Scalar dissonances, knowledge-making, sense of urgency, and social narratives about the future. Contours of the climate change debate in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This article aims to situate climate change by examining three scalar dissonances between “global” and “local” knowledge-making and policy action. The three dissonances – the knowledge production and policy meaning-making nexus, the politics of urgency, and the politics of building socio-climatic future pathways – engage deeply with the emergent literature that deals with climate change from the perspective of Human Geography Studies and the Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS). By posing guiding questions and through examples primarily from Latin American countries, this paper lays out a research agenda that advances geographical sensitivity, allowing us to better understand the “other” geographies of climate science production, circulation, and information use. Furthermore, it highlights the unresolved political and interdisciplinary tensions in accommodating global narratives in regions of the Global South.

RESUMO

Este artigo tem como objetivo situar a mudança climática examinando três dissonâncias escalares entre a produção de conhecimento e a ação política nos níveis “global” e “local.” As três dissonâncias (1. o nexo entre a produção de conhecimento e a formulação de políticas, 2. a política da urgência e 3. a política de construção de caminhos socioclimáticos futuros) estão intimamente ligadas à literatura emergente que aborda as mudanças climáticas sob a perspectiva dos estudos de Geografia Humana e Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS). Por meio de exemplos, principalmente de países latinoamericanos, e de perguntas orientadoras, este artigo estabelece uma agenda de pesquisa para avançar na construção de uma sensibilidade geográfica que estuda a dinâmica em “outras” geografias da produção, circulação e uso de informações climáticas. Ele também aponta para as tensões políticas e interdisciplinares não resolvidas em torno da compreensão e da apropriação de narrativas globais nas regiões do Sul Global.

RESUMEN

Este artículo tiene por objetivo situar el cambio climático examinando tres disonancias escalares entre la elaboración de conocimiento y la acción política a nivel “global” y “local.” Las tres disonancias (1. El nexo entre la producción de conocimiento y la formulación de políticas, 2. La política de urgencia, y 3. La política de construcción de vías de futuro socio-climáticas) se vinculan estrechamente con la literatura emergente que aborda el cambio climático desde la perspectiva de los estudios en Geografía Humana y de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad (CTS). Por medio de ejemplos, principalmente de países latinoamericanos, y de preguntas orientadoras, este documento establece una agenda de investigación que permite avanzar en la construcción de una sensibilidad geográfica que estudie las dinámicas en “otras” geografías de la producción, circulación y del uso de la información climática. Asimismo, esta agenda señala las tensiones políticas e interdisciplinarias no resueltas en torno al entendimiento y apropiación de las narrativas globales en las regiones del Sur Global.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge-making
• uses of information
• urgency
• future socio-climatic pathways

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Produção de conhecimento
• usos de informações
• urgência
• trajetórias socioclimáticas para o futuro

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Producción de conocimiento
• usos de la información
• urgencia
• trayectorias socio-climáticas al futuro

a. Introduction

The tensions surrounding the representation of climate change in scientific discourse and its local understanding and interpretation were initially pointed out over two decades ago by contributions from STS scholars, Human Geographers, and Environmental Social Scientists (Demeritt 2001; Hulme 2010; Jasanoff 2010; Lahsen 2004; Shackely and Wynne 1995; Shackley 2001). However, the frictions and consequences arising from the encounter between these two scales of understanding remain insufficiently explored and understudied in the Global South,¹ particularly in Latin American countries. While important research about this has been conducted in the case of Brazil and India (Hochsprung-Miguel 2017; Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004; Mahony 2014), there is still a notable gap in our understanding of this topic.

To situate climate change² analysis is still a pending task and I argue it impacts at least two facets. On the one hand, it requires examining how global climate facts and policy framings are mobilized and used by and through knowledge-making institutions (e.g. World Meteorological Organization, WMO), scientific networks (e.g. the World Climate Research Program, WCRP, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC), and political international cooperation (e.g. the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC and the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP) within various political and cultural contexts. This argument aligns with prior research on the spatial turn within the sociology of knowledge (Powell 2007; Shapin 1988), the geography of science (Demeritt 2001; Finnegan 2008; Livingstone 2003; 2005; Mahony 2021), and more recently, within the latter, in the analysis of how scientific knowledge production shapes and influences public discourses on climate change (Hulme 2010; Mahony and Hulme 2018).

Within these analytical traditions, “space” is not merely an additional variable of interest in producing science and circulating it beyond scientific communities. On the contrary, they consider “placing knowledge” as integral to understanding and grasping power dynamics, for instance, in making climate change a scientifically and politically relevant topic. Thus, it becomes worth asking in what ways do space, scale, place, and region shape scientific practices, rather than only “localizing” and focusing on a particular cartographical representation of where scientific evidence is produced.³ More precisely, as David Livingston suggested, we should reflect on the question “How do particular spaces matter in the production, consumption and circulation of science?” (2005, 100). These questions are central to debates over the distribution of concern about climate change impacts which are historically situated and extend beyond scientific facts (Mahony and Hulme 2018). Additionally, they pertain to debates over how geographies of climate science production have been built (Edwards 2010; Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Mahony 2014; Mahony and Hulme 2018). Furthermore, they also trigger reflections about the configuration of the geopolitical debate on this phenomenon, who gets to join it in an active way and who leads it (Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004; Pasgaard, Dalsgaard, and Maruyama 2015).

On the other hand, the second aspect of situating environmental change involves shifting the epistemological approach through which we understand and grasp climate and its (scientific and non-scientific) representations. Instead of analyzing climate change as an abstract phenomenon, removed from individual experiences, predominantly shaped by scientific language and carbon metrics (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Hulme 2011; Romero-Lankao 2007), scholars such as Demeritt (2001), Lezama (2004), Hackmann, Moser, and St. Clair (2014), Castree et al. (2014) and Oreskes (2015) have advocated for plural ways to understand, place, and frame this phenomenon and its consequences. They encourage shifting away from a top-down perspective, which prioritizes planetary visions of climate at the expense of its local understanding and interpretation, towards examining local disagreements and contestation over it within science and society.

In this paper, I focus on the critiques of the scientific representations of climate change and the tensions they have generated locally, an area that remains understudied in many Global South countries⁴ (Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019). I argue that situating climate change extends beyond looking at the countries’ rankings of mitigation ambitions, often standardized on a scale of sufficiency and insufficiency (CAT 2021) or looking at their climate adaptation gap through metrics such as the number of locally enacted plans, regulations or laws (UNDP 2022). Rather, it entails delving into the intersection of global facts with local (scientific and political) realities, and how this dynamic integrates into public agendas – a dimension that quantitative indicators frequently overlook or fail to capture. Therefore, the contributions of Environmental STS studies and the Geography of sciences on this topic can significantly enrich its analytical and empirical scope. Through this approach, this paper aims to propose a research agenda for the Geographies of science on climate change for Latin American countries. This research agenda contributes to the discussion of three key convergent debates around situating global climate knowledge-making and policy in the Global South (Figure 1). By engaging with the debates over (1) The nexus between knowledge production and policy meaning-making, (2) The politics of urgency, and (3) The politics of building socio-climatic future pathways, I examine the unresolved tensions around these debates, primarily drawing on examples from Mexico and Brazil.

Figure 1. The three key debates and scalar dissonances between global and local climate change.

I argue for a plural and critical debate across disciplines and countries on these topics in order to grasp the contested ways in which environmental change has been locally framed by scientific communities and policymakers. To achieve this, this article engages with the “interactional” co-production school within STS (Jasanoff 2004; 2010). Despite the saliency of the “constitutive” co-production of actor-network theory (ANT) in Human Geography, which studies the mobility of scientific knowledge-objects (Latour 1986; Mahony and Hulme 2018), the notion of “immutable mobiles” that enables scientific knowledge to travel as a stable object in different cultural settings does not correspond to the kind of movements and disguised contestation processes considered in this discussion. As Martin Mahony and Mike Hulme argued, “understanding science in motion is often less about standardization and the secure transfer of ideas and artifacts and more about understanding more unstable geographies of encounter and hybridization between different forms of knowledge and practice” (2018, 398). Thus, the “interactional” co-production approach is useful for this analysis because it draws attention to how certain climate representations reach stability and persuasive power through interactions between what is considered “the best climate science production” and the conditions required to produce local climate knowledge and circulate it within wider communities. I draw upon the concept of “scalar dislocations” of Jasanoff (2010) to describe the mobility and encountering between “global” and “local” climate change. Here, I reframe it as “scalar dissonances” that remain unresolved within the three key debates presented. I argue that the dislocation of climate change has occurred and now we are dealing with its multiple dissonances (i.e. the ones here presented).

