Zero carbon imaginaries: Official and fictional

Realising a zero carbon future after more than a century of steady growth in greenhouse gas emissions will require deliberate transformation of key social-ecological systems, particularly energy, transport, and agricultural systems. Imagination plays a crucial role in this transformation; before we can create new zero carbon systems we need to imagine them. As the Director of the Imaginary Foundation puts it: ‘Imagination is the…beginning of all achievement. To imagine is to perceive many potential futures, select the most delightful possibility, and then pull the present forward to meet it’ (Silva, 2011).

But who decides what ‘the most delightful possibility’ is? Beneath the apparent agreement over the goal of a zero carbon future lies deep contestation. Radically different social imaginaries are competing to make their vision of a zero carbon future reality (Levy & Spicer, 2013). While there has been much attention to the material dimensions of the climate crisis, it is only recently that scholars have begun to explore the ways in which our collectively held visions of the future both limit and enable positive transformations (Levy & Spicer, 2013; Milkoreit, 2017; Moore & Milkoreit, 2020; Riedy & Waddock, 2022). What this work demonstrates is that the climate crisis is as much a crisis of meaning and imagination as a material crisis.

This presentation reports on an ongoing project to analyse the social imaginaries that give meaning to our collective response to climate change. Specifically, I explore zero carbon imaginaries - shared socio-semiotic systems of cultural values and meanings envisioning a zero carbon future and appropriate pathways towards that future. I examine and compare two sources of zero carbon imaginaries: official publications by governance institutions tasked with responding to climate change; and creative works of hopeful climate fiction in emerging genres such as solarpunk, hopepunk and thrutopia.

Speaker Biography:

Chris Riedy is Professor of Sustainability Transformations and Associate Director Learning and Development at the Institute for Sustainable Futures. Chris is an action researcher who has worked on sustainability transformations for 30 years. He uses sociological and political theory, narrative theory and futures thinking to design, facilitate and evaluate practical experiments in transformative change towards sustainable futures. Chris is an Advisor to the Transformations Community and a Senior Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance project. He was a Contributing Author on the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment and is on the Editorial Boards of Futures and Global Social Challenges Journal.

Speaker website link:

https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Christopher.Riedy