Breaking Barriers with Patterns: New Tools for Integrating Distributional Justice into Global Mitigation Scenarios

Global mitigation scenarios allocate resources in ways that align with specific climate targets under varying assumptions. These allocations inevitably raise questions of distributional justice. With scenarios becoming a major tool for global climate policy, the distributional implications of global mitigation scenarios are increasingly central to international political debates and negotiations. However, the scenario community lacks tools to systematically and transparently incorporate considerations of distributional justice in scenario development. This research addresses this gap by operationalizing philosophical concepts of distributional justice, referred to as justice patterns.

The justice patterns examined in this study include Aggregate Utilitarian (core idea: everyone benefits), Egalitarian (equal outcomes for all), Prioritarian (priority to those worst-off), Sufficientarian (ensuring everyone reaches a minimum threshold), and Limitarian (ensuring no one exceeds a maximum threshold). With two concrete applications we demonstrate that these justice patterns provide a useful framework for integrating distributional justice considerations in scenario development.

First, we quantify justice patterns to analyse the distributional logic of energy service access in scenarios from the AR6 database. Our findings reveal that Prioritatrian and Egalitarian patterns are the most prominent in AR6 scenarios, while Sufficientarian and Limitarian patterns remain underexplored, leaving a gap in the scenario space.

Second, we introduce an open-source web application that visualizes justice patterns as idealized trajectories, allowing stakeholders to explore and express their preferences for justice patterns in varying contexts. We demonstrate the tool’s potential to guide scenario development in a small pilot study.

We conclude by advocating for future scenario studies to systematically incorporate diverse justice patterns to examine potential conflicts between mitigation strategies and justice considerations. Furthermore, we recommend extending assessments beyond energy services to encompass non-material dimensions critical to socially acceptable futures, such as freedom and power. By operationalizing justice patterns, this research establishes a foundation for comprehensive scenario assessments on distributional justice and systematic stakeholder engagement.