Abstract
While climate scenarios are well-established, scenarios for socio-economic developments are often missing. Beyond the continuation of business-as-usual trajectories, it is possible to actively shape different future outcomes, for that it is essential to have a clear, collectively defined vision of the desired conditions under climate change—one that is shared by a significant part of the community. In this contribution we present results from an original “futures workshop”, where a vision for a climate-resilient South Tyrol was developed through the method of backcasting and considering key climate risks assessed with impact chain assessment. Backcasting is a structured scenario analysis approach, where participants develop explicitly normative scenarios together, share their visions of the desirable future and identify the steps needed to realize those visions. The result was a detailed vision of a desirable future in terms of climate-resilient societal activities in South Tyrol and a set of plausible steps enabling its realization. The futures workshop encouraged collaborative social learning among various stakeholders and helped to build a bridge between climate risk assessment and the development of holistic, forward-looking adaptation options. The experience shows that the storytelling approach and the positive framing of the vision can foster political and social acceptance for early adaptation measures and proactively integrate climate risks into planning processes and investment decisions.