Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action. Composed of twenty-eight essays—a combination of new and republished texts—the anthology is organised around seven main themes: paradigms; what counts?; extraction; dispatches from a climate change frontline country; governance; finance; and action(s). Through this multifaceted approach, the contributors ask pressing questions about how we conceptualise and respond to the climate crisis, providing both ‘big picture’ perspectives and more focussed case studies. This unique and extensive collection will be of great value to environmental and social scientists alike, as well as to the general reader interested in understanding current views on the climate crisis.

Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to be done to create more decisive action. Composed of twenty-eight essays--a combination of new and republished texts--the anthology is organised around seven main themes: paradigms; what counts?; extraction; dispatches from a climate change frontline country; governance; finance; and action(s). Through this multifaceted approach, the contributors ask pressing questions about how we conceptualise and respond to the climate crisis, providing both 'big picture' perspectives and more focussed case studies. This unique and extensive collection will be of great value to environmental and social scientists alike, as well as to the general reader interested in understanding current views on the climate crisis.

Climate change is the greatest challenge of the age, and yet fierce disagreement still exists over the best way to tackle the problem or, indeed, whether it should be tackled at all. In this original book, Amanda Machin draws on radical democratic theory to show that such disagreement does not have to hinder collective action; rather, democratic differences are necessary if we are to have any hope of acting against climate change. This is an important read for researchers, students, policy makers and anyone concerned about the current (lack of) politics in climate change.

Concentrating on a powerful, emerging genre, Tatiana Konrad’s Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis provides a survey of popular narratives that further our understanding of climate change in contemporary fiction. Konrad advocates for the expansion and redefinition of the cli-fi genre and argues that industrial fiction from the nineteenth century is the first example of climate change fiction. Tracing the ways through which cli-fi outlines a history of our modern ecocultural crisis, this book demonstrates how the genre employs four major thematic clusters to achieve this narrative: weather, science, religion, and place. Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events. The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.

Reconstructs negotiations of the Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.

This book examines how an error in global meta-policy set climate change negotiations on an unproductive course. The decision to base negotiations on the Montreal Protocol and overlook the importance of interests, it argues, institutionalised an approach doomed to fail. By analysing interests, science and norms in the process, and the neglect of ‘interactive minilateralism’, learning was delayed until the more promising Paris Agreement was finally concluded, only to encounter a Trump Presidency, which (ironically) might offer further learning opportunities.

This concise and informative text provides a critical history of the concept of sustainability and the various institutional measures taken to promote, implement and enforce sustainable development, proposing new organizational solutions to deal with the crisis of sustainability. Crisis of Global Sustainability provides for the first time a compact insider description of the evolution and impact of the Club of Rome, a global think tank that produced a groundbreaking 1972 study "The Limits to Growth" which highlighted the dangers of unrestrained economic growth and possible collapse of global economy during the first decades of the 21st century. With recent research confirming the validity of these concerns, Kanninen asks whether our overarching concept of thinking on world development today should continue to be "global sustainability", which implies that we still have enough time to make adjustments in our future policies and action. Or should the main paradigm of our thinking shift to "global survivability", a concept that stresses the absolute necessity of immediate and drastic change both in institutions and policies? Many environmentalists, green politicians and think tanks are speaking today more loudly than ever about the necessity for a major policy, institutional and paradigm change and this work is essential reading for students and scholars alike.

There is increasing understanding that climate change will have profound, mostly harmful effects on human health. In this authoritative book, international experts examine long-recognized areas of health concern for populations vulnerable to climate change, describing effects that are both direct, such as heat waves, and indirect, such as via vector-borne diseases. This lively yet scholarly resource explores all these issues, finishing with a practical discussion of avenues to reform. As Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, states in the foreword: 'Climate change interacts with many undesirable aspects of human behaviour, including inequality, racism and other manifestations of injustice. Climate change policies, as practised by most countries in the global North, not only interact with these long-standing forms of injustice, but exemplify a new form, of startling magnitude.' This book will be invaluable for students, post-graduates, researchers and policy-makers in public health, climate change and medicine.

Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives recognizes that climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is also a question of political and communicative capacity. This book enquires into which approaches to journalism, as a particularly important form of public communication, can best enable humanity to productively address climate crisis. The book combines selective overviews of previous research, normative enquiry (what should journalism be doing?) and original empirical case studies of environmental communication and media coverage in Australia and Canada. Bringing together perspectives from the fields of environmental communication and journalism studies, the authors argue for forms of journalism that can encourage public engagement and mobilization to challenge the powerful interests vested in a high-carbon economy – ‘facilitative’ and ‘radical’ roles particularly well-suited to alternative media and alternative journalism. Ultimately, the book argues for a fundamental rethinking of relationships between journalism, publics, democracy and climate crisis. This book will interest researchers, students and activists in environmental politics, social movements and the media.

The ESRC/GEC programme has made a major contribution in terms of environmental social science research. The chapters in this book provide incisive, detailed and reflective critiques of the development of knowledge over the last ten years and provide powerful and important messages about the challenges presented by the complex relationship between environmental and social change. The book should be essential reading for all researchers and also for all policymakers who are grappling with questions about how to respond to environment/society controversies. Judith Petts, Birmingham University, UK and Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Global environmental change will be with us forever. But how it happens in the future, and with what effect on the planet and its peoples depends to a large extent on how the international agreements, national politics and local actions play out. This collection provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of these critical interconnections, and reveals how social scientists are making an invaluable contribution to the creation of more science and just livelihoods in a future world. Tim O Riordan, University of East Anglia, UK An aphrodisiac to the tepid response of positivist social science. People are not merely actors, perpetrators and victims, in an environmental drama. The critical social theorists in this book constructively show us how people are improvising the stage and the script as we update our understanding of nature, what constitutes a good life, and our individual and collective options. Richard B. Norgaard, University of California, Berkeley, US Negotiating Environmental Change is a child of the ESRCs Global Environmental Change Programme, by far the biggest piece of work by social scientists in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the balance sheet needs to be drawn up: what do our policies, insights and values owe to the collaborative efforts of social scientists? This book suggests that ideas and approaches that were conceived at a time when the Ozone Hole , Global Warming and Biodiversity Losses were beginning to resonate in academic and policy circles have now entered the British and European psyche. The challenge of forward thinking in the twenty-first century, in which the environment is central to most of the issues that concern social science, is to demonstrate that the environment is not a separate territory . Environmental thinking and practice affects us in various guises: governance and democracy, business and management, risk and everyday consumption: the substance of this book. Negotiating Environmental Change makes clear the contribution that new thinking is making to problems that were not looked upon as environmental a decade ago, but which we now see as being at the forefront of global research and policy agendas. Michael Redclift, King s College London, UK Major advances have been made recently in environmental social science but the context and importance of this research has also changed. Social and natural science studies of the environment have begun to interact more closely with each other and many analysts now agree that an understanding of environmental problems often depends on an understanding of the attitudes and behaviour of people and organisations. Moreover, policy and public debates have also shown that many assumptions that underpin arguments about sustainable development need to be reconsidered and re-framed. This book by leading researchers presents a critical review of debates in environmental social science over the past decade. Three broad areas are covered in ten chapters: the problems of scientific uncertainty and its role in shaping environmental policy and decisions; the development of institutional frameworks for governing natural resources; and the link between economic and technological change and the environment. The book begins with an overview essay exam