Issue Brief: Scenarios and drivers to explore global food security up to 2050

Several conclusions can be drawn from the scenario development process. First, a participatory approach towards scenario development, involving a diverse group of stakeholders, combined with a professional management and planning of the process, leads to the creation of innovative and diverse scenarios. It is unlikely that the derived scenarios would also have resulted from an exercise that mainly involved scientists. Second, the adaptation of already existing scenarios (the so called ‘fast-track’ approach), that was initially proposed, is not without risk. Stakeholders indicated they wanted to develop new scenarios and therefore a completely new set of scenarios was developed, which, however, led to delays. Finally, participatory ‘trend mapping’, in combination with thorough validation, proved to be a useful tool to derive realistic trends of long-term driving forces of global food and nutrition security