Infrastructuring the Future: IIASA and the Making of Climate Scenarios since the 1970s

• In Event: Climate Infrastructures II: Knowledge Infrastructures

Abstract

Even in the face of its immediate consequence and of the urgency to act, climate change is mostly discussed in the future tense. Our understanding of climate change largely rests on projections and scenarios – of temperature change, sea-level rise, greenhouse gas emissions, technology costs… Mitigation scenarios have become prominent as the focus has shifted to action. Often encountered as graphs displaying an arrays of “roads-yet-to-be-taken”, these scenarios are complex sets of interrelated numerical variables produced by a specific kind of computer models, Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). There is ample literature on the “anticipatory politics” of such scenarios and their role in delineating the space of plausible futures. But these scenarios do not only shape climate science and politics, they are also part of an epistemic infrastructure to navigate the future. This presentation seeks to characterize this epistemic infrastructure in its material, institutional and historical dimensions. To do so, I will focus on the role played by one nodal point in this infrastructure: the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), founded in 1972 in Laxenburg, Austria as a bridge between East and West. One of the first international hubs of climate and energy research, IIASA published a detailed analysis of the climate consequences of energy choices in the late 1970s; it now hosts one of the main IAMS as well as the IPCC emission scenarios databases. It is thus a fascinating entryway to analyze the establishment of an interdisciplinary knowledge infrastructure on energy and climate futures.

Author

• Béatrice Cointe, CNRS