Targeted Scenario Analysis

Published on February 10, 2022

The Targeted Scenario Analysis (TSA) is an innovative approach providing focused direction towards specific sustainable development policy and investment choices for public or private sector actors. It presents the value and the contribution of ecosystem services to sectorial development within a decision-making framework, helping make the business case for sustainable policy and investment choices. TSA has three pillars:

Targeted: Within a multistakeholder participatory process, TSA helps decision makers and stakeholders target a critical decision to be made at a policy or management level, which involves a change on how ecosystem services are managed, and improvements in sustainable development outcomes.
Scenario: It does this by developing and contrasting two future scenarios – Business as Usual vs. Sustainable Ecosystem Management – that link changes to biophysical and socio-economic indicators as the scenarios develop.
Analysis: It presents an analysis of selected sustainable development indicators into the future.

The product of a TSA is a balanced presentation of evidence, for a decision maker, that weighs up the pros and cons of continuing with business as usual (BAU) or following a sustainable development path in which ecosystems are more effectively managed. This alternate path is termed sustainable ecosystem management (SEM). A TSA should be conducted for a particular productive sector, and with a specific decision maker in mind. Decision makers will be primarily government officials or business managers, who generally come from a specific productive sector (e.g. Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Energy, hydropower plant manager, plantation owner or cattle farmer). The results of a TSA can show the impact of certain policy options or management practices on specific ecosystem services or resources, to help decision makers understand the circumstances in which maintaining ecosystems and their services may generate greater economic benefit than promoting economic processes that degrade and deplete ecosystems.