Climate Disavowal: Inaction and Anticipation

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Phoebe Koundouri ^*
Nikos Stasinopoulos^†
Maria Chourdaki^‡
Ioulia Kontopoulou^§

Abstract

This paper advances a framework for interpreting climate denial coining climate disavowal as an integrating approach for climate foresight anticipation. It argues that, particularly under conditions of data scarcity and the uncertainty of undefinable probabilities, the expansion of plausibility-based thinking can productively complement probability-driven models. The paper demonstrates how complex and wicked problems can be addressed, scenario-building prerequisites can be enriched, enabling more resilient and holistic understandings of reasonable potential climate futures based on current and partial knowledge. This approach complements risk analysis by reframing uncertainty not as a limitation, but as a science-informed space for generating alternative trajectories and deepening analytical insight. Within this space, foresight—like art—plays the role of an exploratory indicator for the thickness of the concrete. It can assist a framework construction in which uncertainties emerge on top of definable risks, depicting the unthinkable. In that sense anticipation provides a foresighting capacity that efficiently addresses climate stakeholders and citizens’ ‘frozen’ and costly inaction by expanding their horizon of what can be actionably conceived. Rather than replacing data-driven approaches, it works alongside them to articulate potential futures that are not yet visible within existing datasets or models. In doing so, art helps structure uncertainty not as a void, but as a field of meaningful possibilities.

1. Introduction

The increased uncertainty and disavowal of climate change have been facilitated over the last decades, through the promotion of free-market (or neoliberal) ideology, globalization, as well as technological change, making people feel left behind, not only in material terms but also mentally. In the presence of uncertainty, the perceived rather than the actual riskiness of events is likely to drive people’s behavior. The perception of risk can be affected by several factors, including memory and emotions, which may lead to people over-estimating the likelihood of low probability events occurring. In this case, people may find it difficult to estimate the timing of climate risks, and therefore the urgency with which they need to adapt.¹

It is today’s paradox that although we know so much about the planet’s threats, yet we act so little upon this.

Nevertheless, climate denial manifests not as much as a refusal to know, but as a refusal to act, provided that we already ‘know’. In the context of SDGs, this denial expresses itself as disavowal that transforms awareness into the defense mechanism of—“I know very well, but nevertheless…”—a subjective and group pattern to secure comfort by avoiding accountability, and furthermore responsibility. It is today’s paradox that although we know so much about the planet’s threats, yet we act so little upon this.

The paper attempts to unfold three interwoven movements. The first examines the socio-political background of climate denial. The second scrutinizes further climate denial in its current transformation to a disavowal mechanism and, based on foresight studies, explores the capacity for anticipatory preparedness. The third section examines the difference within risk analysis by reframing uncertainty, highlighting the distinction between reliance on data-driven probabilities and the expansion toward plausibility-based thinking, which considers what could occur given the limits of available data or the absence of structural models, while also introducing the role of plausibility-based practices in rendering such uncertain futures perceptible. Overall, this paper argues that anticipatory sustainability is grounded not only in forecasting but also on actionable, and realistically based on plausibilities policy foresight.

2. Climate Deniers, Cost of Inaction

2.1 Climate deniers

Climate change can be approached as a continual and adaptive challenge that is fundamentally linked to beliefs, values and worldviews, as well as to power, politics, identities and interests.² Over the past decades, contemporary climate governance has been confronted with the emerging phenomenon of climate change denial, which persists in many societies.³ Drawing on key theoretical approaches from the social sciences and humanities, scholars highlight the ideological dimensions of denial, particularly the anthropocentric denial underlying society’s failure to respond to climate change.⁴

These groups of people express their discontent not through traditional representative channels such as party politics, but through claims rooted in blame, resentment, and grievance-based politics that may manifest as populism, extremism, and policy resistance.⁵ More specifically, structuralist accounts link climate change denial to the material interests of groups that feel left behind by globalization and technological change. This leads to a major decline in trust in government and many other institutions, as well as to attacks on expert society e.g., scientists, educators, and the mainstream media.⁶ Such responses also include distrust of compensatory mechanisms like carbon offsets and growing resentment toward land acquisitions associated with climate mitigation efforts, which have been also judged in climate policy literature as unfeasible and unjust.⁷ This has helped generate a ‘post-truth society’ highly receptive to various sources of misinformation and ‘alternative facts,’ such as ‘climate change has no scientific basis’.⁸

