GEO-6 Regional Assessment for Africa
path shall be led by increased agricultural productivity, industrialization, investment in infrastructure development and
renewable energy, conservation of biodiversity,
sustainable and fair and equitable use of its genetic resources, clean air and water, and better adaptive capacity to climate change. However, Africa’s growth pathway is faced with challenges of sustaining rapid economic growth as its population is expected to double to approximately 2.5 billion by 2050, and the need to safeguard the life-support system provided by its rich natural capital. It is therefore imperative that such growth must consider the region’s relatively weak environmental governance and a paucity of accurate and up-to-date environmental and related data for evidence-based decision-making.
As an affirmation of the importance of both Agenda 2063 and Agenda 2030 as defined by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Africa’s future will contain common elements for a development trajectory that will provide the region with a healthy living environment while ensuring good health and quality of life for her people. The two are also critical to preserving and valuing Africa’s natural capital for the benefit of its citizens and their livelihoods (More... 29 and 30).
3.2 Scenario analysis
Africa’s future is shaped by many uncertain drivers of change whose interactions might result in different pathways for development and impacts on natural resources. It is therefore dangerous to rely on projects with a ‘most likely’ future. Instead, policy makers and other societal actors must acknowledge future uncertainty, and take a range of different possibilities into consideration when developing strategies and plans to increase their feasibility.
Scenarios offer a particularly useful tool for exploring the implications of different futures (Wilkinson and Eidinow 2008). Scenarios are ‘what if’ narratives, creating a range of different future worlds, each exploring a different direction in which drivers of change could develop and interact. Scenarios have been used effectively as a tool to test and
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This outlook is based on four scenarios described in the WWF/ African Development Bank 2015 African Ecological Futures report (WWF/AfDB 2015). After a process of developing sectoral scenarios with various stakeholders on the continent, this final set of scenarios was developed at the 15th
develop plans and policies for development, environment and adaptation (Vervoort et al. 2014) .
African
Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Cairo in March 2015 and published in May 2015, making it the most recent set of regionally-applicable participatory scenarios for the continent, which provide a legitimate, credible set of future pathways (Chaudhury et al. 2013). Two critical, but uncertain, factors are used to create a set of axes on which the four scenario pathways are developed. The first is that of governance and decision-making around infrastructure/land development and natural resource use, where centralized and coordinated, or top-down planning is contrasted with more organic decentralized decision- making. The second axis relates to economic production and the focus of trade in Africa and whether it is global export- oriented or more intra-African and driven by domestic urban and rural consumption. Figure 3.2.1 outlines where the four scenarios – Good Neighbours, Going Global, All in Together and Helping Hands – fit relative to the development and trade options.
The scenarios outline a future Africa in which governance is more centralized and planned or more decentralized, and where trade is more regionally focused on the continent or looks more to global exports.
The GEO-6 Africa Outlook builds on these existing scenarios and adapts them to a discussion of Africa’s natural capital. The narratives in this section offer discursive storylines around different potential futures, depending on the directions in which the key drivers (trade focus and level of centrality) might develop. They are not intended to be projections of a ‘most likely’ set of futures, since it is accepted that such claims are difficult and dangerous. Instead, they offer diverse, but plausible (believable if we accept that drivers of change could evolve in certain directions) future worlds, that
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