Abstract
Making sense of the implications of climate engineering approaches (solar radiation management, SRM; and carbon dioxide removal, CDR) at planetary scales occurs via a host of methods that calculate, project, and imagine the future in distinct ways. We take a systemic and synthesizing view of some of the (inter)disciplinary methods by which these futures are derived: climate and integrated assessment modeling, ‘deductive’ modes of social science inquiry, deliberative stakeholder engagement, and foresight-based scenarios. We speak to the epistemologies, objectives, and user communities surrounding these research practices, highlighting that different modes of constructing and interpreting evidence about an unformed future yield different kinds of results and signals for actions to be taken. We show how different methods for exploring ‘futures’ form an evolving history of how the risks of CE have been assessed (or constructed), and conclude by echoing calls for a stronger shared understanding of the practices and politics that underpin future-oriented research.
Highlights
In the governance of climate change, understandings and decisions in the present are often informed by evidence that speaks of the future
Advocacy and opposition has in the last decade been shaped by calculations, projections, and imaginings that richly depict the potential benefits and risks of these socalled forms of ‘climate engineering’ (CE)
The Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rely upon ‘a vast machine’ of computer models to simulate future climates—that is, they provide a legitimized mode for forming evidence on the risks of a warming planet, as well as for assessing the viability of strategies to reduce emissions (Edwards 2010)
Summary
We lay out some characteristics by which we can differentiate methods engaged in mapping the concerns and challenges associated with engineering the climate—the following section on the methods themselves should be read in this light. The second is on the kind of challenges that a method is deployed to investigate surrounding the development or deployment of CE techniques The dimensions of such inquiry can be (combinations of the) physical, techno-economic, and socio-political. In the CE space, this includes efforts to gauge climatic as well as societal dimensions of CE; quantitative modeling and more qualitative methods; and disciplines ranging from climate science to economic and sociopolitical inquiry (see “Climate models and integrated assessment models”, and “Deductive reasoning in socio-political inquiry”). A process set in opposition to ‘deductive’ thinking might be labeled as ‘deliberative’—though this term (like deduction) is shorthand for other adjoining concepts Attempts to cohere such a mode of investigation can be found in frameworks of emerging technology governance that highlight deliberative engagement as part of the concept of ‘anticipation’ (see “Deliberative stakeholder engagement and foresight approaches”). Futures should be more explicitly treated as experimental, user-generated, and as inclusive as possible, highlighting the disciplinary and political understandings that create them, and generating avenues for action that navigate a wide array of aims and possibilities
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