The article is structured into three sections. The first section examines the concept of scalar dissonance, which produces local climate knowledge and ignites its political significance. Drawing on previous research in Brazil and India, I argue that linking the global representations of this phenomenon to specific realities has been a subject of contestation, which remains largely unknown in most Latin American countries. Section two expounds the dissonances induced by the politics of urgency. It explores some of the consequences of replicating an uncritical sense of the global climate emergency across geographies, particularly in those dealing with impoverishment, security issues, and deep inequalities in the Global South. The third section introduces the politics of building pathways toward a social future. This third scalar dissonance is explained by the convergence of the production of scientific climate knowledge and the sense of urgency in shaping the way societies imagine and build narratives about their future. This is still a novel topic in Latin American countries that has largely been absent from environmental STS studies and critical social sciences work, despite its potential to recentre “the social heart of global environmental change” as aptly phrased by Hackmann, Moser, and St. Clair (2014) in their work’s title. Each of these debates offers guiding queries to expand the analytical reflection and explore its further applications (Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler 2017; Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004).

1. The knowledge production and policy meaning-making nexus

Earth is an open system, which scientific communities can only partially understand due to the inherent uncertainties entailed in fully grasping its system functions. One of the main challenges in the field of climate sciences is grasping the Earth system feedbacks and how they can unfold in the future under a set of environmental and emission assumptions (Edwards 2010). The analysis of the climate system involves understanding the relationship between different systems such as the atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere, the lithosphere, and the biosphere. Additionally, it involves assessing alterations to these systems resulting from external influences, whether they are driven by human and non-human activities such as the intensive use of fossil fuels, land-use change, rapid urbanization, and the solar cycle or volcanic eruptions. Given the complex and dynamic processes that shape the climate system, it is virtually impossible to study it in a comprehensive and experimental manner (Oreskes, Shrader-Frechette, and Belitz 1994). Therefore, climate scientists elucidate future possibilities of climate change and its associated impacts through the application of sophisticated physical and mathematical abstractions, represented in numerical climate models. Without numerical models, climate would be empirically ungraspable. Notably, global complex models (see Jalota et al. 2018) such as the Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) and the Earth System Models (ESMs) have not only reconstructed past climate patterns but have also contrasted them with observational data. Furthermore, these models have generated projection for future climate scenarios under various possible emission scenarios and climate variables.

Yet despite the significant increase in the accumulation of global climate information in the last four decades, this growth has not been produced evenly across countries (Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler 2017; Knutti 2019; Lemos, Kirchhoff, and Ramprasad 2012). Producing global modeling demands a robust knowledge infrastructure, involving the establishment of networks of climate experts and supercomputer labs to process vast quantities of data, and computing coding to produce climate simulations (Edwards 2010). Additionally, “infrastructural geopolitics” are required to unveil the power imbalance in building climate science and mobilizing it in order to make climate at a local scale governable (Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019). Historically, the production of global climate models has been led by research centers mainly based in the US and Western European countries since the 1970s (Edwards 2010). More recently, in the past decade, countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa have produced their own Earth System Model and, therefore, have joined the elite modeling research group (see Hausfather 2019, and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6).⁵ These geographies depict the asymmetries between mainly affluent countries, with well-established industrialization processes and technological development producing complex models, and the countries using the global model outputs to study environmental change relevant to their regions. However, little is known yet about circulation, consumption, and appropriation dynamics of global information among the countries that are not producers of GCMs⁶ in the Global South (Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004; Mahony 2014).

The history of the uneven distribution of climate research centers (e.g. as captured by CMIP6) can be traced back to World War II and the early Cold War geopolitics. During this period, developments in computing and the scientific specialization in meteorology fostered the expectation that natural and social systems could be grasped, modeled, and potentially controlled (Edwards 2010; Heymann and Dahan 2019; Mahony and Hulme 2018). Other climate research backgrounds involve reclaiming a privileged position from which to draw future climate possibilities, particularly from a Latin American standpoint, as exemplified by the Brazil Earth System Model (BESM). According to Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves (2019), the BESM was developed by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) with the goal of asserting scientific sovereignty and overcoming the geopolitical imbalance in producing climate science as well as shaping the climate political discussion in their own terms (Escobar 2013).

Beyond the political, cultural, and historical particularities that explain thoroughly the geographies of global climate modeling, the expansion of these research centers is not a primary concern for countries that are not producers of GCMs (Skelton, Porter, and Dessai 2017; 2019). Rather than developing local (super)computing power, Open access to global model outputs, climate simulators, and emulators, has mobilized their use in countries seeking to translate them into relevant sources of information (i.e. into regional scenarios, national risks assessments, and national adaptation plans). Thus, building global models is not necessarily a current priority in Latin American countries; instead, many countries are concentrating on ways to apply this information at a local level (Conde et al. 2011; Estrada, Mendoza-Ponce, and Murray 2023).

Although not every country sees the necessity of developing their own GCM, it is undeniable that global complex models serve as powerful heuristic tools for understanding environmental change and envisioning future living possibilities. They act as interface tools bringing climate science and policy together, mediated by experts in regional scenarios and communities focused on impact and vulnerability, all aiming to translate complex model outputs into useful sources of policy information (Skelton, Porter, and Dessai 2017). Simultaneously, these models can operate as “anchoring devices in science for policy” (Van der Sluijs et al. 1998). Drawing from the work of Van der Sluijs et al. (1998), consensus on climate-changing trends, particularly the rising global mean temperature, can serve as an anchoring device in science, justifying specific policy actions, such as the pursuit of a net zero emissions mitigation agenda or the transition to electromobility (Godínez-Zamora, Victor-Gallardo, and Angulo-Paniagua 2020). Therefore, grasping how climate science and policy interact is relevant, as is analyzing the political uses of climate evidence (Lahsen, de Azevedo Couto, and Lorenzoni 2020, Lahsen and Ribot 2022). At this juncture, where climate science and policy intersect, different logics of framing and addressing the phenomenon converge and create tensions. Through the example of Brazil, which is the Latin American country that leads STS on climate knowledge-making (Hochsprung-Miguel 2017; Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004), these interactions between science and policy are illustrated.

1.1 Linking global climate scientific representations to local realities

Climate change narratives, supported by the IPCC assessment reports, represent the world, at least discursively, as a category of analysis capable of blurring the diversity between regions and their asymmetries (Hulme 2010). These narratives also establish new spatial and temporal scales of social concern that entail the Earth as a whole, compelling us to think about the end of the century. Thus, the future becomes a pressing present for “humanity”. It is as if “humanity” were a synthesis category used to reasonably describe the wide diversity of societies worldwide, their unequal contributions to this phenomenon, their differentiated impacts, and their capacities and ways of addressing this issue (Heymann 2019). The way in which these narratives are portrayed by the scientific community through the IPCC assessment reports transforms the perception of human activity and its long-standing consequences for the Earth (Hulme 2011). This is illustrated by statements about humanity triggering the Sixth mass extinction or the Anthropocene extinction (Kaiho 2022; Walsh 2022). It not only depoliticizes the discussion around which human activities are triggering these consequences, driven by whom, and situated in which specific geohistorical landscapes, but it also reshapes the relationship between humanity and the environment. As Hulme (2017; 2023) argues, the social encounter with nature has been narrowed by a generic distinction of villains and saviors of the Earth, which has triggered ethical reflections about what is more socially sensitive to nature and what is not. This division tends to take out of the analysis the cultural practices and different framings of experiencing nature and the environment. This way of framing climate change also influences the way of thinking about the political arrangements, finances, and institutions to make environmental change governable. This is depicted by the number of milestone international agreements (e.g. the Earth Summit in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and the Paris Agreement in 2015), the institutions built (e.g. the WMO, the UNFCCC, the IPCC, and the WCRP) and climate funds (e.g. the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), and the Adaptation Fund (AF)) dedicated to ensure the flow of knowledge, politics, and investment from “developed” to “underdeveloped” countries to produce a sense of progression in the climate agenda.

