• Energy Research

How actors relate to the future has long been considered important in research on the governance of transformations towards sustainability. Recent contributions have explored the politics at play in the ‘making’ of futures and the forming of collective expectations. Building on the concept of socio-material incumbency and integrating academic discussions which appreciate the politics of future-making, we consider the forming of collective expectations as a process through which prevailing socio-material arrangements are challenged and reproduced. We introduce the concept of ‘scope incumbency’, through which the particular ideas about the future collectively deemed plausible are shaped by prevailing power arrangements. Consequently, we suggest it plays an important and underappreciated role in the reproduction of locked-in systems. We illustrate this perspective by exploring how mobility futures are imagined in sustainability transition research. We investigate academic contributions which explicitly articulate possible, plausible and/or desirable alternative mobility arrangements and consider the extent to which and how contributions challenge and reproduce hegemonic socio-technical orders. We find that a substantial portion of the contributions collectively limits the scope of the plausible around automobile-centric futures in several ways.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) have emerged as an important concept to build climate resilience in cities whilst providing a wide range of ecological, economic, and social co-benefits. With the ambition of increasing NBS uptake, diverse actors have been developing means to demonstrate and prove these benefits. However, the multifunctionality, the different types of benefits provided, and the context-specificity make it difficult to capture and communicate their overall value. In this paper, a value-based framework is presented that allows for structured navigation through these issues with the goal of identifying key values and engaging beneficiaries from the public, private, and civil society sector in the development of NBS. Applied methods such as focus groups, interviews, and surveys were used to assess different framework components and their interlinkages, as well as to test its applicability in urban planning. Results suggest that more specialized “hard facts” might be needed to actually attract larger investments of specific actors. However, the softer and more holistic approach could inspire and support the forming of alliances amongst a wider range of urban stakeholders and the prioritization of specific benefits for further assessment. Consequently, it is argued that both hard and soft approaches to nature valuation will be necessary to further promote and drive the uptake of NBS in cities.

Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthesis of the resulting 1,682 articles presents a systematic and comprehensive global stocktake of implemented human adaptation to climate change. Documented adaptations were largely fragmented, local and incremental, with limited evidence of transformational adaptation and negligible evidence of risk reduction outcomes. We identify eight priorities for global adaptation research: assess the effectiveness of adaptation responses, enhance the understanding of limits to adaptation, enable individuals and civil society to adapt, include missing places, scholars and scholarship, understand private sector responses, improve methods for synthesizing different forms of evidence, assess the adaptation at different temperature thresholds, and improve the inclusion of timescale and the dynamics of 536 responses.