Nevertheless, even though climate science has established that global warming is occurring, that human activities cause large amounts of greenhouse gases, and that current and future warming portend negative impacts on both ecological and social systems a significant amount of people still remain ambivalent or unconcerned, leading to inadequate climate adaptation.⁹ Adaptation might also be undermined by asymmetric information or moral hazard effect, when individuals choose not to adapt to the appropriate level because they think losses will ultimately be borne by the Government or insurers, and they are not provided with adequate incentives for take up of preventive measures.¹⁰ For instance, studies from the United Kingdom show that exposure to floods does not automatically raise concern, indicating that direct climate events are not a reliable predictor of adaptive attitudes.¹¹ This asymmetric information leads to complexity and uncertainty of climate policy, which clashes with the populist demand for simple, direct democracy, prompting climate deniers to dismiss the science as opaque or conspiratorial.¹²

A second dimension concerns the ideological content, especially the antagonism constructed between “the people”—in this case the deniers—and a cosmopolitan elite.¹³ This elite could be understood as the large industries, which are positioned as privileged partners of the “green” governance elites, shaping the orientation of political decisions and ultimately contributing to a shift from global green pluralism toward a private environmental governance, where only selective, extra-institutional partners can participate.

2.2 Individual perspectives and utilitarian considerations

Individuals tend to see climate adaptation as a personal response that is shaped more by how they engage cognitively, affectively and morally with climate change than by simply having experienced climate impacts.¹⁴ Since climate’s response is highly uncertain, utilitarian theory suggests maximizing the expected net benefit rather than trying to guarantee a particular outcome.¹⁵ In this context, this could have a dual interpretation and lead to two different types of opportunity costs. On one hand, allocating resources to climate mitigation or adaptation means sacrificing the potential welfare that could have been generated if those same resources were invested in alternative activities with potentially higher immediate social returns (e.g., healthcare, education, or poverty alleviation). On the other hand, choosing not to invest in climate action now carries the opportunity cost of future welfare losses caused by more severe climate impacts, including higher adaptation costs, economic disruption, and reduced wellbeing for future generations, restricting humans’ responsibility to intended consequences.

Existentialist philosophical theory adds a critical dimension to this discussion by emphasizing individual freedom, responsibility, and the moral weight of choices. Through an existential lens, climate change denial can be understood not merely as ignorance or ideology, but as a reflection of how individuals confront—or avoid—the ethical responsibility inherent in their actions. As Myers (2014) suggests, the ethical obligations entailed by climate change are often ‘denied’ to protect the integrity of everyday existence, thereby containing anxieties that might otherwise overwhelm individuals.¹⁶ Overall, adaptation is perceived through a lens of personal efficacy, moral responsibility, and existing belief structures, with experiential cues playing a limited and context-dependent role.¹⁷

2.3 Climate change consequences: Assessing the cost of inaction

Denying the existence of climate change does exacerbate the problem and exponentially so.¹⁸ From a societal perspective, the strongest argument for the significant impact of climate-denial behavior is the high cost of inaction, which is distributed across society, often described in the literature as the cost of doing nothing. The increasing financial toll of climate change presents serious challenges for many regions, particularly those with limited resources and institutional capacities. It is important to emphasize that public attention often centers on the direct impacts of climate change, e.g., damage to infrastructure caused by floods. However, there is far less awareness of the indirect or broader macroeconomic impacts, like productivity losses due to heatwaves, disruptions to supply chains, or increased health-related costs.¹⁹ The economist Nicholas Stern estimates that the overall costs of inaction will be equivalent to losing 5% of global GDP each year, every year now and into the future.²⁰