Thus, these narratives produce a “universal knowledge” regardless of where it is applied and who is using it. As Hulme suggested, “rather than the view from nowhere, global kinds of knowledge claim to offer the view from everywhere” (2010, 559). “Universal facts” constructed a view of climate that, as Jasanoff (2010) argues, is detached from local meaning-making to produce a totalizing way of grasping and understanding it. Thus, climate scientific representations, depicting warming trends and heat maps, were particularly detached from individual experience, situated analysis, and social subjectivities during the 80s when this phenomenon gained momentum in the international political agenda. This was especially evident in the USA, where in 1988, climate scientist, James Hansen, based at The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), gave a Congressional testimony on climate change to raise political awareness of its risks (Heymann 2010; 2012). Since then, the study of climate change has been based mainly on abstractions of this phenomenon. Understanding climate requires interpreting it in statistical terms. Through the language of meteorological data collected over 30 year periods, through models, tendencies, projections, estimations, computing codes, and scenarios, the climate system became intelligible to lay audiences in various forms. However, linking these abstractions with the local interpretation of climate could trigger unforeseen clashes. Lahsen (2004) examined the interaction between climate scientists and policymakers in Brazil, in association with the modeling groups at the IPCC before Brazil built its Earth System Model. She extensively analyzed the seemingly uncontentious consensus over global and regional climate supported by Brazilian scientists at the beginning of the century. Her qualitative analysis highlights the numerous layers at play in establishing a shared scientific and political view on climate. For instance, she explains how the colonial legacy engendered distrust over climate evidence portrayed by the Northern countries and their strategies for addressing this phenomenon. Climate scientists in Brazil, interviewed by Lahsen, stressed their disagreement (although not loudly voiced in international meetings) about the over-emphasis on the part of Northern countries on tackling the sources of black carbon (i.e. wood, field residue, and cow dung), primarily used in developing countries for cooking and heating, as a key priority in the mitigation agenda. As Lahsen argues, “In this way, [they were evoking] a normative framework that distinguishes between “luxury emissions” and “survival emissions”” (2004, 162). According to Lahsen, Brazilian climate scientists and policymakers disagreed with many of the assumptions made by the IPCC. Nevertheless, they did not feel empowered to challenge these assumptions due to their economic dependence (at that time, climate science heavily relied on international funding). Additionally, they wanted to remain involved in the IPCC meetings, despite feeling that their voice was not considered relevant in the discussions or even sometimes sensing patronization or marginalization because they were perceived as “Indians” rather than “English-speaking scientists” among a Northern group of countries (Lahsen 2004, 160). Recent research conducted by Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves (2019) demonstrates important endeavors to overcome this geopolitical divide between the North and the South when it comes to framing climate change, achieved through the development of the Brazilian climate model (BESM). However, beyond Brazil, there remains a limited understanding of how other Latin American countries are encountering the global climate narratives in their scientific and political agendas.

Another example of how climate facts failed to seamlessly integrate with other cultural contexts was elaborated by Mahony (2014). Through interviews with scientists, policymakers, and journalists in India in 2012, he traced the reactions to a flaw estimation made by Working Group II of the IPCC in 2009 regarding the Himalaya glaciers receding faster than in any other part of the world, estimating their disappearance by 2035 or sooner. This statement prompted a national political strategy to build an Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment (INCCA) in order to develop their own assessment of their glaciers and foster a political strategy to position India in the international discussion. Despite the geopolitical movement that aimed to assert Indian sovereignty in this discussion, largely driven by the head of the Ministry of Environment and Forest at that time, it paradoxically also reinforced the proximity of India with the UK-based climate models and US-led climate policy initiatives (Mahony 2014; 2017). Both the Brazilian and Indian cases illustrate the encounters and discounters of global and local scientific and political cultures.

In this context, scientific narratives are produced and legitimized by global institutions, as mentioned previously, which are powerful entities enacting epistemic and social authority through their reports and the information products over the lay public (Hulme 2012). However, the scientific facts presented in these documents and the narratives they built do not adapt to different geographical scales, cultures, and fragmented-polarized societies without encountering frictions and processes of appropriation regarding this phenomenon (Bridel 2023; Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004). As Lahsen argued, “universalizing discourses can serve problematic political programs by hiding contradictions, ambiguities and complexities of socio-political realities” (2004, 151), as seen in the case of Brazil. There was a division among scientists and policymakers at the beginning of the 2000s with differing “international vision”; this “cognitive difference” was deeply rooted in political identities and experiences of colonialism, which permeated the climate change debate (2004, 157). As Whyte (2019) says about Anishinaabe peoples, primarily located in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States, their ancient stories spoke of the extreme weather events, environmental changes, migrations to different ecosystems, and society's capacity to transform their regions. This was before meteorological and climate knowledge were the authorized voices to discuss and understand the weather and climate. Another example comes from Anna Bridel’s study (2023) of the civic epistemologies of the marginalized in hurricane risk perception in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her study depicts different visions about risk, vulnerability, and responsibility over hurricanes. Contrasting positions between fishermen and government officials (scientists and experts in risk management) center on the way they frame the risk. Fishermen were fearing not earning money when the storm arrived, while authorities were focusing on the risks of losing lives. Although, paradoxically, both reinforced the belief that the disaster was a biophysical or natural one, for which no one could be blamed or held responsible. The textures of disagreement and convergence are critically analyzed in Bridel’s work (2023). However, other studies about local perceptions of weather patterns, extreme events, and climate change often focus on repeating the main scientific narrative (Logroño and Muñoz 2019; Viguera et al. 2019), neglecting to explore alternative framings that are not rooted in science and Northern visions on this phenomenon. This leads to exploring critical questions about understanding Earth’s change without marginalizing other regional ways of thinking about climate change (Hulme 2009; Hulme 2010). Additionally, it prompts us to consider alternatives that move away from top-down climate framing, which tends to downplay geocultural differences (Hulme and Dessai 2008). Drawing from Jasanoff’s paper published in 2010, I will now expand on the idea of the scalar dissonances in producing local climate science and making this phenomenon governable at a local scale (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The scalar dissonance of knowledge production and policy meaning-making nexus.

1.1.1 Producing local climate science

Scalar dissonances occur when local political attention primarily focuses on global climate evidence, neglecting the situated information regarding its regional impacts. This phenomenon has been highlighted as the “geographical imbalance” in climate information production, as noted by Pasgaard, Dalsgaard, and Maruyama (2015) and Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves (2019). Their research reveals profound asymmetries between affluent countries, which share climate research agendas due to geographical or climate proximities, as well as their closely aligned political cultures and trade interests, and less affluent countries that grapple with other pressing social issues and lack globally recognized climate research institutions.

Furthermore, as argued by Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler (2017), the production of climate science is also linked with long-standing imbalances among world regions, particularly between the Global North and the Global South. These historical inequalities, that such a division represents, partly explain the predominant production of climate information originating from Northern countries, which primarily study their own geographies of concern, while fewer authors focus on the Global South within research institutions in these Northern countries (Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler 2017; CMIP6).

I argue that these asymmetries may lead to a preference for particular approaches in the development of climate science. This preference includes a bias toward the use of specific methods such as dynamical downscaling rather than statistical downscaling depending on who has the international network to develop more advanced science even if this does not entail building capacities and improving science production in the country (as observed by Conde et al. 2011; Estrada et al. 2012). It also involves the use of particular software tools like MAGICC and PRECIS, as exemplified in the case of Mexico and documented by SEMARNAT-INECC (2012, 2014a; 2018). Furthermore, the choice of output models is influenced by the country financing the development of regional climate scenarios,⁷ which consequently impacts the selection of their GCM, as is described by SEMARNAT-INE (1997; 2001; 2006). These preferences may become the standardized way to produce the so called “best climate science” possible in Latin American countries (SEMARNAT-INECC 2018, 9). However, these preferences could pose technical difficulties in the absence of a robust climate knowledge infrastructure, potentially leading to flawed local climate change assessment and estimation. As Conde et al. (2011) and Estrada et al. (2012) argued in the case of the Mexican Climate Scenarios informing the 4th National Communication of Climate Change.

Thus, political relationships and financial constraints shape the choice of tools for making climate change graspable. Building “the best science possible” is not only a normative query but a very practical one as well, as illustrated before. The ways of knowledge production influence how we perceive, understand, and frame this phenomenon within local scientific communities as well as in the larger communities (Hulme 2011; 2012; Mahony 2014; 2017).

