Abstract
Non-technical summaryIn the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways.
Highlights
Following the adoption of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, all parties are obliged to offer proposals of concrete contributions to the climate change mitigation challenge
In line with research and innovation (RRI) scholars, we suggest that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) open up and integrate a broader range of approaches when it comes to framing and assessing the future impacts of emerging technologies – including but going beyond Integrated Assessment Models (IAM)
We have suggested that the politics of anticipation poses new challenges to scientific assessments, necessitating new consideration of the IPCC’s own role in climate politics
Summary
Following the adoption of the Paris Agreement of December 2015, all parties are obliged to offer proposals of concrete contributions to the climate change mitigation challenge. There have been concerted calls for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to reconsider its role in a new global climate policy regime shaped around the national implementation – and international monitoring – of highly heterogeneous, domestically-determined mitigation policies. The IPCC’s new leadership has called for a focus on climate solutions to support the Paris Agreement, including an anticipated Special Report on the impacts of 1.5 °C of warming (IPCC Special Report [SR]1.5) (p.xi [1]). We examine some of the challenges that may arise from what we call the politics of anticipation This is when science is asked to project and evaluate the performance of policies in the future. We discuss particular challenges raised if the IPCC is shifting along the spectrum from cause and impacts into future solutions by examining recent controversies over the inclusion of negative emissions technologies (NETs) in posited pathways of climate change.
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