Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CliCCS)”(2019-2025)

The next few years of climate governance-in-the-making are critical: observing them closely allows us to identify and assess key drivers of long-term social trends towards or away from decarbonization, which form – individually and through their interaction at different governance scales – the backdrop of possible and plausible scenarios of future climate governance.
The Paris agreement departs from the Kyoto Protocol’s state-centered, top-down approach. It attempts to overcome the fragmentation of current climate governance through an architecture that relies on the global guiding norm of “keeping warming below 2°C”, and enables a universal and voluntary bottom-up process based on the cyclical submission and review of freely determined climate policy proposals by states – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – and other public and private entities.
The effectiveness of this process will crucially depend on the practice of the upcoming global review-resubmission cycles of the Paris agreement (2018-20 and 2023-25) and the local implementation of NDCs.

The project addresses both. It will focus on the following key drivers:

• The (in)capacity of the UNFCCC to align the expectations and preferences of heterogeneous actors
• The effects of regional norm conflicts and contestations on energy security and climate justice
• The social and political dynamics of policy-instruments that shape NDC formulation and implementation.

Assessing these drivers and their interplay across scales will enable us to identify plausible dynamics of climate governance which will be a necessary prerequisite for separating plausible from possible climate futures.

Chairs: Stefan Aykut (UHH), Grischa Perino (UHH), Antje Wiener (UHH), associated researcher: Jan Wilkens. Previous members include Dr. Tobias Zumbrägel and Alvine Datchoua-Tirvaudey.
Further information about project B2 can be found here.

Publications

In 2023, CLICSS published a new Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook. The purpose of the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023 is to systematically analyze and assess the plausibility of certain well-defined climate futures based on present knowledge of social drivers and physical processes. In particular, we assess the plausibility of those climate futures that are envisioned by the 2015 Paris Agreement, namely holding global warming to well below 2°C and, if possible, to 1.5°C, relative to pre-industrial levels (UNFCCC 2015, Article 2 paragraph 1a). Prof. Antje Wiener PhD has contributed the following chapters: 

• Wilkens, J., Pagnone, A., Gonçalves Gresse, E., López-Rivera, A., Engels, A., Marotzke, J., Aykut, S.C., Rödder, S., Sillmann, J. & Wiener, A. (2023) CLICCS Plausibility Assessment Framework. In: Engels et.al. (eds.) Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023. The plausibility of a 1.5°C limit to global warming—Social drivers and physical processes. Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Hamburg, Germany, 19-31 (link)
• Wilkens, J., Pagnone, A., Gonçalves Gresse, E., López-Rivera, A., Engels, A., Marotzke, J., Aykut, S.C., Rödder, S., Sillmann, J. & Wiener, A. (2023) An integrative approach to assess the plausibility of climate future scenarios. In: Engels et.al. (eds.) Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023. The plausibility of a 1.5°C limit to global warming—Social drivers and physical processes. Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Hamburg, Germany, 20-25 (link)
• Wiener, A., Aykut, S.C., Gonçalves Gresse, E., López-Rivera & Wilkens, J. (2023) The Social Plausibility Assessment Framework: from social drivers to the plausibility of deep decarbonization. In: Engels et.al. (eds.) Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023. The plausibility of a 1.5°C limit to global warming—Social drivers and physical processes. Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Hamburg, Germany, 26-28 (link)
• Zengerling, C., Aykut, S.C., Wiener, A., Bähring, J., d’Amico, (2023) Climate Litigation. In: Engels et.al. (eds.) Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023. The plausibility of a 1.5°C limit to global warming—Social drivers and physical processes. Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Hamburg, Germany, 104-110 (link)
• Wilkens, J., López-Rivera, A., Rothe, D., Schenuit, F., Wiener (2023) Knowledge Production. In: Engels et.al. (eds.) Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023. The plausibility of a 1.5°C limit to global warming—Social drivers and physical processes. Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Hamburg, Germany, 133-139 (link)

Addtitionally, CLICCS was featured in the book ‘How to Manage International Multidisciplinary Research Projects’ as a case study. The book chapter ‘Climate, Climate Change and Society (CLICCS)’ can be found here. The online resource, featuring Dr Jan Wilkens on the CLICCS, can be found here. The Professional Development Webinar Series with Prof Linda Hantrais can be found here.

