In the coming year, MN350, a Minnesota-based climate justice organization, will work with the city of Bemidji, nonprofit groups, residents, and three tribal nations—Leech Lake, Red Lake, and White Earth—to explore what an equitable transition away from fossil fuels could look like. The scenario planning project aims to uncover lessons applicable to other U.S. cities located in proximity to tribal nations and is one of eight projects selected for support by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to develop new applications of scenario planning. The projects will focus on two major challenges: stagnant or declining population, and spatial inequity.

Each recipient will receive $10,000 to conduct original research and develop new methods for applying scenario planning, a practice through which communities plan for uncertainty by exploring multiple plausible futures. Completed projects will range from a working paper to case studies to a guidebook for practitioners to model decline or low-growth scenarios.

In addition to the MN350 planning initiative, the Lincoln Institute will support the following projects:

• In Boston, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council will undertake a literature review, stakeholder engagement, and modeling exercise to create a framework for forecasting the racial makeup of particular neighborhoods, with no ‘correct’ forecast, but a range of segregation scenarios against which policies can be tested.
• Cascadia Partners will research equitable technologies for scenario planning, with a particular focus on public engagement in a post-pandemic world.
• Center for a New Economy will produce a working paper focused on San Juan, Puerto Rico, with new data that practitioners can use to determine the impact of disasters on socioeconomic segregation, urban decay, housing affordability, gentrification, and residential displacement. The center will share the research through workshops and webinars with practitioners and decision makers at FEMA, HUD, the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, and municipal governments.
• Officials in Vancouver will write a case study on how they are deploying scenario planning with an equity lens and how they are altering the process to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.
• The City of Youngstown, Ohio is using scenario planning to explore how their comprehensive plan for land use over the long-term might hold up amid various population trends in the future.
• Arnab Chakraborty, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois, will create a toolkit for communities undertaking scenario planning in low-growth geographies.
• Ian Varley, planning manager at City Explained, will develop case studies and a guidebook, adapting the CommunityViz software as a demonstration tool to model low-growth geographies.

The projects are supported by the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning and Legacy Cities Initiative. The Consortium aims to improve the practice of scenario planning and broaden its use across disciplines in communities of all sizes through research, peer-to-peer learning, training, and technical assistance. The Legacy Cities Initiative, a new program of the Lincoln Institute, seeks to promote sustainable and equitable revitalization of post-industrial cities by convening networks, facilitating the exchange of ideas and practices, and researching and advancing new policy approaches.

Together, these projects will help to broaden the applicability of scenario planning, an increasingly popular tool in urban planning, said Heather Sauceda Hannon, the institute’s scenario planning manager.

“Scenario planning is a mechanism for purposeful decision-making and is often used to measure impacts of transportation and land use through a variety of metrics,” said Hannon. “The social implications of decision-making and planning are often more difficult to identify and measure. However, scenario planning can be an effective framework through which planners can explore the potential impacts of decisions on historically marginalized communities. In addition, scenario planning has historically been used with high-growth projections and we want to show how it can be used for areas that have seen decline or low growth.”

The Lincoln Institute is also exploring how practitioners can make the process of scenario planning itself more equitable by, for example, undertaking activities to reach historically underrepresented populations, according to Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality for the institute and leader of the institute’s Legacy Cities Initiative.

Emma Zehner is communications and publications editor at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Photograph credit: J. Stephen Conn/Flickr.

After several hours of gentle rain in Tucson, water clogs the streets of the modest Palo Verde neighborhood. Traffic chokes a major intersection where an emergency vehicle’s flashing red and blue lights signal to cars to detour around a swamped section of road. Rivulets rush along the curbs of side streets, creating pools of water that geyser when cars plough through.

Less than a mile away, at the nonprofit Watershed Management Group’s Living Lab and Learning Center, the story is different. Here, a series of tiered, vegetated basins—shallow depressions filled with mesquite trees, brittlebrush, and other native plants—act like sponges, diverting and absorbing the rainwater running down the street. The center’s pervious parking lot easily absorbs the light winter precipitation, and downspouts channel the rain drumming on the center’s roof into a 10,000-gallon underground storage tank.

