Climate change is not just a problem of scale—it is a problem of time. Some of the most consequential risks we face today may unfold over decades or centuries, yet our political and institutional systems are built to think in years—often only until the next election.
This mismatch is starkly visible in the growing risk of climate tipping points: abrupt, potentially irreversible changes in the Earth system that could reshape societies within a single generation. Consider the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a major ocean current system that regulates climate across the globe. Scientists warn that its collapse could trigger cascading disruptions—from severe winter cooling in Europe to shifts in tropical rainfall patterns and monsoons and rising sea levels. Yet today, no governance system is equipped to anticipate and respond to such risks in a systematic way.
The challenge is not only scientific or political—it is cognitive, institutional, and societal.
CAMELOT (Capacities for More Effective Long-Term Climate Change Governance) is an ERC-funded research project that investigates a simple but fundamental question:
What capacities do individuals, institutions, and societies need to govern the long term—and how can we build them?
The project develops a new interdisciplinary theory of long-term governance capacities and tests how different forms of science–policy–society interaction can strengthen them in practice.
At the center of CAMELOT is a provocative idea: Effective long-term governance depends on imagination.
Governing long-term risks requires more than data and models. It requires the ability to engage with futures that are uncertain, complex, and often unprecedented. CAMELOT approaches this challenge through the concept of imagination.
Imagination is the capacity to construct, interpret, and act on possible futures—linking what we know about the world to what we choose to do next.
In practice, this means being able to:
- envision possible future developments, including unlikely but high-impact events
- interpret their significance for societies, economies, and ecosystems
- connect these futures to present-day decisions and strategies
Without this capacity, long-term risks remain abstract. With it, they become actionable.
Imagination is not a fixed trait—it can be strengthened through specific methods and processes. CAMELOT investigates how different forms of science–policy–society engagement—such as scenarios, storytelling, and interactive simulations—can enhance the ability of individuals and institutions to think and act long-term.
Explore how CAMELOT studies imagination as a governance capacity
CAMELOT contributes to scholarly debates across environmental governance, political science, futures studies, and cognitive science. It offers new theoretical tools for understanding how future-oriented thinking emerges—and how it can be studied empirically across scales.
CAMELOT is equally a project about practice. It develops and tests concrete approaches to improve long-term risk assessment, strengthen future-oriented decision-making, and design more effective science–policy engagement.
The goal is to support institutions in navigating deep uncertainty and long-term risks.
While rooted in climate change, the project addresses a broader challenge of the 21st century: how societies govern risks that are complex, uncertain, and unfold across generations—from biodiversity loss to emerging technologies and Earth system instability.
