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The paper relates the 'global' to the 'local' through examination of the impacts of recent concerns regarding global atmospheric change (stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change) upon thinking and practices within sections of the British refrigeration industry. Complementing political studies of the effects of international agreements to curb the production and emission of gases implicated...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – comprised of top climate scientists from around the globe – has reached consensus that human activities have contributed significantly to global climate change. However, over time, the United States has refused to join concerted international efforts – such as the Kyoto Protocol – to curb human activities contributing to climate change. US newspaper...
The questions of how land use change affects climate, and how climate change affects land use, require examination of societal and environmental systems across space at multiple scales, from the global climate to regional vegetative dynamics to local decision making by farmers and herders. It also requires an analysis of causal linkages and feedback loops between systems. These questions and the conceptual...
This paper considers some intellectual, practical and political dimensions of collaboration between human and physical geographers exploring how firms are using relatively new financial products – weather derivatives – to displace any costs of weather-related uncertainty and risk. The paper defines weather derivatives and indicates how they differ from weather insurance products before considering...
Natural resource-dependent societies in developing countries are facing increased pressures linked to global climate change. While social-ecological systems evolve to accommodate variability, there is growing evidence that changes in drought, storm and flood extremes are increasing exposure of currently vulnerable populations. In many countries in Africa, these pressures are compounded by disruption...
The idea of climate has both statistical and social foundations. Both of these dimensions of climate change over time: climate, as defined by meteorological statistics, changes for both natural and anthropogenic reasons; and our expectations of future climate also change, as cultures, societies and knowledge evolves. This paper explores the interactions between these different expressions of climate...
The issue of the social geographical dimensions of climate change is timely and important. This paper sets out to explore one example of this: how people living in the Pacific who are most at risk of being made landless by climate change are portrayed in policy discourse, and how high-level international representatives of Pacific nations have responded to these portrayals. At the heart of this is...
With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science–policy–celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate...
As a microcosm of the global livestock-climate problem, this tale of two hegemonies explores how and why two critical constituencies—development planners and conservation professionals—have failed to see the “raw hides” of cattle’s impact on the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala. Based on ethnographic research carried out between 1993 and 2007, this paper seeks to explain the idealization,...
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has piqued interest in the insurance industry, and this scrutiny has led to assumptions that the industry has become unstable and unprofitable with the increased incidence of disasters in highly-insured regions of the world. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that the insurance industry has responded by spreading risk through scaled and networked recovery...
This paper critically but sympathetically examines eco-localisation as a response to ‘peak oil’ and to reduce the emission of CO 2 to avoid dangerous climate change. Rather than seeing the politics of climate change and peak oil as in some way ‘post-political’, the paper argues that protagonists of localised economies are developing radical new conceptions of livelihood and economy that directly...
An important topic in climate change discourse is the question of “climate refugees” and climate-related mobility, which is often presented as failed adaptation. This discourse feeds into, and reinvigorates, anti-mobility sentiments, especially concerning youth, among nongovernmental and governmental organizations that conceptualize mobility as involuntary and associated with social rupture. Challenging...
Climate-induced migration, and particularly the issue of climate refugees, is subject to growing attention in global climate governance. The debate on the topic sees the convergence of conflicting discourses (ranging from those of conservative European governments to southern NGOs) onto apocalyptic narratives that forecast massive, abrupt and unavoidable flows of climate refugees. Such dystopian narratives,...
This paper develops and tests the application of a Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) for agricultural and natural resource-dependent communities in developing countries. The index is applied in a comparative study of two wetland communities in Trinidad and Tobago, a country that is expected to bear some of the most severe impacts of climate change. Our application of the LVI entailed a series of...
Adaptation to climate change is being planned and implemented across the developing world. As billions of development aid dollars are being mobilised around this new theme there are risks that adaptation efforts of the development sector will result in familiar problems. In this paper we draw upon postdevelopment perspectives that critically consider development aid and the role of the development...
This paper reflects on the resurgence and meaning of the adaptation concept in the current climate change literature. We explore the extent to which the early political economic critique of the adaptation concept has influenced how it is used in this literature. That is, has the current conceptualization been enriched by the political economic critique of the 1970s and 1980s and thus represent something...
Images act to draw in audiences through vivid and emotive portrayals, and in doing so, they facilitate both cognitive and affective processing. Yet images are not neutral – they can portray highly ideological messages, and act as normative statements portraying a particular way of viewing the world. Whilst climate imagery proliferates, media analysis of climate to date has focused almost exclusively...
This article demonstrates how market-focused natural resource management can reduce adaptive capacity to environmental change. It describes attempts to standardize socio-ecological phenomena in the New England groundfishery for purposes of legal accountability and the development of environmental markets. Industry flexibility across harvested species has supported a range of informal social networks...
This critical review debates the issues raised in Bassett and Fogelman’s 2013 article “Déjà vu or something new? The adaptation concept in the climate change literature”. After summarising the main findings of their article, we examine the methodology that Bassett and Fogelman adopted. We question the narrow sample of journals analysed, which we argue has led to a bias in the conclusions drawn. We...
This reply is in response to Lorenz et al.’s commentary on our original article, “Déjà vu or something new? The adaptation concept in the climate change literature.” Their commentary criticizes our literature review method for not being sufficiently systematic. They do not dispute our conclusions yet call them “biased.” We believe the claim of bias is unfounded and we stand by the methods and conclusions...
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