Also, the uncertainty about the estimates of the impact of climate change on total economic welfare is rather large. Weather and climate-related extremes caused economic losses of assets estimated at EUR 738 billion during 1980-2023 in the European Union, with over EUR 162 billion (22%) between 2021 and 2023.²¹ Another study has shown that by 2050, the disposable income of households whose main income earner is unemployed or retired will be 57% and 15% below the average, respectively. Climate change is expected to further exacerbate this inequality by widening the gap in disposable income across all household types under each climate change scenario. Structural changes, such as job and income losses in vulnerable sectors will further widen existing disparities, making social sustainability an even greater challenge.

Thus, it is essential to create equity in the distribution of environmental risk, to recognize the diversity of the participants and experiences in affected communities, and to increase participation in the political processes which create and manage environmental policy. The existence of these three different notions of justice in the movement, simultaneously, demonstrates the plausibility of a plural yet unified theory and practice of justice.²² These dynamics expose significant shortcomings in institutional capacities to recognize and respond to concerns that extend beyond the distributive focus of conventional climate justice frameworks. Therefore, there is a critical need to expand equity-oriented distributional justice towards a stronger model of recognitional justice, one that acknowledges diverse identities, lived experiences, and the localized socio-cultural impacts of climate policies.²³ 

3. Climate Disavowal: Confirming Crisis in order to avoid it

But how does this sociopsychological mechanism of denial work? It is true that climate change denial wins the case across individuals and countries. It is worth delving into this concept of ‘denial’, of which the proper—and updated—technical psychoanalytic term is ‘disavowal’.²⁴ Even worse, we—the citizens—are used to hearing and using this concept of denial. For instance, denial of climate change, denial of this or that. But, the hereby mentioned concept of disavowal functions in a much more subtle way. Namely, by first fully recognizing some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter. So, in practice, you just go on as before. And this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple ‘denial’. This concept of disavowal is not new. It was proposed already by Freud but most notably by the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Octave Mannoni  who proposed this formula as “I know very well, but nevertheless… (I continue in my everyday practical life my climate harmful practices as if I didn’t know).”²⁵ Mannoni analyzed the mode of functioning that gained currency again, but with a slight twist. The: “I know very well, but nevertheless, I continue in my practical life as if I didn’t know” switched to the “I know very well. I publicly declare that I know and this is precisely the excuse why I can go on as before.”²⁶

On top of the above, people who declare the truth of climate change but then do nothing through their disavowal—potentially do more harm than simple deniers of climate change. They are entrapped in this kind of ideological short circuit with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. People are really afraid to present themselves as ignorant—even of the risks of the future—ashamed to be declared naive. How does this mechanism work? We intensively declare and flag the knowledge that we have on climate change, and exactly this is the very shield that protects us from this knowledge having any consequences in reality. It seems psychically relieving for us that we know and that we are in the know. Disavowal is less painful than merely simple ‘denial’ because according to this psychoanalytic term, the repressed thing of denial returns back to our consciousness and it is painful for us. Whereas disavowal is much less painful due to the fact that when we act under disavowal we completely psychically ‘de-realize’ reality. We address the climate change issue and we talk about it as if it did not have anything to do with us. We feel ‘free’ from any commitments because we psychically function via fetishizing knowledge, a kind of knowledge which, let’s say, ‘believes’ undoubtedly ‘out there’ instead of us. Under these circumstances, we do not subjectively assume a commitment stance, but the problem remains ‘out there’ in reality.

Against the above scrutinized defense mechanism, even Art with its mental faculties can be in place to deconstruct creating uncertainty, but also potentially create hope and engaged citizenship.²⁷ Futures-oriented imaginative power of Art is not merely the endeavor to synthesize, to bring together the dispersed manifold given in intuition (as Kant would stand for), but also promotes the opposite power (emphasized later by Hegel),  namely futures-oriented imagination qua the—uncertain concerning results but—emancipatory and constructive ‘activity of dissolution’, which treats as a separate entity what has effective existence only as a part of some organically prejudiced—potentially totalitarian—Whole.  But how does this procedure take place?

