470.6816.