UK livestock futures: co-designing Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

Abstract The UK livestock sector faces complex socio-economic, political, and environmental challenges, requiring approaches for exploring trade-offs and resilience across a range of plausible futures. To address these challenges, this study develops the UK Livestock Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (UK-Livestock-SSPs) through an iterative, stakeholder-driven co-design process that incorporates UK livestock sector realities. Engaging diverse actors from policy, industry, academia, and civil society, we co-produce narratives, visual summaries, and semi-quantitative trends that capture sector-specific dynamics while remaining consistent with the global and regional SSP frameworks. Visual and interactive methods supported the co-design process by helping stakeholders articulate and examine their values, trade-offs, and priorities. The resulting five scenarios highlight interactions between governance, societal, and production drivers, emphasising the diversity of plausible futures, uncertainties, and potential trade-offs facing the sector. The scenario outputs support the exploration of alternative futures, and have the potential to inform policy, research, and decision making to assess sector vulnerabilities, mitigation and adaptation options, and resilience building strategies.