Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis E-Book

Steffen Böhm

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

NEGOTIATING CLIMATE CHANGE in crisis

Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis

Edited by Steffen Böhm and Sian Sullivan

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2021 Steffen Böhm and Sian Sullivan. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Attribution should include the following information:

Steffen Böhm and Sian Sullivan (eds), Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0265

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In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0265#copyright. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800642607

ISBN Hardback: 9781800642614

ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800642621

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800642638

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800642645

ISBN XML: 9781800642652

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0265

Cover image: Photo by Thijs Stoop on Unsplash available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/A_AQxGz9z5I

Cover design by Anna Gatti

Contents

List of Images and Videos

ix

Acknowledgements

xiii

The Authors

xv

Introduction: Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis?

xxxiii

Steffen Böhm and Sian Sullivan

I. PARADIGMS

1

1.

One Earth, Many Futures, No Destination

3

Mike Hulme

2.

From Efficiency to Resilience: Systemic Change towards Sustainability after COVID-19 Pandemic

13

Minna Halme, Eeva Furman, Eeva-Lotta Apajalahti, Jouni J. K. Jaakkola, Lassi Linnanen, Jari Lyytimäki, Mikko Mönkkönen, Arto O. Salonen, Katriina Soini, Katriina Siivonen, Tuuli Toivonen and Anne Tolvanen

3.

On Climate Change Ontologies and the Spirit(s) of Oil

25

Sian Sullivan

II. WHAT COUNTS?

37

4.

Why Net Zero Policies Do More Harm than Good

39

James G. Dyke, Wolfgang Knorr and Robert Watson

5.

The Carbon Bootprint of the US Military and Prospects for a Safer Climate

53

Patrick Bigger, Cara Kennelly, Oliver Belcher andBenjamin Neimark

6.

Climate Migration Is about People, Not Numbers

63

David Durand-Delacre, Giovanni Bettini, Sarah L. Nash, Harald Sterly, Giovanna Gioli, Elodie Hut, Ingrid Boas, Carol Farbotko, Patrick Sakdapolrak, Mirjam de Bruijn, Basundhara Tripathy Furlong, Kees van der Geest, Samuel Lietaer, and Mike Hulme

7.

We’ll Always Have Paris

83

Mike Hannis

8.

The Atmospheric Carbon Commons in Transition

97

Bruce Lankford

III. EXTRACTION

111

9.

The Mobilisation of Extractivism: The Social and Political Influence of the Fossil Fuel Industry

113

Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg

10.

End the ‘Green’ Delusions: Industrial-Scale Renewable Energy is Fossil Fuel+

127

Alexander Dunlap

11.

I’m Sian, and I’m a Fossil Fuel Addict: On Paradox, Disavowal and (Im)Possibility in Changing Climate Change

139

Sian Sullivan

IV. DISPATCHES FROM A CLIMATE CHANGE FRONTLINE COUNTRY—NAMIBIA, SOUTHERN AFRICA

157

12.

Gendered Climate Change-Induced Human-Wildlife Conflicts (HWC) amidst COVID-19 in the Erongo Region, Namibia

159

Selma Lendelvo, Romie Nghitevelekwa and Mechtilde Pinto

13.

Environmental Change in Namibia: Land-Use Impacts and Climate Change as Revealed by Repeat Photography

173

Rick Rohde, M. Timm Hoffman and Sian Sullivan

14.

On Climate and the Risk of Onto-Epistemological Chainsaw Massacres: A Study on Climate Change and Indigenous People in Namibia Revisited

189

Ute Dieckmann

V. GOVERNANCE

207

15.

Towards a Fossil Fuel Treaty

209

Peter Newell

16.

How Governments React to Climate Change: An Interview with the Political Theorists Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann

217

Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann (Interviewed by Isaac Chotiner)

17.

Inside Out COPs: Turning Climate Negotiations Upside Down

225

Shahrin Mannan, Saleemul Huq and Mizan R Khan

18.

Local Net Zero Emissions Plans: How Can National Governments Help?

231

Ian Bailey

19.

Reversing the Failures of Climate Governance: Radical Action for Climate Justice

243

Paul G. Harris

VI. FINANCE

253

20.

Climate Finance and the Promise of Fake Solutions to Climate Change

255

Sarah Bracking

21.

The Promise and Peril of Financialised Climate Governance

277

Rami Kaplan and David Levy

VII. ACTION(S)

289

22.

What Is to Be Done to Save the Planet?

291

Peter North

23.

Climate Politics between Conflict and Complexity

303

Matthew Paterson

24.

