2025 Kiley Fellow Lecture: Kira Clingen,
“Place-Based Scenario Planning for the Climate Emergency”

Scenario planning evolved out of military intelligence in the 1970s as a tool for corporations to make strategic plans in situations with multiple stakeholders and high degrees of uncertainty. Over the past forty years, the method has diversified across industries and disciplines due to its utility in complex decision making.

Place-based scenario planning is a method of strategic planning that leverages the skill set of landscape architects to assist decision makers choosing adaptation measures to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Complementary to probabilistic models that forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario planning draws upon scientific data to generate specific, localized future scenarios that reveal existing biases and frame new ways of thinking about the future, leveraging landscape architects’ skills in analysis and visualization to expand their public role.

The talk focuses on a case study of Long Beach, a coastal neighborhood in Rockport, Massachusetts. Illustrating six plausible future scenarios for adaptation within a continuous trajectory of change, the exercise uses design storytelling to celebrate people’s deep attachments to the landscape, elicit tacit knowledge, and build shared climate landscape literacy while planning for the future.

As a tool for practice and a pedagogical approach, place-based scenario planning embraces the multiplicity of narratives and complexities of place, generates diverse approaches to serve the public in the climate emergency, and engages the discipline in critical political and social movements.