“Why are certain climate futures overlooked in current climate modelling practices?”

In the context of the TANC conference “The Apocalypse is Not Coming” held at the University Autónoma of Barcelona in May, and Future Earth’ Annual Science Sustainability Conference held at the University of Lausanne in June, Guillemette Legrand and members of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Eulàlia Baulenas Serra, Ania Kawiecki Peralta, Amirpasha Mozaffari, Sam Pickard, and Diana Urquiza have hosted two role-playing workshop sessions that explored why and how certain political, socio-economic and cultural imaginaries are excluded from climate debates.

During the workshop, each participant took on different roles (e.g, lobbyist, modeller, computational architecture, etc.) to speculatively reenact how decisions are made in defining the climate future. The discussion was centred on a schematic pipeline that illustrates the different steps, actors, and components of climate projection infrastructure. The workshop addressed how and where responsibilities should be taken on, and how accountabilities can be made visible throughout the process. In a second part, participants were asked to break the pipeline, identify space for intervention, and discuss which other actors, practices, and ways of knowing should be involved.

The next iteration of the workshop will be hosted at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in the fall of 2026.

Read more about the workshop in the programme of TANC conference.