By Bea Addis, Washington University in Saint Louis & Samara Brock, Yale University, United States.
Focusing on both the location of this COP as a backdrop as well as discourses of innovation that took place in the green and blue zones1, this piece asks how COP operates as a future-making event. Which futures are deemed possible, which are presented as probable, and which are obscured? Our aim here is to highlight the importance of attending to the futurework (Fine 2007) that is happening at COP and the structural inequalities in this.
Dubai – “the city of the future”
COP28 was held in Dubai, the self-branded “city of the future”, home to the worlds’ first ‘Museum of the Future’ and first “Ministry of Possibilities.” Set in the world expo site 2020, it was no surprise that COP28 felt like the most futuristic COP yet. A space full of innovation, technological optimism and capital intensive “solutions” to climate change.
We (this article’s co-authors) first connected over the fact we had both visited the Museum of the Future. “How did you find it?” Samara asked, waiting a beat before the quizzical expression on her face revealed a shared questioning of the bleak, creative agency / corporate futurist vision of the future that the museum portrays. The museum experience starts in the year 2071 with a recruitment day for an Orbital Space Station.
You are then guided to a vault where the DNA of thousands of species are stored in an artistic rendition of a “library” and to an adjacent lab where DNA is altered to help plants absorb more carbon in the controlled environment of the indoor “Garden.”
Each of the seven floors houses a separate themed exhibition. In the middle lies Al Waha (meaning The Oasis) – the health and wellbeing floor. Despite the rest of the museum presenting an increasingly technology dominated world as both inevitable and exciting, this floor’s emphasis on digital detox suggests an admission of the possible negative effects of technology on mental health and society. One exhibit, ‘connection therapy’ for example, states “to counteract the alienating effects of technology we need new rituals to foster togetherness and connection”. This experience consists of queuing for your place at a large table, humming into a small microphone until a digital display on the table shows a light moving up from each person’s microphone until they all connect. Once “connection” has been achieved, each participant is rewarded with a puff of scent of a local flower.
The experience is awkward, rushed, discordant and felt, to us at least, depressingly disconnected (you sit far away from the other participants and barely make eye contact as you face down towards the microphone).This is one of many examples of narrative being more important than content at the museum. Each floor of the museum has a plaque crediting the individuals and creative agencies responsible for “concept, narrative & creative direction”.
Several of the creators of the Museum of the Future have also helped design and/or market new technologies for large corporations. Indeed the museum arguably lacks imagination. It’s slick and with high budget production, but challenges nothing about the current direction of the world. Besides, humans are already quite capable of connecting with each other, and trees already capture carbon. Yet its display brings to life a particular vision of the future, one in which the proliferation of technology, as our saviour, is rendered inevitable.
Inevitability is a powerful and potentially dangerous tool in producing futures and must be challenged in order to maintain an “ethics of possibility” (Appadurai 2013: 295). This is particularly important to remember in the context of climate change. For example, we must acknowledge that the transition to fossil fuels that arguably led to today’s climate crisis was not an inevitability but was driven by social factors (Malm 2013). Imagination and a sense of possibility is needed to avoid condemning ourselves to an “inevitable” future.
The museum ends with a large showcase of innovations in the “Tomorrow, Today” section such as robotics, AI, indoor farming, and other early stage tech prototypes. Each innovation, with brand name or company name also on show, is displayed with text pondering the futures made probable by the fact that these technologies already exist to some degree (though largely not at commercial scales).
What is obscured in the exhibition is the fact that many of the designers of this space are companies and creative agencies that are largely tasked with the sort of futurist work that helps companies identify trends and meet challenges (often in 10 year time windows) to stay relevant and profitable. Having just come from the COP, where after years of struggle, nations were finally hammering out the terms of the loss and damage fund, the question “How smart will our homes be?” appeared somewhat tone deaf. The world was finally accepting the reality of the already irreparable damage of climate change, including the many homes that have and will be lost and destroyed. Yet none of this loss, inequity, and suffering was reflected in the triumphalist displays of the museum.
Shaped like an oblong donut, the Museum of the Future features excerpts from a poem about innovation on its gleaming silver exterior. Written by the UAE’s prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the poem declares:
The secret to the renewal of life,
the evolution of civilizations,
the development of humanity is simple:
Innovation.
The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it.
It isn’t something you await, but rather create.
We may not live for hundreds of years,
but the products of our creativity leave a legacy
long after we are gone.
This faith in innovation is imbued in Dubai. It is a city where expats are eager to hand you their card while giving you their elevator pitch about their latest start-up. Dubai strives to have the biggest, the first, the best. But the bravado of this breathless optimism hides a lot. Beneath the exuberant faith in innovation, lies a deeply inequitable society. The buildings that tower over the city, including the Expo 2020 site where COP was hosted, were largely built using indentured labourers. Over 80% of the population of Dubai is made up of foreign nationals, and this includes a large workforce who live in cramped conditions and work for low pay to build the towers and monuments the city is so famous for2.
