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As Director of the ANU Institute for Water Futures, I’m often asked “what exactly do you mean by ‘water futures?”

If you Google the phrase, you might get some invitation to invest in a dodgy-sounding speculative water market. You may also find yourself deep in an esoteric and jargon-heavy exposition of philosophical positions on unknowability. Neither will get you much closer to a handle on the concept of ‘water futures,’ and how it can be used to improve decision-making in the water sector.

In this blog, I’ll lay out the what, why and how of water futures as I see it with the hope of starting an ongoing conversation. In this spirit, your comments and feedback are very welcome.

Most simply, we can describe water futures as the application of futures thinking tools, techniques and methods to decision-making about water.

So, to get to ‘water futures’ we first need to get a sense of futures thinking as a field and practice.

What and how?

There are three main categories of futures for water decision-making (Muiderman and colleagues propose four, but for our purposes two are similar enough to be the same category, see Further reading below):

1.      Predictive

While many futures scholars implicitly or explicitly reject prediction as a key dimension of futures methods and practice, in the water management field understanding prediction as a futures approach is absolutely essential. Indeed, it is often the first thing that comes to mind – how wet or dry can we expect the next day /week / month / season / year / decade to be? What will the level of water storage be by the end of the season?

The defining feature of a predictive future is that it seeks to define a single, most likely state. Tremendous resources are dedicated to trying to improve the accuracy of predictions, and even though predictions are rarely 100% certain, we often act as though they are.

This is not the least because they are the best we have to go on – if the weather forecast tells me there is a 70% chance of rain, I will take my raincoat. I may understand very well that there is a decent chance it won’t rain, but I still take actions as if it will because the information I have guides me to act toward the most likely predicted future (rain).

The prevailing critique of prediction or forecasting as a futures approach is that it limits us to a single defined future and, under some circumstances, can support poor decision-making. This is especially the case if uncertainties of the forecast are not clearly laid out, or are simply omitted, or a single possible future is presented in a deterministic way. I’m sure you are familiar with the rider that must by law accompany any advertisement for financial products based on their performance to date: “past performance is not an indicator of future performance”. This is an acknowledgment of the flaws of prediction based on historical data.

The future is inherently unknowable and the scale or context in which forecasts are reliable often does not match with the scale or context we need for decision-making. A forecast of a 70 percent chance of rain may be based on a near-certainty that it will rain somewhere, but whether it will rain in my specific location is less certain.

In general terms, futures thinking tools and methods that go beyond prediction are trying to build more nuance in how we approach the inherently unknowable future, supporting processes to explore more than one possibility.

2.      Anticipatory

Anticipatory futures are also firmly situated in governance and decision-making but are typically broader in their scope than predictive approaches by extending beyond the most likely.

The ability to anticipate a range of possible futures has links to prediction and forecasting, but tends to take a longer-term perspective, and consequently must cope with greater uncertainty. The focus of anticipatory governance, one of the key emerging fields, is on identifying and thinking through a range of plausible futures and taking decisions that will be robust to that range.

Anticipatory futures identify trends and analyse the possible interactions between key variables of interest. Scenario planning is a well-known example of this approach. In a water management context, for example, this may include efforts to consider both climate change and changing trends of food markets and consumption when planning for the water demands of an agricultural region for the coming decade.

We can construct and consider different plausible scenarios, based on projections of low, medium or high manifestations of the key variables. In some cases, strategic planning and policy-change can then aim to manipulate the variables (for example, advertising to influence food consumption patterns) in the short term to make the more desirable futures more likely, or the undesirable futures less likely.

Similarly, foresighting activities can encourage water professionals to consider a range of contingencies for different possible futures. This may involve ensuring there is greater flexibility in institutional arrangements to allow for adaptation across a range of plausible climate futures, investing in monitoring of ‘weak signals’ that are not yet important but could become so, or allowing for redundancy in critical infrastructure that may only be called on in extreme events.

Anticipation is not about ‘covering all bases’ as the number of possible ‘bases’ is infinite. It is about considering carefully and deliberately what the different possible and plausible futures may be, weighing up possibility alongside probability, and costs and likely efficacy of interventions to nudge a system towards more desirable outcomes.

