CLICCS

The way people perceive climate change, the way they communicate about it and discuss differing impressions and beliefs influences how societies envisage and negotiate the future climate. In such debates, responsibility for climate change and mitigation measures are negotiated, and accordingly, certain solutions are endorsed or rejected – imagined climate futures thus influence the plausibility of possible climate futures. The aim of B1 is to investigate how future climates are imagined in various social arenas (the media, activism, science and everyday discourse) and how these ideas circulate within and between these arenas. These arenas follow different communicative logics, but are interconnected in that they shape the understanding, ideas and solutions employed to tackle climate change. Debates in different regions of the world are rooted in local cultural contexts and globally interlinked.

To examine how climate futures are constructed and under what conditions they emerge and evolve, we ask the following questions:

• To whom do people, across different arenas, assign responsibility for mitigating climate change?
• What kinds of measures do they support, and which do they reject?
• How are conceptions of possible and plausible climate futures socially and culturally constituted and embedded within broader visions of the future and belief systems?