Description
In the face of an accelerating planetary crisis, knowing the future holds profound value for practitioners and decision-makers working on the intersection of climate change and security. Private and public actors mobilize advanced computer models, digital twins, or machine learning to turn vast datasets of big Earth data into knowledge of future risks – from large-scale natural disasters to environmental migration, or related political conflicts. However, this growing future expertise rarely seems to translate into political action in the present. The paper argues that the key to explaining this puzzle lies in practices and technologies of de/valuing climate futures. Linking work on anticipatory security in CSS and STS, with the sociology of valuation, I conceptualize climate security as a political economy of futures in which data does not simply inform policy but is translated through three logics of de/valuation.
First, discounting functions as a political technology of devaluing future harm. Through a close reading of the UK Treasury's 2025 “Green Book supplementary guidance: Accounting for the effects of climate change,” I trace how data-driven future scenarios are translated into present-value calculations, rendering long-term risks manageable as part of a broader UK resilience strategy. Second, capitalization enacts climate futures as sites of speculative value. Using the European Earth observation program Copernicus as a paradigmatic case, I study the strategies aimed at turning big Earth data on future risks into (knowledge) products to be further used by economic, administrative, and political actors. Third, I describe the dismantling of knowledge infrastructures and related abilities to monitor and predict climate risks by the current US government as a form of epistemic erasure that seeks to secure the ongoing generation of value by fossil fuel industries.
