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How might Einstein approach futures thinking? Watch this  5-minute video introducing you to backcasting. View it here  with 4 questions to answer.  https://vialogues.com/vialogues/play/38097

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Sustainability plan: How might Einstein solve our problems? (backcasting)

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Learn about sustainability for free with short animation videos! Find all sustainability videos and join the community on http://sustainabilityillustrated.com and http://www.youtube.com/learnsustainability Subscribe to receive the latest videos: http://alturl.com/jc8u6 Become a patron: http://www.patreon.com/sustainability. Extra info & links below...

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Every resource list will include a sample lesson plan or lesson report.

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Article about backcasting
10 minute read
https://wearearising.org/2009/01/13/backcasting/

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Backcasting - first, get clear on your vision of success...
Backcasting is a process of starting from a vision of success, then looking back to today to identify the most strategic steps to get achieve success. The process is described here, compared against forecasting or use of scenarios in planning processes, and examples of applications provided. Introduction
Many individuals, organistions and teams will start work with no clear, shared purpose. In every situation there is a way to get clear on an agreed vision of success to which all efforts can be directed. In fact, the more uncertain the future, the more likely your action are likely to influence or create that future, the more important if is to 'backcast'.

Backcasting is used in this context to meaning "looking at the current situation from a future perspective". After envisioning a successful result in this future scenario, you can then ask "what can we do today to reach that result". This allows you to ensure that your actions and strategy are taking you in the direction you want to head. This may seem simple and obvious, but many people do not do it. It complements other perspectives used in business planning: scenario planning, forecasting, and action planning of next steps. The figure below is one representation of how these different concepts relate:
Backcasting
Backcasting is used to describe the future scenario you would like to head towards, and assess its feasibility. This is usually a long-term exercise, in terms of business planning - setting 1, 5 and 10 year goals. Because there is often greater uncertainty and less control over what may happen in longer time frames, the future vision may usefully be defined using principles rather than specifics. Backcasting is an opportunity to let go of the current reality for a moment and freely imagine what might be possible. A typical backcasting question is " How would you describe 'wild success' for yourself in 2012? ".

The description of 'wild success' may be in the form of principles, felt emotions, 'SMART' or 'Well-designed' goals or outcomes, a narrative story (download a pdf on these approaches to a vision well-designed-outcomes_updated), or even an image (e.g. visual facilitation, like this or this).
Scenario planning
Scenario planning is used to explore alternative futures. These scenarios usually have more specific detail than backcasting. You can characterize multiple scenarios, then explore the implications of these scenarios for enterprise profitability, personal satisfaction etc. This can commonly be seen when presenting 'high, low and medium' scenarios for sales, resources or the political and consumer context. A typical scenario planning trigger questions might be " What would happen to our business model if our sales were half, double or ten times what they are now? "
Forecasting
Forecasting is used to predict the most likely future. This is usually projected forward over coming weeks or months based on the past or present trends in things like performance and profitability. A typical forecasting question might be " Based on last year's sales growth of 10%, what will our total sales be at the end of next year? "

Sometimes the only planning you want or need to do are figure out the 'next steps'. Next steps are quite literally the next concrete actions to undertake. They are usually based on intuition, reacting to present circumstances, but also (hopefully) are still aligned with the future vision and direction. A normal next step question is " To make progress towards achieving our goal of helping 100 extra beneficiaries by 2008, what is the very next thing we have to do? "
Which to use for your circumstances?
Distinguishing between, and consciously engaging ALL these perspectives through any planning process is VERY important. Often individuals, organisations (or even society) can mistake one for the other. This can, for example, mean people artificially restrict what they imagine is possible in the future, forgetting the future is yet to be co-created! Or, it can mean people get obsessed with next actions without considering how aligned they are with what they ultimately want to achieve.

In the specific case of sustainability, many organisations undertake the first steps but lose motivation because there is no explicit, shared vision of success. Similarly, some organisations have lofty visions, but are unable to use that to guide their next steps.