Therefore, the process of making environmental change relevant within countries requires exploring the tensions it generates (Hulme 2009). These tensions can be explored, for instance, in the renewable energy projects developed in the Istmo de Tehuantepec, the Southwest part of Mexico, from 2015 to 2018, during the Enrique Peña Nieto administration, a center-right government that ruled the country from 2012 until 2018. Another example can be traced to the mega hydroelectricity project of El Bala-Chepete in the Amazon Region of Bolivia during the mandate of former president Evo Morales (2006–2019), who has led a left-wing populist and indigenous political party in Bolivia since then. Both case studies are discussed in section 2 and illustrate the scalar tensions inherent in implementing renewable energy transitions at a federal level while conflicting with local communitarian values and concerns.

It is important to note that countries grappling with pressing social issues, such as poverty reduction, profound economic and social inequalities, as well as addressing the social causes of insecurity, among other challenges, cannot easily prioritize addressing climate change (Bayón 2019; Gasparini, Cicowiez, and Sosa-Escudero 2012). Is not a straightforward task, especially when the local impacts of climate change remain poorly understood (Conde et al. 2011; Estrada et al. 2012). Nonetheless, this does not diminish the importance of reducing social vulnerabilities, whether viewed through a climate perspective or not.

An additional approach to the geographical imbalance perspective (Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler 2017; Karlsson, Srebotnjak, and Gonzales 2007; Pasgaard, Dalsgaard, and Maruyama 2015) is offered by Maurice Skelton, Porter, and Dessai (2017; 2019). They suggest that the conventional binary divide between the Global South and North inadequately captures the current dynamics of power relations, economic trajectories, and the development of climate science in countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa. These countries have established climate research centers that generate Earth System Models tailored to their regional climates and Earth’s changing patterns. Consequently, this regional divide raises questions when zooming in and comparing specific variables among nations or within elite groups. Skelton, Porter, and Dessai (2017; 2019) propose expanding the imbalance perspective by exploring “how” countries use, appropriate, and customize global information. Furthermore, studying countries that are non-producers of GCMs can add further geographical nuance to our understanding of these asymmetries.

Therefore, I argue that the race for improving the existing global complex models diverts attention away from how scientific communities customize their outputs and findings, ultimately influencing adaptation policies. The rise in the use of pre-configured software, such as simulators and emulators, and open-access global climate model outputs that can run on regular computers, have facilitated the consumption of information, regardless of where it was produced. However, this does not address the underrepresentation of physical dynamics and regional processes in tropical areas (Zadra et al. 2018). Nor does it explain how global climate facts are adjusted, tuned, and bias-corrected to integrate local orographic and climatic processes essential for building regional climate change scenarios. This approach has also failed to raise awareness about a country’s capacity to appropriate and use global information (Skelton, Porter, and Dessai 2017; 2019).

I propose some guiding questions in order to build a geographical sensibility within this discussion, drawing insight from the field of environmental STS. In essence, to situate this analysis within Latin American countries, we should ask the where, who, and how of climate information production, circulation, appropriation and use (Livingstone 2005). This entails grasping the institutional-geopolitical knowledge infrastructure that local climate experts rely upon, including its historical trajectories, source of funding, institutional support, connections with climate networks abroad, as well as the epistemic and social authority of the climate community. These aspects should be individually considered in each specific case (Edwards 2010; Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Hulme 2012). Furthermore, it is essential to uncover how climate change could be discursively acknowledged as a major concern within government while simultaneously struggling to foster local scientific understanding.⁸ In this context, to inquire about what consequences it carries in informing local adaptation strategies is also of paramount relevance. Finally, instead of echoing mainstream global climate slogans about “reducing the gap between climate knowledge and policy action,” it is crucial to first explore how the relationship between science and policy is constituted within each geographical context in Latin America.

1.1.2 Making climate governable at a local scale

There is also a dissonance produced by the encounter of global and local ways of making climate governable (Mahony 2017). This entails exploring the dynamics in which this phenomenon becomes relevant on local agendas, as well as tracing the political uses (and misuses) of climate information (Jasanoff and Martello 2004; Lahsen and Ribot 2022; Lahsen, de Azevedo Couto, and Lorenzoni 2020). Understanding local political processes related to making sense of environmental change is closely linked to local scientific knowledge and its intricate and multifaceted relationship with policymaking (Tang and Dessai 2012).

Governing the Earth's change not only depends on expert consensus over the changing climate, which is legitimated by international institutions, but also needs concerted policy actions that are supported by societies governed by these institutions. Thus, when governing environmental change at the local level, it is essential to engage with reducing social vulnerabilities while also addressing its pre-existent causes. Simultaneously, this process must transform our consumption and production of energy fuel-based systems. For this task, scientific facts and accumulated evidence are integral components of a larger set of political factors that are disputed when building a climate change agenda. Factors such as weighting the decision to address pressing social concerns against fulfilling an international commitment, even if they entail detrimental or uncertain local consequences. For example, consider the reinforcement of vulnerabilities that can result from certain adaptation strategies implemented from a top-down perspective. As illustrated by Schipper (2020), in the case of women in Peru having access to microcredits to start their own development projects, this led to aggravating domestic violence from their male partners. This issue extends to mitigation strategies as well. For instance, energy transition in Mexico fostered territorial conflicts in indigenous communities due to the expansion of wind parks in the Istmo de Tehuantepec (see section 2), an area known for its substantial wind power potential in the country (Martínez-Mendoza, Rivas-Tovar, and Fernández-Echeverría 2020; Mejía-Carrasco 2017; Zárate-Toledo and Fraga 2016).

The interface study between climate science and policy has gained significant attention among social scientists, human geographers and STS scholars (Casas and Pérez-Bustos 2019; Findlater et al. 2021; Lemos, Kirchhoff, and Ramprasad 2012; Tang and Dessai 2012; Vessuri and Cancino 2018). In the 1970s and 1980s, the prevailing assumption was that the availability of scientific evidence played a primary role in mediating the relationship between these two spheres. It was believed that robust data supporting anthropogenic climate change and its impacts would potentially lead to better public decisions aimed at reducing carbon emissions. The lack of credibility and political action regarding environmental change was attributed to the deficit information model, which assumed that the public lacked sufficient information and understanding of this phenomenon to take appropriate action (Suldovsky 2017).

To address this deficit model, scientists focused on enhancing the systematization of meteorological and climate data, expanding their research on climate impacts in areas such as agriculture, water provision, biodiversity, coastal zones, cities infrastructure, among others. All of these efforts were aimed at providing evidence and raising social awareness about climate risks. This model operated on the assumption of a linear, stable, free of tensions relationship between the scientific communities that produced, for example, regional climate change scenarios and the individuals assessing impacts and vulnerabilities to inform sectoral or risk prevention decision-makers (Tang and Dessai 2012).

However, despite the accumulation of a vast body of climate knowledge over the past four decades and the objectives outlined in international climate conferences, the design and implementation of climate policies have fallen short of the required effort, as indicated by IPCC assessments (IPCC 2018; 2021; Knutti 2019). This suggests that contrary to what the deficit model assumed, the relationship between science and policy is mediated by multiple factors, including political momentum, the state of the relationship between these two spheres, the actors involved, and the shaping of their relationship, among others. These factors collectively affect how science is socially perceived especially in terms of its credibility, legitimacy, salience, and its ability to provide usable information for decision-making (López Cerezo and Lujan López 2000; Tang and Dessai 2012).

This partially explains why simply increasing the availability of evidence and climate data has not always resulted in improved policymaking across all geographical contexts. The persisting concern regarding the dynamic interactions between these two spheres led to rethink the issue in the 90s and the early twenty-first century. Instead of framing it as the climate deficit information problem, the focus shifted towards the notion of “political unwillingness to act” despite the wealth of knowledge available. This is the main stance of the so-called climate knowledge-action gap (Knutti 2019). Scholars like Lemos, Kirchhoff, and Ramprasad (2012) proposed ways of bridging the gap between these two spheres by improving science communication with various users of climate information. Meanwhile, others, such as Porter and Dessai (2017), conducted critical studies on the co-production processes of building climate-usable information, raising questions about the challenges of speaking different disciplinary languages and bringing together communities with different interests and ways of understanding climate change. Notably, both perspectives have focused on European or USA contexts.

I argue that both the information deficit model and the knowledge-action gap model fail to account for geographical variations in the production of local climate evidence. These models neglect the diverse forms of scientific understanding of climate impacts found across countries. Moreover, they do not consider how climate evidence accommodates to different political cultures where evidence is negotiated alongside other pressing social issues (Jasanoff and Martello 2004). Consequently, the local relevance of this phenomenon has been overshadowed by a predominant focus on the deficit or political unwillingness models.

