B1 - Social Constructions of Climate Futures

Project description: The way people communicate and debate perceptions and beliefs about climate change affects how societies imagine and negotiate climate futures. These debates assign responsibility for causing climate change and for mitigating it, and advocate for or reject specific solutions – imagined climate futures thus affect the plausibility of possible climate futures.

Most recent research findings:

• We contributed to the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook (2021) with a chapter on how “Journalism” can be a social driver towards deep decarbonization, and we provided input on “Diverse ways of knowing in a changing climate” and “Social movements”.
• Our book “Global warming in local discourses: How communities around the world make sense of climate change” (Brüggemann & Rödder, 2020) explores how local communities engage with the transnational climate discourse via a range of case studies drawn from around the world, reflecting diverse cultural and geographical contexts.
• Our qualitative study on the media’s framing of climate futures across news magazines in four countries (Guenther, Brüggemann, & Elkobros, 2021) identified three frames: Global Doom, Local Tragedies, and Sustainable Future.
• We started theorizing about the circumstances in which environmental movements use technoscientific knowledge as a resource, rather than critically framing it as a risk (technology) (Rödder, 2020).
• Our collaborative ethnography at the COP26 (Glasgow, November 2021), including 55 problem-centred interviews with activists inside/outside the conference spaces, delivers an in-depth understand of activists’ narrations and how they come about (Aykut et al., 2022).
• We explored everyday constructions of climate futures based on a survey of 28 ethnographic cases (Schnegg, O’Brian, & Sievert, 2021) and found that people mostly see human behavior as a cause of climate change; however, in most cases, it is them and their behavior held responsible for weather change.
• We found that the scientific understanding that climate change is human-induced merges with local ontologies in which people are responsible for the weather and unfortunate weather is conceived to reflect an imbalance in human-environmental relationships. Within this framing of self-blame, different understandings of climate change causes often co-exist (Schnegg, 2021a).
• To theorise why some aspects of scientific models do not travel, we developed a responsive phenomenological framework with the main intervention to describe different ways of knowing as a reaction to the demands and the affordances the social-ecological environment makes (Schnegg, 2021b).

Chairs: Michael Brüggemann (UHH), Simone Rödder (UHH), Michael Schnegg (UHH)

Team: Lars Guenther (UHH), Youssef Ibrahim (UHH), Christopher Pavenstädt (UHH), Coral O'Brian (UHH), Inga Janina Sievert (UHH), Jana Lüdemann (UHH), Fynn Schröder (UHH)

Participating Researchers: Chris Biemann (UHH), Anita Engels (UHH), Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw (UHH), Martina Neuburger (UHH), Miriam Prys-Hansen (GIGA), Beate Ratter (UHH)

Climate communication blog: www.climatematters.de