Biosphere Futures: a database of social-ecological scenarios

Biosphere Futures (biospherefutures.net) is a new online database to collect and discover scenario studies from across the world, focusing on scenarios that explicitly incorporate interdependencies between humans and their supporting ecosystems. It provides access to a rich collection of case studies at national, regional, and global scales enabling exploration of the various ways in which the future might unfold. Together, the case studies give insight into the diversity and plurality of people's expectations and aspirations for the future. The objective of Biosphere Futures is to promote the use of scenarios for sustainable development of the Biosphere and help build a community of practice around social-ecological scenarios. We do so by facilitating the assessment, synthesis, and comparative analysis of scenario case studies, pointing to relevant resources, and by helping practitioners and researchers to disseminate and showcase their own work. In this article, we first describe the rationale for the database, introduce the database and the criteria we use for selecting examples for inclusion. Next, we present a synthesis of the examples included in the scenarios database to date, highlighting emerging patterns and possible avenues for further research. Finally, as the objectives of Biosphere Futures will be better achieved by having more people use and contribute to this database, we invite the creators of social-ecological scenarios to contribute additional case studies.