Which kind of city are you living in and how will it develop in the future? Urban populations are growing, which presents both great challenges and exciting opportunities. The latest scenarios supplement reveals how we might make our cities more efficient and appealing places to live. Around three out of every four of us will live in cities by 2050. As cities swell, pressure on vital resources of energy, water and food will become ever greater. Across the world there are big differences in the way cities are built and run, their transport systems and energy use. It’s vital to understand more about these differences in order to make the right choices for building sustainable cities.
With the world’s population headed toward 9 billion at mid-century and millions of people climbing out of poverty, global energy demand could increase by as much as 80% by 2050. That’s according to Shell’s latest scenarios, which look at trends in the economy, politics and energy in considering developments over the next half a century.
What might lie ahead 50 years from now… or even in 2100? We consider two possible scenarios of the future, taking a number of pressing global trends and issues and using them as “lenses” through which to view the world.
The scenarios provide a detailed analysis of current trends and their likely trajectory into the future.
They dive into the implications for the pace of global economic development, the types of energy we use to power our lives and the growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
The scenarios also highlight areas of public policy likely to have the greatest influence on the development of cleaner fuels, improvements in energy efficiency and on moderating greenhouse gas emissions.
Mountains
The first scenario, labelled “mountains”, sees a strong role for government and the introduction of firm and far-reaching policy measures. These help to develop more compact cities and transform the global transport network. New policies unlock plentiful natural gas resources – making it the largest global energy source by the 2030s – and accelerate carbon capture and storage technology, supporting a cleaner energy system.
Oceans
The second scenario, which we call “oceans”, describes a more prosperous and volatile world. Energy demand surges, due to strong economic growth. Power is more widely distributed and governments take longer to agree major decisions. Market forces rather than policies shape the energy system: oil and coal remain part of the energy mix but renewable energy also grows. By the 2070s solar becomes the world’s largest energy source.
We are all faced with choices that produce consequences for years – and even decades – into the future. whether we are developing new opportunities or anticipating significant threats, we base decisions on our perspectives of the future. so there is huge value in developing as rich an understanding as possible of the drivers, trends, uncertainties, choices, and cycles that will shape that unknowable future, and that may look very different through the eyes of different actors.
the future is neither completely predictable nor completely random. Any meaningful exploration of possible future landscapes inevitably highlights alternative features or patterns. for over four decades now, shell has developed and applied contrasting scenarios to help us consider the future more extensively and deepen our strategic thinking. we have also shared summaries of that work externally whenever we have sensed that it will make a contribution to better public dialogue about the collective challenges and choices we face.
these scenarios provide quantified insights and a language for shell’s executives to apply when grappling with increasingly unfamiliar and challenging conditions. they aim to be thought-provoking yet plausible, highlighting matters already in the foreground and also, crucially, background developments that should be brought to the fore. Used effectively, these alternative outlooks can help organisations address difficult issues that need to be explored collaboratively even though there may be deeply divided opinions about them.
such an approach also helps equip decision-makers with a deeper awareness of the very different perspectives others may have, the need to engage with these perspectives effectively, and the significance to their own future of the choices made by others. in that sense, scenarios are deeply relational as they focus on people and their behaviour, and not only on seemingly impersonal economic, political, and social forces.
so there we have something of the scenario alchemy as we experience it in shell – an amalgam of a strategic thinking process, a mode of analysis, a social process of engagement and influence, and, at its most powerful, an enabler of individual and group exploration and discovery.
in that regard, the words of former Us secretary of defence donald rumsfeld are relevant in that at least one of the functions of scenario work is to bring people together to explore areas in a way that may reveal ‘unknown unknowns’. this exploration is not primarily intended to produce attractive booklets or reports, nice though those can be. it is most importantly about helping people take a journey that guides them into better choices based on richer considerations of the world around them.
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