Governing climate futures

Climate change is one of the most profound, complex transboundary and transdisciplinary sustainability challenges facing us today. Governance of climate change requires action at all levels and from all actors, as well as multiple governance strategies and approaches. Increasingly, the key challenge is how to collectively imagine, anticipate and govern climate futures, which are characterized by extreme uncertainty and potentially highly unequal spatial and temporal distributional impacts. ENP research explores and assesses key aspects of this anticipatory climate governance challenge. These include the role of science, knowledge, information and transparency in public understanding of challenges and solutions and in national and multilateral governance arrangements, including those under the United Nations. We also examine governance challenges associated with needed, large-scale dietary shifts, as well as controversial new options such as climate engineering; as well as the functioning of carbon markets and carbon trading in the Global South; the role of new ICT technologies in responding to climate migration; and the role and functioning of key tools of anticipation (such as foresight, modelling and scenario building) in designing anticipatory climate governance arrangements.