The second aspect at stake concerns the political framing and uses of climate information for electoral purposes or to obscure responsibility in disasters falsely attributed to climate change (Lahsen and Ribot 2022; Lahsen, de Azevedo Couto, and Lorenzoni 2020; Sarewitz 2004). Climate change is becoming a wider umbrella to describe weather-climatic extreme events. The most recent IPCC report in 2021 issued a warning about the more frequent and intense climate impacts worldwide. This has fostered the political attribution of climate extreme events, often regardless of the scientific evidence supporting this attribution, a phenomenon that Lahsen and Ribot (2022) draw our attention to. They have investigated the political manipulation of climate information in Brazil, where some extreme weather events have been attributed to climate change based on political rather than climatic criteria. Through their examination of the flooding and landslide in Rio de Janeiro in 2011 and Santa Catarina in 2008, they illustrate how a climate-centric framing of disasters can obscure political responsibilities in two ways: (a) by failing to address precarious living conditions for people residing in landslide zones, and (b) by neglecting efforts to reduce vulnerabilities in these areas. The political attribution of these events as climate disasters aims to divert attention from prior poor livelihood conditions and shift media focus onto the consequences of climate change, thereby amplifying fear of its “unexpected impacts.” This framing serves to normalize the catastrophe, deflecting direct responsibility for inadequate housing policies and the prevention of wider vulnerabilities, according to these authors. In these cases, the role of the climate scientific community was instrumental in demonstrating that the climatic-centric framing did not contribute to explaining the root causes of vulnerability, which were the primary factors behind the disaster (Lahsen and Ribot 2022; Otto et al. 2015).

Another example of this political attribution to socio-political phenomena is the framing of climatic migrations. Authors such as Ramos and Yanes (2018), Oswald (2014), Selby, Dahi, and Fröhlich (2017), Christiane Fröhlic and Tobias Ide (2019), and Lustgarten (2020) suggest that narratives around migration, primarily attributed to climatic factors, oversimplify historical and multi-causal processes, straying far from reality. The displacement of many people in Central America, the Sahel, or Syria does not primarily result from climatic reasons. Although climate plays a role, this is not more important than factors such as precarious living conditions, poverty and insecurity (Lustgarten 2020; Oswald 2014; Selby, Dahi, and Fröhlich 2017). Therefore, environmental change and its impacts are only one additional element, not necessarily the most relevant, in explaining this phenomenon among a myriad of other factors. In addition, this simplified explanation of complex political, economic, social, and cultural problems carries the risk of endorsing misguided measures to address migration (Selby, Dahi, and Fröhlich 2017).

Analyzing critically how climate and policy interact and examining the political implications of uses of the evidence as observed in public opinion and media, constitute as integral aspect of framing the climate change debate. Beyond the factual underpinning, the political discussion over climate demands attention. Therefore, grasping how and who mediates in this interface is helpful to situate this debate. To achieve this, it is essential to analyze how local political actors frame, adapt, and appropriate discussions of climate change in order to translate them into public decisions. Additionally, a comprehensive understanding of regional (social and climatic) tipping points, climate and social vulnerability hotspots that inform decision-makers, and the potential for establishing local climate scientific consensus is crucial. Subsequently, it is important to explore references to local climate scientific findings in adaptation plans and risk assessments. Do climate science and policymaking effectively communicate with each other? How do local climate scientists disseminate their findings to potential users? How do policymakers express their climate information needs or concerns? Are sectoral development plans intersecting with the local climate agenda? How does the sense of climate urgency emerge in local policy agendas? These questions serve as useful guides for empirically situating the political and scientific dissonances triggered by global narratives over the Earth’s change.

2. The politics of urgency

The second scalar dissonance arises when framing the concept of climate urgency. It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into the prior debates surrounding the politics of urgency in non-climatic disasters, such as earthquake and volcano responses, as well as terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, there are crucial contributions available from in-depth examinations of emergency settings and the analysis of risk perception from various perspectives, sociocultural contexts, and colonial-racialized histories. Notably, Whyte (2019) and Ben Anderson et al. (2020) illustrate how discussions about emergency settings, when transitioning from a national perspective to a local one, often obscure deeply ingrained conditions of marginalization. Their work engages with everyday life threats, the intersection of different inequalities, and the different temporalities of grasping the sense of urgency (Anderson et al. 2020). Environmental STS and geography of science scholars can enlarge the scope of their analysis by exploring further the connections between these discussions and the environmental change debate. However, for the purposes of this discussion, I focus on the impact of narratives on the urgency of addressing this phenomenon.

Climate change has become a ubiquitous issue that exerts a significant influence on various major global disruptions (Hulme 2023 ). These disruptions span a wide spectrum, including weather events (Garlati 2013), famine (Janssens, Havlík, and Krisztin 2020), migration (Oswald 2014), warfare (Karnieli et al. 2019), and exacerbated inequalities (Cappelli, Costantini, and Consoli 2021). It has become the lens through which we perceive and address societal challenges. This ideological shift, as argued by Hulme (2023), has placed climate as a “self-sufficient” narrative capable of explaining political, socio-ecological, and ethical dilemmas. This aligns also with the discussion presented by Lahsen and Ribot (2022) regarding a climate-centric approach to framing disasters and shaping our thinking and perspectives on global challenges.

The term “climatisation,” coined by Hulme (2023), describes this oversimplification of the understanding of complex problems, such as those aforementioned, which lack singular and unproblematic solutions. Furthermore, it diverges our attention and depoliticizes the interpretation, for instance, of long-standing structural inequalities that shape the world. These inequalities play a significant role in understanding migration dynamics and the geographical patterns of famine, for example (Selby, Dahi, and Fröhlich 2017). The omnipresence of climate concerns is fueled by a sense of urgency depicted in scientific reports and the call from international organizations, emphasizing the need for rapid transformation before “we run out of time!” or before the consequences become unbearable for future generations (ClimateClock 2020; Harvey 2023; IPCC 2018; Sarewitz 2004). The representations of the sense of urgency are mobilized through scientific tools. Heat dynamical maps, prominently showing the alarming rise in temperatures over the next decades in vivid red, as well as graphs illustrating the projected increase of CO² emissions, alongside images vividly depicting the destruction caused by more frequent and intense extreme weather events (Hulme 2012; IPCC 2018; 2021). These representations underpin the growing demand for climate action, which is being driven by social movements, non-governmental organizations, the scientific communities, and political actors (Hulme 2011; 2023). Thus, slogans demanding “we need action now!”, and “science has spoken” (Harvey 2023) emanate from the top-down assumption that scalar dissonance over the knowledge production and policy meaning-making nexus has been overcome or is irrelevant when it comes to enacting policy action. Additionally, this framework lacks sensitivity in understanding the wider aspects of climate, not necessarily shaped by science, such as indigenous knowledge of past weather events that have posed challenges to their livelihoods and their experience in overcoming them and building a new relationship with the environment (Whyte 2019). These important concerns have to be recognized without leaving aside that climate change introduces new challenges that have not necessarily been experienced in the past. However, this does not mean that histories and memories of disasters cannot contribute to thinking about the articulation of social responses in the Anthropocene era (Svampa 2018).

In this context, I focus on two main features arising from the politics of urgency (Figure 3). The first one concerns the effect of displacing social reflexivity over the causes and consequences of Earth’s change. As Aarti Gupta argues (Cornell and Gupta 2019) the “tyranny of the urgency” surrounding this phenomenon casts a shadow over other pressing social issues. Thus, this term depicts the centrality of arguments about cutting (now!) GHG emissions causing climate change. This accentuates the narrow vision centered on carbon metrics reduction, neglecting the historical causes of deep socioeconomic inequalities that drive climate change. This framing of urgency has resulted, for instance, in investment flows from affluent countries to less affluent ones, aiming to mitigate their GHG emissions in impoverished regions (Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler 2017). However, these countries have mobilized fewer economic resources for the development of their own specific strategies, a trend that has only gained prominence in the last decade. A prime example is Mexico, where international funding for mitigation projects has far exceeded resources allocated to adaptation projects between 2014 and 2018 (see INECC 2014b; 2018b). Therefore, the concept of “tyranny of urgency” is thought-provoking and serves as a valuable tool to explore the daunting consequences of reproducing uncritically the urgency across Latin American geographies (Whyte 2019).