In 2021, CLICSS published the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook, a new study on climate futures which represents the first systematic attempt to investigate whether a climate future with net-zero carbon emissions is not only possible but also plausible. The Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook adresses the question: Is it plausible that the world will reach deep decarbonization by 2050? The authors of the study examine plausibility for climate futures from a technical-economic perspective, but also with regard to the societal changes necessary for such a future. They conclude that deep decarbonization by 2050 is currently not plausible – the current efforts to bring about societal transformation need to be far more ambitious.

Antje Wiener, together with Stefan Aykut, has produced the “Social Plausibility Assessment Framework for Climate Futures” (Chapter 4) that attempts to overcome the dominant focus in scenario-based modeling on techno-economic drivers of change. The framework enables the analysis of the social drivers of decarbonization, their enabling and constraining conditions, and emerging resources and structures that could influence plausible future developments of these drivers. 

For further details read the entire chapter:

• Aykut, S.C., Wiener, A., Engels, A., Gresse, E., Hedemann, C., & Petzold, J. (2021) The Social Plausibility Assessment Framework. In: Stammer, Detlef et al. (eds.) Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2021. Assessing the Plausibility of Deep Decarbonization by 2050. Cluster of Excellence - Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS), Hamburg, 29-38.

Next to the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook, Antje Wiener’s recent publications on climate governance include:

• Wiener, Antje (2022) Climate, Climatic Change and Society (CLICCS). In: Hantrais, Linda (ed.) How to Manage International Multidisciplinary Research Projects. Edgar Elgar Publishing, 101-113 (link).
• Guest contribution on climate protests in the Hamburger Abendblatt (2020): Climate protests reveal where norms are violated (link).
• Wiener, Antje (2019) Stakeholder Access to Norm Validation: Whose Practices Count in Global International Relations? In: Peterson, M.J. (ed.) Contesting Global Environment Knowledge, Norms and Governance. London: Routledge, 127-143 (link).

Workshops & Conferences

The CLICCS B2 project group has organized a range of workshops. A first workshop, organized by project group B2 took place at the Centre for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) on February 6, 2019. The leading researches took rounds in introducing their research agendas and after a short report on the Climate Conference in Katowice further planning on research within the Cluster of Excellence was conducted.

In 2019, 2020 and 2021 several public talks and lectures were organized by the project group. These include:

• A virtual workshop on the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook "The Global Opportunity Structure for Climate Action. Theorizing Global Societal Agency towards Decarbonization". Click here for details. Contributions by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (American University, Washington, DC), Felix Anderl (Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung), Sören Altstaedt (Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe), Franziska Müller (Universität Hamburg) and Bruno Turnheim (INRAE and Lisis, University Paris-Est).
• An evening lecture with Klaus Dodds (Royal Holloway University of London) on "Using the "Global Arctic"? Climate change, geopolitics and non-state and indigenous/northern actors in the making and remaking of the "High North"". See here for further information. Klaus Dodds' lecture can also be found on the University's video-platform.
• An internal workshop with Hannes Hansen-Magnusson (Cardiff University) on "Arctic Governance and the Anthropocene". Click here for more information.
• An evening lecture with Cécile Pelaudeix (Sciences Po, CNRS & PACTE, Grenoble) on "International Law and Energy Resources Extraction in the Arctic: Assessing Innovative Legitimation Practices". Click here for further information.

Next to the above workshops, Antje Wiener has contributed to the following conferences:

• Academia Europea 2021 (Online): "Human Resources Challenges" (link).
• Millennium Conference 2021 (Online): "Societal Multiplicity for International Relations: Engaging Societal Interaction" (link).
• GPSA congress 2021 (Online): "Theorising with Those who Struggle for Deep Decarbonisation: Societal Agency Shaping the Global Opportunity Structure" with Stefan Aykut (link).
• ISA 2021 (Online): "Limited IR: Why are International Relations not global?" (link).
• 13th Pan-European Conference on International Relations - A Century of Show and Tell: The Seen and the Unseen of IR 2019 (Sofia): contribution to roundtable "Multiplicity: Revealing IR’s Hidden Commonality, Unleashing its Latent Potential" (link).
• Democracy & its Futures 2019 (Canada): "Turning the Global Liberal Order on its Head: From the 'Unfreedom of the Moderns' to the Global IR Project" (link).

Further information about CLiCCS, participating researchers and institutions can be found on the project's flyer and official website. Please click here for news about CLiCCS. Here is the contact form (PDF) for interviewees. 

For information about job announcements within the project “Dynamics of Climate Governance", please check the clusters website. Announcements for different positions will appear gradually.