Geography Of Climate Change

Climate change is one of the inescapable themes of current times. Climate change confronts society in issues as diverse as domestic and international political debate and negotiation, discussion in the media and public opinion, land management choices and decisions, and concerns about environmental, social and economic priorities now and for the future. Climate change also spans spatial, temporal and organisational scales, and has strong links with nature-society relationships, environmental dynamics, and vulnerability. Understanding the full range of possible consequences of climate change is essential for informed decision making and debate. This book provides a collection of chapters that span environmental, social and economic aspects of climate change. Together the chapters provide a diverse and contrasting series that highlights the need to analyze, review and debate climate change and its possible impacts and consequences from multiple perspectives. The book also is intended to promote discussion and debate of a more integrated, inclusive and open approach to climate change and demonstrates the value of geography in addressing climate change issues. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

This book takes a comprehensive look at several cases of climate change adaptation responses across various sectors and geographical areas in urban Africa and places them within a solid theoretical context. Each chapter is a state-of-the-art overview of a significant topic on climate change adaptation in urban Africa and is written by a leading expert in the field. In addition to the focus on the geography of urban adaptation to climate change in Africa, this collection offers a broader perspective by blending the use of case studies and theory based research. It examines transformations in climate change adaptation and its future orientation from the perspectives of urban planners, political economists, environmentalists, ecologists, economists and geographers, thereby addressing the challenges facing African cities adaptation responses from all angles. Providing up-to-date and authoritative contributions covering the key aspects of climate change adaptation in urban Africa, this book will be of great interest to policymakers, practitioners, scholars and students of geography, urban development and management, environmental science and policy, disaster management, as well as those in the field of urban planning.

Climate change is one of the inescapable themes of current times. Climate change confronts society in issues as diverse as domestic and international political debate and negotiation, discussion in the media and public opinion, land management choices and decisions, and concerns about environmental, social and economic priorities now and for the future. Climate change also spans spatial, temporal and organisational scales, and has strong links with nature-society relationships, environmental dynamics, and vulnerability. Understanding the full range of possible consequences of climate change is essential for informed decision making and debate. This book provides a collection of chapters that span environmental, social and economic aspects of climate change. Together the chapters provide a diverse and contrasting series that highlights the need to analyze, review and debate climate change and its possible impacts and consequences from multiple perspectives. The book also is intended to promote discussion and debate of a more integrated, inclusive and open approach to climate change and demonstrates the value of geography in addressing climate change issues. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Written by a leading geographer of climate, this book offers a unique guide to students and general readers alike for making sense of this profound, far-reaching, and contested idea. It presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present, and a future. In ten carefully crafted chapters, Climate Change offers a synoptic and inter-disciplinary understanding of the idea of climate change from its varied historical and cultural origins; to its construction more recently through scientific endeavour; to the multiple ways in which political, social, and cultural movements in today’s world seek to make sense of and act upon it; to the possible futures of climate, however it may be governed and imagined. The central claim of the book is that the full breadth and power of the idea of climate change can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. This vantage point is what the book offers, written from the perspective of a geographer whose career work on climate change has drawn across the full range of academic disciplines. The book highlights the work of leading geographers in relation to climate change; examples, illustrations, and case study boxes are drawn from different cultures around the world, and questions are posed for use in class discussions. The book is written as a student text, suitable for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses that embrace climate change from within social science and humanities disciplines. Science students studying climate change on inter-disciplinary programmes will also benefit from reading it, as too will the general reader looking for a fresh and distinctive account of climate change.

As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.

Conversations about climate change are filled with challenges involving complex data, deeply held values, and political issues. Understanding Climate Change examines climate change as both a scientific and a public policy issue. Sarah L. Burch and Sara E. Harris explain the basics of the climate system, climate models and prediction, and human and biophysical impacts, as well as strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The second edition has been fully updated throughout, including coverage of new advances in climate modelling and of the shifting landscape of renewable energy production and distribution. A brand new chapter discusses global governance, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, as well as mitigation efforts at the national and subnational levels. This new chapter makes the book even more relevant to climate change courses housed in social sciences departments such as political science and geography. An effective and integrated introduction to an urgent and controversial issue, this book is well-suited to adoption in a variety of introductory climate change courses found in a number of science and social science departments. Its ultimate goal is to equip readers with the tools needed to become constructive participants in the human response to climate change.

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism" -- a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

"Change the system, not the climate" is a common slogan of climate change activists. Yet when this idea comes into the academic and policy realm, it is easy to see how climate change discourse frequently asks the wrong questions. Reframing Climate Change encourages social scientists, policy-makers, and graduate students to critically consider how climate change is framed in scientific, social, and political spheres. It proposes ecological geopolitics as a framework for understanding the extent to which climate change is a meaningful analytical focus, as well as the ways in which it can be detrimental, detracting attention from more productive lines of thought, research, and action. The volume draws from multiple perspectives and disciplines to cover a broad scope of climate change. Chapter topics range from climate science and security to climate justice and literacy. Although these familiar concepts are widely used by scholars and policy-makers, they are discussed here as frequently problematic when used as lenses through which to study climate change. Beyond merely reviewing current trends within these different approaches to climate change, the collection offers a thoughtful assessment of these approaches with an eye towards an overarching reconsideration of the current understanding of our relationship to climate change. Reframing Climate Change is an essential resource for students, policy-makers, and anyone interested in understanding more about this important topic. Who decides what the priorities are? Who benefits from these priorities, and what kinds of systems or actions are justified or hindered? The key contribution of the book is the outlining of ecological geopolitics as a different way of understanding human–environment relationships including and beyond climate change issues.