A scenario process for urban forest design at the neighbourhood level

Abstract

Urban forests are facing multiple future challenges. In order for urban forest designs to successfully respond to these challenges, we must explore new approaches that allow for meaningful and rich transdisciplinary conversation and assessment of the trade-offs and co-benefits of a range of options. Scenarios are increasingly being used by numerous disciplines to help understand complex futures, but to be useful they must follow a defensible design process, use consistent methods, explore plausible futures, and communicate results in an appealing, comprehensive, and insightful way. In this paper, we describe a new structured scenario design process to create distinct and holistic urban forest scenarios with detailed spatial configurations of urban vegetation. The process is replicable and integrates an iterative process of seven steps to develop a set of future urban forest scenarios. The resulting scenarios identify options with the greatest range of benefits and provide insights into forest performance when retrofitting urban forests in compact communities. In a world facing multiple simultaneous crises, local decision-makers can draw on the measured guidance provided by a robust, comprehensive scenario process such as that detailed here to create urban forest strategies that are resilient in a range of futures.