The IPCC SSP’s & Hydrofutures

Russian Hydrofutures was a workshop with Strelka KB and the researchers at The Terraforming, post-graduate programme currently running at the Strelka Institute, Moscow.

The aim of the workshop was to explore the ramifications of climate change on Russia and in particular how it's future maybe shaped by changes in hydrological flow, both directly in the form of permafrost melt, drought, flooding, precipitation and water cycle instability and then the knock-on implications across agriculture, land-use, industry and ultimately on the topology of Russia's urban network.

The brief for the researchers on the program was to use the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) and forthcoming Shared Socioeconomic Pathways outlined by the International Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) as the grounds for a project based on real climate modelling projections, across demographic, economic and climatic data, building on a two-day introduction to GIS data and mapping at the start of the week.

In attempt to reverse the traditional logic of responding to 'site', the 'site condition' for the project was world predicted by the scenarios, with each of the 8 working groups assigned a scenario from SSP1 1.9 through SSP5 8.5 and asked to imagine how it's specific conditions and assumptions might effect Russia as a territorial site-condition to 2100. Playing on Ed Ruscha's 'Hollywood Is A Verb' part of the researchers were asked to consider Russia in this context also as a process, or as a 'verb'.

2100 is obviously a distant speculative timeframe, but the logic of how these scenarios play out, in particular the reinforcing feedback mechanisms between different technical and political responses is a very interesting foundation on which to start a design process from. For instance the SSP3 'Regional Rivalry' scenario outlines the plausible conditions in which the global response to climate change is mediated through increasing nationalism. It's noteworthy perhaps that these sorts of political potentials are being baked into these highly influential climate models and

One of the interesting design challenges of reflecting on the range of climate futures and uncertainty that emerges from the IPCC projections the need for designers to some how occupy multiple futures at the same time, since we cannot guarantee any given outcome from this range of uncertain possibilities.

There is also a strikingly pragmatic aspect to the consequences of these questions when it comes to the design of urban 'resilience' against sea level rise or flooding. The variance in projected risk has major implications for the types of infrastructure that cities and countries may employ to protect themselves. In a world of limited resources and carbon-intensive cement, the scale and geo-politics that such infrastructures encapsulate may entrench and compound the issue. See for instance the recent debates about the construction of a sea wall to 'protect' New York.

Inherent to the debate is the tricky question of which future this $120B speculative and monumental slab of infrastructure protecting New York against? As part of the week-long workshop I gave a lecture entitled 'Deep Uncertainty' and presented the recent Heat Island project 'Deep House' from the "State of The Art of Architecture" at the Milan Trienalle which I will post soon.

Despite the two-day production window for the workshop there was a vast array of interesting speculations across the projects including the potential emergence of Russia as bio-gas (Team E - SSP4 3.4) or fresh water (Team B - SSP1 2.6) super-power, the possibility of the north arctic shipping route augmenting the Chinese Belt and Road initiative (Team D - SSP3 7.0).  The researchers also produced some highly detailed visualisations which will hopefully find their way online soon.

One of the aspects of the workshop which created most discussion was whether we should as designers or researchers be focused on the far edges of these speculations. The question was rightly asked by one of the researchers Tigran, to paraphrase - if this is a climate crisis should we not focus all our energy on the pathways that give us a chance of averting the crisis and not the radical environmental damage that the majority of these pathways outline.

One function of the relatively opaqueness of using 'relative forcing' as the basic metric rather than temperature is that some devastating implications of these projections is normalised. Even the seemingly less severe scenarios still detail a world of radical climatic changes and a likely minimum global average temperature increase of 2C to 2050. The destabilisation of water, food and biodiversity of even this should rightly be considered deeply frightening, taking us likely beyond for example, the survival of the Great Barrier Reef.

It should be noted that there is currently an intense debate within the climate modelling community about the validity of the RCP 8.5 model (with questions being raised about the assumptions on future coal-use). At the other end of the spectrum, the SSP1 1.9 is appears largely as the best-case scenario on the basis of Paris Climate Agreement, but is also potentially 'unrealistic' given the current speed of decarbonisation and gradual increase in global emissions since 2015.

Personally I think that it's extremely valuable to develop literacy in these scenarios to try and bridge professional and conceptual gaps between the disciplines of design, climate modelling and policy. Partly because, although the scenarios are not built to directly inform policy makers, the discussion they generate certainly should and will. Secondly there is an obvious and important politics that is blurred by the presentation and language of scientific modelling processed through international diplomacy. If you are inclined to trust the climate scientists, it's not hyperbolic to infer that models have massive importance because the form the foundation for what might be most consequential international (climate) policy negotiations of our lifetime over the next few years. Their relevance for designers and any one else trying to respond to climate change is therefore pretty significant. Beyond just appreciating their content however, there is potentially a real value in designers, architects and artists, who of course often spend a great deal of time strategically speculating over the implications of different cultural, political and systemic futures.

An interesting aspect of climate modelling is that because of the rapid growth in available computational power since 1990 and the first IPCC report, the 'resolution' of the models has been also rapidly increasing. Also the next major IPCC Assessment Report 6 (AR6) forthcoming in 2022 will include the outcomes of the climate modelling communities attempts to couple the RCP's and SSP's. Given the importance the assumptions and scope of these scenarios, alongside an escalation in resolvable detail, perhaps it's meaningful to ask what the next generation of a 'shared-socioeconomic pathways' might look like given wider cross-disciplinary input?