Advisory committee explores scenario planning, identifies tourism, climate and funding as top uncertainties

Juneau City and Borough advisory committee members and staff used the meeting’s main session to introduce scenario planning for the comprehensive plan, define three critical uncertainties, and run a preliminary ranking of 15 “resilient strategies” to test how policies might perform under different futures.

Staff explained scenario planning as a way to test policy options against plausible futures rather than assuming past trends will continue. The committee heard that the project team developed 10 drivers of change from expert interviews and prior meetings; staff said those drivers were distilled into three critical uncertainties that the land‑use scenarios will use for testing: tourism and its spillover effects; climate change and environmental hazards; and federal and state funding and policy decisions (the latter combining several drivers including transportation/infrastructure vulnerabilities and state fiscal stability).

After a short break,…