Title of the thesis: A study of the links between prospective modeling and governance regarding the climate change mitigation scenarios assessed by IPCC Group III.
Supervisors: Béatrice Cointe (CSI, Mines Paris-PSL) and Nadia Maïzi (CMA, Mines Paris-PSL).
To address the many ecological crises currently unfolding, prospective modeling tools strive to map out coherent, plausible scenarios to guide policy decisions. Among the most widely considered scenarios are the climate change mitigation scenarios assessed by IPCC Working Group III. However, critics from within the research communities involved in scenario building or from the humanities and social sciences, have expressed concern that scenarios, by informing policy planning and decision-making, may reduce the range of possible futures and have called for greater reflexivity in prospective modeling. This PhD project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the path taken by the mitigation scenarios assessed by IPCC Group III, and to analyze how these scenarios may (or may not) feed into the positions of different stakeholder groups. It will attempt to study how the dominant framings in terms of models and scenarios have been imposed. The aim is to determine whether these framings are internal to the models (underlying economic assumptions) or are rather imposed as part of the scenario-building process. Understanding these choices and their consequences on the scenarios produced could lead to recommendations for future forecasting exercises, at the national or international level.