A simple example of using these for a restaurant business may be:
The desired future is to be a sustainable business with three outlets by 2012, which will mean the owners can be taking a less hands-on role in the business. One scenario of how they might grow is to focus on sales to a nearby suburb with a growing percentage of wealthy, young professionals. The current business financial forecast is based on past trends in profitability, and shows that their may even be the resources to expand into a second store next year. The owners decide on the next action of visiting that suburb on the weekend, as the first step of market research.
So, that's backcasting presented in the context of other methods. I like this quote, which I think communicates some of the relevance of this idea:

"A vision without a ask is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world" [From a church in Sussex, UK,1730 A.D.]

I have used these techniques consistently with established organisations, teams, entrepreneurs, and individuals in coaching sessions. There are a range or associated tools and techniques that can make the 'backcasting' experience and application very powerful, including experiential workshops like the 'Future Room'.

Backcasting from principles is the primary context in which The Natural Step Framework, and Strategic Approach to Sustainable Development becomes so powerful.

Backcasting and creating a vision sets the conditions for creative tension that motivates - the gap between the current reality (holding you where you are) and future potential (drawing you forward). Like this figure illustrates:
(thanks to LearningHouse's adaptation of Peter Senge's concept)

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Backcasting - first, get clear on your vision of success... Backcasting is a process of starting from a vision of success, then looking back to today to identify the most strategic steps to get achieve success. The process is described here, compared against forecasting or use of scenarios in planning processes, and examples of applications...

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Find out more about how accommodation businesses can get the Green Key Certification label that assures guests that they meet certain sustainability standards.

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Unlocking sustainability in the hospitality industry

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Infographic from IFHE
Best practice laundry

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A 23 page pdf showing you how to make your teaching/training modules more sustainable.

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Guess which action would have the most effect on climate change?

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Guess which action would have the most effect on climate change?

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This article contains a lst of the top ten most effective actions to reduce the effects of climate change based on extensive research. The number one action will probably come as a surprise. And it's something you can act on in your professional and private life.

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This conversation was originally published in 2017 and has been lightly updated.
By now, the looming dangers of climate change are clear to anyone who's been paying attention, covered extensively in both academic literature and the popular press.

But what about solutions?

For all the hand-wringing on climate change over the years, discussion of solutions remains puzzlingly anemic and fractured. A few high-profile approaches, mainly around renewable energy and electric cars, dominate discussion and modeling. Until 2017, there was no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There was no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors.

Paul Hawken got tired of waiting.

Hawken is a legend in environmental circles. Since the early 1980s, he has been starting green businesses, writing books on ecological commerce (President Bill Clinton called Hawken's Natural Capitalism one of the five most important books in the world), consulting with businesses and governments, speaking to civic groups, and collecting honorary doctorates (six so far).

A few years ago, he set out to pull together the careful coverage of solutions that had so long been lacking. With the help of a little funding, he and a team of several dozen research fellows set out to "map, measure, and model" the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change, using only peer-reviewed research.

Unlike most popular books on climate change, it is not a polemic or a collection of anecdotes and exhortations. In fact, with the exception of a few thoughtful essays scattered throughout, it's basically a reference book: a list of solutions, ranked by potential carbon impact, each with cost estimates and a short description. A set of scenarios show the cumulative potential.

It is fascinating, a powerful reminder of how narrow a set of solutions dominates the public's attention. Alternatives range from farmland irrigation to heat pumps to ride-sharing.

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning, which together could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050 - more than on- and offshore wind power combined (99 GT).

Also sitting atop the list, with an impact that dwarfs any single energy source: refrigerant management. (Don't hear much about that, do you? Here's a great Brad Plumer piece on it.)

Both reduced food waste and plant-rich diets, on their own, beat solar farms and rooftop solar combined.

(Important note: The above comparisons are true in Drawdown's central, "probable" scenario. There are also more ambitious scenarios, in which each solution is pushed to its full potential. In the "optimum" scenario, onshore wind rises to crush all competitors, reducing 139 GT. All scenarios use only existing, commercialized technologies, so they should be considered conservative. All the solutions, data, and references are available at drawdown.org.)

I spoke with Hawken over a beer when he passed through Seattle on his book tour in 2017. He told me the book is already in its third printing, confirming our mutual sense that the public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom. An edited transcript of our conversation follows, with occasional editorial comments in [brackets].

David Roberts

For the record, explain the term "drawdown."

Paul Hawken

Drawdown is the point in time when greenhouse gas concentrations peak in the atmosphere and begin to go down on a year-to-year basis.

