Proposal for a solarpunk shared universe

"Our aim should not be to secure a somewhat thicker slice of bread today, even if this would make us happy; we must not forget what our real aim is. Our main duty is to consider the needs of others. If we become alive to this duty, there will be no unjustly treated people in our midst, and we, in turn, shall not be treated unjustly. Our day-to-day motto should be: "Your problems are also my problems." We must extend our friendship and strengthen our solidarity."
Anna Walentynowicz

A few months ago, I started working on an idea for a Solarpunk Role Playing Game. At the time, I felt it was possible to leave the setting completely open, so that GMs could design their own worlds.
It can be hard work though to create a compelling universe for people to visit, and having some backstory, shared elements and persistent elements which wouldn't change from game to game would be something that would appeal to hosts and players alike.

Since then, I've been writing some short fiction and designing a video game and I've come up with a world which is flexible enough to host a variety of different narratives while still sharing a core identity.

Here I will give a short outline of that world, so that others could use it if they wanted for any project that they saw fit.

It's early in the second half of the 21st century. Climate change surged about 15-20 years ago. Sea levels rose by around 3 meters and some regions had already become too hot to live in. 

There was chaos. A lot of people died but even more lived. More than a billion people migrated...  everywhere is a multicultural society now. Racially homogeneous nation states are a thing of the past.

Capitalism collapsed and the global elites retreated to a few Neo-feudal walled cities, powerless to deal with what was going on outside.

Before the collapse, there was a rush of new initiatives to try and stop climate change using high tech solutions. The massive relics of this time can still be found; gene-engineered forests that grew in a decade, giant wind turbines, half built mirrors in space designed to deflect sunlight, a few giant nuclear reactors, floating cities in the Pacific, autonomous robot factories designed to process landfills... but it was too little too late, and didn't address the problem of consumption. 

The superpowers engaged in a cyber war which crippled the global data infrastructure, destroyed the Cloud and left regions isolated from each other. The orbital satellite fleet is dead. Global trade was cut off and people had to learn to live locally. Communications happen through an ad-hoc wifi-net which sometimes allows connection across hundreds of miles, but often fails or contracts.

Some places suffered more than others. Some areas have adapted better than others. 

There's no central authority or top-down solution, but by common agreement, emissions have dropped to virtually nothing, and there's evidence that someone, somewhere is actually removing CO2 from the air.

A new normal is emerging, with the collapse having achieved what politics could not; de-growth and a grudging egalitarianism in the face of disaster. But it's not primitivism. New green technologies are emerging and people are learning to live better lives than before. Amazing, small-scale technologies that were being developed before the chaos are rushed in to use. The world is transforming quicker than ever.

The capitalists are still a problem, their dirty cities full of ragged souls, eager to escape their chains. The walls now are to keep people in...

Climate change hasn't stopped, only slowed. There are still massive weather events and the new coastline is unstable. Pandemics created by eco-fascists and the old-world order are always a worry and the work of regenerating the environment will never be finished.

Life is good, but there's plenty of scope for conflict. Other countries are far away without air travel or global media... rumors abound, but there are few hard facts to back them up. Anything could be happening anywhere. There are a lot of opportunities for varied narratives; Fantastic stories, unreliable narrators, unbelievable tales, or simply the everyday stories of life after the collapse.

Stories in this shared universe would be practically unbound. Localization of technology and social development means that certain areas could be more or less advanced than others. Some narratives could be quite grounded, while other explore more radical possibilities.

There's no central authority to put limits on what people want to make of the world, and the question of whether we should do something is again becoming more important than if we can do it.

The age of geoengineering and tech futurism has passed, but relics from that time remain. Did godlike AI ever get released before the fall of the Cloud? Are there hidden utopias or dystopias left over from that time? What horrors of twisted science are hidden in the dark corners of the world?

There are three generations; The oldest grew up before the collapse and miss the old world of consumer goods and mass media. The second came to maturity during the collapse. For them the past is a childhood memory, but they are already becoming conservative and adjusting to the new normal. The newest generation are the radicals. They want to do more, do it faster and better. They are ready to become the transhuman generation... 

For anyone setting a story in this shared universe, a few things could make it easier to integrate various narratives so that they don't all invalidate each other. If we say that London is underwater, but in another story, someone visits the city and finds it as dry as a bone, that creates a difficult continuity error. As far as possible, stories should be local. Settings should be small towns or villages. A city setting could be a brand new fictional city; New Atlantis, Neo-Amazonia, Arbor City....

If a real place has to be represented, it should be referenced using in-universe labels. It doesn't have to be the walled city of New York, it can be referred to as "the Republic" or the "Enclave", or upstate.

History should be viewed with the idea that changes are a result of broad geo-political forces, not "Great men" or brilliant strategies. We don't need to hear a detailed description of what happened during the crisis, what's important is what's happening now, and that should occur on a local, communal level. Gardners are more important than generals, the local mayor should be more of a focus than the distant figure of the President.

Writers could collaborate to create shared locales, with more detail and persistent characters. This would be a way to populate the world with new landmarks and interesting features which won't overshadow other narratives. The important thing though would be to keep the global setting stable. If there's going to be a global pandemic that wipes out 99% of the population, that's something that all collaborators would need to agree with. Aliens landing would be hard for the rest of the world to ignore, even if they are isolated.

It would be possible to flashback to events during the crisis, as long as it didn't focus too much on the big picture. Stories could also flash forward to the far future when the climate has been fully regenerated and nature has been restored. But that's a setting to be visited, not lived in.