Call for Papers: Long-term Sustainable Development Scenarios

Natural Resources Forum, a United Nations Sustainable Development Journal, a  quarterly journal issued by the Division for Sustainable Development of the United Nations calls for papers for a special issue on long-term scenarios for sustainable development, to be published in 2012.This special issue will take stock of recent advances in the development of long-term sustainable development scenarios. Scenarios have become a standard tool in the analysis of global issues, including climate change, energy, land, and water. There have also been efforts to extend the coverage of models and scenario exercises to go beyond individual sectors and provide integrated analyses, simultaneously considering economic, social and environmental objectives, as well as multiple sectors. The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+20”), to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, will be an occasion to reflect on progress in model-based scenario analysis and trends in the interface between scenario modeling and policy-making.

This special issue calls for papers considering, inter alia, the following areas:
• Integration of sustainable development objectives in model-based scenario analysis, including post-2015 development goals;
• Global sustainable development scenarios, including new insights regarding social outcomes, planetary boundaries and breaching of environmental thresholds;
• Trade-offs and synergies across sectors and in terms of multiple objectives;
• National-level integrated, multi-sectoral scenarios and their implications for policy making;
• Gaps in terms of model coverage of sectors, sustainable development dimensions, data quality and availability;
• Trends in the interface between the scenario modeling and policymakers since the Earth Summit in 1992, and suggestions for the future;
• Emerging approaches to scenario analysis, including those based on risk management, game theory, complexity science, political and institutional assessments, and the research agenda for the future

Articles should contain original material and should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length. Please consult our Author Guidelines (http://www.wiley.com/bw/submit.asp?ref=0165-0203&site=1).Contributions to the journal are accepted at the NRFs manuscript submission site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nrf.

Questions and comments can be addressed to NRFORUM@un.org