Using strategic foresight to assess conservation opportunity
© 2014 Society for Conservation Biology.
| Veröffentlicht in: | Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology. - 1999. - 28(2014), 6 vom: 10. Dez., Seite 1474-83 |
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| Format: | Online-Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2014
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| Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk: | Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology |
| Schlagworte: | Journal Article biodiversity conservation conservación de la biodiversidad conservation policy decision making environmental futures futures research futuros ambientales investigaciones futuras pensamiento estratégico mehr... |
| Zusammenfassung: | © 2014 Society for Conservation Biology. The nature of conservation challenges can foster a reactive, rather than proactive approach to decision making. Failure to anticipate problems before they escalate results in the need for more costly and time-consuming solutions. Proactive conservation requires forward-looking approaches to decision making that consider possible futures without being overly constrained by the past. Strategic foresight provides a structured process for considering the most desirable future and for mapping the most efficient and effective approaches to promoting that future with tools that facilitate creative thinking. The process involves 6 steps: setting the scope, collecting inputs, analyzing signals, interpreting the information, determining how to act, and implementing the outcomes. Strategic foresight is ideal for seeking, recognizing, and realizing conservation opportunities because it explicitly encourages a broad-minded, forward-looking perspective on an issue. Despite its potential value, the foresight process is rarely used to address conservation issues, and previous attempts have generally failed to influence policy. We present the strategic foresight process as it can be used for proactive conservation planning, describing some of the key tools in the foresight tool kit and how they can be used to identify and exploit different types of conservation opportunities. Scanning is an important tool for collecting and organizing diverse streams of information and can be used to recognize new opportunities and those that could be created. Scenario planning explores how current trends, drivers of change, and key uncertainties might influence the future and can be used to identify barriers to opportunities. Backcasting is used to map out a path to a goal and can determine how to remove barriers to opportunities. We highlight how the foresight process was used to identify conservation opportunities during the development of a strategic plan to address climate change in New York State. The plan identified solutions that should be effective across a range of possible futures. Illustrating the application of strategic foresight to identify conservation opportunities should provide the impetus for decision makers to explore strategic foresight as a way to support more proactive conservation policy, planning, and management |
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| Beschreibung: | Date Completed 06.07.2015 Date Revised 12.11.2014 published: Print-Electronic Citation Status MEDLINE |
| ISSN: | 1523-1739 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/cobi.12404 |