Risk and Uncertainty in the Anthropocene

A one-day conference
Wednesday, 26 June 2019, 9.45am–5.15pm

This conference explores from a multidisciplinary perspective the role of risk and uncertainty in the Anthropocene. It investigates the specific logics, strategies, forms of knowledge and technologies that different actors are, or should be, using to approach risk and uncertainty.

The scale and timing of existing and potential impacts of environmental degradation in the Anthropocene appear to belie our efforts to interpret and manage them. Yet ‘risk management’ remains the dominant mode of representing and governing catastrophic environmental change, with the pretension of ‘taming uncertainty’. Managed as risk, environmental breakdown and catastrophe can be approached in accounting and investment terms: they can be rendered ‘investable’, and conducive to market opportunity and framings such as ‘natural capital’.

This ‘new era’ of environmental breakdown challenges established forms of expertise and authority and tasks us with thinking about new approaches to politics and political economy. Embracing radical uncertainty permits us to consider multiple, alternative futures, opening up for discussion political and economic settlements seemingly out of reach. But given the timescales for responding to threats such as the climate crisis, what kind of politics or political economy does fast approaching existential risk provoke? Suggestions for ‘war mobilisation’ analogies in fighting climate change or ideas about engineering the planet might give some indication.

In facing the need for transformative and systemic change, it is also necessary to question who will bear the risks and uncertainties of the Anthropocene. How will risk and the costs of mitigation be distributed over time and space? Where will it be situated – locally, at the urban level, globally – and what consequences does this have for different disciplinary approaches?