The World’s on Fire (Literally), and We’ve Got Plans (or Do We?): Why Scenario Planning Matters for the Climate Crisis

Embracing Uncertainty

A few years ago, if someone had asked me what I thought the next decade would look like, I probably would’ve shrugged and said something vague like, “More tech? More green energy? Maybe self-driving bikes?” What I didn’t expect was to live through a pandemic, see temperatures hit 40°C in a London summer, or watch wildfire smoke paint the skies of New York City an eerie Mars-orange.

Suddenly, the future didn’t feel so linear anymore.

This is the world we live in now: volatile, complex, and unpredictable. Climate change isn’t a distant problem; it’s a multiplying force. It’s reshaping our food systems, testing the limits of our infrastructure, shifting migration patterns, straining health systems, and in some cases, completely redrawing coastlines and through it all, we’re still trying to make long-term decisions about where to invest, where to build, what to protect, and how to adapt.

This is why scenario planning has quietly become one of the most important tools in the environmental toolkit. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t make headlines or promise instant impact. However, what it does do is help us plan for multiple futures, not just the one we hope will happen. It teaches us to think expansively, prepare flexibly, and act strategically—even when the road ahead is anything but clear.

What Is Scenario Planning 

Scenario planning is often misunderstood as a prediction. It’s not. It doesn’t tell you what will happen, it helps you imagine what could happen. More importantly, it helps you figure out what you might do in each of those futures.

Think of it as structured storytelling for strategy. You start by asking a big, difficult question, something like, “How can our city remain livable as temperatures rise?” or “How might food security shift in the face of changing rainfall patterns?” From there, you identify the driving forces that could shape that future: policy decisions, technological innovation, social movements, economic trends, and, of course, the climate itself.

The magic of scenario planning is that it forces you out of the single-track mindset. Instead of assuming one outcome and betting everything on it, you consider a range of plausible, diverging futures. In some things might improve; in others, they might unravel. Long story short, you don’t plan for perfection, you plan for resilience.

Why Scenario Planning Matters More Than Ever in the Climate Era

I would make the argument that the climate crisis is,by nature, a scenario problem. There are too many variables in motion, too many uncertainties about how people, governments, and ecosystems will respond. While climate models can give us projections based on emissions pathways, they can’t tell us what policies will pass next year, whether a key tipping point will be crossed, or if a breakthrough technology will scale in time.

Scenario planning helps us navigate this ambiguity without falling into despair or inaction. It allows us to explore not just what’s likely, but what’s possible—and to stretch our strategies accordingly.

Take water, for example. A region might face prolonged drought in one future, and destructive floods in another. Both scenarios require investment, but the solutions will differ. A single plan based on past averages will fail both. However, scenario planning can help us design adaptable infrastructure systems that hold up whether we get one kind of crisis, the other, or both in rapid succession.

It also invites longer time horizons into our decision-making. Politicians often plan in election cycles. Companies in quarterly reports. Communities, meanwhile, are dealing with questions about where to live, farm, and raise children over the next 10, 20, even 50 years. Scenario planning slows us down just enough to see beyond the short term, without paralyzing us.

Imagining Climate Futures: Not Just Doom or Utopia

One of the most valuable aspects of scenario planning is its refusal to collapse the future into binary dualisms: success or failure, apocalypse or salvation. Climate conversations often swing between extremes, either techno-utopian dreams where carbon is scrubbed from the skies or dystopian collapse scenarios, but I think the real future will likely live in the messy middle, with progress and setbacks unfolding unevenly across regions, sectors, and populations.

Scenario planning allows us to tell multiple, layered stories of the future. In one version, a country might lead the charge on renewable energy while struggling with climate migration. In another, grassroots adaptation outpaces top-down policies. These narratives help us visualize consequences and opportunities more concretely. They also allow different stakeholders to locate themselves in the picture. 

More importantly, these scenarios make risks and trade-offs visible. We stop pretending we can have it all and start asking what we’re willing to prioritize, prepare for, and protect.

