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As humans, we find complex, systemic change incredibly hard to grapple with. Immediate and present issues are easier; for instance, a flood in your town might call for emergency services, sandbags, aid to trapped residents. However, complex, uncertain and evolving threats like climate change call for solutions that are harder to develop and apply.

These challenges require decades-long, systemic efforts, with many intermediate steps that need to be continually assessed and improved along the way. These multi-dimensional problems, with timescales that confound our preference for simplicity and immediacy. Which flood defences will be most effective, given the risks will likely intensify in 10 years’ time? Does planning for one possible future scenario jeopardise our preparedness for alternative scenarios? It’s hard to make workable commitments for such ambiguous and shifting goals, which are inherently hard to navigate. How can we develop our capacity to anticipate and remain focused on our target while being prepared for emergent change?

A new way to gauge future success

This is a problem given that accessing (and effectively deploying) policy, strategy and design for long-term systemic objectives such as climate change requires widespread support and understanding from governments, businesses and communities. To establish this support, we need a clearer vision of the possible futures we face. To help articulate this vision, Arup has developed a new tool – 1–3–10–30 – that analytically establishes the connections between the present and possible futures. The goal is to make long-term thinking and complex systems analysis accessible, relevant and tangible to better enable its application on real-world projects.

The 1–3–10–30 tool combines a wide range of credible scientific and policy targets, trends and projections to map how the decisions we make in the next 1-3 years can drive positive or detrimental change in the next 10-30. This helps us map uncertainty, untangle complexity and understand plausible pathways into the future.

Diagram.
Watch to learn more about how 1–3–10–30 helps decision makers to shape more effective long-term policy, business strategy and design solutions..

Who wants to live in a degraded world?

1–3–10–30 tracks three possible futures which are based on three of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP). These take us to either a thriving, sustained or degraded planet. Into these pathways Arup has aggregated data on biodiversity, virgin material use, economic damage from climate change, education outcomes and parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. These aggregates represent a more fully-rounded definition of the impact we can have in building a better world, looking beyond the control and reduction of carbon emissions.

Along the ‘thriving planet’ pathway, aligned to SSP1, we meet the targets of the 2015 Paris agreement and emissions begin to halt and reverse, putting us on a path to peaking at 1.5°C of warming by around 2040. On the ‘sustained pathway’, aligned with SSP3 and our most likely current scenario, we head toward 2.1-3.5°C of global warming. The ‘degraded planet’ pathway aligns with SSP5 and a continued expansion of fossil fuels leading to 4°C+ of global warming.

Onto the three pathways we so far have mapped over 1300 credible data points and projections on future change. These include key demographic tipping points, policy and scientific targets, economic performance indicators, political decision points, projected extreme weather events and socioeconomic peaks – all mapped to whether they push us towards a more thriving or degraded planet.

For instance, when does China become the world’s biggest economy? When is the UK’s net zero water target? When will United States working hours have declined by 5%, due to heat stress? When does the share of global GDP spent on healthcare reach 10%? Any credible projection or commitment, either validated by scientific consensus or documented by a reputable and recognised government or institution, can be collated and mapped within the 1–3–10–30 model.  

Staying on track

We built 1–3–10–30 to help organisations understand and describe their future contexts, identify new opportunities and potential risks, test and develop more robust strategy, design and policy in the context of long-term visioning, and most importantly, help Arup and our clients develop futures and systems literacy for future resilience.

The Foresight team at Arup have developed a range of ways to work with 1–3–10–30 , from high-level exploratory workshops to in-depth custom maps and we’ve used it to tackle a wide range of client challenges. These include helping the senior leadership of a global construction firm to identify and prepare for unforeseen futures; working with a multinational FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) company to identify potential long-term blockers to their sustainability commitments; to supporting regional and national utility providers in articulating multi-decade visions and relevant asset management strategies.

1–3–10–30 allows us to frame long-term trends, datapoints, drivers and events to give us a rich and diverse evidence base for more effective decisions today. It makes the complexity of thinking about long-term systemic change into something practical, tangible and applicable to today’s real problems.