3.1. Preparedness against ‘Default’ Climate Future

Our line of argumentation here stresses that stressful, anxiety provoking uncertainty is the most crucial component of the above-mentioned mechanism and ideological prejudice, but also a prerequisite of a Sustainable, anticipatory envisioning of the future in line with climate justice and resilience. It is worth mentioning that foresight and futures studies is a transdisciplinary research approach having also philosophical underpinnings.²⁸

According to a widespread view across different domains of life that the future is currently problematized as a disruption, a surprise. This problematization of the future as indeterminate or uncertain has been met with an extraordinary proliferation of anticipatory action. In order to understand how anticipatory action functions we must understand the presence of the future, to problematize ‘the future’ in particular ways, conditioning how it may be anticipated and acted upon. Therefore, the interdisciplinary approach of Futures Studies and anticipatory Foresight has been established and gained currency currently. But what is foresight and its anticipative capacity? Foresight is a social science practice and methodology, along with a policy making practice and a skill and competence to be developed.²⁹ At a glance below, a standard version of the futures cone is depicted: ³⁰

On the left side of the standardized diagram of the above depicted Futures Cone we consider the now-time, the present. On the right side we have the philosophical, ontological clusters of the ‘future’, either as:

1. Potential future – everything beyond the present is the foresighted future, the present component of potentiality.
2. Preposterous Future – these are the components of our present actual potentiality that we judge to be ‘impossible’ now and ever, that we assume will ‘never’ happen.
3. Possible Future – those components of our present actual potentiality that we think ‘might’ happen in the future, based on some future knowledge we do not yet possess, but which we might possess someday.
4. Plausible Future – those components of our present actual virtuality we think ‘could’ happen in the present, based on our current understanding of how the world works (physical laws, social processes, etc.). This entity is subdivided in Probable future – those components of our present afforded potentialities that we think are ‘likely’ happening, usually based on (in many cases, quantitative) current trends, and the Preferable future – those components of potentiality that we think ‘should’ or ‘ought to’ happen in the future. They are normative value judgements as opposed to the mostly descriptive, as depicted above.
5. Projected Future – components of our present potentiality which is the ‘default, business as usual’, an extrapolated ‘continuation of the past through the present to the future’.

In a former paragraph we focused on the Costs of Climate Inaction. Having in mind the anticipatory mechanics addressing future uncertainties, our focus in the following is on how the future is made present within anticipation, while remaining absent through some standard scientific practices of calculation. Below, we move further to a component of analytics of anticipatory Foresight action and focus on three well documented logics of anticipatory action:³² precaution, preemption and preparedness. The goal of each is to care for by neutralizing climate inaction threats to our social life. At a glance, their philosophical logic is analyzed below:

Precaution was formalized in the ‘precautionary principle’ since late seventies. According to this policy principle, in the emergent case of dealing with a risk (not a calculated hazard), for instance a potentially pollution-causing technology, the default counteracting policy is to ‘play safe’ and have very strict regulations and prohibition. This, in contradistinction to other policy systems where the default stance is to ‘let’s leave on the loose until it is proven dangerous’.³³ Precaution can be understood as a preventative logic with two characteristics. First, preventative action is separate from the processes it acts upon.³⁴ The object of precaution could develop a catastrophic outcome if the precautionary act was not to take place. Precaution begins once a determinate threat has been identified, even if that threat is scientifically uncertain. Second, precautionary logics act before the identified threat reaches a point of irreversibility. There is a need, therefore, to constantly assess the balance between what the threat could become and the costs of (in)action in the present. One such anticipatory measure is in our case carbon offsets as a proactive mechanism to stop a series of already ongoing processes that may lead to adverse impacts.

