Climate futures require politics

The purpose of this commentary is to suggest steps to improve the incorporation of political development in scenarios during the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) seventh assessment cycle (AR7) and beyond. For AR7, scientists have started to assess the literature on feasible and just climate and sustainability scenarios. The recommendations of the IPCC Workshop on the lessons learnt from the use of scenarios in AR6 point to the need for political science expertise to improve scenarios.

One key aspect highlighted in this report is political development, including the quality and effectiveness of institutions, rule of law, and maintenance of peace. These factors have not yet been incorporated systematically and quantitatively into the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to generate pathways of climate action that are assessed in the IPCC. Findings of the IPCC have substantially influenced global climate action. If the omission of political development biases the conclusions drawn from scenario analysis, then the real-world merit of the scenario-based findings is called into question.