ABSTRACT
Why are the visions of development that incorporate climate change so constrained? It may be argued that conservative futures thinking is less likely to alienate and more likely to offer easy connections to current policy and practices. This may be true in part, but to date the failure of national actors and international fora to squarely address climate change as a development issue suggests we need to look for alternative framings. The likelihood of failure is clear, for example, in the work of the Climate Action Tracker which calculates that even if we implement the most stringent reductions proposed at the UN Climate Conference in Cancun in 2010, we would still miss the 2°C target by 8 Gigatonnes (Gt) CO2-equivalents annually by 2020. This conclusion is supported by similar gaps identified in other reports (UNEP 2010). Utopian thinking offers an alternative logic, one that sets its sights high, maybe unachievably high, but in so doing forces a consideration of a wider range of choices that need to be made to confront the root causes of climate change.