Stooping to check the meter on the tank’s lid, Lisa Shipek, executive director of Watershed Management Group (WMG), looks pleased. “Five hundred more gallons and it’s full. Then it overflows over there,” she says, pointing to an adjacent series of rain gardens pulsing with desert life. Prickly pear cacti and giant sacaton grass intermingle with canyon hackberry, desert willow, and velvet mesquite, all native shade trees; pollinator plants like the yellow-flowered and piney smelling creosote, hopseed, and vibrant red chuparosa also populate the gardens.

Straightening to survey the carefully landscaped center—which serves as a demonstration site for the sustainable solutions WMG promotes throughout the desert Southwest—Shipek says proudly, “all of our water needs, including indoor use, are provided by the rainwater we harvest.” In this desert city, which receives an average of 12 inches of rainfall a year, finding ways to capture and reuse that water is increasingly important.

Like other cities across the U.S. West, Tucson is feeling the dual squeeze of climate change and rapid growth. The population of the Tucson metro area, now close to one million, is expected to expand 30 percent by 2050. This is increasing demand for water, even as hotter temperatures and drought diminish supply. When storms come, they are increasingly severe, posing serious flood risks. In response, Tucson and other cities are investing in low-impact development, working with nature to manage stormwater as close to its source as possible.

This type of approach yields multiple benefits, including improving water quality and mitigating flooding, creating green spaces that provide habitat and urgently needed shade, and boosting local water supplies. Tucson’s water department has invested $2.4 million in rebates for some 2,000 customers who’ve installed rain-collecting cisterns or “earthworks” (e.g., vegetated basins and rain gardens) since 2013. The rebate program financed half of the $30,000 cost of WMG’s underground storage tank, and is among many efforts taken by the city in recent years to promote green infrastructure.

Nearly 500 miles away, in coastal Los Angeles, similar funding mechanisms are changing the landscape of a much larger city. Four million inhabitants strong, Los Angeles boasts one of the country’s largest public water systems; like many other cities in the region, it depends in part on the Colorado River for drinking water. With that resource increasingly vulnerable to shortages, the city is looking for more reliable sources of water close to home.

Both cities have led the way on green infrastructure in the West with their comprehensive approaches and investments. When cities invest in projects with measurable local results, their actions can help make the entire region more resilient, says Paula Randolph, associate director at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

“The benefit of green infrastructure in the West is twofold,” observes Randolph. “One is to capture water and try to keep it in place, let it percolate back into aquifers [for local use]. Two is to sustain the flow of the region’s rivers. If there’s enough water in an aquifer, if you keep it high enough, you can keep a river flowing.”

Tucson: Shifting the Water Supply Equation

Until the 1990s, Tucson relied entirely on groundwater for its water supply. Decades of over pumping led the city to turn to Colorado River supplies via the Central Arizona Project (CAP), an aqueduct system that pipes Colorado River water from its input at Lake Havasu to municipalities and water districts spanning some 330 miles across the state.

Today the city relies on CAP water to recharge its groundwater aquifers, with CAP providing 85 percent of Tucson’s supply. Source groundwater contributes only six percent. The remainder comes from reclaimed wastewater that’s used for non-potable needs such as irrigation—or for recharging the ephemeral rivers that traverse the city and flow primarily during the monsoon rains each summer, or after other major rain events.

But the Colorado River is an increasingly stressed resource. It provides water to 40 million people and four million acres of irrigated agriculture throughout the West. U.S. Geological Survey scientists predict that the river could lose a quarter of its flow in the next 30 years as climate change shrinks snowpack at the headwaters and increasing temperatures further decrease streamflows (USGS 2020).

“We are at a crossroads with the Colorado River, and Arizona is in the hot seat because we have taken and will continue to take significant cuts,” warns Randolph. That’s because Central Arizona has the most junior water rights of the Colorado River basin. As Arizona plans for a drier future and cutbacks of its allotment, as agreed to under the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan between the seven basin states and Mexico, Tucson officials are looking to augment local supplies (USBR 2019).

James MacAdam, superintendent of Tucson Water Public Information & Conservation, says that today the city views stormwater as a significant resource for Tucson’s future. “One of the paradigm shifts at Tucson Water is that we now count [stormwater] as a water source in our planning. That’s changed in the past five years.”

Pima County Regional Flood Control District, in fact, estimates that Tucson’s stormwater capture potential is roughly 35,000 acre-feet per year, or one-third of the volume Tucson Water delivers today to its 730,000 customers.

