Alternative futures for Puget Sound
NEW: Exploring Bold Land Use Ideas in Puget Sound WORKSHOP
On June 18, 2024, the Future Scenarios project hosted a morning workshop with the invitation to:
- Learn about a new alternative scenario that incorporates bold land use ideas. Leaders in Puget Sound recovery joined together to consider a future that encompasses five of the bold ideas you helped generate in the November 2023 Bold Land Use Planning in Puget Sound workshop.
- Explore each bold land use idea. A discussion was held to consider the assumptions that underpin the bold ideas and their associated tradeoffs to identify specific implications, risks, and opportunities, as well as ways to navigate and offset them.
- Contribute to a working list of concrete next steps. Using insights from the scenario analysis, we helped to identify actions that could advance some or all the bold ideas in both the near and long terms.
This workshop built on the work of theNovember 2023 workshop, which generated bold ideas that address various development, human wellbeing, equity, and ecosystem restoration implications derived from three alternative scenarios. Since then, the Future Scenarios Project Team has worked closely with Strategic Initiative Leads and other partners to create another alternative scenario that illustrates a subset of bold land use ideas. The June 2024 workshop explored a new hybrid scenario that included five bold ideas:
- Integrate growth management. Adopt growth management frameworks that encourage cohesion and planning to achieve multiple benefits at the watershed scale working across jurisdictions.
- Concentrate growth in already developed areas. Adopt policies and incentives that funnel growth into already developed urban areas and emphasize redevelopment; limit rural growth and ensure rural growth that does occur is near urban boundaries.
- Redefine critical areas. Protect remaining salmon habitat through enhanced and more consistent critical area definitions and implementation across Puget Sound and invest in restoration of habitat important to salmon including barrier removal, riparian habitat, floodplains, and estuaries. Use climate impacts as a catalyst to expand restoration efforts in impacted areas.
- Protect and expand working lands. Adopt policies that increase the viability of working agriculture and working forestry. Fully value working lands and their services to incentivize farm and forest land preservation.
- Emphasize innovative stormwater management. Implement a variety of stormwater policies that emphasize multiple benefits at the watershed scale such as use of regional facilities, stormwater parks, and stormwater transfers.
If you’d like to learn more, please explore the workshop agenda and materials.
BOLD LAND USE PLanning WORKSHOP, 2023
The Bold Land Use Planning Workshop on November 7, 2023, brought together over sixty regional land use and growth management experts, local and state agency planners and coordinators, and stormwater and salmon managers as members of the Puget Sound recovery community to generate bold ideas that could help shepherd the Action Agenda’s Smart Growth strategy into the future. (Links: Workshop Agenda, Workshop Presentation, Additional Workshop Materials, Workshop Synopsis)
Together, the group examined alternative future scenarios and identified over seventy future implications for development, human wellbeing and equity, and ecosystem restoration and conservation. They generated twenty-seven individual bold ideas that could address those implications.
Three Alternative Future Scenarios informed that workshop. Scenarios are not intended to be predictive, but rather illuminate a range of possible conditions to assess our strategies and spur creative thinking. The scenarios were as follows:
Alternative 1 – Salmon Forward:
Explores a future where both government cohesion and willingness to act and human perceptions & behaviors are positive toward Puget Sound. This creates a mutually reinforcing virtuous cycle that unlocks large scale changes in how big cities are developed to minimize their impacts and maximize their livability in a way that calls people in to dense urban living and maximizes protection and restoration of land outside growth centers in existing urban areas. Land use is tightly managed, and protection of critical areas is high. Read more.
Alternative 2 – Networked Growth:
Government cohesion and willingness to act remain positive toward Puget Sound but human perceptions and behaviors are not. This alternative explores a future where people are less willing to live in dense urban centers and instead distribute themselves more evenly across the Puget Sound region and are relatively unengaged in considering the impacts of dispersed growth. Government responds to this by developing new planning models that ensure small and medium sized cities can make the infrastructure investments needed to manage new growth and land use continues to be tightly managed. Read more.
Alternative 3 – Stewardship and Rural Living:
Explores a future where government cohesion and willingness to act is low but where human perceptions and behaviors are very aligned and positive toward Puget Sound. In this future, people distribute themselves more evenly across the Puget Sound region and prefer rural living to urban centers. Cities grow less rapidly and are less dense. Non- and quasi-government actors play a strong role in supporting individuals in implementing best management practices and taking other individual actions to slow Puget Sound decline and implement neighborhood-scale restorations. Read more
Puget Sound future scenarios project
Future Scenarios help plan for a changing future that is shifting in known and unknown ways. We do this by generating and then exploring a suite of distinct, plausible futures. Alternative scenarios help reveal what it takes to achieve recovery goals, and the trade-offs and co-benefits of present-day policy choices for future outcomes. Scenarios often spur creative solutions.
