Co-creating Utopia?

COP26 has been bringing together parties from across the world to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Open University has official observer status at COP26 and is learning from the conference to inform the university’s wider sustainability mission and inspire students and staff to take action. Here are some of the conference’s highlights, as told by our Open University observers. 

COP26 Diary - 3 November: Stephen Peake, Professor of Climate Change and Energy.

"The Paris Agreement is an 18 page-long condensed novel - a [very good] utopian science fiction story" according to Kim Stanley Robinson the American science fiction author. He is a member a very distinguished panel of the UNFCCC-backed initiative called The Resilience Frontiers whose side event yesterday (2 November) was on Awareness - Acceptance - Action. Other panellists included the film maker Vanessa Berlowitz (well known to the OU), the philosopher Michael Weisberg and the journalist Wolfgang Blau. The UN is as close to a World Government that we have, but they have asked this group to make an "Orwellian effort" to imagine what comes next and how we might convincingly get from here to there in the medium term. They are exploring long-term human resilience based on frontier technology and regenerative principles. 

Their serious playfulness with ideas about imagination as a critical ingredient of how we create the sustainable future we all want to see is as important as any discussion around the small print of nature-based solutions, carbon financing or new legal protocols. We need to believe. We want to believe. This is why the 'last chance' framing at the start of COP26 is a dangerous game – it's not the way to suspend most people's disbelief around the utopian future we all crave. Hats off to these experts who understand that fictional experiences are acts of faith and co-creation on the part of the author and the reader and bringing this to the COP. They understand that our modern world is a lived experience acting out several dystopian science fiction scenarios which includes the pandemic, but also climate change. We need descriptions of the future with convincing texture. "If you read a detailed description of the place that you would like yourself to be in the future: where the animals are doing well; we've dodged the mass extinction; we have a relationship with nature; inequalities have been banished – and all these things are described in a thick texture and you believe it" says KSR, then and only then we begin serious work on just how do we get there…