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Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2021. Assessing the plausibility of deep decarbonization by 2050
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In the annual Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook, CLICCS researchers make the first systematic attempt to assess which climate futures are plausible, by combining multidisciplinary assessments of plausibility. The inaugural 2021 Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook addresses the question: Is it plausible that the world will reach deep decarbonization by 2050?
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... Is the hope for a profound decarbonization of the economy in the coming decades justified? This is the prognostic question of two reports published by the Cluster of Excellence CLICCS (Climate, Climate Change and Society) at the University of Hamburg in 2021 and 2023 (Engels et al., 2023;Stammer et al., 2021). Reducing emissions to the level necessary to meet the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 °C global warming requires the complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050. ...
Faced with climate change and other ecological crises, sustainability has become an inescapable normative framework for organizations and societies worldwide. However, it conceals very different practices and imaginaries of a sustainable future. Firstly, this article introduces the three imaginaries of modernization, transformation, and control and explores what chances of implementation these trajectories have. Modernization is the dominant path driven by governments and corporations, transformation efforts by civil society actors are marginalized, and control is currently becoming more influential as a trajectory in the wake of a renaissance of strong nation-states. Secondly, this article works out the idea that sustainability, in the sense of an open future, is no longer achievable. Too many ecological burdens already exist, or can no longer be averted, so much so that one should be speaking instead about the politics of post-sustainability. It is highly probable that catastrophes and social collapses can no longer be prevented, and a rapid decarbonization of economies and societies in the coming years is so unlikely that the question thus arises as to how positive visions of the future for living together can still be derived from this. Finally, using the example of the rights of nature, it is discussed how there can, nevertheless, be forms of conviviality that could (albeit slowly) grow out of the multiple social and ecological crises and which are based on an amalgam of modernization, transformation, and control.
... This includes counts of both "feasibility" and "feasible." 2 Note that this diverges from a recent suggestion to equate "feasible" futures with "possible" futures and define "plausible" futures as those which empirical evidence about recent trends in key drivers and enabling conditions point toEngels & Marotzke, 2023;Stammer et al., 2021). In futures studies, futures which result from ...
The feasibility of different options to reduce the risks of climate change has engaged scholars for decades. Yet there is no agreement on how to define and assess feasibility. We define feasible as “do‐able under realistic assumptions.” A sound feasibility assessment is based on causal reasoning; enables comparison of feasibility across climate options, contexts, and implementation levels; and reflexively considers the agency of its audience. Global climate scenarios are a good starting point for assessing the feasibility of climate options since they represent causal pathways, quantify implementation levels, and consider policy choices. Yet, scenario developers face difficulties to represent all relevant causalities, assess the realism of assumptions, assign likelihood to potential outcomes, and evaluate the agency of their users, which calls for external feasibility assessments. Existing approaches to feasibility assessment mirror the “inside” and the “outside” view coined by Kahneman and co‐authors. The inside view considers climate change as a unique challenge and seeks to identify barriers that should be overcome by political choice, commitment, and skill. The outside view assesses feasibility through examining historical analogies (reference cases) to the given climate option. Recent studies seek to bridge the inside and the outside views through “feasibility spaces,” by identifying reference cases for a climate option, measuring their outcomes and relevant characteristics, and mapping them together with the expected outcomes and characteristics of the climate option. Feasibility spaces are a promising method to prioritize climate options, realistically assess the achievability of climate goals, and construct scenarios with empirically‐grounded assumptions.
This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives
Assessing Impacts of Climate Change > Representing Uncertainty
The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Decarbonizing Energy and/or Reducing Demand
... It reflects the European and German efforts to initiate a transformation of society toward decarbonization. However, recent surveys of this process show that there is no plausibility that Germany will reach its ambitious climate goals with current measures [13,14]. At the same time, these surveys highlight the role of social movements and public pressure on politics for a successful transition toward decarbonization. ...
This article addresses the appropriate place for and design of climate services drawing upon a case study of three different forms of climate service delivery in a coastal landscape in Northern Germany. Each of these forms addresses different audiences and provides different types of knowledge about climate change and a different orientation toward policy support. The three-part case study includes a regional, a municipal and a social climate service. Drawing upon this comparative, case-based research, I develop the idea of ‘slowing down climate services’, based on the ‘slow science manifesto’ introduced by the science philosopher Isabelle Stengers, by postnormal science and by political ecology as suggested by Bruno Latour. How does climate change become a matter of concern? Slowing down climate services means following the social life of scientific facts, engaging with the public and exploring ways to improve democratic and place-based decision making. I argue that there is an urgent need to overcome the big science orientation of climate services and to add what Stengers calls ‘public intelligence’, the integration of a sense of place and of the social, cultural, political and other performative aspects of climate change in specific landscapes.
