The Paris Agreement set a highly ambitious goal of keeping global average temperature increases to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The significant use of Negative Emission Technologies (NETs) is both necessary and feasible for achieving this goal, according to the IPCC. Based on the IPCC’s emission pathways, large-scale deployment of NETs has also become a fully-fledged policy option under consideration by national governments under the FCCC, as well as by companies and entrepreneurs, even if these technologies are not available at the scale and scope projected by the pathways. The NETS example illustrates that scientific assessments of emerging technologies shape the pathways that define the horizon of future action to achieve Net-Zero goals. Recognizing the world-making role of scenario and foresight tools requires exploring their origins and their impacts and implications for projecting and governing green innovation responsibly and sustainably.

To understand how foresight approaches inform comparisons of possible courses of action, this project will analyze two authoritative assessments of Net Zero futures (IPCC 2024 and OECD 2023) and their translations into financial management tools and policy roadmaps for green innovation (in the German case). The project brings together a variety of approaches from STS, management, governance, and law to reconstruct the life of green innovation pathways in three stages: from its genesis in scientific models and foresight to pathways, setting trajectories of green innovation (1), from innovation pathways to emerging market (2), and to support tools for NET-Zero public policies (3).

In seeking to understand how authoritative expert agencies (such as the IPCC and the OECD) cope with complexity and uncertainty and assess the transformative potential of tech, this project contributes to the TransforM focus areas by exploring how green innovation is enabled, shaped and governed by anticipation and foresight methods and by identifying the spectrum of choices for designing green tech assessments and for coping with complexity and uncertainty in a more integrated manner