The Five Future Scenarios
By the end of 2025, the Future Scenarios project included five scenarios: one baseline scenario and four alternative scenarios. These scenarios are not predictions of Puget Sound’s future. Instead, they are meant to provide descriptive, memorable, and distinct visions of potential futures to help us understand the potential implications and outcomes of current management choices.
All five scenarios assume that, by 2080, the Puget Sound region will experience high impacts from climate change and high population growth. The project uses these “high” assumptions because they create the best test for the region’s growth management and recovery strategies in an uncertain future.
Each scenario assumes a unique set of growth and development choices intended to explore how Puget Sound recovery goals might be met across a range of population distributions, from more concentrated in urban areas to less concentrated in urban areas.
Benchmark scenario
Baseline Scenario
Current growth trends and policies continue through 2080.
The Baseline Scenario projects Puget Sound’s 2020 population growth trends and current policies, including conservation and restoration funding levels, into 2080. The purpose of the Baseline Scenario is to provide a comparison for the alternative scenarios. It helps illustrate the potential differences between the current trajectory and the variations explored in the alternative scenarios.
Use this scenario as the comparison point.
Alternative Scenarios
Alternative scenarios are presented in two ways:
- Through narrative storytelling
- Through modeled results.
The narratives are the project’s main tool to explore the future. In exploratory scenario planning, narratives can take many forms. Future Scenarios created four character-driven narratives (one for each alternative scenario) that show different ways Puget Sound might progress towards its recovery goals by 2080 and how an individual might experience them.
In each narrative, the characters are in their different futures and travel to the same fictional event in Olympia called Shadow and Song, a celebration of Southern Resident killer whale recovery. The shared setting creates a common point or reference across the scenarios, making the stories easier to compare and follow. Because each scenario is designed to explore how to achieve recovery goals, Shadow and Song is intended to be plausible in each future.
Alternative scenario 1 of 4
Salmon Forward
Dense urban life and thriving natural areas exist in deliberate balance.
In the Salmon Forward alternative scenario, Puget Sound is a region where dense urban life and nature exist in a deliberate balance. Decades of coordinated planning, conservation efforts, and public commitment to restoring the landscape have concentrated growth in existing urban areas in central Puget Sound. This has resulted in compact, transit-oriented cities, while surrounding rural and wild areas remain intact and thriving. The contrast is striking. Dense urban neighborhoods are seamlessly connected to working farms, salmon-bearing streams, and mature forests, all within reach of the urban core.
Alternative scenario 2 of 4
Networked Growth
Every county shares responsibility for channeling growth into urban areas.
In the Networked Growth alternative scenario, all Puget Sound counties participate in a shared growth model that channels growth and development into existing urban growth areas across the region. This approach makes sure that no single county bears the pressure of growth, while also preserving working lands, restoring watersheds, and making more efficient infrastructure investments. Smaller urban areas have become thriving hubs of climate-smart development, thanks to regional funding tools, local planning authority, and a commitment to shared outcomes.
Read the Networked Growth narrative and spend a day with Jenna, a middle-aged farmer from Chimacum.
Alternative scenario 3 of 4
Rural Stewardship
Local choices and community-led conservation shape a more distributed future.
In the Rural Stewardship alternative scenario, Puget Sound evolves into a region where rural living and environmental stewardship coexist through many individual choices and collective actions rather than centralized planning. This future is shaped by local decisions, private initiatives, and community-driven conservation. Population is distributed more evenly across the landscape, both within and near urban growth areas, but without regional mandates. Rural conservation villages, community land trusts, and community benefit agreements with developers have enabled pockets of higher density development in rural areas while preserving ecological function. The result is a variety of communities that adapt in their own ways which contribute to Puget Sound’s resilience.
Alternative scenario 4 of 4
Hybrid
Watershed-conscious design combines ideas from the other scenarios.
The Hybrid alternative scenario combines ideas explored in Salmon Forward, Networked Growth, and Rural Stewardship. In this future, Puget Sound is defined by thoughtful density and watershed-conscious design. Land use decisions are shaped by watersheds, not just by city and county boundaries. Stormwater and wastewater systems have become tools of ecological restoration, not just infrastructure.
Current as of: 07/20/26