Figure 3. The scalar dissonance of the politics of urgency.

The second feature is the mobilization of “fear” through the representation of catastrophe and the political uses of these emotions to orient policy actions. An example of this phenomenon can be observed in the rapid decarbonization of the energy matrix aimed at mitigating potential further climatic impacts (Villavicencio-Calzadillo and Mauger 2021). This sense of urgency underpins alarmist discourses concerning the future (Hulme 2011; 2023; Svampa 2018). Despite their lack of scientific accuracy, these discourses tend to disseminate a climate of fear that is susceptible to misuse (Lahsen, de Azevedo Couto, and Lorenzoni 2020 & Sarewitz 2004). Through examples of mitigation strategies in Mexico, Bolivia, and South America’s so-called “lithium triangle” encompassing Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, I will demonstrate how these elements of the politics of urgency operate.

In 2013, Mexico’s Congress enacted a major and highly contested Energy Reform aimed at permitting private national and international participation in the country’s oil and gas industry, along with the renewable energy sector. This represented a radical shift from the policies implemented in 1938 when President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the oil and gas industry (Eljuri and Johnston 2014). The reform was framed as a response to the imperative to address climate challenge and expand the scale of renewable energy projects within the country (Clavellina-Miller 2014; Presidencia 2014). Therefore, it can be argued that these reforms were, in part, framed as a response to the (mitigation) climate urgency and to accomplish the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). From that time until 2018, the transition to renewable energies led to a surge in auctions for the construction of wind energy parks, primarily by private international companies in the Istmo de Tehuantepec region. However, the rapid expansion of wind parks in this area exacerbated preexisting territorial tensions and gave rise to new disputes over land ownership, land uses, and access to land (Dunlap 2021; Mejía-Carrasco 2017). Energy transition in the Istmo region failed to adequately consider the impact on local livelihoods, such as the disruption it caused to the traditional fishing practices of indigenous Ikjoot (Huave in Spanish) communities in San Dionisio del Mar. These communities reported being unable to fish in the lagoon due to the presence of wind turbines infrastructure (Mejía-Carrasco 2017).

This case prompts us to reflect on how the politics of urgency associated with climate policy often overshadows its adverse social consequences. It invites us to reflect whether the mitigating GHG emissions should be pursued at any social cost. As Kyle Whyte argues, “environmental injustices aren't any less likely in actions taken in the spirit of urgency to adapt to climate change and mitigate a 2°C rise” (2019, 2). In consideration of Whyte's excerpt, I will emphasize the prevalence of mitigation that climate urgency often conveys. This emphasis primarily centers on framing the issue in terms of reducing emissions, rather than delving into the complexities of unveiling the colonial legacies and addressing the impoverishment experienced by numerous countries that are grappling with intersecting social vulnerabilities (Barra 2021).

Another example of the controversial consequences stemming from the politics of urgency can be traced in the controversial mega hydroelectricity project of El Bala-Chepete in the Amazon Region of Bolivia (Villavicencio-Calzadillo and Mauger 2021). This project seeks to diversify Bolivia’s electricity generation matrix, but it primarily relies on water-intensive technologies, leading to tensions over local water usage. Furthermore, it is poised to impact vast biodiversity-rich protected areas, as well as the indigenous and local populations living in the Bolivian Amazon region. This energy project not only operates within the framework of climate urgency but also undermines Bolivia’s core principle of respecting the rights of Mother Earth and ensuring a harmonious coexistence with nature (Villavicencio-Calzadillo and Mauger 2021). The uncritical adoption of urgency in energy transition strategies tends to trigger local disputes over the management of natural resources and even contradicts the main political and legal frameworks, as illustrated by the Bala-Chepete project.

The third example pertains to the growing demand for electromobility and the electrification of infrastructure within the framework of the Net Zero energy transition, fostered by the urgent need to reduce GHG emissions. This discussion has significantly expanded the landscape of the politics of neo-extractivism in the name of addressing climate change, with a particular focus on rare Earth minerals where the crucial role of lithium is the development of affordable lithium-ion batteries for vehicles (Sovacool 2020). This has brought more attention to the so-called “lithium triangle” region, encompassing Northern Chile, Southern Bolivia, and Northeastern Argentina, which collectively hold 75 percent of the world’s lithium supply beneath their salt flats (Ahmad 2020; Kingsbury 2021). This raises critical questions concerning the environmental impact of these activities and their effects on socio-economic dynamics around mining and electromobility. Although it is an ongoing debate, there is a need to reflect on what Kingsbury (2021) claims about the potential for international decarbonization plans to reinforce, rather than redress, the asymmetrical dynamics between the Global North and Global South. This, in turn, can undermine the prospect of sustainable energy transitions in the mineral-rich regions.

These examples invite us to reflect on how to break free from the top-down framework that dominates climate change analysis. Furthermore, we should consider what potential consequences might flow from indiscriminately and uncritically calling for urgent action. In order to situate the analysis of urgency in Latin American countries, it will be relevant to ask what type of evidence and social discussions underpin the local demand for urgency. Do these pieces of evidence and social discussion effectively drive local mitigation and adaptation strategies? Moreover, are environmental change concerns being seamlessly integrated into policy agendas, rather than displacing other social priorities in the competition for economic resources and policy support? How does climate urgency serve the national and subnational political agendas? Is there a tendency to attribute arbitrarily extreme weather events as climate-related solely on political grounds rather than meteorological and climate criteria, as a way to avoid political responsibility, secure public support, avoid voter loss, and access public financial resources for addressing social damage (Lahsen and Ribot 2022; Lahsen, de Azevedo Couto, and Lorenzoni 2020)? Other questions revolve around exploring the effectiveness of fear-based politics concerning climate change (Grundmann and Stehr 2010). Additionally, we should investigate whether framing climate change through representations of catastrophe serves as a means to transform energy systems and their policies, and if this framing narrows the gap between climate knowledge and action.

In this context, it is not implausible to consider what Grundmann and Stehr (2010, 899) suggested as “political fatigue” over the sense of urgency that has been sustained for a long time. Given that this issue is a wicked one and lacks a safety exit, it is essential not to opt for fictional solutions that are geographically insensitive (Hulme 2011; see Ariztia, Bravo, and Nuñez 2023 for a comprehensive account of local climate technologies in Chile). This becomes particularly evident when examining the case of climate planetary engineering techniques. Despite their variety and technological complexity, exemplified by methods like stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening (Hulme 2014), they offer a new way to deal with climate change that appears to circumvent the messy and slow process of policymaking. Conversely, they embody the principle of anthropocentrism, offering techno-fix solutions to deal with global climate issues. This alternative path carries inherent risks, ethical and political controversies that have not been widely discussed and resolved. The threat is that climate politics of fear entangled with the politics of urgency is capable of supporting geoengineering strategies that are highly disputed and unknown yet (Hulme 2014). Therefore, as Mark B. Brown argues, while climate science plays a vital role in informing policy, it does not dictate which policies best “represent the needs and values of diverse human communities around the globe” (2014, 141). Nor does it seek to establish how and when the sense of urgency is locally constituted. Finally, it is important to recall Noel Castree’s assertion that “crisis rhetoric should not suspend robust societal debate about future pathways” (2014, 765).

3. The politics of building socio-climatic future

This third scalar dissonance concerns the ways of shaping and producing future pathways for societies in the face of environmental change. It raises questions about who designs how the future might look like, how these designs are negotiated, what factors are taken into account, and what is left behind (Figure 4). As Hulme (2010; 2023) mentions, it prompts us to ponder who owns and controls the future we imagine. The previous dissonances provide a foundation for understanding why thinking about the future and proposing a vision of it have become a powerful link between science and policy in the urgency moment in which we currently live.

Figure 4. The scalar dissonance of the politics of building socio-climatic future pathways.

The widespread “climatism,” predominantly observed in affluent countries but also present in impoverished countries,⁹ lays the basis for reimagining how the future may unfold, especially regarding strategies to avert catastrophic scenarios (Hulme 2023). This underscores the importance of situating the geographical and epistemological dimensions of how climate may unfold for specific countries that grapple with colonial legacies, historical land tenure disputes, indigenous communities, and political backgrounds that span from dictatorships to democratic models, among other aspects worth analyzing in environmental STS discussions and geography of science.