The Future Imaginary at COP28
With a huge corporate presence and the arrival for the first time of several corporate creative agencies, COP28, is itself reminiscent of a museum of the future. The display of innovation, both existing and potential, was more evident at COP28 than at any of the previous 4 COPs we (the authors) had been to, and from speaking to longer standing attendees, many agreed it was the most future and tech focussed COP to date.
The many actions that could have been taken to ameliorate the climate crisis earlier; the ecosystems, cultures and people that could have been protected; the disasters that could have been avoided (or at least reduced), will always haunt COP spaces and documents. At the same time, different visions of possible futures and ideas of what can still be done will continue to be fought for.
If we think of COP as a physical and experiential space, continuing the comparison to a museum, the key questions are, what is really on display here? Which visions of the future are presented? Who designs the spaces? Who has the power to showcase their ideas and imaginaries? This matters. These future visions are the content around which movements can coalesce, media can be galvanised, policy can be debated, resources can be acquired and ultimately, these visions can be realised.
This is especially true as COP expands its remit from a focussed conference for parties to the UNFCCC agreement in 1992 to work out and agree on policy, to a world forum for politics, advocacy and business many times outside of the remit of any climate agreements. With the eyes of the world focussed each year on COP, even without any clear policy agreements, COP emits powerful signals to the market, media and culture. An example of this has been the rapid growth of voluntary carbon markets over the last few years. Despite the fact that Article 6 (regarding the creation of new Carbon markets) is still being negotiated, and that voluntary carbon markets won’t even be directly affected by this policy, it is frequently remarked on at COP that voluntary carbon markets are already using negotiations as guidelines for development and as a go signal for rapid growth. At COP there are multiple events each day across multiple spaces dedicated to the voluntary carbon market, where developers, investors, potential clients and media meet to build relationships, narratives and projects.
The innovation zone
Innovation was on display everywhere at COP28. The Green Zone (open to the public) featured two huge temporary structures dedicated to innovation. These spaces are very similar to trade conferences in that they feature booths set up by companies to display products and technology. A prototype of a new uber-type service running electric mini helicopters across the city gathered crowds. As did, several high end electric cars, including one with the number plate “COP28”.
The Green Zone also featured a Start Up Village (sponsored by Barclays Bank). While less corporate, this area was equally tech focussed, and further enhanced the impression that the key to solving the climate crisis is through business and innovation. The idea that climate and capitalism can be win-win has been repeatedly shown as false (Howe 2019) and yet this fantasy is powerfully brought to life at COP.
Writing about start-up culture, technology journalist and intellectual Evgeny Morozov argues “all these efforts [of technology start-ups] to ease the torments of existence might sound like paradise to Silicon Valley. But for the rest of us, they will be hell. They are driven by a pervasive and dangerous ideology that I call “solutionism”: an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are “solvable” with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” (Morozov 2013).
Furthermore, Günel’s brilliant ethnography of Masdar City (a zero-carbon eco-city that houses a renewable energy research institute in Abu Dhabi) shows how future-oriented technocratic design can fail to account for social practice in the present. Günel (2019) argues that the over-emphasis of ‘potential’ impact can render technical ‘solutions’ incapable of making real social contributions. Yet, it is very hard to contest something that is always ‘potential’. Indeed, this is a common way to escape being critiqued for false claims, that is often used by PR companies and start-ups in their grand visionary claims.
Meanwhile, thousands of community leaders and activists from around the world travel to COP every year to share their lived experience–often revealing the unintended or disregarded consequences of solutionism, capitalist fixes for climate change and business as usual. These perspectives are often invited into COP through talks at pavilions but less often given space within the official UNFCCC programme. They lack the same amount of space, budget, and frankly, optimistic and political appeal that ‘innovation’ has.
The business of the future
Dubai as a host city was particularly conducive to a growing trend at COP which is for companies and organisations to rent offsite locations to run their own concurrent event programmes. COP28 saw the launch of KYU house, a week-long programme from a collective of “best-in-class creative firms”. This was a beautiful airy space in the trendy industrial chic cultural district of Dubai, Alserkal Avenue. Just opposite KYU House was Goals House, an exclusive space and programme of events mainly for people in corporate leadership positions running several events and roundtables designed to get the “right people” (those with business influence) talking to each other. Both venues went on till the night, with glamorous people convening in the square outside.