Flood Control District Civil Engineering Manager Evan Canfield says the city has prioritized the benefits stormwater capture could provide. “For the Tucson region, addressing water scarcity and increasing resilience—planting trees in water harvesting basins to help with shade and cooling—are the core benefits that we’re looking for,” he says. “Water quality concerns are the padding.”

There are also real financial benefits at stake: Autocase cloud-based software developed by the Pima Association of Governments shows that every dollar invested in green stormwater infrastructure returns two to four dollars in benefits, including flood risk reduction, property value uplift, and heat mortality risk reduction (Parker 2018).

Over the past decade, the Flood Control District has installed and maintains more than a dozen large projects in the city, such as the $11 million Kino Environmental Restoration Project, which captures stormwater from 17.7 square miles of urban watershed and directs it into more than 100 acres of wetlands and recreational area, while providing up to 114 million gallons annually for landscape irrigation at an adjacent sports complex.

Now Tucson is poised to tap deeper into its stormwater potential. It’s passed a number of related measures, including the 2013 Green Streets Policy, requiring the incorporation of green infrastructure into all publicly funded roadway projects; the 2013 Low Impact Development Ordinance, requiring new commercial development to capture the first half-inch of rainwater; and the 2008 first-in-the-nation Commercial Water Harvesting Ordinance, requiring commercial developments to meet 50 percent of their landscaping water needs with harvested rainwater.

The sum of these measures, says MacAdam of Tucson Water, means that “any time we’re building a road or a parking lot, or rebuilding our public and private infrastructure, we now design it in a water-literate way. When Parks is redoing a park, they’re incorporating intelligent management of stormwater; when Streets is building a street, they do it in a way that intelligently incorporates and manages stormwater, and so on.”

The city recently enacted a novel green stormwater infrastructure fund to help expand and maintain high-priority public projects. The fund will raise about $3 million annually through a small charge on residents’ water bills, estimated to cost the average homeowner about $1.04 per month, according to MacAdam. The city has identified 86 potential sites for such projects—many in lower-income neighborhoods that are prone to flooding and searing temperatures of up to 117 degrees in the summer—at a cost of $31 million.

The fund “gets us started,” says Catlow Shipek, a driving force behind the local green infrastructure movement who cofounded Watershed Management Group with Lisa, his wife, and is now its policy and technical director. “It’s very focused on maintenance because there’s currently no dedicated funding for that.” The fund, he says, will also help “capitalize on new projects and leverage other departments and agencies to do more.”

MacAdam says the fund’s approach is to add elements to capital works projects being built through the Parks and Connections Bond, passed in 2018, which allocated $225 million for building bike boulevards, constructing greenways, and fixing up parks. When an old parking lot is being ripped up and replaced, for example, the city will create new basins and curb cuts to channel water into rain gardens that it will plant with native trees and shrubs. The fund will also seek to piggyback off flood control projects.

“When Flood Control buys a vacant lot to bring water off a flooding street in a neighborhood, we can use our funds,” MacAdam explained. “They pay for land acquisition and digging the deep basin, and we pay for smaller basins to add vegetation and create a more functional landscape for the neighborhood, and to maintain that landscape over time.”

The importance of adding tree cover to the city cannot be overstated, says Randolph. “It’s a health issue and a disparity issue,” because the hottest parts of Tucson are typically in socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. “Tucson has done some very innovative things that are not the norm throughout the West, or in Arizona,” she adds. “In essence, they’ve created a master plan where water touches all lives and ecosystems. All of the things they’re doing with rainwater harvesting, the rebates, the fund, mean less groundwater pumping, which allows natural systems to flourish and grow.”

Los Angeles: Seeing Stormwater as a Resource

Los Angeles is 10 to 15 degrees cooler on average than Tucson in the summer, though temperatures can vary by as much as 20 degrees across its different microclimates, from beach to hills to hot, flat inland. Lush vegetation in some of the wealthier and cooler seaside communities may give the impression that water is not a concern, but that’s not the case.

Like Tucson, Los Angeles receives just 12 inches of rainfall per year. And like Arizona, California faces major water challenges, with climate change intensifying drought while population growth puts pressure on limited supplies. Some California communities are still recovering from the last drought that wrung the state dry from 2012 to 2016. Meanwhile, legacy agricultural pollution in the Central Valley has left one million residents without reliable access to safe drinking water, and the state is just beginning to rein in decades of groundwater overuse through its 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which targets critically overdrafted basins.

