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Module Combining these into their four possible combinations defines four scenarios.
6 ? Scenario A: The world proves to be an ecologically resilient world, with high potential for innovation

in environmentally relevant technologies.

Scenario B: The world proves to be ecologically vulnerable, but with high potential for innovation in
?
environmentally relevant technologies.
9-12 December, 2013 ? environmentally relevant technologies.
Scenario C: The world proves to be ecologically vulnerable, with low potential for innovation in
?

Scenario D: The world proves to be ecologically resilient, but with low potential for innovation in
environmentally relevant technologies.

This simple approach yields four distinct scenarios in the situation where there are two critical
uncertainties and each has two fundamentally distinct future paths worth exploring. There would be
more than four distinct scenarios, if there are more than two critical uncertainties, and/or if any of
them has more than two possible paths worth exploring. In such a case, you could enumerate all

combinations, and thus all possible scenarios.

Consider the example illustrated in the table below, in which there are three critical uncertainties.
Critical Uncertainty #1 has two fundamentally distinct possible future evolutions (1a and 1b). Likewise,

Critical Uncertainty #2 has two fundamentally distinct possible future evolutions (2a and 2b). Critical
Uncertainty #3, has three fundamentally distinct possible future evolutions (3a, 3b and 3c). This leads
to a total of twelve combinations (2 _ 2 _ 3 = 12), and thus twelve possible scenarios. This is a large
number of scenarios, and it probably will not be possible to elaborate and clearly present them all. Thus,
it generally makes sense to pare the possible scenarios down to a number that is manageable given the
time, resources and intended audience. In many cases, some of them will likely be less coherent than
others. For example, if in the case described above a third critical uncertainty were to be the general

rate of economic development, defined as low, medium and high. Many people would argue that high
rates of economic development are not plausible in a world of technological stagnation; thus any
combinations of the two would not be worth pursuing.

Critical Uncertainty 1 Critical Uncertainty 2 Critical Uncertainty 3

(1a, 1b) (2a, 2b) (3a, 3b, 3c)
Scenario 1 1a 2a 3a

Scenario 2 1a 2a 3b
Scenario 3 1a 2a 3c
Scenario 4 1a 2b 3a

48 Scenario Development and Analysis