MA Scenarios - Adapting Mosaic

The MA developed four global scenarios exploring plausible future changes in drivers, ecosystems, ecosystem services, and human well-being. These scenarios are :

"The Adapting Mosaic scenario, regional watershed-scale ecosystems are the focus of political and economic activity. This scenario sees the rise of local ecosystem management strategies, and the strengthening of local institutions. Investments in human and social capital are geared towards improving knowledge about ecosystem functioning and management, which results in a better understanding of resilience, fragility, and local flexibility of ecosystems. There is optimism that we can learn, but humility about preparing for surprises and about our ability to know everything about managing ecosystems.

There is also great variation among nations and regions in styles of governance, including management of ecosystem services. Some regions explore actively adaptive management, investigating alternatives through experimentation. Others employ bureaucratically rigid methods to optimize ecosystem performance. Great diversity exists in the outcome of these approaches: some areas thrive, while others develop severe inequality or experience ecological degradation. Initially, trade barriers for goods and products are increased, but barriers for information nearly disappear (for those who are motivated to use them) due to improving communication technologies and rapidly decreasing costs of access to information.

Eventually, the focus on local governance leads to failures in managing the global commons. Problems like climate change, marine fisheries, and pollution grow worse and global environmental problems intensify. Communities slowly realize that they cannot manage their local areas because global and regional problems are infringing, and they begin to develop networks among communities, regions, and even nations, to better manage the global commons. Solutions that were effective locally are adopted among networks. These networks of regional successes are especially common in situations where there are mutually beneficial opportunities for coordination, such as along river valleys. Sharing good solutions and discarding poor ones eventually improves approaches to a variety of social and environmental problems, ranging from urban poverty to agricultural water pollution. As more knowledge is collected from successes and failures, provision of many services improves. "

Source & © Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
 Synthesis Report (2005),
Chapter 5, Box 5.1, pp.72-73