Imagining a climate-change future, without the dystopia

Abstract

Most popular narratives about climate change are negative, playing off people’s anxieties. In the movie The Day After Tomorrow , a climate disaster precipitates the fall of civilization. Margaret Atwood's novel MaddAddam is set in a society shattered by an ecological catastrophe. In Aaron Sorkin's HBO TV series The Newsroom , an Environmental Protection Agency researcher proclaims, “a person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet.” The “cli-fi” genre is so popular that the Chicago Review of Books has an entire column (“Burning Worlds”) dedicated to it. A 3D visualization of Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, NY, showing coastal inundation from Hurricane Sandy, is part of an effort to explore which buildings and residents may be at risk from future storms. The Urban Systems Lab layers present-day data and future visions of cities, tracking social, ecological, and technological systems. Image credit: Urban Systems Lab. But a group of scholars is trying to resist such negative thinking, even while grappling with serious consequences for both humans and ecosystems. People from government, academia, and nonprofits are joining community representatives as part of the Urban Resilience to Extremes (UREx) Sustainability Research Network to rethink how society envisions and plans for climate’s effects in the decades to come (1). At a 2017 workshop, issues ranging from flooding to droughts to social justice were on the agenda. “It’s difficult to know where you are going if you don't have a clear vision of what that [future] should look like, in particular, a positive vision that you could get excited about and motivated to really make a transformative change,” says Timon McPhearson, director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School in New York City. McPhearson and his colleagues at UREx are helping city planners assemble positive, …