Preemption. This policy practice differs. While precaution is parasitic to already existent acts on processes that have an actual or possible existence prior to the intervention and does so on the basis of a determinate empirically apprehended threat, preemption is different.³⁵ It acts over threats that have not yet emerged as determinate threats, and so does not only halt or stop from a position outside. Its form of intervention is incitatory and it is justified on the basis of indeterminate potentiality.³⁶ Preemptive acts become immersed in the conditions of emergence of a threat, ideally occurring before a threat has actually emerged. Unlike precaution, which aims to preserve a valued life through preventive policies, preemptive logics work by proliferating effects and creating life and policies in the above mentioned of ‘let them loose’.

Preparedness.³⁷ While preemption and precaution are based on action that aims to prevent the occurrence of a future, the third logic prepares for the aftermath of events. In preparedness the response differs from the other two logics in one critical way: both precaution and preemption aim to stop the occurrence of a future, by either stopping a process before it reaches a point of irreversibility or initiating a new (although potentially illegitimate via citizens deliberation) process. Preparedness is deployed as a sphere of operation in a series of events after a precipitating event. Unlike precaution or preemption, preparedness does not merely aim to stop a future event happening. Rather, intervention aims to stop the effects of an event disrupting the circulations and interdependencies that make up a valued life. Here the emphasis is on developing the capabilities necessary to respond to a series of disruptive future events. The deployment of preparedness techniques becomes part of the infrastructure of urban life. The life of the State and citizens’ life is made ‘resilient’ as a way of preparing for the occurrence of unpredictable events.

Precaution, preemption and preparedness are all means of guiding action once the future has been problematized in an uncertain way—as a disruptive surprise—and each are deployed once specific futures have been made present through concrete and actually impactful practices that exceed full calculation.^¶ Life as a human species and infrastructure partially protected against contingencies via an anticipatory system of preparedness.

4. Plausibilities: A complementarity to Probabilities

According to the standard aggregative connotation of risk, we address expectation values of possible outcomes and future states as results from the product of the expected amount of damage/loss (or benefit/gain) and the probability that a future state will occur.³⁸ Such a definition presupposes the quantifiability of the variables and intermediate states involved, which is typically achieved by stochastic or empirical methods based on large numbers of cases or iterations. On the other side, being prepared against contingencies, urges us to further enrich evidence-based policy frameworks to become aligned with “facts that are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent” and address “wicked problems” which are difficult to define, having no unique, clear and one-off solutions but sets of plausible solutions.³⁹ This drives researchers and policy makers to take into account the—above depicted in figure 1 futures cone—‘plausibility’ ontological mode of addressing complex issues, where plausibility refers to a qualitative and evidence-informed meaningful context and depiction of the future. Due to a structural lack of adequate and finite information on events and causation features, quantitative and fully measured likelihood and frequency of occurrence do not apply.⁴⁰ As mentioned by an anticipation ontology scholar, we have here a fuzzy dimension where in risks ‘we don’t know what is going to happen next, but we do know what the distribution looks like’, which find themselves in analytical distinction from uncertainties, where ‘we don’t know what is going to happen next but also we don’t know what the possible distribution might be, without defined probability’. A fair depiction of this can be found below:

Addressing emerging risks and uncertainties that are accompanied by insufficient knowledge and structurally imprecise data need the soothing hand of forward-looking foresight approaches that engulf plausibilities in a real life and accountable long-term plans and accountable transgenerational decisions. Instead of the ‘how likely’ of the probability of occurrence, this line of thought encompasses fruitful identified contingencies, states of imperfect information and ‘strong substantive uncertainties’ that presuppose an open set of outcomes, not allowing inference to probability distributions.⁴¹ In our case of uncertainty, we have to cope with partial knowledge of outcome related variables and causal relationships that are structurally unpredictable and have no bearing on the sharpness of our current tools or the temporary incompleteness of our information. On top of the above, we are not helpless in addressing uncertainties. Historiographical informed futures thinking and causal explanation is currently of promising assistance adding complementary idiographic value of singular case studies documentation input to recurrent regularities and mechanisms based causal explanation.⁴²