In Los Angeles, the Department of Water and Power (LADWP) serves four million residents over a 472 square-mile area, supplying more than 520,000 acre-feet of water per year. That supply is largely imported through three aqueduct systems. The California Aqueduct delivers water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 444 miles to the north; water is pumped over the Tehachapi mountains and stored for distribution in Pyramid Lake and Castaic Lake north of the city. The Colorado River Aqueduct carries water 244 miles across the Mojave Desert and Imperial Valley from its origins at Lake Havasu, the same source that feeds the Central Arizona Project.

That water is stored in Lake Mathews, about 60 miles southeast of the city. The final aqueduct, the Los Angeles, delivers water from the Owens River Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. That system includes a series of eight dams and reservoirs along the 300-mile route. Within the city limits, another nine reservoirs and 110 storage tanks allow for controlled release when water is needed.

Just 14 percent of Los Angeles water comes from local supplies. Under LA’s Green New Deal, the city’s 2019 sustainability plan, local leaders plan to turn that balance on its head, shifting the contribution from local water supplies—groundwater, recycled wastewater, stormwater, and water conservation—to a whopping 71 percent of its total supply by 2035 (City of Los Angeles 2019). While some southern California cities, like Huntington Beach and San Diego, are turning to desalination—that is, converting ocean water into drinking water—Los Angeles is opting out of this costly, energy-intensive approach, which also harms marine life.

“We want to be more reliable and sustainable on the local level and not depend so much on imported water supply,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at LADWP. “Climate studies show there’s going to be a lot less snow and a lot more rain. That means we’ll have less time to capture that snow melt . . . and with less snow and more stormwater, we’re not going to have that luxury to store water.” It’s one of the reasons the city wants to become more self-reliant, says Castro, adding, “the system was built for storage.”

Los Angeles is already recharging or capturing 74,000 acre-feet of stormwater per year, primarily through centralized projects like football field-sized spreading grounds and detention basins. Spreading grounds, akin to bottomless cups, are large, sandy basins that overlie an aquifer and allow for rapid infiltration. Water captured in Los Angeles’ spreading grounds eventually percolates down some 200 to 400 feet to aquifers in the San Fernando Basin, according to Castro. A Stormwater Capture Master Plan, published in 2015, lays out how the city can double the amount of stormwater it captures, through projects both large and small (LADWP 2015).

Decentralized projects on city streets, in alleys, and on residential properties are a critical component of Los Angeles’ stormwater management plans, which address both water quantity and water quality. Stormwater running off city streets eventually makes its way to the Pacific Ocean via the Los Angeles River, polluting some Southern California beaches.

“We have to capture, clean, and infiltrate, if possible, the water moving through a green street system,” says Eileen Alduenda, director of the nonprofit Council for Watershed Health, which has played a critical role in the green infrastructure movement in Los Angeles. Alduenda envisions a proliferation of rainwater retention features—like permeable parking lots and driveways, curb cuts, and drought-tolerant landscaping—throughout the city’s streets and alleyways, working together to reduce the flow of stormwater to the sea.

A low-impact development ordinance, requiring developers to capture a certain amount of rain (in this case the first three-quarters of an inch) to reduce stormwater runoff, went into effect in Los Angeles in 2012 and is helping spur such decentralized green infrastructure projects throughout the city. Los Angeles County has financed dozens of projects under Proposition O, a funding mechanism that passed in 2004. Projects range from stormwater retention features in public parks and recreation areas to infiltration galleries, catch basins, bioswales, and other structures built into rights of way on residential streets.

This year, new funds will be available for stormwater capture and treatment through Measure W, the 2018 Safe Clean Water Act, a parcel tax projected to raise $300 million per year. The measure allows funds to go toward operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. Having such funds available is critically important, according to Daniel Berger, director of community greening at the nonprofit TreePeople, a local nonprofit that promotes tree planting, rainwater harvesting, and low-impact development. “One of the largest objections [to implementing green infrastructure] from a government perspective has been the long-term O&M costs, which are certainly higher than for gray infrastructure and are often hard to find dedicated funding for,” Berger says. “Measure W is an absolute game changer, an opportunity to really scale things up.”