Sustainable Foodscapes: Hybrid Food Networks Creating Food Change

313

Rebecca Sandover

25.

Telling the ‘Truth’: Communication of the Climate Protest Agenda in the UK Legacy Media

323

Sharon Gardham

26.

Climate Justice Advocacy: Strategic Choices for Glasgow and Beyond

335

Patrick Bond

27.

Public Engagement with Radical Climate Change Action

353

Lorraine Whitmarsh

28.

Five Questions whilst Walking: For Those that Decided to Participate in Agir Pour le Vivant

367

Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan

Index

379

List of Images and Videos

Introduction

Fig. 1

Annual average temperatures for the world, 1850–2020, based on data by the UK Met Office, Graphics and lead scientist Ed Hawkins, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading, Creative Commons, https://showyourstripes.info/.

xxxvii

Fig. 2

Annual total CO2 emissions, by world region, 1750–2019, Creative Commons, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region.

xliii

Chapter 3

Fig. 3

Indigenous territories and tendered oil blocks in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 2018. ©Amazon Watch, public domain, https://amazonwatch.org/news/2017/1026-amazonian-indigenous-peoples-reject-ecuadors-plans-for-new-oil-tender.

31

Chapter 8

Fig. 4

Three frames and stages of the global atmospheric/carbon commons. Image by chapter author.

98

Chapter 11

Fig. 5

ǁOeb:Cousins Noag Mûgagara Ganaseb and Franz |Haen ǁHoëb revisit places in the westward reaches of the Hoanib River where they used to live. Photo: Sian Sullivan, November 2015, composite made with Mike Hannis using three 10 x 10 km aerial images from Directorate of Survey and Mapping, Windhoek, July 2017, part of the exhibition Future Pasts: Landscape, Memory and Music in West Namibia, https://www.futurepasts.net/memory. ©Future Pasts, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

141

Video 1

Hildegaart |Nuas of Sesfontein / !Nani|aus, Kunene Region, north-west Namibia remembers harvesting !nara (Acanthosicyos horridus) in the dune fields of the Hoanib River. Video by Sian Sullivan (2019), https://vimeo.com/380044842. ©Future Pasts, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

142

Chapter 12

Fig. 6

Map showing the location of the Otjimboyo and Ohungu conservancies in Namibia, adapted by the authors from public domain image at http://www.nacso.org.na/conservation-and-conservancies. © NACSO CC BY 4.0.

163

Chapter 13

Fig. 7

Repeat photos of Mirabib inselberg in the Namib Desert. Composite image © Rick Rohde, drawing with permission on images by John Jay, Frank Eckhardt, Rick Rohde and Timm Hoffman.

174

Fig. 8

Maherero’s kraal (1876), and present day Okahandja (2009). Sparse riverine Ana trees and thornveld savanna have been replaced by alien tree species such as eucalyptus (Australian) and prosopis (North American) that now obscure the view of the upper reaches of the Swakop River. W. C. Palgrave Collection (National Library of South Africa), out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

176

Fig. 9

River Skaap, Hatsemas Central Highlands, central Namibia. Matched photographs spanning 1876 to 2005. Photo credits: W. C. Palgrave Collection (National Library of South Africa) out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

177

Fig. 10

Windhoek southern suburbs, looking south-west from Wassenberg. Matched photographs spanning 1919 to 2014. I. B. Pole-Evans (South African National Biodiversity Institute), out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde.

178

Fig. 11

Otjisewa, central Namibia. W. C. Palgrave Collection (National Library of South Africa), out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

179

Fig. 12

Aub / Gurieb River, southern Namibia. W. C. Palgrave Collection (National Library of South Africa), out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

180

Fig. 13

Location of repeat photo sites in each of four vegetation types, west and central Namibia. Image by chapter lead author.

181

Fig. 14

Fogbelt site near Rössing uranium mine (33km from coast) showing examples of the long-lived shrubsbetween 1919 and 2016 displaying the same individuals in each image I. B. Pole-Evans (South African National Biodiversity Institute), out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

182

Fig. 15

Grass/shrublands (Aukas East). Matched photographs of Euphorbia damarana, Calicorema capitata shrubland (110km from coast) illustrating slight decrease in cover over ninety-seven years between 1919 and 2016. I. B. Pole-Evans (South African National Biodiversity Institute), out of copyright, used with permission); © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

183

Fig. 16

North Usakos Railway. Savanna transition showing significant increase in woody cover between 1919 and 2014, indicating the influence of a westward shift in summer rainfall. I. B. Pole-Evans (South African National Biodiversity Institute); © R. F. Rohde and M. T. Hoffman.