According to a renowned anticipatory systems ontologies scholar there is an analytical distinction between explicit anticipation of which a system is aware and implicit anticipations, by contrast, which work below the threshold of awareness. Anticipatory systems show forms of ‘impredicativity’, that is the presence of self-referential cycles in their constitution.⁴⁴ The legitimate role of plausible anticipatory foresight discipline and exercises is to challenge the mindset of decision makers using counterfactual causation and exploring possible futures, using alternatively normative futures. It is worth mentioning that the difference between explorative scenarios and normative scenarios is that the former work in a forward attitude from the present to the future while the latter work backward from the future to the present. Moreover, while the method of exploratory scenarios produces a variety of different, mutually incompatible scenarios, the method of normative scenarios selects a given scenario and works backward towards its necessary conditions. Plausibility and not probability can be their proper scientific, concrete register, especially when the pressing demand of populations and policy makers is to rephrase inadequate data in actionable decisions implementation.⁴⁵ Plausibility is also an epistemological and ontological prerequisite for foresight—and not predictive forecasting—scenarios, aligned with their capability (1) to present a set of alternative futures, to support and orient the decision-making process, (2) to involve all the actors in the same process through the use of a common language, and (3) to stimulate a convergence towards the same option, and the possibility to be used at different stages of the design process and with different purposes in the same process. Therefore, their strategic dimension transforms the very scenarios in design-oriented tools of anticipatory governance.⁴⁶ Plausibility methodological thinking allows us not to lead a biased research—even an art-based research—on ‘predicting the future’ but to concretely, reasonably and based on evidence ‘appreciate plausible futures’ and analyze ‘futura’ as expectations and latent dispositions.⁴⁷

5. Conclusion

Climate disavowal, unlike simple denial, which causes the repressed content to return painfully to consciousness, generating increased inaction socio-economic costs, is less immediately painful. Against this defense mechanism, art can deconstruct ideological prejudices and foster hope and engaged citizenship. This paper employs foresight and futures studies, transdisciplinary approaches with philosophical underpinnings, as tools to problematize the future and guide anticipatory action, mapping potential, preposterous, possible, plausible, probable, preferable, and projected futures. Within this framework, anticipatory futures epistemologies give a soothing hand to unblock the short circuit in current discursive practices where the more climate change information the more disavowal and less efficient action connected to it.

The paper imposes us plausible scientific pathways that allow to reopen ourselves as hosts of the Other(s) and caring quests of our planet. Hans Jonas, the eminent scholar on planetary ethical responsibility, had stressed this point by insisting that we have to “act so that the effects of our action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life, guiding it from trivial observation to participatory care.” ⁴⁸ Hans Jonas, scrutinized in his abovementioned book the ethical imperative of the indigenous peoples that we do not ‘possess’ the world but ‘we have borrowed our world from our children!’

While the United Nations’ SDGs provide a moral horizon for peace, justice, equality, and ecology, evidence-based policy must be informed by educated futures studies and plausibility epistemological and methodological pre-assumptions; transformation requires an interior awakening and moral engagement. Thus, futures-oriented thinking and acting under plausible conditions of structural uncertainty is not to be disavowed but crucial research considerations—and point of intersection also with ‘art-based practices’ which exercise the thickness of the concrete under conditions of uncertainty—for sustainable, anticipatory envisioning of the future.

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47. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