The Value of Nonprofit Participation

In Los Angeles, nonprofit organizations including TreePeople, the Council for Watershed Health, and Heal the Bay were instrumental in getting green alternatives on the city’s stormwater management agenda. The Council for Watershed Health and TreePeople collaborated with LADWP and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on a three-part study of the potential for groundwater recharge from stormwater infiltration. TreePeople also partnered with LADWP on the 2015 Stormwater Capture Management Plan.

The Council for Watershed Health developed a training program for the City’s Native Green Gardener program, a workforce development effort focused on training day laborers how to manage landscapes with unfamiliar native plants and how to maintain and clean features like curb cuts. The Council also managed the city’s first large-scale neighborhood project to use green infrastructure for stormwater management, Elmer Avenue in Sun Valley, a low-income neighborhood that regularly flooded.

“Elmer Ave became a demonstration for not only how you do this technically, but also how you collaborate amongst agencies to ensure you’re getting multiple benefits out of any project,” says Alduenda. Los Angeles’ Green Streets Committee, which was instituted by former Los Angeles Public Works Commissioner Paula Daniels to coordinate work among all of the involved agencies, was vital to the process, she added. “It was a place where folks who were working on Green Streets projects could talk about issues they were encountering. Inconsistences between departments, or process barriers, could get worked out.”

Daniels created the committee in 2007 when she saw the need for a culture shift within the city’s Engineering, Sanitation, Parks and Recreation, and Street Services bureaus charged with developing green infrastructure projects. The bureaus were staffed with engineers, not landscape architects, said Daniels, so the expertise they brought to the job was about mechanical solutions. Daniels invited middle managers, rather than bureau heads, and gave staff the opportunity to “kick the tires on an idea,” to talk among themselves and teach each other. She invited their peers from cities with strong green infrastructure programs, like Santa Monica and Portland, to show what was possible.

Nonprofits, says Daniels, were an essential part of that mix. “Nonprofits do a really good job at data collection, extracting the necessary analytics,” she says. Their involvement in the first green street project led by the city, on Riverdale Avenue, helped “prove out the assumption that it would improve water quality, and that all the water flow would be managed [as required].”

Nonprofits have also played a key role in Tucson, where organizations and engaged citizens have led the way. Tucson water experts credit permaculture enthusiast and author Brad Lancaster with kickstarting the rain harvesting movement in the 1990s, when he created the first intentional curb cut, which was illegal at the time. Lancaster sliced out a piece of curb and placed a vegetated basin behind it to capture the water running down his Tucson street. For its part, WMG created the first-ever green infrastructure planning manual for desert cities (WMG 2017). Catlow Shipek says the group identified the need for a how-to manual with practices, schematics, and maintenance information when it discovered that key stakeholders—engineers, city departments, and neighborhoods—weren’t speaking the same language. The manual helped create that common language and facilitated better collaboration.

MacAdam confirms that citizens, neighborhood groups, and nonprofits have gotten the city where it is today on low-impact development. “It was decades of continual and concerted action by people, the grassroots,” he says. “As a city, we want to take that and build on it, improve it and professionalize iit, and make it part of our infrastructure.”

A Solution with Multiple Benefits

One of the challenges Tucson Water has faced in advancing low-impact development is that it doesn’t pencil out from a water savings or flood control perspective alone. If you look at these elements in isolation, the costs exceed the benefits, according to MacAdam. Tucson will continue to invest in traditional gray infrastructure for flood control, but MacAdam points out that the low-impact approach “can improve a lot of things: how we do flood control, how we manage our water supplies, how we build our streets to provide multiple public benefits, air quality, water quality, shade and resiliency.”

Berger of TreePeople agrees. “No one could argue with a straight face that nature-based solutions will be your most effective from a flood control perspective exclusively,” he said. But, like MacAdam, he believes that if you take into account the multiple benefits, “nature-based solutions will rise to the top as the preferred solution in many cases.”

Both Tucson and Los Angeles can point to proof that investments in low-impact development pay off in multiple ways. But the economics of urban water management are likely to get more complex, not less, as development and climate change continue to accelerate. “Water is only going to get more expensive,” says Randolph. “Each city has to invest in solutions that will keep them vibrant for years to come, and that don’t pit people against each other when water prices begin to rise. Tucson and LA are making good decisions for their communities. They’re tackling the problem head on.”

Meg Wilcox is an environmental journalist covering climate change and water, environmental health, and sustainable food systems. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Next City, PRI, and other outlets.

Photograph: Thunderstorm in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: John Sirlin via Getty Images.