While broader than predictive approaches in their explicit recognition of the need to prepare for multiple possible futures, anticipatory futures are still bound by parameters of plausibility and likelihood.

3.      Speculative

Speculative futures methods (not financial products) usually reject predictive and anticipatory foundations of likelihood and explore the wider reaches of what may be possible.

Through arts and design-based approaches such as speculative fiction, film, visual and experiential artworks, speculative futures approaches deliberately seek to challenge the many implicit assumptions we make when thinking about the future, and stretch our imaginations to consider more far-reaching possibilities. Many sci-fi movies, for example, can be classified as speculative futures.

While some may regard speculative futures as too far removed from daily reality to be useful, there are many reasons to look more closely at what speculative approaches can do. In thinking about the future it is well-recognised that we tend to have a cognitive bias towards the familiar—neurologically we are simply not very good at imagining beyond our comfort zones (discussed in an ARRC podcast).

Consequently, we may avoid uncomfortable or distressing scenarios (more extreme impacts of sea level rise, for example), but in doing so we also cut off a vast array of potentially empowering ideas and strategies for avoiding or reducing the negative impact of possible change, and even for guiding us towards more positive visions of the future.

Similarly, it opens possibilities for non-Western, decolonising approaches that can explore diverse cosmologies and ways of understanding temporality. Speculative futures thinking encourages us to imagine our life experience as it could be, not only as we think it will be. It encourages a more proactive perspective to plant the seeds of what could become more desirable futures, in the present.

Speculative methods are varied, and can include some variants of foresighting where participants are asked to imagine beyond the likely and plausible; Three Horizons, to the extent that it is focused on desired rather than expected change; Futures Literacy, similarly; and decolonising methodologies.

Why or when to use different Futures approaches?

Clearly not all approaches are suited for all tasks. If I want to know whether to take my raincoat, or if my dam will still have water in it by the end of summer, it makes no sense to take a speculative futures approach – but I may want to consider in a more anticipatory way whether there is benefit in planning for more than one possibility.

The key point here is that predictive futures tend to be our default setting, whether they are most appropriate or not. Regulatory environments can reinforce this approach through requirements to use ‘best available science’; or social or political pressure to justify long-term decisions based on simple narratives of trends and forecasts.

In general terms, I would suggest that predictive futures are best suited to situations where the task is relatively short-term, simple and clearly defined; there are good data; and uncertainties are readily quantified and their implications are understood. Where there is some uncertainty but also opportunity to examine and incorporate new ideas toward a shared and well-articulated goal, then anticipatory approaches are useful for developing strategies that are robust to different possibilities.

However, when the task is long-term; the context is complex and values are contested; there are many interacting processes and trends; uncertainties are difficult to quantify and explain; and particularly if there is a prevailing sense of pessimism and “feeling stuck”, then a careful combination of predictive, anticipatory and speculative futures thinking is warranted.

Imagine a workshop with a diverse range of participants, examining digestible summaries of scientifically credible climate trends towards 2100, and engaging in a lively discussion about what life could be like in 75 years’ time. While the group considers the trends, they also mull over several alternatives, based largely on technological innovations but also on different social norms and political commitments.

What if most protein consumption came from cultured meat? What if large tracts of land transition from livestock production to carbon farming under an effective and somewhat lucrative scheme co-financed by governments and energy companies?

Participants identify key areas of work that would sow the seeds for better visions of the future, and leave armed with ideas and energy.

Having a combination of tools and methods can ensure discussions and planning are grounded in (likely) reality and what we know now, but are also more open to identifying new options and pathways.

Bringing speculative ideas of what a positive future may look like in the context of known trends and biophysical changes, can be an empowering way to unlock creative, robust and emergent solutions to our more intractable water governance challenges.

Want more? Further reading:

Alexandra, C, C Wyborn, C Munera Roldan and L van Kerkhoff (2023). Futures-thinking: concepts, methods and capacities for adaptive governance. In S Juhola  (Ed) Handbook on Adaptive Governance, Elgar Handbooks in Energy, the Environment and Climate Change. 76-98

Muiderman, K, A Gupta, J Vervoort & F Biermann (2020). Four approaches to anticipatory climate governance: Different conceptions of the future and implications for the present. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 11, e673. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.673