Notes

1. Frederica Cimato and Michael Mullan, Adapting to Climate Change: Analysing the Role of Government, Defra Evidence and Analysis Series, Paper 1 (London: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2010), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a79c1b4ed915d07d35b7dff/pb13341-analysing-role-government-100122.pdf.
2. Bertrand Guillaume and Stijn Neuteleers, “The Intangibles of Climate Change Adaptation,” in The Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 24–40.
3. Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
4. Núria Almiron and Marta Tafalla, “Rethinking the Ethical Challenge in the Climate Deadlock: Anthropocentrism, Ideological Denial and Animal Liberation,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32, no. 2 (2019): 255–67.
5. Matthew Lockwood, “Right-Wing Populism and the Climate Change Agenda: Exploring the Linkages,” Environmental Politics 27, no. 4 (2018): 712–32; Bernhard Forchtner, “Climate Change and the Far Right,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 10, no. 5 (2019): 604.
6. Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Trust in Government to Handle Problems at New Low,” Gallup Poll, September 26, 2019; Thomas M. Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
7. Wim Carton, “‘Fixing’ Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay,” Antipode 51, no. 3 (2019): 750–69.
8. Matthew d’Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (London: Random House, 2017).
9. Anthony Leiserowitz, Global Warming’s Six Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change, 2009); Riley E. Dunlap, “Climate Change Skepticism and Denial: An Introduction,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 6 (2013): 691–98.
10. Cimato and Mullan, Adapting to Climate Change.
11. Johanna Wolf and Susanne C. Moser, “Individual Understandings, Perceptions, and Engagement with Climate Change: Insights from In-Depth Studies across the World,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 4 (2011): 547–69.
12. Lockwood, “Right-Wing Populism.”
13. Lockwood, “Right-Wing Populism.”
14. Wolf and Moser, “Individual Understandings.”
15. John Broome, “Utilitarianism and Climate Change,” Scientific American 319, no. 6 (2018): 97–102.
16. Tim Christion Myers, “Understanding Climate Change as an Existential Threat: Confronting Climate Denial as a Challenge to Climate Ethics,” De Ethica 1, no. 1 (2014): 53–70.
17. Wolf and Moser, “Individual Understandings.”
18. Richard Snow and Mary Snow, “The Damaging Effects of Climate Change Denial,” Journal of Climatology & Weather Forecasting 3, no. 2 (2015).
19. W. J. Wouter Botzen, Olivier Deschenes, and Mark Sanders, “The Economic Impacts of Natural Disasters: A Review of Models and Empirical Studies,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 13, no. 2 (2019): 167–88.
20. Snow and Snow, “Damaging Effects.”
21. European Environment Agency, Europe’s Environment 2025: Main Report—Europe’s Environment and Climate: Knowledge for Resilience, Prosperity and Sustainability (Copenhagen: European Environment Agency, 2025).
22. David Schlosberg, “Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements and Political Theories,” Environmental Politics 13, no. 3 (2004): 517–40.
23. Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (Chicago: Columbia University Press, 2009); Schlosberg, “Reconceiving Environmental Justice.”
24. Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2024).
25. For a structural breakdown of the disavowal mechanism (the Freudian term Verleugnung), see Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times of War and Death,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957), 274–300. Mode of defence which consists in the subject’s refusing to recognise the reality of a traumatic perception (e.g., castration of the Other). Disavowal of the fact is always accompanied by the opposite attitude (acceptance of reality), since it is ‘rarely or perhaps never’ possible for ‘the ego’s detachment from reality to be carried through completely’ (Freud). The coexistence in the ego of these two contradictory attitudes to reality leads to what Freud terms ‘the splitting of the ego’. Via the use of a fetish, disavowal is always accompanied by a simultaneous acknowledgement of what is disavowed. Thus, the pervert is not simply ignorant of castration; he simultaneously knows it and denies it. Disavowal is the failure to accept that lack causes desire, the belief that desire is caused by a presence (e.g., the fetish). I am ‘free’ from every belief, even unconscious ones, because it is my fetish that believes for me. Our belief fetish works disguised as a kind of ‘objective knowledge’ which is ‘out there’ objectively and comes from outside, as if it is not mine. So I cannot feel split and doubt it. See also Octave Mannoni, “I Know Well, But All the Same...,” in Perversion and the Social Relation, ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 68–92.
26. Zupančič, Disavowal.
27. In lieu of many references, see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), chap. 1; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Everyman’s Library, 1988); Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Discovery of the Imagination,” Constellations 1, no. 2 (October 1994): 136–54; Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), app. V (“Davos Disputation”), 193–207.
