Sustainable Sydney 2050 megatrends and scenarios

The City of Sydney has worked with ISF more than 40 times since 2005, on projects engaging a breadth of our research areas to address issues relating to urban life and sustainability.

In 2018, the City of Sydney began development of a strategic vision for 2050. Building on from their Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, the 2050 vision incorporates a focus on ‘environmental pathways’ including those pertaining to energy, water and waste management. To assist in planning these pathways, the City required research and modelling of future scenarios for Sydney in 2050.

For this, ISF partnered with urban analytics and modelling specialists Kinesis. The research involved first consultation and a literature review to identify ‘megatrends’, far-reaching, global patterns that can provide a basis for imagining a likely future, as well as the underlying factors that drive change.

The second half of this project required ISF and Kinesis to draw on the megatrends to formulate four plausible scenarios for Sydney in 2050. Scenarios provide a tool to think about the future in a structured way and are designed to challenge current thinking.

The Sustainable Sydney 2050 scenarios provide different stories about how Sydney’s future could unfold through to 2050 and illustrate implications across multiple domains. The process of developing these scenarios was largely consultative. ISF and Kinesis led workshops with City of Sydney representatives and expert stakeholders in which participants helped to develop potential scenarios and implications.

Kinesis modelled energy/emissions, water and waste targets under each scenario, for both 2050 and 2040 and developed high-level trajectories required to reach the targets under each scenario.

The results of our findings on megatrends and the scenarios are helping to inform the City of Sydney’s considerations for their 2050 vision, which is in development.