First IQ SCENE workshop held at the UCL Energy Institute

This workshop was a joint intitiatve between UCL Energy Institute and Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Developpement (CIRED) in France. The workshop brought together over 30 researchers from nine countries in Europe and North America, working in energy and environmental fields.

The workshop’s mission was, for the first time, to bring together the key researchers that use innovative techniques for developing, analysing and choosing quantitative scenarios, to share experiences and thoughts for future research.

The workshop started with the keynote speech by Rob Lempert from RAND Santa Monica (USA), who questioned whether interacting with computers could help people choose better scenarios. Afterwards, two academics Bert de Vries from Utrecht University (the Netherlands) and Franck Lecocq from CIRED (France) as well as two practitioners Thomas Counsell from DECC (UK) and Martin Haigh from Shell (UK) discussed challenges in developing and using scenarios for research and decision making.

In parallel presentation sessions, the workshop participants resented and discussed a mix of own methodological advances and applications. Eventually, three cross-cutting themes were chosen for knowledge integration: (i) building and analysing large numbers of scenarios, (ii) choosing small sets of scenarios, and (iii) Llnking approaches (qualitative and quantitative, different disciplines, different models, different scales, different stakeholders) for scenario studies.