... Despite increasing impacts from the social-ecological crisis and international policy goals to combat them (e.g. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or the Paris Climate Agreement), current policy responses have insufficient capacity to foster deep transformation such as decarbonisation (Scott and Gössling 2021;Stammer et al. 2021). Also, on the individual level, there is a lack of adequate proenvironmental response to the crisis, taking into account some of the most efficient climate-friendly behaviours such as car-free existence, cutbacks in air travel or following a plant-based diet (Ivanova et al. 2020). ...
Despite increasing efforts by research and policy to approach sustainability, human impact on nonhuman nature is intensifying the current social-ecological crisis. To foster sustainability transformation, there is a need to re-think qualities of human-nature connections which calls for relational discourses that provide alternatives to the predominance of mindsets postulating a human-nature divide. Against this backdrop, this conceptual paper introduces ‘human-nature resonance’ as a relational account that provides system, target, and transformation knowledge for sustainability transformation. The paper argues that the social-ecological crisis has one of its root causes in mute human-nature relations. On this basis, it is illustrated how the social-ecological crisis is only slightly affecting the behaviours of Western societies, which are subsequently failing to establish responsive human-nature relations. Considering that mute relations are fostered by making the world constantly available, the non-affective human-nature relation can be traced back to a lack of material and moral boundaries of nonhuman nature perceived as a lifeless object of infinite availability. For strengthening human-nature resonance, the paper calls for the vision of human-nature partnership neglecting hierarchical human-nature relations. To strengthen the human-nature partnership, nature will speak with an own voice by assigning her legal personhood, agency, and soulfulness. Furthermore, human self-efficacy needs to be strengthened to listen to nature by nourishing internal relational capacities such as compassion and self-worth. Future work on human-nature resonance can integrate basic and applied inter- and transdisciplinary research which links natural and social sciences, Western and Indigenous ontologies, and the scientific world of logos and transcendental wisdom.
... Deep decarbonization can be observed on institutional (Geels et al. 2017), industrial (e.g., Falter et al. 2020, and organizational levels (Liu 2014). Key societal drivers, including consumer preferences, intergovernmental policies, social movements, and knowledge transfer, will have to work in tandem with corporate responses, aligning in complementary, facilitative ways to foster a transition towards a low-carbon society by 2050 at the latest (Geels et al. 2017;Stammer et al. 2021 ...
Over the past 20 years, the literature on corporate responses to climate change has offered a vast array of theoretical and practical insights into organizational efforts to reduce business-related carbon emissions. However, it remains unclear whether these efforts will result in significant reductions of carbon emissions. Presently, it becomes crucial to understand, if, why, and how companies can effectively respond to the current challenges of deep decarbonization, defined as the process of emission reduction down to, or close to, zero to limit global warming. By means of a systematic literature review with 370 identified papers, we are able to categorize the main findings of the literature according to the four most common areas of investigation, including drivers, actions, barriers, and facilitators. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of the literature along these four areas of investigation according to two categories: conventional responses and deep decarbonization responses. The results show that the literature on conventional responses to climate change (n = 321) extensively covers all four areas of investigation; however, it only touches on the descriptive (i.e., ‘what’) aspects of decarbonization. The recent and emerging literature on deep decarbonization responses (n = 49) provides novel insights on the prescriptive (i.e., ‘why’ and ‘how’) aspects of deep decarbonization. However, this literature is restricted to mostly regional and industrial foci, and it does not connect drivers, barriers, and facilitators in a systematic way. Thus, we highlight key implications for future research and practice in order to effectively address corporate deep decarbonization.
... Though, it has been argued that the extreme high and low scenarios are less plausible and unnecessarily inflate uncertainty (Hausfather and Peters 2020). Communities of practice are forming to help inform relevant scenario selection by users (Stammer et al. 2021). ...
Species distribution models (SDMs) have been widely used to project terrestrial species’ responses to climate change and are increasingly being used for similar objectives in the marine realm. These projections are critically needed to develop strategies for resource management and the conservation of marine ecosystems. SDMs are a powerful and necessary tool; however, they are subject to many sources of uncertainty. To ensure that SDM projections are informative for management and conservation decisions, sources of uncertainty must be considered and properly addressed. Here we provide ten overarching guidelines that will aid researchers to identify, minimize, and account for uncertainty through the entire model development process, from the formation of a study question to the presentation of results. These guidelines were developed at an international workshop attended by over 50 researchers and practitioners. Although our guidelines are broadly applicable across biological realms, we provide particular focus to the challenges and uncertainties associated with projecting the impacts of climate change on marine species and ecosystems.
