The Georgia Basin Futures Project (GBFP) is a five-year regional participatory integrated assessment whose purpose is to combine public values, preferences. and beliefs with expert knowledge in the production of scenarios for the future of the area in western Canada known as the Georgia Basin (see map) over the next forty years. The key goals are to increase public involvement in the discourse about issues of sustainability, explore pathways to sustainability in the region, and create a database of public preferences, values, and acceptable and unacceptable trade-offs that can be analyzed to provide a picture of how participants feel about sustainability issues and evaluate the relationship between the use of computer-based simulation tools and the beliefs, values, and behaviors of the users of those tools (Tansey, Carmichael et al. 2002).

Background

The GBFP is based on a long tradition of futures studies in...