Tools for Comprehensive Proactive Planning: Backcasting Long-Term Water Supply Scenarios for a Large Southeastern River
Abstract
Approaches to water planning are increasingly collaborative, watershed-scale, and
focused on adaptive management. Such approaches are difficult to implement under the
conditions of low certainty and control that typify large watersheds over long time
horizons. To achieve comprehensive proactive planning, a toolbox of techniques is
needed that can help incorporate new information into plans as the appropriate implementation,
framing, and context of management shifts. This study investigated backcasting as
one such complementary technique to current water planning strategies.
Backcasting is a planning technique in which participants reconstruct sequences of
events that connect future scenarios to near-term actions. This process helps managers
to consider a range of possible system futures, links future scenarios to present
actions, and understand the policy changes needed. To test this technique, I designed
and facilitated a backcasting workshop using participatory methods modified from those
used in a similar, larger process in the European Union.
I conducted the workshop once with graduate students and once with policy and management
experts in the Cape Fear River basin of North Carolina. The participants used backcasting
to articulate several plausible trajectories for water supply in the basin over a
60 year time horizon. Each backcasted trajectory began with a different endpoint scenario
for the basin economy and patterns of land use in 2075.
Results confirm that backcasting is useful for identifying priority actions and potential
obstacles to desirable outcomes, and suggest that it is a good way to reveal decision-makers’
underlying assumptions about system dynamics and the purposes of planning. Backcasting
is an important addition to the toolbox of U.S. water planning techniques. Use of
this technique has great potential to strengthen collaborative watershed-scale adaptive
management of water resources.
Type
Master's projectSubject
watershed planningcape fear river
backcasting
scenario planning
adaptive management
water resources
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8560Citation
Perry, Margaret (2014). Tools for Comprehensive Proactive Planning: Backcasting Long-Term Water Supply Scenarios
for a Large Southeastern River. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8560.Collections
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