References

City of Los Angeles. 2019. “LA’s Green New Deal: Sustainable City pLAn.” https://plan.lamayor.org/sites/default/files/pLAn_2019_final.pdf.

LADWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power). 2015. “Stormwater Capture Master Plan.” Los Angeles, CA: Geosyntec Consultants. August. https://www.treepeople.org/sites/default/files/pdf/publications/%2BLADWPStormwaterCaptureMasterPlan_MainReport_101615.pdf.

OEO (Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity). “Population Projections.” Phoenix, AZ: Arizona Commerce Authority. https://www.azcommerce.com/oeo/population/population-projections/.

Parker, John. 2018. “Triple Bottom Line Cost Benefit Analysis Makes the Case for Green Infrastructure in Pima County.” New York, NY: Autocase. October 24. https://autocase.com/triple-bottom-line-costbenefit-analysis-make-the-case-for-greeninfrastructure-in-pima-county/.

USBR (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation). 2019. “Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Department of Reclamation. https://www.usbr.gov/dcp/finaldocs.html.

USGS (U.S. Geological Survey). 2020. “Atmospheric Warming, Loss of Snow Cover, and Declining Colorado River Flow.” Water Resources. https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/atmospheric-warming-loss-snow-cover-and-declining-colorado?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects.

WMG (Watershed Management Group). 2017. “Green Infrastructure for Desert Cities.” Tucson, Arizona: Watershed Management Group. First published 2016. https://www.vibrantcitieslab.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/green-infrastructuremanual-for-desert-communities-2016.pdf.

Local authorities focus on quickly getting services back up and running, returning to previous systems and making them as effective as possible in the new context. After a year of upheaval, staff and the wider public have little appetite for change.

—“Race Back to Normal” scenario, Social Finance

Earlier this year, the U.K.-based nonprofit Social Finance carried out a weeklong scenario planning exercise for local governments. The process asked officials to imagine four potential futures as they looked toward pandemic recovery: Innovation Against the Odds, Civic Renewal, Central Command and Control, and Race Back to Normal (Social Finance 2020).

The four scenarios varied along two axes—responsibility, referring to whether the crisis response is directed by the central government or localities, and transformation, which described whether localities would use the crisis to drive systemic change or, alternatively, quickly return to old ways. A guiding question drove the exercise: faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, how can local authorities change and adapt to meet the emerging needs of communities over the next year?

Originally developed as a tool to refine military and corporate strategies, scenario planning enables communities to create and analyze multiple plausible versions of the future. Unlike traditional planning approaches that tend to assume one likely or desired outcome, scenario planning encourages users to embrace uncertainty and imagine multiple endpoints. Since the onset of the current pandemic, the practice has gained renewed attention and taken on new relevance across many industries, which are all facing uncertainties not accounted for in their routine planning processes. Universities that unexpectedly sent their students packing mid-semester have developed scenarios to determine what the fall semester might look like and how to prepare accordingly for various options. At the onset of the pandemic, hospitals used real-time scenario planning to prepare for different outcomes related to facility supplies, staff capacity, and financial management. Businesses, transit agencies, and nonprofits across the country are using the method to navigate a new baseline of uncertainty.

“This pandemic has helped people understand the purpose and value of scenario planning,” said Sarah Philbrick, a socioeconomic analyst at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), the regional planning agency for metropolitan Boston. “Normally people view uncertainties as far-fetched scenarios and think they could never really happen. However, with COVID, people are now able to see how dramatically things can shift in a short amount of time. This is a prime opportunity for practitioners to talk about this method and use it with others.”

Scenario Planning for Local Governments

Scenario planning was first incorporated into urban planning projects in the 1990s and marked the beginning of a gradual shift away from traditional planning, which has largely ignored uncertainty, according to Robert Goodspeed, professor at the University of Michigan and author of the new Lincoln Institute book Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Envisioning and Managing Uncertainties (Goodspeed 2020).

Planning that narrows in on one future can result in plans that are poorly suited for implementation, said Goodspeed, who is also a board member of the Consortium for Scenario Planning, a peer network launched by the Lincoln Institute (see sidebar). For example, inflexible plans have seen homes flooded because they were built in areas that were thought to be safe from storms, public funds wasted on infrastructure to accommodate overestimated growth, and extensive mismatches between affordable housing types and residents’ needs.