Ideo, one of the world’s leading design and innovation companies ran a futures workshop at KYU house emphasising the importance of storytelling to future work: “to create new worlds we need to create new words”. They stressed for example, “this is how you talk to a millennial about money – you don’t talk about banking”. As they highlight, sometimes the best strategy is to obscure certain information. There is indeed power in crafting a compelling narrative to bring people onboard with a particular vision of the future. What this event again made evident is how unequally this power is distributed at COP.
For businesses there is a huge advantage in being seen as having a voice in the future, and concomitantly in being part of the conversation around climate change at COP28. This is one way to be considered a “thought leader” , an important marketing strategy. Arguably the huge investment Dubai has made on The Museum of the Future, and creating its Ministry of Possibilities (incidentally also an IDEO project) was also part of a national marketing or positioning strategy to be seen as the city of the future and move away from its image as an oil state.
COP now offers business an opportunity not just for greenwashing – benefitting from a perception as climate positive without really changing any business practices– but also to be seen as creators of the future. It is a forum where they get to showcase technology and innovation and through placing the bets of their investment and resources add weight and probability to some futures over others. We must ask ourselves who is imagining these futures and what are they motivated by? How could alternative futures get more traction and resources at COP? Without doubt there is much resistance to the hegemonic narratives of the future that so many companies espouse. Youth, indigenous peoples, local community and many other movement and group leaders do an amazing job of organising protests within the rules of each COP, generating media and tirelessly arguing against dominant narratives to present alternative viewpoints. However, far less visible in these discussions is the presentation of alternative visions of the future. This is totally understandable given the urgent need to first contest narratives of the past and reveal what is currently happening to populations around the world. However, the lack of alternative visions of the future presented at COP is also a disadvantage to those that would support them. As argued by Appadurai: “imagination is a vital resource in all social processes and projects” and should be seen as “quotidian energy”. He argues “the capacity to aspire [should be seen] as a social and collective capacity without which words such as “empowerment”, “voice”, and “participation” cannot be meaningful” (2013: 287).
Conclusion
The idea that the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination is one that is heard often at climate conferences such as COP28. The problem is not that we don’t know what to do, it’s that it is often against the interests of capital and many governments to do what needs to be done. This puts us in a stalemate from which innovation offers a tidy escape. Technological solutions can keep systems of power and wealth intact. But whose imagination is on display in these approaches? We began this article with the Museum of the Future, as the huge investment in that space is a perfect demonstration of the way that even the future is commandeered by the imagination of those with power and resources. Innovation as a way of understanding and creating the future imaginary, most often ignores issues of inequity and injustice. Innovation frames the future in a certain way, and also frames who can speak about the future – the entrepreneurs, the start-ups, the global wheeler-and-dealers who increasingly form part of the COPs. While innovation offers a seductive call for those tired of the doom and gloom of the climate crisis, we caution that embracing it as a way of knowing the future can come at a price. We need a diversity of imaginations to create our futures, especially of those who are capable of thinking outside of dominant systems and crucially, we need to actually invest in bringing those imaginations to life so they too can be seen as legitimate possibilities. The “inevitability” of technology’s advance is further compounded by the structural fact that if an innovation can be profitable it will be commercialised. But attention to diversity, cultural difference and remembering that humans do not all desire the same futures reminds us that the future has never been inevitable.
References
Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact : Essays on the Global Condition. Edited by Arjun Appadurai. Essays on the Global Condition. London: New York.
Fine, Gary Alan. “Futurework.” In Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction University of Chicago Press, 2007. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2013.
Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131f5h.
Howe, Cymene. 2019. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Malm, Andreas. 2013. “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry.” Historical Materialism 21 (1): 15–68. https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~moyer/GEOS24705/Readings/From_water_to_steam.pdf.
Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane.
After working for 10 years in start-ups in design, sustainability and tech Bea Addis is now writing up her PhD dissertation (at Washington University in Saint Louis) on Web 3 climate-tech start-up experiments in the Brazilian Amazon, global to local climate governance and carbon markets. As part of this she is working with local community leaders and activist in the Amazon region to help them prepare for COP30 and facilitate some future imaginary workshops with the hope of bringing these alternative visions to COP.
Samara Brock works at the intersection science and technology studies and critical food scholarship to understand contested food system futures. She has worked for over 15 years with NGOs, governments, and foundations focused on food justice and sustainable agriculture. Her current PhD research, based at the Yale School of the Environment, engages with prominent transnational organizations and networks working to transform the future of the global food system.
- The “blue zone” is only open to accredited badge holders (including ‘Observers’) and is where all of the official sessions take place. The “green zone” is open to everyone and is for civil society. ↩︎
- https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/migration-theories/0/steps/35094 and https://the-argonaut.com/comment-4/2023/1/2/constructing-power-the-exploitation-of-migrant-construction-workers-in-the-uae ↩︎
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