From Theory to Practice: What It Looks Like on the Ground

In the early 2010s, the city of New York developed a suite of climate scenarios to inform its infrastructure planning. They weren’t trying to guess the exact sea level in 2050. Instead, they mapped out multiple possible futures based on a range of global emissions, local development patterns, and storm frequency, and used that spectrum to guide their coastal resilience strategy. When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, those efforts, while still in early stages, had already informed critical investment decisions (Horton et al., 2010).

Cape Town, South Africa, offers another powerful example. Facing an unprecedented drought in 2017, the city created a “Day Zero” scenario: a hypothetical moment when municipal water would run out entirely. The government used this scenario not just internally but publicly, mobilizing citizens, adjusting consumption, and pushing forward emergency policies. The worst-case scenario never materialized, but the planning for it changed behavior in real time (Pascale et al., 2020). This scenario was so plausible that movies were made about in countries such as Turkey and the United States.

In these cases and many others, the power of scenario planning wasn’t in predicting the exact event. It was in being ready enough to pivot, adapt, and respond under pressure.

Building a Culture of Strategic Imagination

Scenario planning doesn’t require an army of data scientists or a massive budget. What it does require is time, attention, and a willingness to think creatively. At its heart, it’s a human process, drawing on insights from across disciplines and communities, and when done well, it can be surprisingly energizing.

Rather than just listing risks and hoping for the best, it invites participants to grapple with the future in a proactive way. It sparks hard conversations, surfaces blind spots, and it encourages a kind of humility, an acknowledgment that we don’t know everything, but we can be thoughtful about what we might face.

This kind of thinking is especially powerful at the local level. Community organizations, municipalities, and even schools can use scenario planning to imagine how their corner of the world might be affected by broader environmental shifts. These efforts don’t need to be perfect. What matters is starting the conversation and committing to revisit it regularly, as new data and experience shape the picture.

Why We Don’t Do It More Often (and Why We Should)

If scenario planning is so useful, why isn’t it more common?

Part of the problem is psychological. Most of us are hardwired to seek certainty. We want plans, answers, guarantees. Scenario planning asks us to get comfortable with ambiguity, to let go of the idea that we can control the future entirely. That’s not easy.

Another barrier is cultural. In many institutions, especially those driven by immediate outcomes, long-term thinking can feel like a luxury. There’s pressure to act quickly, not to imagine slowly. However, when you’re facing something as complex as the climate crisis, speed without direction can be dangerous.

The good news is that this mindset is changing (Haigh, 2019). More organizations, from global corporations to small climate justice groups, are incorporating scenario thinking into their planning. Universities are teaching it. Funders are supporting it. The rise of interdisciplinary climate teams—bringing together scientists, planners, sociologists, and artists—means that scenario planning is evolving beyond spreadsheets and into something more dynamic and inclusive.

Conclusion: Planning Isn’t Optional Anymore

The bottom line is that we’re living through a time of cascading environmental, social, and political changes. The temptation to retreat into denial or rigid optimism is understandable, but unhelpful. What we need instead is a mindset of strategic imagination: the ability to explore uncertainty without being overwhelmed by it, and to act boldly even when we can’t control every variable.

Scenario planning offers that mindset. It helps us hold multiple futures in view at once and to make decisions that are resilient across them. It allows us to prepare for both progress and disruption, for breakthroughs and breakdowns, without becoming cynical or naive.

In a warming world, this kind of thinking isn’t a luxury. It’s a survival skill and a hopeful one at that. The act of imagining better futures, and preparing thoughtfully for difficult ones, is itself a declaration: that the future isn’t written yet, and that what we do today still matters.

So the next time someone tells you “we’ll figure it out as we go,” consider offering an alternative.

References:

Haigh, N. (2019). Scenario Planning for Climate Change: A Guide for Strategists. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351016353

Horton, R., Rosenzweig, C., Gornitz, V., Bader, D., & O'Grady, M. (2010). Climate risk information: Climate change scenarios and implications for NYC infrastructure. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1196(1), 147–228. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05323.x

Pascale, S., Kapnick, S. B., Delworth, T. L., & Cooke, W. F. (2020). Increasing risk of another Cape Town “Day Zero” drought in the 21st century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(47), 29495–29503. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009144117