The Colorado River is a vital source of water in the Western United States, providing drinking water for homes and irrigation for farms in seven states, but the basin is under increasing pressure from climate change and drought. A new computational tool developed by a research team, led by Penn State scientists, may help the region adapt to a complex and uncertain future.

Their tool, the Framework for Narrative Storylines and Impact Classification (FRNSIC), can help decision-makers explore many plausible futures and identify consequential scenario storylines—or descriptions of what critical futures might look like—to help planners better address the uncertainties and impacts presented by climate change. They reported their findings Sept. 19 in the journal Earth's Future.

"One of the ways states like Colorado are preparing for the future is by making plans for how things might evolve based on the available science and inputs from various stakeholders," said Antonia Hadjimichael, assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State and lead author of the study. "This scenario planning process recognizes that planning for the future comes with many uncertainties about climate and water needs. So, planners have to consider different possibilities, such as a high-warming or a low-warming scenario."

Hadjimichael said that both the scientific community and decision makers around the world often turn to scenarios to describe what conditions may look like in the future, but this approach may regard only a few possibilities and discount other alternatives.

These scenario planning approaches often feature a relatively small number of scenarios—for example what drought conditions might look like under different levels of warming—and may fail to capture the complexity of all the factors involved.

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