Climate anxiety, reflecting concerns about the negative impacts of climate change, is growing. Planning and action on individual specific climate risks could be a way to reduce personal climate anxiety.
We suggest a new Social Plausibility Assessment Framework to assess which climate futures are plausible (Aykut, Wiener et al., 2021). The approach is rooted in theories about social change, social inertia and path dependency, disruptive change, and transformation. This theoretical basis allows us to identify a set of key drivers that can be assumed to have a high impact on a given future scenario. A climate future is socially plausible if the empirical evidence about the key drivers point in the direction toward the chosen scenario, or at least strongly indicates that enabling conditions are building up that support this direction. To test the framework, we chose the scenario of deep decarbonization by 2050 which is our understanding of the necessary social change that would be needed for limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 °C, with reasonable likelihood of only a limited overshoot. We selected ten key social drivers that influence whether we achieve deep decarbonization by 2050: UN climate governance, transnational initiatives, climate-related regulation, climate protests and social movements, climate litigation, corporate responses, fossil fuel divestment, consumption patterns, journalism, and knowledge production. We defined enabling and constraining conditions for each of these drivers to be able to assess whether these drivers are moving towards or away from deep decarbonization, and how fast. We used extensive literature reviews, existing data bases, and our own research to establish the empirical evidence for the assessment. Unless the enabling conditions of social drivers change dramatically over the next few years, reaching worldwide deep decarbonization by 2050 is not plausible. We discuss implications of this assessment.
The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge. The Handbook starts by presenting some of the main core theoretical perspectives in the field. A section exploring some of the major social transformations that have recently affected social movements is then followed by one devoted to the analysis of micro dynamics of collective action. At the meso-level, movements’ cultures, organizational models, and repertoires of action are covered. Finally, the last sections address the political and non-political opportunities for social movements’ development, as well as at social movements’ effects on their environment.
This paper investigates the impact of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on carbon emissions and economic performance based on a matching methodology exploiting installation-level inclusion criteria combined with difference-in-differences. Installation-level data from national Polluting Emissions Registries in France, Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom point to a reduction in carbon emissions in the order of −10% between 2005 and 2012, in line with existing micro and macro evidence. Meanwhile, firm-level data on the 31 ETS-regulated countries shows that the EU ETS had no significant impact on profits and employment, and led to an increase in regulated firms' revenues and fixed assets. We explore various explanations for these findings.
This article addresses the broader question of the special issue by reflecting on
the coloniality of knowledge production in a context of global climate governance. We highlight key dynamics in which knowledge shapes climate policies and propose a decolonial approach at the nexus of academic knowledge production and policy formation by accounting for diverse ways of knowing climate justice. The article asks how to
develop a decolonial approach to researching climate justice in order to identify
the meaning-in-use of climate justice by affected people in what we describe as
sensitive regions of the Arctic and the Mediterranean. To this end, the article
proposes a research design that accounts for diverse ways of knowing and proceeds as follows: first, we will discuss how diverse ways of knowing are related
to global climate governance and climate justice; second, we outline our practicebased
research framework that addresses research ethics, decolonial approaches
and norm contestation; and third, we discuss how our approach can inform not
only the co-production of research in climate governance, but also current debates
on climate justice.
The ideological function of the postcolonial 'national', 'liberal', and 'developmental' state inflicts various forms of marginalisation on minorities, but simultaneously justifies oppression in the name of national unity, equality and non-discrimination, and economic development. International law plays a central role in the ideological making of the postcolonial state in relation to postcolonial boundaries, the liberal-individualist architecture of rights, and the neoliberal economic vision of development. In this process, international law subjugates minority interests and in turn aggravates the problem of ethno-nationalism. Analysing the geneses of ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states, Mohammad Shahabuddin substantiates these arguments with in-depth case studies on the Rohingya and the hill people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, against the historical backdrop of the minority question in Indian nationalist and constitutional discourse. Shahabuddin also proposes alternative international law frameworks for minorities.
Science journalism has never been more important, but citizens must sometimes struggle to find independent, evidence-based information. At the same time, conditions for specialist science journalists are becoming more difficult. This chapter discusses these conundrums and what they portend for the future of science journalism. It first tracks the evolution of the field, noting the long history of popular science and the presence of science stories in the mass media for as long as these channels have existed. The chapter then moves to reflections on characteristics of 21st-century science news content and opportunities and challenges confronting science journalists in this age of digital media and gig economy. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench; individual chapters, the contributors.