Regional Subcommittee
In the next generation of land-use forecasts, the Technical Forecast Committee is considering three different scenarios:
- A baseline scenario, which assumes that population, employment and other factors will continue to change along current trend lines.
- An more-adaptive scenario, which assumes that the region adapts well to changing fundamental forces affecting the region's future:
- Global climate change and growing resource scarcity
- Globalization of the economy and the desire for economic growth
- Technological changes
- Demographic changes
- A less-adaptive scenario, which assumes that the region does not adapt well to the forces listed above.
To develop these three scenarios, we must first determine what it means to be more adaptive or less adaptive.
The Regional Subcommittee is tasked with predicting the region's total population and jobs for each of the three scenarios and documenting the rationale for each.
In generating the three scenarios, we assume that greater success in adapting to the fundamental forces that shape the region's future will lead to a higher quality of life.
- In the more-adaptive scenario, the region would do better than most parts of the country and see greater levels of net migration -- meaning that more people would move into the region than would move away.
- In the middle scenario, we would continue to do about as well as we do now, which means our population and job growth would slip a little in comparison to peer metropolitan areas.
- In the less-adaptive scenario, we would do worse than most of our peers.
The Regional Subcommittee must define what "doing better" and "doing worse" mean in terms of total regional population and employment. The land-use changes determined by the Land Use Subcommittee will factor into our ability to do "better" or "worse."