Table 3.

Core assumptions used for all the Key Challenges

Cross challenge assumptions
1. The time horizon for the alternate futures is 2030 (the end of the UN Oceans Decade)
2. Population will continue to increase towards 2030 as per UN projections and is expected to be in the order of 8.5 billion by 2030. Global populations will not be equally distributed in space (UN 2015a)
3. The globe is locked into climate change of at least 1.5 °C of warming relative to pre-industrial conditions by 2030 due to existing inertia in the planetary system, and there will be associated consequences of this 1.5 °C warming as articulated in Allen et al. (2019) and IPCC (2019)
4. No new major international agreements will be implemented by 2030. Note this does not include agreements that are already under discussion or in progress
5. No large-scale violent conflicts will playout by 2030
6. There will be some resource use continuing into the future; there will be no radical cessation of activities such as fishing and mining
7. Knowledge production will continue, but there will be no unpredicted giant leaps in new sciences. Note, although participants were aware of the very rapid rate of change in technological advancement (e.g. in the first ten years after the iPhone was launched, 2 billion were sold globally), for the purposes of the Key Challenges, we did not ‘invent’ any technologies, rather we relied on scaling up of emerging technologies to anticipate possible changes to 2030

These assumptions were negotiated among participants at the first workshop and revisited throughout the process to allow for additions and modifications