To begin, what are the socio-climatic future pathways? These are qualitative and quantitative scientific tools used to construct a “consistent” and “plausible” narrative describing potential emissions trajectories that may unfold in the future, leading to various warming scenarios.¹⁰ The socio-climatic future pathways aim to establish consistent trends regarding economic and demographic trends, as well as changes in carbon emissions and energy efficiency projected into the future (Shimoda, Yamaguchi, and Iwafune 2020). This quantitative data needs to be anchored by plausible narratives that explore how societal choices will impact greenhouse gas emissions (Hausfather 2018). This entails mainly drawing from possible institutional and political regimes, financial flows, social movements, preferences, lifestyles, and energy systems. Yet, the development of these socio-climate future pathways is primarily conducted by climate natural scientists and economists (Grundmann and Stehr 2010; Hackmann, Moser, and St. Clair 2014 Hausfather 2018; Koehrsen, Dickel, and Pfister 2020; Oreskes 2015). These experts have not adequately considered the sociocultural and ethical dimensions of building assumptions about unknown societies’ futures. In this context, temporality plays a key role. Future time scales are established by criteria from the natural sciences. The uncertainties surrounding the approximate duration of carbon dioxide’s presence in the atmosphere, estimated to be between 300 and 1,000 years, and the selection of 2100¹¹ as an appropriate distant horizon by the first climate modelers in the 1980s have set this as the focal point of social concern (Buis 2019; Lyon, Saupe, and Smith 2021). This illustrates how concerns about temporalities have little connection to historical, political, or cultural changes. On top of this, there is a misallocation of climate research funding,¹² as demonstrated by Indra Overland and Benjamin Sovacool, who showed that “natural and technical sciences received, from 1990 to 2018, 770% more funding than the social sciences for research on issues related to climate change” (2020, 1).

Thus, socio-climatic futures are based on global assumptions built mainly in North-affluent countries, in institutions such as the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Potsdam Institute, the European Institute on Economics and Environment, and the European Commission (Hausfather 2018). Currently, there is a debate on how to make these pathways locally representative of different realities and at the same time relevant for decision-making (O’Neill, Carter, and Ebi 2020). In other words, the challenge is how to mobilize this knowledge-making across geographies (Mahony and Hulme 2018). Like climate models, socio-climatic pathways simplify the social factors influencing emissions in positive or negative ways. These pathways are the foundation of any carbon emission scenario (Schneider 1983; Yearley 2010). Interestingly, not many social scientists, human geographers, and STS scholars are involved in their development yet. However, those who are working on this are mainly focused on GHG reduction scenarios and, more recently, Net-Zero pathways, with less attention given to their applications in reducing social vulnerabilities (Pasgaard, Dalsgaard, and Maruyama 2015). As Mike Hulme suggests, and this is closely related to the previous dissonance, scenarios can portray misleading facts, triggering policy into an even more complex process of decision-making. He examines the case of the voluntary Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), established in 2019, tasked with “stress-testing of financial institutions to assess their financial resilience to hypothetical, extreme, yet plausible climate scenarios” (Hulme 2023, 64). NGFS has three main scenarios, which range from the least hazardous to the “Hothouse World” scenario, assuming a rapid increase in carbon dioxide emissions from 2021 to 2100, as well as a lack of progress in climate policies and technologies. However, Hulme examines how plausibility is built around this extreme scenario. For him, there is no plausibility in this scenario despite current energy controversial statements by many politicians in Western and non-Western countries, as well as ongoing war situations. He debates how portraying an extreme warming scenario, which goes beyond what can already be a challenging social and emission scenario, is a worrying issue because it can be misused to influence global finance and policy actions (Pielke 2022, cited in Hulme 2014, 65). Knutti (2018) also questions the way we approach and use climate scenarios. He points out that building mitigation scenarios is being used to show how climate engineering techniques can bring about positive outcomes in terms of cooling the Earth's system. Regardless of the validity of this statement, it is clear that climate solar engineering scenarios might only be plausible if they remove from discussion the ethical and political aspects of governance and local consequences (Knutti 2018). Thus, it is critical to understand how scenarios are built, from whose perspective they are developed, what concerns they address, and what they leave unexplored.

Another feature of socio-climatic futures, much like climate models, is their limited scope to incorporate socio-political contingencies and struggles, such as further regional conflicts, pandemics, and economic inflation. They also illustrate a limited understanding of how society’s values, cultures, and practices change over time (Hulme 2012; 2019). These pathways are designed for stability, as Valdes (2011) titled his influential article about the state-of-the-art of climate models. These pathways, perhaps even more clearly than global climate models, are potent political tools with the potential to shape social imaginaries and the range of possible policies aimed at transforming our energy systems, consumption and production patterns, and lifestyles. As argued by Beck and Mahony (2017), these pathways or the scenarios resulting from SSPs and RCPs in various combinations not only depict different ways in which the future might unfold, but also actively shape future scenarios in social imaginaries. They exercise a performative power through the development pathways they create according to economic and climate models. The pathway to avoid a global mean temperature increase of 1.5 – 2°C illustrates this point. The emission scenarios and the social assumptions behind them have created mitigation strategies aligned to avoid the impacts associated with reaching this and higher temperature, such as the Net-zero emissions strategy. This strategy is a powerful performative tool with the potential to relocate policy and economic efforts in its favor, as well as the potential to reshape the market, industries, material resources extraction, and everyday life dynamics (i.e. electromobility) around achieving this target, despite the dissonances it might trigger in each specific geography as the ones reviewed in section 2.

These scenarios and their consequences were not previously envisioned in any society until scientists and international climate politics made them a future possibility (Seager 2009). They, like climate models, are deeply rooted in a top-down perspective, originating from an international-affluent framework that built future plausible possibilities. However, it remains unclear for whom these scenarios are plausible and how plausibility is determined (Hulme 2023). Moreover, socio-climatic future pathways have not yet engaged with communities to develop locally relevant future scenarios at the subnational level. For instance, they have not actively involved farmers in assessing their perspective on future possibilities for land-change uses in the agricultural sector.

However, these anchoring devices in science for policy also aim to stimulate reflections on alternative ways of thinking about the world (Hulme 2019). Thus, producing social climate futures can entail the negotiation of how climate possibilities might manifest in broader (scientific and non-scientific) terms and how they are translated into climate future scenarios (Hulme 2019; Hulme and Dessai 2008). This involves a discussion about which social variables and values should take priority in the face of uncertainty, and who should participate in these decision-making processes. In order to diversify, both epistemologically and geographically, the study of the politics surrounding the construction of social future pathways in Latin American geographies, some guiding questions are suggested. STS and Human Geography can contribute to the exploration of the public role in social scenarios. Do they serve as an open invitation to deeply and creatively reflect on how we interact with the environment going forward? Or are they primarily a scientific achievement that describes an authoritative epistemic approach to thinking about the future? (Beck and Mahony 2017; Hulme 2019). Additionally, it is relevant to grasp how socio-climatic pathways are constructed, by whom, what factors are considered, what is omitted, and how uncertainties are communicated. Furthermore, we must address the tensions and disputes over the values that should guide the development of social pathways and narratives (Castree et al. 2014). Finally, if future societal components are central in developing emissions and climate scenarios, then why are social scientists and humanities not more deeply involved in the discussion of social climate scenarios? Moreover, as Oreskes (2015) has pointed out, who is monitoring the potential consequences of mishandling the social dimension of these scenarios?

b. Conclusions

Situating climate change entails embracing the challenge of placing knowledge and its embedded power relations within the interaction between science and politics. This notion challenges the linear and stable communication assumed between scientific evidence and policymaking, something that STS has carefully analyzed (Jasanoff and Martello 2004; Tang and Dessai 2012). In addition, global climate narratives are always locally contested in visible and disguised ways, mediated by various actors and interests within a framework of political contingencies in each context. To address this, it is crucial to revisit how the relationship between scientific cultures and policymaking around environmental change is shaped and transformed; this endeavor is key for situating the knowledge-action gap. It is also important to locally frame the sense of urgency in addressing this phenomenon and envisioning future socio-climatic pathways. These topics, despite their saliency in global climate debates, have been insufficiently studied in the Global South, including most Latin American countries. To do this, I propose that, along with previous scholars from STS and Human Geography, a geographical sensitivity and an epistemological shift toward these discussions will enable a better understanding of climate and environmental change.

