Step 1: problem identification, trust and awareness building

In October 2018, a short survey (Table S1) was distributed to all participants of the project asking individuals to identify issues they felt addressed important challenges facing the oceans and our society. From this survey, a list of potential Key Challenges was drawn up. At the first 2-day workshop (November 2018), participants discussed the Key Challenges and their current framing, and agreed upon a short list of reframed challenges.

At this workshop, participants also explored the meaning of a ‘More Sustainable’ future, such that a series of common objectives were identified for the ‘More Sustainable’ futures. Participants agreed that imagining a future that moved as far as possible towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) would be the core focus of the ‘More Sustainable’ Future in each Key Challenge, providing a broadly consistent, normative target across the Challenges (Börjeson et al. 2006; Planque et al. 2019). It was, however, made explicit among participants that the different Challenge teams were likely to have distinct starting perspectives. Those differences were likely to manifest in variability in the importance placed on different SDGs and their constituent targets among the Key Challenges. Similarly, it was agreed that the anticipated, ‘Business-as-Usual’ scenario was to be based upon the current trajectory of trends into the future (Planque et al. 2019), providing a broadly consistent predictive target for all the challenges (Börjeson et al. 2006). It is acknowledged that this split into a predictive ‘Business-as-Usual’ versus a normative ‘More Sustainable’ future is somewhat arbitrary. Elements of the ‘Business-as-Usual’ future implicitly contained judgements by the participants that were normative in nature. Similarly, aspects of the More Sustainable future were based on predictions arising from current trends.

Participants tested a range of scenario development approaches on two example Key Challenges. The subsequent plenary discussion led to participants agreeing on the preferred methods for later use (detailed in Step 2: Future Discovery & Development). Finally, at this first workshop, participants identified a series of overarching assumptions that would be consistent across all the Key Challenges and alternate futures (‘Business-as-Usual’ and ‘More Sustainable’). These assumptions were identified to constrain the Future Seas project within a consistent and tractable range of possible future conditions for each of the Challenge teams to explore. Assumptions identified (Table 3) were general in nature and related to: (1) events that were not anticipated within the scope of the Future Seas Key Challenges, (e.g. global-scale conflicts), (2) well-known dynamics for which we assumed current predictions were likely to hold over the next ten years (e.g. climate change), (3) factors that were unlikely to change over the course of the Decade of Ocean Science (e.g. cessation of all fishing). Each team also identified Key Challenge specific assumptions over the course of the scenario development process. These assumptions are detailed in the individual challenge papers.

Core assumptions used for all the Key Challenges

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

Prior to the second workshop, the reframed Key Challenges were disseminated to the participants in a second survey (Table 1A, Table S2), and they were asked to choose one (or more) Key Challenge to participate in. Participation was based on individual interest and area of expertise. One of the aims of Future Seas is to enable learning and leadership for ECRs in an interdisciplinary setting, thus each Challenge team was led by and/or included ECRs and was mentored by an experienced researcher as the senior author. Efforts were made to ensure each Challenge team achieved representation across disciplines. Challenge teams had between 11 and 26 participants.