“Plenty of places are not happy with conventional trends and have sought scenario planning out as a method to envision a more sustainable future,” Goodspeed said. “And now, amidst COVID-19, local leaders who have not previously participated in these types of activities are seeing the value, and urban and land use professionals are realizing how all long-range plans need to be mindful of major uncertainties.”

Scenario planning for urban planners varies in several ways from scenario planning for businesses. As Goodspeed explains in his book, the primary stakeholder for a business is typically the business itself. “Scenario-based urban planning, in contrast, has many stakeholders whose participation is closely linked with research and technical analysis, and it may use evaluation criteria to compare scenarios,” he writes (Goodspeed 2020).

The methodology, which takes two main forms—normative and exploratory—is used most often to help define long-range transportation and land use plans. In a normative scenario plan, the goal is to reach a specific target or “future.” The scenarios come into play in how stakeholders choose to get to the future. Each scenario for reaching the desired outcome will have benefits and drawbacks that planners and community members must weigh.

With exploratory scenario planning, stakeholders identify “driving forces” and combine these elements into several possible futures. Then, the group outlines appropriate responses for each scenario. “Through exploratory scenario planning, it is acknowledged that the future cannot be predicted, but preparation and proactive action can and should take place,” writes Janae Futrell, who previously worked as a consultant at the Lincoln Institute, in a PAS memo for the American Planning Association (Futrell 2019).

In her memo, Futrell cites the example of the Greater Philadelphia Futures Group, a regional coalition formed to identify the various driving forces most likely to shape the region through 2050. For instance, the group has considered how the introduction of autonomous vehicles will affect the metro area. Participants outlined four scenarios that might result from this vehicular shift and developed strategies that would be successful regardless of which reality plays out. This summer, the coalition will issue a futures report informed by the digital revolution, rising inequality, and climate change, incorporating the pandemic and recent racial justice protests into each scenario’s narrative.

Planning departments had already begun to recognize the value of scenario planning for hazard mitigation and climate resilience work, as well as for internal capacity-building exercises. Now its very premise—embracing uncertainty—turns out to be perfectly suited for the times.

Adapting the Tool for a Pandemic

“Traditionally, [scenario planning] is used to consider long-term trends and promote big picture thinking,” the report from Social Finance explains. “However, in crisis situations such as COVID-19, scenario planning can be a useful technique to help interpret and respond to rapid change, as it allows organizations to anticipate and manage uncertainty” (Social Finance 2020).

Many of the basic strategies of exploratory scenario planning can be useful for looking at pandemic recovery scenarios, with one notable exception: timeframe. In the middle of a pandemic, timelines and expectations can be different. Whereas typical plans that incorporate scenarios might project 30 to 50 years into the future, the day-by-day variation of COVID-19 makes 12 to 18 months a more digestible timeline.

“The pandemic is a tangible thing you are reacting to, so people’s current use of the tool is more reactionary instead of the more standard anticipatory approach,” explained Heather Hannon, director of the Consortium for Scenario Planning.

Transit agencies, for example, are adjusting scenarios every week and working on the fly to create pop-up bike lanes and parklets. “With fewer staff and constrained budgets, transit agencies are preparing for a staggering number of scenarios,” wrote Tiffany Chu, a commissioner at San Francisco’s Department of the Environment, in Forbes (Chu 2020).

In May, WSP, a professional services firm based in Canada, published “Public Transportation and COVID-19: Funding and Finance Resiliency: Considerations When Planning in an Unprecedented Realm of Unknowns.” The report recommends scenario planning as a tool for public transportation staff and includes some of the factors agencies will have to consider, such as higher cleaning and sanitizing costs, higher absenteeism, demands for higher wages, and changing ridership patterns (WSP 2020).

Lisa Nisenson, vice president of the national design and professional services firm WGI and a member of the Consortium for Scenario Planning, is also considering how scenario planning can be useful in responding to COVID’s impact on the mobility industry. Will transit and shared-use companies rebound? Will telecommuting stick over the long run? Will open streets be temporary?

“Any time you have different alternative ways that the future could unfold, taking a deliberate look at how it could unfold is never a bad idea,” Nisenson said. “That said, the ability to figure out how things unfold very much depends on your confidence in the variables. In this case, you want to assemble stakeholders and experts who can describe the variables, the directions the variables could take, and benchmarks for monitoring the situation based on your organization’s needs.” In a recent mobility plan, Nisenson said, the company identified ideas for ‘distancing while in motion,’ including bicycling and a popular open-air electric shuttle, that would also address long-term mobility and sustainability goals.

