Threshold, budget and deadline: beyond the discourse of climate scarcity and control

Abstract

Since its inception, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has always been at the centre of the global climate debate. Its authoritative reports provide cultural resources for public understanding on the challenge of climate change. While the IPCC maintains its perception as a policy-neutral adviser, the IPCC in practice acts as a powerful discursive agent that guides policy debates in a certain direction by enacting influential scientific concepts. These concepts include three prominent metaphors—temperature threshold, carbon budget and climate deadline—that have been widely circulated across science, policy and advocacy. Three metaphors differ on ways in which the risk of climate change is expressed in terms of space and time. But they all constitute the discourse of climate scarcity—the cognitive view of that we have (too) little space and time to stay below a physical limit for avoiding dangerous climate change. This discursive construction of physical scarcity on climate change has significant political and psychological implications. Politically, the scarcity discourse has the risk of increasing a post-political tendency towards managerial control of the global climate (‘scarcity of politics’). Psychologically, however, scarcity has a greater risk of generating a ‘scarcity mindset’ that inhibits our cognitive capacity to imagine human life beyond managing physical scarcity. Under a narrow mindset of scarcity, the future is closed down to the ‘point of no return’ that, if crossed, is destined to be the end. To go beyond the scarcity discourse, a new discourse of emancipation has to be fostered. Climate change can be reframed not as a common single destination but as a predicament for actively reimagining human life. Such a narrative can expand our imaginative capacity and animate political action while embracing social losses.

The role of scientific knowledge in Extinction Rebellion's communication of climate futures

“…The second part involved fieldwork, as we performed participant observation over the two-week period of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), and as part of a larger group of researchers interested in global climate governance (Aykut et al, 2022). Taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, COP26 represented a focal point for climate activists across the globe to rally around.…”

“…Embedded in the storeys that activists tell is information on where agency lies, which themes claim attention, and how interfaces between knowledge and policy are supposed to work. We thus employ a narrative analysis of a combination of online documents from XR in the United Kingdom with problem-centred interviews embedded in participant observation of the movement's direct action over the 2-week period of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) and as part of a larger group of researchers interested in global climate governance (Aykut et al, 2022).…”

Land use trade-offs in China's protected areas from the perspective of accounting values of ecosystem services

“…A small change in economic activity or in environmental status, if crossing a threshold, may have enormous impacts (Farley 2012). Numerous studies have demonstrated existence of environmental or ecological thresholds, notably thresholds of biodiversity loss, ES degradation, and climate change, and many ESs (e.g., climate regulation and fish provision) are at critique state, hence small change in ESs' quantity may cause large changes in ESs' values (Asayama 2021;Farley 2012;IPBES 2019;IPCC 2018;Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005;Rockström et al 2009). ( 5) Even if marginal value is always diminishing, it is challenging and even infeasible to measure diminishment of marginal value in complex, highly interdependent economic systems and ecosystems (Ouyang et al 2020;Turner et al 1998).…”

A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

“…Although IPCC reports have never endorsed any specific temperature limit as a marker of 'dangerous' climate change, they have increasingly been framed around temperature increase as a unifying metric. This is seen, for example, in the so-called 'Reasons for Concern' framework, which was introduced in the Third Assessment Report (AR3) and lent credibility to the idea of considering climate impacts in relation to global temperature rise (Mahony, 2015;Asayama, 2021;see Chapter 21).…”