4 Discussion
4.1 Scenarios connect back to the LDA analysis
Following the structured futuring approach, and the creation of the
story-based scenarios, we examined whether the resultant stories bore a
resemblance to the original LDA topics. Each of the narratives was
iteratively reviewed to ensure both that (a) the story content reflected
the corresponding topic clustering and the topic keywords, and (b) that
each story did not too-closely resemble the content of another set of
topic keywords. This review process helped to ensure that each scenario
depicted relatively unique elements of the future. While outside the
scope of the present analysis, future work could endeavor to explicitly
determine whether the keywords present in a resultant scenario are
quantitatively distinct from other scenarios. However, this would be
challenging due to the short word count of the story scenarios, which
are each between 1,500 and 2,500 words.
4.2 Comparison with narrative scenarios across the global Arctic
We find notable thematic overlap among various other narrative scenario
efforts, sampled from research conducted around the global Arctic. In
Table 3, we highlight some of these other scenarios, with corresponding
descriptions of thematic overlap. The narrative scenarios highlighted in
Table 3 provide a sample of the existing literature on the topic of the
future of the Arctic region. While it is interesting that some of the
scenarios that we have produced are thematically well-represented in the
Arctic scenario literature (e.g., “Concession 60”, “Assisted
Migration”), there is one that notably has no apparent representation
in the existing literature.
“Putin’s Gambit” describes a world that has made tremendous global
progress on climate change action and emissions reductions, except for
Russia, where its politics have fostered continued fossil fuel
exploration. From a scenario perspective, this is in large part due to
Russia’s continued and projected reliance on fossil fuels as a major
part of its economy (Ilinova et al., 2020; Keil, 2014). Thus, a
contradiction emerges where despite global progress being made on the
topic of emissions reduction, there is a significant aberration in the
Russian economy. The brief thematic review in Table 3 suggests that this
combination of themes may be under-represented in the existing scenario
literature.