Degree of Master of

Scenario approach in scientific publications

Scenario approach is widely-spread as a strategic management tool for decision making process in environmental science (Lindgren and Bandhold 2003). A large number of international environmental organizations and institutions broadly use the scenario approach in the research of severe environmental problems such as global climate change, increasing growth of the world population, water scarcity, desertification, deforestation and others (IISD 2008). For instance, UNEP has published enormous amount of reports devoted to application of the scenario approach in environmental science, e.g. “Four scenarios for Europe: Based on UNEP’s third Global Environment Outlook” issued in 2003 (UNEP/RIVM 2003), “Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100” (Sala, Chapin et al. 2000), “GEO-2000 report: Alternative Policy Study: Water Resource Management in West Asia” (UNEP 2000) and many others.
Among other international reports focused on scenario approach we should list a great amount of papers published by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, “Emission Scenarios: summary for policy makers” (IPCC 2000), and “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” (IPCC 2001). Also, there are several reports published by less known institutions, for instance, “Central Asia’s Economy: Mapping Future Prospects to 2015” published by Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (Dowling and Wignaraja 2006).
Furthermore, a huge variety of contemporary projects focused on the scenario approach are published in different scientific journals, namely:

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  “Holistic aspects in landscape development: a scenario approach” in Landscape and Urban Planning (Patton 2002);
  
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  “Scenario building as a tool for planning a sustainable transportation system” in Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment (Shiftan, Kaplan et al. 2003);
  
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  “Scenarios as a tool in water management: Considerations of scale and application” in
  

Developments in Water Science (Warwick, Bakker et al. 2003);

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  “A formal framework for scenario development in support of environmental decision- making” in Environmental Modeling & Software (Mahmoud, Liu et al. 2009);
  
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  “A DSS for water resources management under uncertainty by scenario analysis” in
  

Environmental Modeling and Software (Pallottino, Sechi et al. 2005);

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  “Scenarios of water resources management in the Lower Lusatian mining district, Germany” in Ecological Engineering (Koch, Kaltofen et al. 2005).
  

It should be noted that very often scenario approach is applied in collaboration with environmental modeling. There are several contemporary environmental projects in which environmental modeling and scenario approach are directly correlated, for example:

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  “Participatory scenario analysis for integrated regional modeling” in Landscape and Urban Planning (Walz, Lardelli et al. 2007);
  
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  “Combined ecological and economic modeling in agricultural land use scenarios” in
  

Ecological Modeling (Monier, Birr-Pedersen et al. 2004);

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  “Solving stochastic complementarity problems in energy market modeling using scenario reduction” in European Journal of Operational Research (Gabriel, Zhuang et al. 2009);
  
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  “Modeling and multicriteria analysis of water saving scenarios for an irrigation district in the upper Yellow River Basin” in Agricultural Water Management (Gonzalves, Pereira et al. 2007);
  
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  “Prospective scenarios for water quality and ecological status in Lake Sete Cidades (Portugal): The integration of mathematical modeling in decision processes” in Applied Geochemistry (Martins, Ribeiro et al. 2008).
  

CEU eTD Collection
Summarizing, it should be underlined that all scientific publications provided above demonstrate a very valuable practical application of the scenario approach in environmental science and show that this approach can be successfully used in the decision making process. Furthermore, application of scenario approach jointly with modeling provides a powerful framework for conducting the research as well as for decision-making process. In the present work we will attempt to use the integration of these two methods in order to reach the main research goal.

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