[ Drawdown 's "plausible" scenario does not reach drawdown. Its second, "drawdown" scenario does. Its third, "optimum" scenario, which maxes out all available technologies, accelerates drawdown.]

David Roberts

So all these models we see in the popular press, the ones that hit, for example, 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050 - none of those actually reach drawdown?

Paul Hawken

None.

And not only that, they're about energy - they're all energy models. There's an assumption that if you get 100 percent renewable [energy], you basically have a hall pass to the 22nd century. That's simply not true. It's a scientific howler. It's extremely important that we [get to 100 percent renewables], but to put all of it on energy ...

[ Drawdown has seven categories of solutions: energy, food, women and girls, buildings and cities, land use, transport, and materials. There's also a "coming attractions" category of not-yet-commercialized technologies, but they are not included in the scenarios.]

David Roberts

How did the book get started?

Paul Hawken

I hadn't thought about solutions much until I saw the wedges, in 2001.

[In 2001, scientists at Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative became famous for proposing a set of "climate stabilization wedges" - efficiency, wind, solar, etc. - to bring emissions down beneath global targets.]

I looked at those and said "whoa, whoa, whoa." Two things are lacking.

The first is affordability and agency. They couldn't be done by you and me, except drive less, maybe put a solar panel on our roof.

The second is that 11 of the 15 could only be done by big corporations - primarily energy utility and car companies - but they were so deeply underwater financially that it was not going to happen. It could happen now, but at that time it was not viable.

So ... now I am depressed. [laughter] The science was clear, but the solutions were just dramatically not.

And then when Bill [McKibben]'s piece came out in 2012, " Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," which is based on Mark Campanale's work at Carbon Tracker, I had friends saying, "game over."

And so I finally decided to do Drawdown: name the goal and then map, measure, and model, see if it's achievable. And away we went, for almost three years, with 70 Drawdown research fellows from 22 countries and six continents.

We went in fairly confident about what the top solutions would be. We were wrong - which is validating, in a way. We have a methodology that forfends against bias.

David Roberts

One thing that jumps out is how different this list looks from what gets discussed most in the media -- wind, solar, CCS. Did you go in expecting your list to look more like conventional wisdom?

Paul Hawken

We thought at least the top of the list would - solar, wind, wind, solar. Because that's what you hear from Charles Ferguson, Al Gore, [Jeffrey] Sachs, or Christiana Figueres. They're all saying the same thing.

It's understandable - 62 percent of the [greenhouse gas] molecules up there came from fossil fuel combustion, so you just invert it, right? It makes sense. It just doesn't work out that way.

If you take solar, which is eight and 10 [on the list], and wind, which is two and 22, and you combine them, they are definitely near the top. But you can't model on- and off-shore wind the same, because the economics are vastly different. And you can't model rooftop and solar farms in the same model. So in some cases we broke things up that people think of as aggregated.

But even then, the number one solution is educating girls and family planning.

David Roberts

How do you put numbers on that?

Paul Hawken

We took the numbers from other agencies - from World Bank, WHO, IPCC. What they are is the delta between the median high population projections of the UN in 2050 and that reduction alone. There are so many ancillary benefits and impacts of 1.1 billion less people, though.

David Roberts

But it is the 1.1 billion fewer people that is doing the carbon work?

Paul Hawken

Yeah, absolutely.

David Roberts

Are there other benign ways of influencing population growth that you considered?

Paul Hawken

There's a lack of original science.

Every carbon number [in the book] is peer-reviewed data. We don't use anecdotal data, or "we think," or "we're seeing." Everything is peer reviewed. If there's no peer-reviewed data, we can't model it. And on the economic side, which is more difficult and gnarly, there's no such thing as peer reviewed data in most cases.

We do lit reviews, tech reviews - we've got a couple thousand notes and three thousand references for the content.

We had a guy who's presenting Drawdown to the [IPCC] Sixth Assessment, the Third Working Group. One of the scientists there took a poke at regenerative agriculture and said, "Well, that's just climate smart agriculture [CSA], we know about that already." I wrote back and said, "Show me the model."

It's a generality. It doesn't mean anything. Multistrata agroforestry, fantastic, show me a model. Silvopasture - show me the science. In the process of covering land use, we had to identify what had actually been studied. So we have 22 land-use solutions. We're splitters, in order to get accurate data.

