Social-science and humanities (SSH) research is crucial for informing ambitious, effective, just and societally acceptable climate action. This session highlights how SSH insights on social metabolism, labor transitions, perceptions and societal readiness, institutional dynamics, justice, needs and capabilities, and power relations can enrich and reshape diverse modeling approaches. We aim to provide a platform for interdisciplinary work that broadens what models and scenarios can represent, clarifies their limits, and strengthens connections across methods and disciplines.
We welcome contributions that:
integrate SSH concepts and methods into integrated assessment models (IAMs), energy–economy–environment models, energy-system models, or other analytical frameworks;
use empirical, qualitative or participatory approaches to inform model assumptions, structures, constraints and scenario design;
engage with normative dimensions such as fairness, feasibility, responsibility and societal acceptance, including in emerging areas such as carbon dioxide removal and other climate-response strategies;
connect justice questions to marginalized or disadvantaged communities, particularly in the Global South;
examine how governance, institutions, finance, law, power relations, and material and human needs shape transition pathways;
investigate social outcomes of modeled scenarios, including distributional, labor, health and wellbeing implications; and
explore how new data, methods and technologies can address, or reproduce, gaps in whose experiences and priorities are represented in climate analysis.
We particularly encourage work engaging with distributive, procedural, recognitional, transitional and other dimensions of justice, as well as studies that provide meaningful two-way connections between social science and modeling communities. Contributions need not themselves be modeling studies where they provide empirical, conceptual or normative insights that can inform how climate and energy scenarios are developed, evaluated or interpreted.
By convening these perspectives, the session seeks to advance interdisciplinary approaches that make climate and energy modeling more relevant, inclusive and transparent about both what it represents and what lies beyond its scope.