Puget Sound Future Scenarios
The Challenge
The future is uncertain. The Puget Sound region’s climate is changing and its population is growing. In the face of these changes, the region faces challenges including housing availability and affordability, increased flooding, pressure to convert working lands, and at-risk salmon and orca populations. The Puget Sound Partnership’s Leadership Council has boldly challenged the region’s recovery community to pursue ambitious action, secure funding, seek supporting legislation and hold themselves accountable for implementing all actions needed to make Puget Sound resilient.
Our Role
We know there are choices we can make now that can help us navigate these uncertainties. Ross Strategic leads the Alternative Futures for Puget Sound Project, known as Future Scenarios, an exploratory scenario planning project, which means it supports open-ended, interdisciplinary, and future-oriented lines of inquiry. In other words, it offers a structured way to think about the future and explore creative and strategic approaches to achieving a resilient future. Future Scenarios explores the implications of different Puget Sound futures—desirable and otherwise—and provides a framework for assessing how best to prepare for uncertainties, such as climate change and population growth, at play.
The Impact
The project’s five scenarios—one “baseline” scenario that projects current growth and development patterns and four alternative scenarios that imagine variations in those patterns—depict different ways the region can achieve its recovery goals in the face of climate change and high population growth. Along with our communication and outreach efforts, the scenarios help build understanding of the implications of present-day choices, inspire action by strengthening the ecosystem recovery community of practice, and influence decision-making by identifying strategies that could be effective.