ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some considerations of elementary very long-term planning. It presents some examples to articulate the issues involved in undertaking appropriate anticipatory and responsive public policies and plans. The limited information that would be available to make decisions for very long-term plans leads to crudely hewn approaches for policy guidance. Consider the case of limited information which would afford the use of only three uncertainty levels of the state of nature: Low, Medium and High. The chapter explores difficulties with perceiving the very long term in order to plan for the foreseeable effects of climate change and discusses several approaches to the undertaking of tasks. Several approaches are proposed to explore possible planning paths for the era of the very long term. Long-term planning efforts due to climate change need to be regional, and targeted at selected economic activities striking a balance between technological feasibility and future innovation to prevent premature lock-in of less efficient mitigation efforts.
