Designing and discussing future pathways to sustainability: what research is needed?

This conference, organised by IDDRI in partnership with the Research Network for Sustainable Development (R2DS), is presented by Stefan Lechtenböhmer (Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy).

The discussants will be Paul Raskin (Tellus Institute) and Jean-Charles Hourcade (CIRED).

>> Download the program and the registration form

Please note that the conference will take place on the 56 rue Jacob - Salle Jean Monnet

ABSTRACT
Sustainable development policies at the global as well as more local scales are linked to the urgency to take into account long term evolutions of our environment and long term consequences of our actions and decisions. Many recent international scientific efforts managed to show that business as usual scenarios would lead to unsustainable futures, as the climate change scenarios of IPCC clearly succeeded in demonstrating. But it also appears that we still do not have the same capacity to describe and analyse really sustainable futures for our societies and their environment, and the pathways leading to such futures, with as much credibility as for the conventional and unsustainable scenarios. For instance, what would be a sustainable transformation of transports, of the mobility of goods and persons and the corresponding infrastructures, if we want to comply with a target of dividing by four the greenhouse gases emissions of our northern economies in 2050? Are we able to represent how our society would look like, what are the pathways we need to follow if we want to reach this target? How can we manage to put into discussion the underlying assumptions about the future that we inevitably have to make in such exercises? 

This conference will build on the example of German research on pathways to low carbon futures, in order to discuss and understand what types of research on future scenarios are needed to support policy making for sustainability, where are the key theoretical, methodological and practical issues, and what are the most important objects and questions for such research.