What might our near climate future look like? The Ministry for the Future, a bestselling science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is set in a near future that, in many ways, has already caught up with us. It tells the story of various efforts to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change, led by a fictional UN institution founded in 2025 in Zurich. Grounded in science and facts, the book still dares to remain hopeful.

Theater Neumarkt and Collegium Helveticum drew inspiration from this fictional premise to spark discussion around the urgent questions posed by climate change—within scenarios we can reasonably expect by the year 2034. In the spirit of the novel, they bring together real science and experts within an imagined future, staged in different spaces throughout the city.

Just as Trump withdrew from the climate agreement and political developments around the world eroded many notions of hope, a collaborative team from Collegium Helveticum—along with several of its fellows—and artists from Theater Neumarkt and Proberaum Zukunft took inspiration from the novel’s premise: a ministry in Zurich. They used this idea to challenge the defeatism of the «here and now» and to pre-enact a world where science and society—the...