Scenarios are both a conceptual approach to decision making and an analysis tool to describe how the socio-ecological system might fare in the future. Scenario planning is a structured process that helps communities plan for an uncertain future by exploring multiple possibilities of what might happen. How might the future unfold and what does that mean for our plans? What happens if we stay on our current trajectory? And what might happen if we change course, by our own volition or by changing external dynamics?
The scenarios work strives to improve the resilience of Puget Sound recovery by doing the following:
- Strengthening recovery strategies. Scenarios help us stress test our strategies and ensure they are effective in a changing region. This exploration can surface creative solutions
- Communicating implications. Scenarios enable us to assess and communicate the co-benefits and trade-offs of current and potential policy and management choices.
- Nurturing the community of practice by bridging social and natural science disciplines. Scenarios incorporate varied drivers of change, sectors, and types of impact.
Stay Tuned as we share more of our findings here!
How are scenarios made?
The scenarios are iteratively developed and refined with input from the recovery community. The project began by looking at past scenario planning efforts in Puget Sound and, through workshops and conversations and with the support of an Advisory Group, sought input on important drivers related to achieving Puget Sound recovery goals. Four drivers were selected as important and (relatively) uncertain factors to consider:
- Population growth is the number of people expected to come to the region by 2080 based on Office of Financial Management projections. All scenarios reflect the high end of OFM projections to demonstrate the most likely, and the most stressful, direction.
- Climate change includes temperature and precipitation forecasts. All scenarios reflect relatively high climate change. This was considered the most likely and the most stressful direction. Holding population growth and climate change constant across the scenarios supports scenario comparisons.
- Governance reflects whether government actors are aligned and coordinating, the amount of central vs. local control, and the willingness of government to change legacy systems vs take an incremental approach. The trajectory of this driver is used to inform the types of growth and development policies represented in the scenarios, with more aligned and coordinated governance generally supporting more ambitious policies.
- Human perceptions and behaviors reflect the attitudes and choices of people – where and how people live on the landscape, and whether behaviors support (or do not support) Puget Sound recovery work. Similar to the governance driver, the trajectory of this driver is used to inform the types of growth and development policies represented in the scenarios, and also informs thinking about the potential success of these policies and where in Puget Sound people might choose to live. More positive human perceptions and behaviors generally support more ambitious and successful policies and more central, urban living.
In the previous phase, Phase 2, the project team presented three alternative scenarios – Salmon Forward, Networked Growth, and Rural Stewardship – each constructed to explore how Smart Growth ideas and policies might “play out” in a different growth and development trajectory. The three Phase 2 scenarios were used to spark creative thinking and help Puget Sound recovery partners generate bold ideas for Smart Growth.
In the current phase, Phase 3, the project team and its advisors examined these bold ideas, plus other bold ideas from multiple Puget Sound recovery plans and sources to identify a subset of ideas that break from the region’s current growth and development approaches. With advice from policy experts, these big ideas were translated into a specific set of policies that were then represented in a new alternative scenario comprised of elements of each of the Phase 2 alternative scenarios. Using one “hybrid” scenario in Phase 3 is intended to facilitate discussion of how big ideas and their related policies could play out, and to illustrate how their impacts and outcomes could interact in different settings.
As before, the Phase 3 hybrid scenario has two parts: a character-driven narrative, or story, about what life might be like for a variety of Puget Sound residents (including the people introduced in the Phase 2 scenarios), and a set of modeled results to help better understand scenario outcomes
what models do the results come from?
The model results help us visualize the alternative future being explored by testing policies that reflect the bold ideas and illustrating how they might look on the Puget Sound landscape. This allows us to explore possible outcomes of those ideas and understand additional implications that may not be explicitly modeled.
The results come from three models:
- Envision, a map-based modelling platform, that helps to explore how different population distribution, growth, development, and conservation “rules” or actions could play out on the landscape;
- A qualitative network model (QNM) of a Puget Sound watershed that identifies and links elements of the recovery system. QNM speaks to water quality, natural resource economy, and sense of place; and:
- An index-based assessment of salmon favorability based on freshwater habitats.
Contact us
If you would like to be involved in this project work, have data to share, or would like a briefing, please get in touch with one of the project leads:
- Katherine Wyatt, katherine.wyatt@psp.wa.gov
- Elizabeth McManus, emcmanus@rossstrategic.com
Last updated: 11/2/23