There is another way in which science can be conservative and that is in it´s perspective and bias:
“It’s a Very Western Vision of the World”
How ideological bias and structural inequality prevent the IPCC from exploring possibilities for fundamental transformation
The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) not only shows that urgent and drastic changes will be necessary to avert even more devastating consequences of global warming than those which are already unavoidable, but also mentions, for the first time, the possibility or even necessity of reducing demand, i.e. the use of energy and resources.
This reality, however, is not reflected in the scenarios included in the IPCC report, as climate experts Yamina Saheb and Kai Kuhnhenn point out. Juliane Schumacher spoke with both of them to understand more about how IPCC reports are compiled, whose interests and biases they reflect, and how to address the deep inequalities in funding and access to the scientific process.
The third part of the IPCC report was published in April, with a focus on mitigation scenarios and policies. Yamina and Kai, you’re both familiar with the IPCC process or have even contributed to the report. Was there anything in it that surprised you?
YS: Yes, there was! We succeeded in including the concept of “sufficiency” in the Summary for Policymakers — that’s actually revolutionary. We even have a definition on page 41, footnote 60.
How is sufficiency defined?
YS: Sufficiency denotes all the policy measures and daily practices that avoid the demand for energy, materials, water, and land, while providing wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries.
This means putting a cap on the overconsumption of the North to allow the South to develop, with another cap on the overconsumption of the richest in the North to allow low-income communities to access decent living standards.KK: I was surprised by Chapter 5, which mentioned the inequality of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s good that this is getting discussed.
If you look at the IPCC reports over the years, there is usually a statement on growth in some part of the report, something like: “economic growth is a driver of emissions”, or “economic growth does not correlate with wellbeing in saturated societies”. But then you have the modelling side, and that side has a very strict bias: “We will model economic growth until the end of times.”
So, there was always a certain kind of schizophrenia between the different parts of the IPCC. That is even stronger in this report, because there is so much talk about reducing demand, sufficiency, or even degrowth,
but it’s not reflected at all in the modelling part....
The people in this chapter were responsible for developing the IPCC scenarios?
YS: No, we had a call — or rather, we had three calls — for scenarios. The IPCC doesn’t develop its own scenarios.
This is important to know: people say “IPCC scenarios”, but actually these are scenarios assessed by the IPCC authors. The assessment of long-term scenarios was led by the authors of Chapter 3. So we had three calls for scenarios: one for long-term scenarios, one for short-term, and one for the building sector. We got more than 3,300 scenarios, out of which 700 were Paris-compatible, meaning that you are between 1.5° and 2°C by the end of the century.
If you consider only those aiming for 1.5°C by the end of the century, the number of scenarios drops to 230. I’ve been looking for sufficiency measures, meaning measures to avoid the demand for energy and materials, in those 230 scenarios — you know the expression, “searching for a needle in a haystack”? —and I found just two. And those two scenarios don’t even mention the word sufficiency.
KK: Oh, wow.
YS: This is such a scandal! At the global level, there are two other scenarios that include sufficiency. One of them is the Societal Transformation Scenario developed by Kai and his colleagues, and the other is the one developed by Julia Steinberger and her team in Leeds called “Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario”.
These two scenarios, however, didn’t make it to the IPCC database, because to be able to submit to the database you need to have resources — especially human resources. Realistic scenarios for a liveable planet like the ones developed by Kai and Julia are often developed by very small teams, sometimes on a voluntary basis, putting in lots of hours during their free time.
The IAM models, by contrast, are developed by huge teams — 40, 60 people — and they have plenty of little hands to do the work. The IPCC database has been conceived for this majority. I contacted Kai and his team and Julia and asked them about submitting their scenarios, but it wasn’t possible for either of them.
Because the datasets have to be prepared in a specific format?
YS: Yes, and that’s a lot of work. So Julia’s and Kai’s scenario couldn’t make it into the IPCC report. But even if they made it into the IPCC, this wouldn’t have meant they would be among the five scenarios selected in the end. We were a group of more than 60 people discussing and selecting the scenarios, but
the majority of these scientists are all from the IAM community, and IAM scenarios are based on growth — they are driven by continuous growth.How are these IAM models made?
YS: Integrated Assessment Models have existed for about 30 years. They’re a specific form of scientific computer modelling. A huge community works with these models, with associations in different parts of the world, one of the most important is the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.
All these models anticipate a continuation of growth. At the same time, they’re driven by supply-side decarbonization and not by demand reduction. In our chapter, we clearly show what it means if we ignore the demand side and don’t consider sufficiency measures. Between 1990 and 2019, the improvement of efficiency in the building sector led to reducing emissions by 49 percent. However, the lack of sufficiency measures — people living or working in bigger buildings and using more and larger appliances — has led to an increase of emissions by 52 percent.
It is also highly problematic that these scenarios do not seek convergence between the Global North and Global South in terms of access to decent living standards.
They expect a continuation of economic growth in the North, but less so in the South?
YS: I’ll give you an example from my area of expertise, buildings. Today, the floor area per capita in North America is around 60 square metres, while it’s below 10 square metres in whole of Africa. In some African countries it is even below five, they don’t have proper housing at all. But these scenarios usually expect continuous growth, so in some scenarios, by 2050 they reach 65 square metres per capita in North America, and the Africans reach 10 square metres per capita. Why the hell would I accept this as an African? It’s just not acceptable.
From which disciplines are these modellers coming from, and where are they based?
YS: Most of them are based in the Global North. It’s a very Western vision of the world — neo-colonial, as Jason Hickel wrote. I understand that, today, things are like that. This is the world we inherited. But what’s really shocking for me as an European-African citizen, who is from both sides of the Mediterranean, is to see that they project a world for my son in 2050 that is similarly unequal to my world today.
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https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46631/its-a-very-western-vision-of-the-world