Co-constructing future land use scenarios for a equity and cooling Antananarivo, Madagascar

Scenario is a promising approach to support future land use optimization and urban sustainable development. Despite an increasing number of scenarios literature undertaken in Sub-Saharan Africa, a little investigation is made into urban green infrastructure injustice and the associated temperature cooling service in Madagascar. Madagascar experiences a complex interplay of challenges of astonishing urbanisation, entrenched poverty, and significant vulnerability to climate change. To anticipate the future of urban development in a highly uncertain socio-economic context, we engaged stakeholders from a dynamic urban region in Antananarivo in a participatory scenario planning process to co-create salient, diverse, plausible, credible, and legitimate scenarios. Stakeholders with researchers developed four normative visions for the future for 2030 aligned with the SDGs and African Union Agenda 2063. Based on stakeholder input, combined with planning documents and analyses of historical dynamics, scenarios were translated into spatially explicit representations of how each of the four narratives would shape land cover by 2063. Four storylines were entitled: (1) a loveable future that by 2063, Antananarivo could transform into a thriving modern city with more equitable access to green infrastructure, restored wetland corridors, expanded public infrastructure, and intensified and modernised agricultural zones, (2) a development prioritised over the environment world, where the drive for profit leads to urban expansion, loss of green spaces, and fragmentation of agricultural land, (3) a worst tomorrow, which we can see the landscape is marked by environmental degradation, as lush natural spaces, rivers, and crop fields are replaced by buildings due to population growth, land privatisation, and rural-to-urban migration, increasing heat extreme events, and (4) a run-away scenario, that results in significant conservation, with agricultural and bare land converted to forest and savanna, but at the cost of lower economic development. Our “bottom-up” urban planning strategy, incorporating stakeholders' perspectives, is essential to fostering an equitable, cool, and green environment for the future of African urban forests and vegetated landscapes.