Lifestyle NW - NW Visions
Exploring what they might get
NW Visions
Welcome to the Eco-life NW module.
For another angle on the future, this one looks at what people really want, and what they might get - big questions...
The future is of course unknowable - so what is the point of looking 50 years ahead? This is the horizon on which climate change is happening. This is the horizon on which the Factor Four goal might be achieved.
One way to explore future possibilities is the scenario approach. With scenarios we can think the unthinkable. What if economic growth really took off without limits? What if everything went wrong that could go wrong? What if the Factor Four vision really happened?
To make the future more manageable, we focus on 4 time steps:
- 2020 - 'soon' - rising tensions between economy, environment & society
- 2030 - 'children's world' - a new generation will have to live with the mistakes of the present
- 2040 - 'later' - as far ahead from now as we are from the 1970s
- 2050 - 'grandchildren's world' - there will be challenges which we can hardly imagine as yet
This scenari-ometer chart shows where we are up to in this cross section of the future. The numbers on the left show the 'factors' of change in resource efficiency. The curves show the effect over 50 years of different scenarios - F0, F1, F2 and F4, as on the next page. (The F-10 scenario is less obvious to draw or describe).
