Imagining Climate-Just Futures

“The European ”Imagining Climate-Just Futures“ project encourages citizens to imagine the climate-just future they want and take action to achieve it 💭🌱💜✊”

From the project’s Instagram

A major European initiative

Imagining Climate-Just Futures is a European project developing and supporting a wide range of activities giving space to citizens to reflect on climate futures. The ambition of this initiative is to engage more than 3,400 European citizens in over 50 activities and workshops of various kinds (awareness-raising, discussions, policy training, local actions, artistic and creative propositions…)

The consortium intends to achieve this goal through three main levers of change: activism, community and culture.

Among the targets of this broad project, young activists have a special place. The intent is to provide them with spaces of discussions, tools for navigating the world of policies.

The Catalan branch: Rubèn Suriñach Padilla, Xarxa d’Economia Solidària de Catalunya, Ecohub

We had the chance to discuss with Rubèn Suriñach Padilla who is involved in the Imagining Climate-Just Futures project. With XES (Xarxa d’Economia Solidària), they shared their knowledge concerning the facilitation of participatory workshops to build future scenarios, notably based on the Futurs imPossibles campaign. They also organized training sessions to help their European partners build up their skills in order to confidently develop similar projects in other countries, other languages.

Out of this process, they updated one of their previous methodological guides to enable people to spontaneously use the method and allow for even broader dispersion.

Building Participatory Future Scenarios for a Socioecological Transition Methodological guide 2024 Version

Construcció participativa d’escenaris de futur per la transició ecosocial, Guia metodològica, Versió 2024

The guide includes four participatory methods for future scenarios building:

• Scenario planning through drivers of change: identifying two major drivers of change for the future, participants form a grid of four quadrants with four different futures to explore and detail. They are then invited to identify the desirable and undesirable parts of each one and build strategies to favor the preferable futures.
• The Three Horizons model: working here on a single scenario, participants depict three different horizons representing the undesirable present issues (Horizon 1), the desirable dynamics for socioecological transition (Horizon 3), and the path between the two, comprising weak signals of the present (Horizon 2).
• Appreciative gaze approach: this exercise proposes to build an hopeful scenario of a future, based on a micro-utopia of the present: “What if we look at some current experiences and movements and project them with hope towards the future? What if, instead of pointing out their limits, biases and shortcomings, we imagined the potentialities they could deploy in favourable political, economic and cultural contexts?”
• Chronicles of the Great Transition: this last method makes the participants travel to a desirable future where they will create an extract of a newspaper describing how the Great-Transition happened in spite of all the challenges that were on the way.

Welcome to ecological realism

“We deal with more news every day related to extreme weather events, the cost-of-living crisis and water scarcity. What was terrible speculation about the future until now has become a harsh reality. This is what we call ecological realism. It’s now more crucial than ever to prepare for potential situations arising from the socioecological crisis.”

Ecological realism is set as the initial diagnosis sparking the need for more scenario planning exercises to take place everywhere with more and more people. It is also a diagnosis the facilitators have to convey to the participants, and that has to be taken into account during the workshop and the imaginative phases.

But the real goal, for XES and the Imagining Climate-Just Futures initiative, is not to create new narratives but to bring back collective dialogue to share the hopes and fears between citizens, and build grounded utopias.

Based on the scientific forecast, ecological realism-scenario planning methods particularly need to focus on “the consequences of climate change, the depletion of fossil fuels and critical resources to provide renewable energy and the impact of biodiversity loss.”

To be continued

For the moment, the guidelines for these utopian-thinking workshops have been sent to the partners in all the 5 countries participating in the “Imagining Climate-Just Futures” initiative. Over the next months, they are going to pilot the tools, facilitate various workshops and collect multiple pieces of evidence and testimonies of these discussions.

There are consequently no final results to be published yet.

Rubèn and his colleagues are organizing workshops with different youth organizations (scout movements for example) in Catalonia. Apart from facilitating workshops with youngsters, they also help the organizations build their strategic plan based on scenario planning, for them to pursue the utopian-thinking activities on their own.

L’Optimista, núm. 3

Here is a newspaper frontpage created with the methodology “Chronicles of the Great Transition” (not specifically with youngsters). The main topics coming out of this narrative are: the pharmaceutical industry and its capitalist downfall, the shortening of the working day, the transformation of an airport into a natural reserve, the nationalisation of housing stock and so on.