28. For a recent publication on this trajectory, see Bruce E. Tonn and Chloe J. Hill, “Capturing the Expanding Research Areas of the Future of Humanity within the Field of Futures Studies: The Case for a Transcendental Futures Subdiscipline,” Futures 174 (2025): 103692, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2025.103692.
29. Significant institutional knowledge is actively emerging at the EU level. See, for example, the European Commission’s Future Forward portal, https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/foresight/future-forward_en; the UNESCO institutional digital archives database tracker at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000264644. For active organizational networks, see the upcoming 2026 Foresight Anticipation Conference schedule hosted at https://anticipationconference.net/.
30. See this dynamic depicted under a policy making context (pp. 14ff.) at https://foresight.gov.gr/en/studies/Generative-AI-Greece-2030-Possible-Futures-of-Generative-Artificial-Intelligence-in-Greece/.
31. Joseph Voros, “A Generic Foresight Process Framework,” Foresight 5, no. 3 (2003): 10–21.
32. Ben Anderson, “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 6 (2010): 777–98.
33. François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 197–210.
34. Anderson, “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness.”
35. Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption,” Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007), https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2007.0066.
36. Anderson, “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness,” 789–90.
37. Anderson, “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness,” 791.
38. Wolfgang Krohn and Georg Krücken, “Risiko als Konstruktion und Wirklichkeit: Eine Einführung in die sozialwissenschaftliche Risikoforschung,” in Riskante Technologien: Reflexion und Regulation: Einführung in die sozialwissenschaftliche Risikoforschung, ed. Wolfgang Krohn and Georg Krücken (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 9–44.
39. This is coined as the ‘post-normal science’ motto in Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, “Science for the Post-Normal Age,” Futures 25, no. 7 (1993): 735–55. See also Jerome R. Ravetz, “What Is Post-Normal Science?” Futures 31, no. 7 (1999): 647–53, https://www.andreasaltelli.eu/file/repository/Editorials2.pdf. For their expanded contemporary contextual synopses, see https://www.isecoeco.org/pdf/pstnormsc.pdf and https://i2insights.org/2021/10/19/guide-to-post-normal-science/. The standard reference for wicked problems is Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–69. For recent updates, see B. Guy Peters, “What Is So Wicked about Wicked Problems? A Conceptual Analysis and a Research Program,” Policy and Society 36, no. 3 (2017): 385–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2017.1361633. In line with the climate change case in point, see Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
40. For an extensive historical look, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
41. S. Grüner, “Uncertainty Decomposed: Understanding Levels of Contingency to Enable Effective Decision-Making,” Strategic Management (March 26, 2024), DOI:10.5937/StraMan2400003G.
42. Veli Virmajoki, “Limits of Conceivability in the Study of the Future: Lessons from Philosophy of Science,” Futures 142 (2022): 102993; Veli Virmajoki, Causal Explanation in Historiography (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). It is worth mentioning that the first book of the well established foresight scholar who has coined the futures methodology of causal layered analysis, Sohail Inayatullah focuses on Macrohistory and future studies, see Sohail Inayatullah and Johan Galtung, eds., Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (London: Praeger, 1997).
43. L. Cavatorta and G. Rosso, “Managing Emerging Risks in Strategic Scenarios of Uncertainty and Complexity: A Theoretical Framework,” in Anticipation, Agency and Complexity, ed. Roberto Poli and Marco Valerio (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag, 2019), 175.
44. A Robert Rosen’s term cited in Roberto Poli, ed., Handbook of Anticipation: Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of Future in Decision Making (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 4, 28.
45. Kees van der Heijden, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996).
46. Poli, Handbook of Anticipation, 840; Roberto Poli, Introduction to Anticipation Studies (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 243–254.
47. Evidence considered as ‘futura’ and not merely ‘facta’ according to a well established futures studies distinction. Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Art of Conjecture (New York: Basic Books, 1967); Rafael Ramirez and Cynthia Selin, “Plausibility and Probability in Scenario Planning,” Foresight 16, no. 1 (2014): 60; Wendell Bell, Foundations of Futures Studies: History, Purposes and Knowledge: Human Science for a New Era, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
48. Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 36 (“Handle so, dass die Wirkungen deiner Handlung verträglich sind mit der Permanenz echten menschlichen Lebens auf Erden”); or its English translation, Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).