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ALTERNATIVE FUTURES ANALYSIS: A FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNITY DECISION-MAKING
Citation:
Hulse, D. W., S. V. Gregory, AND J P. Baker. ALTERNATIVE FUTURES ANALYSIS: A FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNITY DECISION-MAKING. Presented at Ecological Society of America annual meeting, Tucson, AZ, August 3-9, 2002.
Description:
Alternative futures analysis is an assessment approach designed to inform community decisions about land and water use. We conducted an alternative futures analysis in Oregon's Willamette River Basin. Three alternative future landscapes for the year 2050 were depicted and compared to present-day and historical landscapes. We evaluated the effects of these landscape changes on water availability, Willamette River, stream condition, and terrestrial wildlife. All three futures assume a doubling of the 1990 human population by 2050. The Plan Trend 2050 scenario assumes current policies and trends continue. Because of Oregon's existing conservation-oriented policies, landscape changes and projected environmental effects associated with this scenario were surprisingly small. The scenario engendered a debate among stakeholders about assuming that existing policies would be implemented as written if no further policy actions were taken. The Development 2050 scenario assumes a loosening of current policies using a more market-oriented approach to resource management. Estimated effects of this scenario include loss of 24% of prime farmland; 39% more wildlife species would lose habitat than gain habitat relative to the 1990 landscape. Projected effects on aquatic biota were less severe, as many of the land use changes involved conversion of agricultural lands into urban/rural development, both of which adversely impact streams. Conservation 2050 assumes ecosystem protection and restoration are given higher priority, although still within the bounds of what stakeholders considered plausible. In response, most terrestrial and aquatic ecological indicators recovered 20 to 70% of the losses sustained since EuroAmerican settlement. The one exception is water availability. Results have been actively discussed by stakeholder groups charged with developing a basin-wide restoration strategy. These discussions lead inevitably to questions of geographic prioritization for conservation and restoration activities. We conclude the presentation with recommendations for a spatially explicit restoration prioritization approach for the historical floodplain of the Willamette River.