David Roberts

If you had to guess, what's the biggest potential contributor that you had to leave out for lack of data?

Paul Hawken

War.

David Roberts

Because it reduces population?

Paul Hawken

No, no, no - just the footprint of maintaining standing armies and militaries around the world. It must be extraordinary.

David Roberts

Oh, the carbon benefit of...

Paul Hawken

Of peace. Yeah. There is one.

David Roberts

How big a role does carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) play in your schema?

Paul Hawken

None. It's unaffordable. It doesn't work. It has to work first, and then has to be affordable. Using carbon capture in Saskatchewan for depleted oil wells isn't exactly a solution, especially when it's only 40 percent capture and the company's depending on the province to subsidize it. There are better results coming out of Texas. We're watching it.

You can't achieve drawdown unless you sequester [carbon], but right now the only way we know how to do it in a reliable way is photosynthesis. I mean, there are science experiments going on, but it's not commercial and it's not practical.

By the way, we're doing D2 - Drawdown Two. And it's all coming attractions that weren't in D1 - 60 more of them, things that are nascent, on the horizon or just below the horizon. They are game-changers, a lot of them. Some of them will fail. It's hard to say which will or won't.

David Roberts

Give me an example.

Paul Hawken

Direct-air water capture - from low-humidity, not high humidity, environments. You get carbon capture in plant life where you couldn't before. It could be agriculture, could be perennial, could be afforestation, could be a combination.

You have this effect of moisture just streaming over every Western landscape in the world, usually bypassing it. What could you do with that water?

David Roberts

You have three scenarios. The main one you call the "plausible scenario."

Paul Hawken

We modeled the solutions, we scaled them in a rigorous but reasonable way, as they're all scaling now, using other literature to predict. That's the first scenario - we think that's happening. But it does not achieve drawdown.

David Roberts

That's just based on what's currently happening, though?

Paul Hawken

And no new technology. Not one single new technology. That's why we had the coming attractions; it's unrealistic to think that this is our portfolio for the next 30 years. It's not true. That's why the next book is important - one out of five or six of these [future solutions] is really going to make a difference.

David Roberts

I guess what trips me up is that the scenario you're calling "plausible" involves reductions in carbon that most modeling outfits would characterize as wildly ambitious.

Paul Hawken

Our models include a lot of things that were excluded from other models. One is land use. It's given passing reference, but hasn't been given much credibility by the IPCC.

They don't include, for example, farmland restoration - over a billion hectares of abandoned land all over the world. We know how to regenerate that, using animals, using cover, using no-till. Is there a transition cost? Yeah. But it's a big sink.

David Roberts

It is conventional wisdom that we don't have any hope on climate change unless we get serious about it - go on war footing. That seems difficult to do without the US federal government.

Paul Hawken

First of all, let's be honest: The US has never led in this area. Ever. When they've tried on an executive level, they've never been supported by Congress. States have led, cities have led, but never the federal government.

Now the federal government is what it is. When [Trump] was elected, I went over every one [of the Drawdown solutions]. I said, "What can the [US federal] government do?" And it really isn't that much.

I don't want to in any way whistle past the graveyard of the enormous damage and harm President Trump can do, in terms of security and war and suffering. It's just that people in the United States think that they're the leaders on this stuff. They're not. It's Germany, China, France, Denmark.

They're not cueing off the Trump administration. The rest of the world doesn't take him seriously on this stuff.

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This book ranks the top 100 solutions to climate change. The results are surprising.

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This conversation was originally published in 2017 and has been lightly updated. By now, the looming dangers of climate change are clear to anyone who's been paying attention, covered extensively in both academic literature and the popular press. But what about solutions?

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In this unit we use the Back to the Future protocol from NSRF. There are many more protocols available from this link.

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This was created to help teachers integrate digital tools but there is no reason why it cannot be used to build scenarios for being more sustainable in your pedagogy.

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The second stage in the Future Classroom Methodology is the use of Future Classroom Scenarios as inspiration for designing Learning Activities to be implemented in the classroom. This involves a collaborative design process, where groups of teachers, often from different subject areas and backgrounds, work together in a design workshop.