MA Scenarios - TechnoGarden

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

"The TechnoGarden scenario depicts a globally connected world relying strongly on technology and highly managed, often engineered ecosystems, to deliver ecosystem services. Overall efficiency of ecosystem service provision improves, but is shadowed by the risks inherent in large-scale human-made solutions and rigid control of ecosystems. Technology and market-oriented institutional reform are used to achieve solutions to environmental problems. These solutions are designed to benefit both the economy and the environment. These changes co-develop with the expansion of property rights to ecosystem services, such as requiring people to pay for pollution they create or paying people for providing key ecosystem services through actions such as preservation of key watersheds. Interest in maintaining, and even increasing, the economic value of these property rights, combined with an interest in learning and information, leads to a flowering of ecological engineering approaches for managing ecosystem services. Investment in green technology is accompanied by a significant focus on economic development and education, improving people's lives and helping them understand how ecosystems make their livelihoods possible.

A variety of problems in global agriculture are addressed by focusing on the multifunctional aspects of agriculture and a global reduction of agricultural subsidies and trade barriers. Recognition of the role of agricultural diversification encourages farms to produce a variety of ecological services, rather than simply maximizing food production. The combination of these movements stimulates the growth of new markets for ecosystem services, such as tradable nutrient runoff permits, and the development of technology for increasingly sophisticated ecosystem management. Gradually, environmental entrepreneurship expands as new property rights and technologies co-evolve to stimulate the growth of companies and cooperatives providing reliable ecosystem services to cities, towns, and individual property owners.

Innovative capacity expands quickly in developing nations. The reliable provision of ecosystem services, as a component of economic growth, together with enhanced uptake of technology due to rising income levels, lifts many of the world's poor into a global middle class. Elements of human well-being associated with social relations decline in this scenario due to great loss of local culture, customs, and traditional knowledge that occurs and due to the weakening of civil society institutions as an increasing share of interactions take place over the Internet. While the provision of basic ecosystem services improves the well-being of the world's poor, the reliability of the services, especially in urban areas, is increasingly critical and increasingly difficult to ensure. Not every problem has succumbed to technological innovation. Reliance on technological solutions sometimes creates new problems and vulnerabilities. In some cases, we seem to be barely ahead of the next threat to ecosystem services. In such cases new problems often seem to emerge from the last solution, and the costs of managing the environment are continually rising. Environmental breakdowns that impact large numbers of people become more common. Sometimes new problems seem to emerge faster than solutions. The challenge for the future will be to learn how to organize social-ecological systems so that ecosystem services are maintained without taxing society's ability to implement solutions to novel, emergent problems. "

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