Future scenarios provide challenging, plausible and relevant stories about how the future could unfold. Urban Futures (UF) research has identified a substantial set (>450) of seemingly disparate scenarios published over the period 1997–2011 and within this research, a sub-set of >160 scenarios has been identified (and categorized) based on their narratives according to the structure first proposed by the Global Scenario Group (GSG) in 1997; three world types (Business as Usual, Barbarization, and Great Transitions) and six scenarios, two for each world type (Policy Reform—PR, Market Forces—MF, Breakdown—B, Fortress World—FW, Eco-Communalism—EC and New Sustainability Paradigm—NSP). It is suggested that four of these scenario archetypes (MF, PR, NSP and FW) are sufficiently distinct to facilitate active stakeholder engagement in futures thinking. Moreover they are accompanied by a well-established, internally consistent set of narratives that provide a deeper understanding of the key fundamental drivers (e.g., STEEP—Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political) that could bring about realistic world changes through a push or a pull effect. This is testament to the original concept of the GSG scenarios and their development and refinement over a 16 year period.

Limited supplies of naturally occurring phosphorus (P) resources and their decreasing purity, coupled with legislative pressure on water service companies to remove P from both their effluent and waste streams, has focused considerable attention on recycling P recovered from domestic wastewater in existing P markets. In the context of the fertiliser industry there may be a number opportunities to substitute fertilisers based on P recovered as struvtite for existing fertiliser products. An economic and environmental evaluation of such substitution opportunities suggests that providing high struvite recovery rates can be achieved in relatively simple process configurations, and recovered materials are distributed to satisfy regional demand, they may offer the most effective economic and environmental use of resources.