Scenarios and Forecasting

[Convenors: Sorensen UNE and Pettit (ECR) RMITU].

Developing scenarios and forecasts/projections, visualising potential outcomes and evaluating them against outcome criteria is particularly important for considering futures in both spatio-social and a socio-spatial contexts, and that is especially important in informing policy formulation.

Key issues to address are:

1. innovation in methodology and tools to undertake tasks such as national, regional and small area population projections;
2. simulating growth and development patterns in regional planning; qualitative and quantitative methodologies for assessing regional risk;
3. designing expert systems to integrate in a GIS diverse databases and spatial modelling tools to build SDSS with on-line access.