Assessing the plausibility of climate futures

Abstract

Abstract 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.