Nisenson added that successful COVID planning can involve a combination of methods that include scenario, anticipatory, and strategic planning, as well as the Delphi method of assembling experts. “This process illuminates one of scenario planning’s benefits: stakeholder engagement,” she said.

Goodspeed emphasized that COVID scenario planning projects will differ from typical scenario planning projects by bridging unconventional communities. For instance, hazard and disaster staff are often siloed from long-range land use and transportation planners, but now will likely become central to any comprehensive recovery plan.

At MAPC, Philbrick has been working with the housing and economic development teams to sketch out a three- to five-year timeline for economic recovery in the Boston metro area. The project focuses on the possible scenarios for housing demand by income levels based on possible employment patterns and the pace of recovery by sector. “Because none of the many questions we have can really be answered, the only real option is scenario planning,” Philbrick said. “Choosing any sort of point estimate when you have very little to base it off of is just irresponsible.”

A Nimble Tool for Resource-Constrained Governments

One of the common misunderstandings about scenario planning is that it always requires expensive software and outside consultants. Now, more than ever, municipalities are resource-limited and largely unable to come up with the extra funds needed for such expenses, and may lack the time and resources to look to the future. But Goodspeed and Hannon—who is leading an internal scenario planning process at the Lincoln Institute—said smaller-scale versions of scenario planning can still be helpful, and exploration and experimentation are the keys to a productive process.

“In the current moment, organizations starting from scratch probably still should frame a project to focus on a particular plan or decision, allowing them to dip their toes in the water and explore methods and figure out how to use them effectively,” Goodspeed recommended. “For those who already have more experience, this is probably a good time to broaden or deepen their practice. For example, they could incorporate more exploratory scenarios or involve experts from new fields like public health.”

Hannon noted that the Consortium for Scenario Planning maintains a list of resources on its website, as well as opportunities for peer exchange and other information. The Lincoln Institute is also releasing a comprehensive manual in partnership with the Sonoran Institute that will provide users with tools and guidance for managing a scenario planning process. Social Finance has developed a template for those attempting to do shorter-term scenario planning online. The organization suggests tools as simple as online Word documents, Zoom, and virtual whiteboards.

“Planners can do a lightweight version without the burden of consultants or software tools,” Hannon said. “Don’t worry about a data-intensive version, just get people together and start brainstorming.”

To learn about how communities are using scenario planning to confront the impacts of climate change, read “Climate Change: Great Lakes Communities Use Scenario Planning to Prepare for Rising Waters.”

Consortium for Scenario Planning

The Consortium for Scenario Planning is a community of practice launched by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that helps to foster growth in the practice of scenario planning at all scales. Through research, peer-to-peer learning, networking, training, and technical assistance, the Consortium helps communities develop better plans to guide a range of actions, from climate change adaptation to transportation investment. The Consortium also convenes researchers and software providers to develop more effective tools and reduce barriers to entry. To learn more, visit www.scenarioplanning.io.

Emma Zehner is publications and communications editor at the Lincoln Institute.

Photograph: Scenario planning enables institutions and communities to create and analyze multiple plausible versions of the future, using simple or sophisticated tools. Credit: Times Up Linz via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

References

Chu, Tiffany. 2020. “In a Pandemic, Transportation Ushers in a New Era of Agile Experimentation.” Forbes, May 12. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiffanychu/2020/05/11/transportation-agileexperimentation.

CSP (Consortium for Scenario Planning). 2020. http://www.scenarioplanning.io/.

Futrell, Janae. 2019. “How to Design Your Scenario Planning Process.” PAS Memo July/August: 1–20. https://www.planning.org/publications/document/9180327/.

Goodspeed, Robert. 2020. Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/scenario-planning-cities-regions.

Social Finance UK. 2020. “Local Government Futures: Scenario Planning for Councils.” London: Social Finance. https://www.socialfinance.org.uk/sites/default/files/scenario_planning_local_government_0.pdf.

WSP. 2020. “Public Transportation and COVID-19: Funding and Finance Resiliency: Considerations When Planning in an Unprecedented Realm of Unknowns.” https://www.wsp.com/-/media/Campaign/US/Document/2020/Public-Transportation-and-COVID-19.pdf.