Qualifying change in urban social-ecological-technological systems: Comparing transformative and adaptive scenarios using leverage points framework

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Daniela Garcia Moreno, Environment and Sustainability, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, Tempe, AZ

Background/Question/Methods
The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network Scenarios Working Group aims to engage stakeholders in developing plausible, coherent visions “through which cities can achieve more resiliently designed infrastructures.” Through workshops stakeholders develop scenarios that fall into two categories, adaptive and transformative. Adaptive scenarios seek to respond specifically to a projected climate extreme, such as flooding or drought, while transformative scenarios envision the best possible future with less restriction. Stakeholders design scenario-specific goals, each of which is to be addressed by specific strategies falling into a social-ecological-technological systems framework category. Given the divergent nature of scenario types, we propose the following question: how do transformative and adaptive scenarios differ in envisioning change for their cities? Utilizing Donella Meadows’ “Places to Intervene in a System,” we developed a framework to quantify the impact of resilience goals proposed in scenarios for Syracuse, NY and New York, NY. A codebook was developed where each “place to intervene in a system” was identified as a leverage point of impact, and each scenario goal was analyzed using a binary code, where they would be scored a “1” if a particular leverage point was “applicable” and “0” if “inapplicable.” A linear impact score scheme was designed, with scores ranging from 1 to 12 accordingly, and increasing incrementally between intervention points. The lowest leverage point (“constants, parameters, and numbers”) was designated an impact score of 1 and the highest leverage point (“the power to see paradigms as such”) an impact score of 12. This impact score was used to determine the overall impact of each scenario and then normalized by number of goals for comparison across scenarios.
Results/Conclusions
The results showed that overall, transformative scenarios had a greater system impact than adaptive scenarios, with transformative scenarios displaying an average impact score of 7.85. On the other hand, transformative scenarios had an average impact score of 1.95. Looking comparatively across the cities, Syracuse had greater overall impact scores than New York City, regardless of scenario type. The distinction between the impact scores for each scenario type indicates that stakeholders envision futures with more impactful interventions when thinking about transformative scenario goals. Understanding the impact of proposed stakeholder goals is critical as it can help optimize impact in cities, especially under monetary constraints and in the high-pressure context of climate change resilience adaptation.