Scenarios and Nature-based Solutions

Linking together nature-based solutions in diverse landscapes, their global potential, and on-the-ground cases to inspire decision makers and stakeholders about the potential of nature-based solutions and restoration in addressing climate change, ensuring food security and reducing biodiversity loss.

Introducing PBL and Global Scenarios

PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency is an independent research institute working in the fields of environment, nature and spatial planning.

We contribute towards improving the quality of environmental decision-making by conducting outlook studies, analyses and evaluations. This work includes the use of scenarios and computer models to understand how global, long-term environmental change and sustainability problems that are driven by human activities develop over time.

PBL recognises that our global scenario analysis often appears abstract for decision makers or indeed distant from local realities in which actual implementation of these solutions need to take place.

This website bridges the gap between global scenarios and local realities, with the aim to both inspire and inform decision makers about the potential of nature-based solutions and restoration. By linking PBL’s global scenario work on restoration, conservation, sustainable use and management of natural resources with concrete local examples of nature-based solutions and restoration in practice, this website showcases how global sustainability goals can be connected to local level action.

Assessing potential future environmental changes helps policymakers decide where to take action and understand potential policy effects. PBL uses scenarios and computer models to explore such future pathways. Scenarios are potential future storylines, and models translate these into data, maps and graphs that give insight into, for example, the impact of specific measures on climate, nature or food security.

PBL uses integrated, model-based scenario-analysis on global and regional scales.

The IMAGE-GLOBIO framework is applied for this purpose.

IMAGE 3.0 is an integrated assessment model that simulates the global environmental consequences of human activities.
The GLOBIO 4.0 model is designed to inform and support policymakers by quantifying global human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems. The model is tightly connected to PBL’s IMAGE model.

Over the past years, the IMAGE-GLOBIO framework has been extensively used for environmental assessments, for example for the UN Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) the Global Land Outlook by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

This website showcases three scenarios

A baseline scenario based on SSP2 "business-as-usual" scenario where future trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns, economic and population growth continue but vary widely between regions and impacts of climate change, as well as future land degradation are taken into account. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are a scenario framework, established by the climate change research community to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation and mitigation.
A restoration scenario that includes restoration and improved land management measures, as well as protection and conservation of key ecosystems. The restoration scenario is developed as part of PBL’s work for the UNCCD’s Global Land Outlook.
A broader "Sharing the Planet" scenario where restoration and nature-based solutions form part of a broader palette of options, e.g. improved agricultural productivity, dietary change and food waste reductions to realise conservation, climate change and food security goals simultaneously. This scenario is developed as part of PBL’s work to support the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the CBD.

Scenarios 1 and 2 are explained in more detail in the forthcoming report (van der Esch et al., expected June 2021) and scenario 3 can be found as the “Sharing the Planet” scenario in Kok et al.,(in press). See reports available for download below.

IMAGE Model 3.0
GLOBIO Model 4.0
Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)
O’Neill, B. C., et al. (2017). "The roads ahead: narratives for shared socioeconomic pathways describing world futures in the 21st century." Global Environmental Change 42: 169-180.
van Vuuren, D. P., et al. (2017). "Energy, land-use and greenhouse gas emissions trajectories under a green growth paradigm." Global Environmental Change 42: 237-250.
Doelman, J. C., et al. (2018). "Exploring SSP land-use dynamics using the IMAGE model: Regional and gridded scenarios of land-use change and land-based climate change mitigation." Global Environmental Change 48: 119-135.