Climate-Related Dynamics of Social Systems

Leaders: Anita Engels (UHH), Andreas Lange (UHH), Prof. Achim Oberg (UHH)

Theme B is guided by the question how dynamics of social systems shape actions addressing climate change, considering diverse spatial and temporal scales.

While investigating climate-related dynamics of social systems, Theme B connects to Theme A’s insights into climate variability and extremes. Theme B furthermore provides knowledge about social capacities and limitations that feed into understanding adaptation strategies in Theme C.

Highlights
Developing the Social Plausibility Assessment Framework and the assessments of 10 social drivers of deep decarbonization of society for the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook.

List of Projects

• B1 Social Constructions of Climate Futures – Is key to understanding how local communities around the world engage with the transnational climate discourse.
  Chairs: M. Brüggemann (UHH), S. Rödder (UHH), M. Schnegg (UHH)
• B2 Dynamics of Climate Governance: Norms, Contestation, and Policies – Analyzes the practice of the global review-resubmission cycles of the Paris agreement and the local implementation of NDCs.
  Chairs: S. Aykut (UHH), G. Perino (UHH), A. Wiener (UHH)
• B3 Conflict and Cooperation at the Climate-Security Nexus – Looks at how the climate-security nexus is empirically manifested and conceptualized, at societal coping mechanisms and at the role of the nexus in future orientations.
  Chairs: C. Hentschel (UHH), J. Scheffran (UHH), U. Schröder (IFSH/UHH)
• B4 From Company Responses to Decarbonization of the Economy– Addresses the questions if, why, how, and how fast are companies moving towards deep decarbonization.
  Chairs: T. Busch (UHH), A. Engels (UHH), M. Paschke (UHH)
• B5 Coping with Climate-Related Uncertainties and Variabilities – Asks how social reactions respond to climate change and can be guided in presence of variable and uncertain conditions in both the climate system and the social system.
  Chairs: M. Drupp (UHH), A. Lange (UHH), J. Marotzke (MPI-M)

Accomplishments
Overall, the goals for the first phase of CLICCS have been reached within Theme B. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to the progress in Theme B. As most of the projects originally relied on empirical fieldwork in various countries around the globe, travel restrictions hindered this in many cases. Empirical and experimental work was postponed, some field visits and data acquisition processes were (temporarily) derailed. Specifically, field work planned to take place in South Africa and India as well as in the Arctic and Mediterranean regions have so far not been possible, while other trips, e.g., to observe the COP in Glasgow, were possible, and other empirical work could be transferred to the digital world, such as interviews with companies in the panel study undertaken in project B4.