I drew on three scalar dissonances spurred by the encounter of global and local climate change narratives. Despite being timely discussions, I acknowledge that, in this article, they do not account for alternative perspectives on how scientific and non-scientific knowledge shape our understanding of climate change. However, the first dissonance highlights how global scientific narratives overshadow the geographical and cultural diversity in the ways of grasping and framing the Earth’s change. This has been mainly triggered by top-down and colonial-rooted knowledge designs in approaching climate. This led to the development of the concept of climate science geographies (Mahony and Hulme 2018). These geographies refer to the division of the world into sites of production of global complex models and the sites of consumption of these information sources (Mahony and Hulme 2018). Also, this explains the understudied climate geographies and the extensive research concentrated in specific regions, primarily in affluent Northern countries (Blicharska, Smithers, and Kuchler 2017). Although there has been important research conducted in India and Brazil, accounting for “other” geographies of climate science (Hochsprung-Miguel, Mahony, and Monteiro-Alves 2019; Lahsen 2004 Mahony 2014). This section showed how in the lower scale of analysis of climate change narratives it becomes clearer that the topic is unsettled in both scientific and political terms (Skelton, Porter, and Dessai 2017). It seems like the global level of analysis subsumes these specific processes and agencies occurring in specific places. In this context, it is relevant to reflect not only on the knowledge-action gap, which assumes a political unwillingness to enact transformative energy policies, but also to consider how Latin American countries, beyond Brazil, engage with, contest, appropriate and use (or not) global information for specific political purposes (Skelton, Porter, and Dessai 2017). Moreover, one must question the motivation behind these actions (Lahsen and Ribot 2022).

The second dissonance raises the question of how the sense of urgency developed locally. If scientifically and politically, we still do not fully grasp how this phenomenon is being framed and accommodated, how do we establish its urgency as an authoritative demand fitting all contexts? Additionally, how can we prevent the climate change agenda from overshadowing other pressing social issues in Global South countries? Rather than comprehensively addressing the historical factors contributing to social impoverishment and economic inequalities as a means to build resilience against climate (and non-climatic) impacts, it prompted us to reflect on how catastrophism and the politics of fear can quickly mobilize the necessary societal and policy changes (i.e. through IPCC reports and UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties). Moreover, what are the consequences of this mobilization, and how effective has the enactment of climate emergencies been, for instance? Additionally, we must address how urgency in various geographical contexts tends to prioritize the mitigation agenda rather than adaptation, leading to questions about funding allocation and priorities. While this remains a current debate, often framed as waiting for actions to be implemented rather than critical questions, it remains crucial to avoid decontextualizing and depoliticizing it. We should also refrain from dismissing or labeling spaces for critical thinking about local climate urgency as denialism.

Finally, the third dissonance was linked and connected with the preceding earlier ones and asked how we can envision local future possibilities. For whom are these possibilities being constructed? From whose perspective and interests are they shaped, and how can we mobilize specific social expectations for the future? The 1.5 or 2°C warming scenarios are now part of public imaginaries, serving as an example of how the future is being constructed to convey and foster specific responses. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are increasingly prominent in global climate discussions (IPCC 2021). However, how this might continue developing is something with which STS research in Latin American countries can engage and make valuable contributions. Rather than merely replicating the history of climate models, perhaps we can reframe and appropriate SSPs in our own terms to represent our plausible and desirable futures. In this sense, the research agenda proposed here can advance by drawing from postcolonial STS analysis, not only by participating in discussions led by affluent Northern countries but also by revisiting and redoing analytical perspectives through empirical cases that will enrich and diversify these debates.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, to Ronald Cancino, Martin Mahony, and Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda for their valuable feedback. To Fátima de León and Karim Berdezerd for their help proofreading and building the figures. To CONAHCYT-Mexico for my PhD funding and to the Laboratorio de Papers ESOCITE, edition (2022), coordinated by the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teresa Guadalupe de León Escobedo

Teresa Guadalupe de León Escobedo is a doctoral candidate in Geography from UNAM, in the line of research in Human Geography and Climate Change. Since August 2022, she has been a professor of Geopolitics, at the Center for International Relations of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM. Her research explores the production dynamics of climate scenarios in Mexico and their uses in policymaking. She aims to contribute to enlarging the geographies of climate science production in the Global South.

Notes

1 In this context, the geohistorical construct of “North” and “South” as pointed out by Lahsen (2004), proves valuable for illustrating deep asymmetries. However, it is crucial to exercise caution in its usage, ensuring that it does not obscure other important divisions that these terms might fail to capture.

2 Here climate change is considered, as proposed by Hulme (2011, 2012), as an environmental, cultural, political, and economic phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of everyday societies differently.

3 The nature of social processes, according to Johnston, Gregory, and Watts (2001), “are inherent spatially structured and, most importantly, deeply embedded in PLACE. In a variety of senses all human activity is localised” (Johnston, Gregory, and Watts 2001, 458–459). This underscores the subtle difference between ‘space’, “place” and “localization.” This distinction between “placing” and “localizing” is pivotal. The former involves a relational construction of societal space, wherein identification processes take root. The latter refers to a geolocation point, denoting a dynamic process that may not necessarily be concerned with representing the social relations shaping the space (2001).

4 This paper does not engage with the emerging and important discussion surrounding the cultural representations of climate – a relatively new research area that explores further into Environmental STS studies and Human Geography (see Ariztia, Bravo, and Nuñez 2023; Barra 2021; Ford, Cameron, and Rubis 2016; Hulme 2016; Turnbull 2000; Whyte 2019).

5 The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) is the latest version of the global models’ outputs assessment conducted by the WCRP. The CMIP initiative aims to inform Group 1, working on the physical basis of climate, and the insights from IPCC on the models’ performance and results. Therefore, it has a crucial role in providing sources of information for the IPCC assessment. For a visual representation of the world’s modeling centres see: https://pcmdi.llnl.gov/CMIP6/.

6 The term “countries-non producers of GCMs” will henceforth refer to the global complex models: Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) and the Earth System Models (ESMs).

7 Regional climate scenarios (RCS) represent plausible descriptions of how regional climate in the future may develop, based on a coherent and internally consistent set of assumptions about key driving forces (e.g., land use change, urban development, deforestation, population growth, economic activities, energy systems among others) and their interactions. These regional scenarios are primarily generated through statistical or dynamic downscaling of information derived from global complex models. It is important to note that these scenarios do not predict or forecast, rather they serve as a means to provide an insight into potential implications of future developments and actions (IPCC 2018). Also, see Mahony and Hulme (2018) for a thoughtful review on RCS as translation tools producing other scales of knowledge that make local climate change governable.

8 The Mexican environmental policy from 2012 to 2018 is a good example of this. The former federal government demonstrated a strong commitment to the climate change agenda, yet simultaneously reduced its financial allocation for it and failed to promote the development of scientific capacities necessary for a better understanding of regional climate change and its associated impacts (SEMARNAT-INECC 2009; 2012; 2018; Vega-López 2020).

9 Although we might observe relevant shifts in the way “climatism” is being embraced within right-leaning (centre-right or far-right) political landscapes gaining momentum in Latin American countries as well as in other regions.

10 There are four primary emissions scenarios known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs 2.6, 4.6, 6, and 8.5) in the IPCC literature since 2013 (Hulme 2023). However, the latest IPCC report from 2021 introduces variations of these RCPs. The socio-climatic futures, referred to as Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), in the literature tend to focus predominantly on economic explanations of the RCPs, which, in my perspective, is somewhat limiting their scope. The conjunction of RCP and SSP results in climate scenarios. For instance, RCP 8.5 represents a high-end emissions scenario, envisioning a world with no-climate policy and projecting temperatures to rise by approximately 4–5°C by 2080–2100. However, this is a contested scenario due to its misleading assumptions about the lack of change in global energy trends, which does not align with the current state of affairs. This discrepancy is evident despite the insufficient energy transformation demanded (Hulme 2023). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that this scenario has been the most widely used in peer-reviewed research between 2020 and 2021 (Hulme 2023).

11 Currently, there is a debate whether this represents the best way to grasp future environmental changes, particularly for those anticipated to extend beyond the year 2100 (Lyon, Saupe, and Smith 2021).

12 Their analysis reviews 37 countries from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Brazil, Russia, India, and China. However, it omits Mexico and Chile, raising questions about its representativeness for understanding the funding dynamics of social sciences and humanities dedicated to environmental change studies in non-OECD countries.