page_title: Backcasting
section_title: Backcasting vs. Forecasting
hierarchical_section_title: Backcasting / Backcasting vs. Forecasting
caption_attribution_description: English: Taken from page 147 of Yeates, L.B., Thought Experimentation: A Cognitive Approach, Graduate Diploma in Arts (By Research) dissertation, University of New South Wales, 2004.
context_page_description: Backcasting is a planning method that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present. The fundamentals of the method were outlined by John B. Robinson from the University of Waterloo in 1990. The fundamental question of backcasting asks: "if we want to attain a certain goal, what actions must be taken to get there?"
  While forecasting involves predicting the future based on current trend analysis, backcasting approaches the challenge of discussing the future from the opposite direction; it is "a method in which the future desired conditions are envisioned and steps are then defined to attain those conditions, rather than taking steps that are merely a continuation of present methods extrapolated into the future".
  In statistics and data analysis, backcasting can be considered to be the opposite of forecasting; thus:
  forecasting involves the prediction of the future values of the dependent variables based on known values of the independent variable.
context_section_description: Backcasting, a term first coined by John B. Robinson in 1982, involves establishing the description of a very definite and very specific future situation. It then involves an imaginary moving backwards in time, step-by-step, in as many stages as are considered necessary, from the future to the present to reveal the mechanism through which that particular specified future could be attained from the present.
  Backcasting is not concerned with predicting the future:
  The major distinguishing characteristic of backcasting analyses is the concern, not with likely energy futures, but with how desirable futures can be attained. It is thus explicitly normative, involving "working backwards" from a particular future end-point to the present to determine what policy measures would be required to reach that future.
  According to Jansen (1994, p. 503):
  Within the framework of technological development, “forecasting” concerns the extrapolation of developments towards the future and the exploration of achievements that can be realized through technology in the long term. Conversely, the reasoning behind “backcasting” is: on the basis of an interconnecting picture of demands technology must meet in the future — “sustainability criteria” — to direct and determine the process that technology development must take and possibly also the pace at which this development process must take effect.
  Backcasting [is] both an important aid in determining the direction technology development must take and in specifying the targets to be set for this purpose. As such, backcasting is an ideal search toward determining the nature and scope of the technological challenge posed by sustainable development, and it can thus serve to direct the search process toward new — sustainable — technology.
caption: Temporal representation of backcasting.[7]
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