Climate policy decision making in contexts of deep uncertainty - from optimisation to robustness

Is seeking certainty in climate sensitivity measures counterproductive in the context of climate emergency? The case for scenario planning

“…Moreover, underpinning the application is the insight that a key aspect of uncertainty is our responses and thus effective management of uncertainty is married to our own commitment to efficacious conduct in order to help realise one possible future and close down another. This deliberative dynamic is common to SFDF approaches, as Workman et al (2021) also emphasise.…”

“…(UNFCCC, 1992: 4) There is, for example, fundamental uncertainty associated with many of the new technologies being developed to facilitate a green economy and to enable mitigation (Rueda et al, 2021;Workman et al, 2021;Dyke et al, 2021;Morgan, 2020). Are they possible in principle, scalable, commercial and (given the urgency of the carbon budget problem) timely?…”

“…Appropriate framing of climate change uncertainty may depend on the stakeholders involved and the specific nature of each policy context. This implies a role for flexible tools for this purpose, tools, moreover, that facilitate the management of degrees of uncertainty and fundamental uncertainty; tools which encourage prudential activity, subject to the precautionary principle and with due consideration to the high impact and irreversible nature of climate change (see Workman et al, 2021Workman et al, , 2020. We would argue that scenario planning has this potential, although much of the work done so far using scenario planning (beyond that previously referenced) has not been particularly sensitised to the required foci.…”

“…Since its basis is plausibility, not classical probability (which can inadvertently present the future as a fait accompli), it can readily accommodate key features of the climate change problematic as they appear to governments and populationsmatters that are irreducible to probabilistic risk and resulting from multiplicative and exponential effects leading to accelerating impacts. Still, while having a long history (Derbyshire, 2020b), scenario planning remains a nascent field (Workman et al, 2021(Workman et al, , 2020, though it is growing in prominence.…”

“…Moreover, given that uncertainty itself can have different effects on policy and behaviour and these depend in part on how evidence and argument are framed, we would argue there are multiple reasons to develop a scenario focused decision framework (SFDF) (Derbyshire, 2022(Derbyshire, , 2020aDerbyshire and Giovannetti, 2017). Unlike standard predictive approaches, SFDF have the great advantage of being exploratory, deliberative, inclusionary, diverse and developmental and this can encourage integrative problem solving policy as well as empowerment and persuasion of stakeholders, which in the case of climate emergency is everybody (for work that emphasizes aspects of this see Workman et al, 2021Workman et al, , 2020Sharmina et al, 2019;Moallemi and Malekpour, 2018). We illustrate this using the Intuitive Logics approach.…”