Collaborative scenario building: Engaging stakeholders to unravel opportunities for urban adaptation planning

Uncertainties arising from the climate crisis and socioeconomic challenges require decision makers to advance climate change adaptation planning and practice. In response, many cities have adopted climate change adaptation strategies, which is also the case in the Czech Republic. Although adaptation planning should be prospective, requiring long-term, future-oriented approaches, the use of future scenarios have not been fully acknowledged yet. In this methodological paper, we introduce a combined approach for delivering spatially explicit future land use/land cover (LULC) scenarios developed as supporting tools for adaptation planning in three major Czech cities—Prague, Brno, and Ostrava. The methodological approach consists of (1) Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) downscaled to city level, to capture underpinning social, environmental, and economic dynamics; (2) collaborative processes with stakeholders; and (3) computer modelling of LULC scenarios. While collaborative process collects the perceptions of local needs, challenges, and opportunities, spatially explicit modelling of LULC changes allows for an easy-to-read visualization of the plausible futures. Nesting the scenarios in SSPs makes them consistent with global socioeconomic drivers. The introduced methodological approach can support adaptation planning by engaging stakeholders directly in the scenario building process, to elaborate on plausible future urban developments while considering an array of different stakes and challenges.