184

Fig. 17

Large ephemeral river (Kuiseb). Matched photograph from Gobabeb (55km from coast) illustrating significant thickening and size increase of riverine woody cover over fifty years between 1965 and 2015. Dominant riverine species: Faidherbia albida, Tamarix usneoides, Acacia erioloba, Salvadora persica. Photographer unknown (Gobabeb Namib Research Institute), out of copyright, used with permission; © R. F. Rohde.

185

Chapter 14

Fig. 18

Locations of Topnaar and Haiǁom research communities in Namibia. Dieckmann et al. (2013), http://www.lac.org.na/projects/lead/Pdf/climate_change.pdf, p. 35, CC BY 4.0.

192

Fig. 19

Conceptual framework deployed in the World Bank Trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (TFESSD) study. Dieckmann et al. (2013), http://www.lac.org.na/projects/lead/Pdf/climate_change.pdf, p. 27, CC BY 4.0.

193

Fig. 20

Position of the moon in Haiǁom rain forecasts. Dieckmann et al. (2013), http://www.lac.org.na/projects/lead/Pdf/climate_change.pdf, p. 91, CC BY 4.0.

197

Chapter 17

Fig. 21

Top 6 Negotiations That Stretched Overtime. Image by Saleemul Huq, Fahad Hossain and Mimansha Joshi (2019), Dhaka, Bangladesh. ©ICCCAD, CCBY 4.0.

226

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful for a research grant from Bath Spa University to cover the production costs of this open access volume. We would also like to thank Alessandra Tosi, Melissa Purkiss and the team at Open Book Publishers, and two anonymous reviewers, for their enthusiasm about publishing this collection in time for the 26th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, November 2021.

This work by eminent scholars from around the world offers a provocative and deeply insightful analysis of “the politics of paralysis and self-destruction” that have long hindered effective and equitable climate policy over the past 20 years. The book is very timely, and I hope will help to increase the sense of urgency for a deal that will save the planet and billions of poor people around the world that bear a disproportionate impact of climate change.

Prof Chukwumerije Okereke, Director Center of Climate Change and Development, Alex-Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Nigeria

Every person of good will must work to make COP26 a decisive moment in the history of the world. This rich and eclectic collection offers a range of critical perspectives into the destructive role played by the coal, oil and gas sectors, and other crucial issues that will underpin the conference, as well as providing ideas for how we can yet secure a world of future flourishing.

David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific

This book presents perspectives from the Global South, highlighting voices from communities and sharing their daily lived experiences of climate change. These voices are often missing from international platforms such as COPs. The contributions included in the book are valuable for countries such as Namibia and others where the impacts of climate change are severe. Namibia strongly advocates for knowledge production regarding climate change and its impact on livelihoods, the coping mechanisms of vulnerable communities and their capacity to adapt.

Hon. Heather Mwiza Sibungo, Deputy Minister of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, Namibia

Bringing a wide range of social scientists together, this volume provides a much needed critical analysis of why meaningful action on climate change has been so elusive and what we can do about it. It asks the difficult questions and provides some promising answers.

Prof. Harriet Bulkeley, Durham University

One of the key challenges in responding to climate change is taking into account multiple perspectives across various theories and methods of research. Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis is a clear and thoughtfully organized anthology that rises to that challenge. Unlike some social science writing, this book is readily accessible to any generally interested reader. The contributors succeed in presenting a comprehensive, state-of-the-art report about social science perspectives on the climate crisis.

Sam Mickey, University of San Francisco

The Authors

Eeva-Lotta Apajalahti is Research Coordinator at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Sciences, HELSUS, in the University of Helsinki. She received her DSc (2018) from Aalto University School of Business by focusing on the role of large energy companies in energy system transition. Her current research focuses on energy transitions in cities, connections between sustainable consumption and production, energy citizenship and energy communities. She is one of the coordinators of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development.

Ian Bailey is Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of Plymouth, UK. His research interests include the politics of designing and regulating carbon markets, social attitudes to onshore and offshore renewable energy, and debates on environmental and social justice within sustainability transitions. He has worked as an expert reviewer for the IPCC Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports and has advised the UK Environmental Audit Committee, Cabinet Office, European Commission, and World Bank on aspects of climate mitigation policy. He is currently a member of the Devon Climate Emergency Net Zero Task Force.

Oliver Belcher is Assistant Professor in International Relations & Security at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. He has written extensively on late-modern warfare, including the U.S. military as a climate actor.

Giovanni Bettini is a Senior Lecturer in International Development and Climate Politics at Lancaster University. His research investigates how environmental change—in its planetary but uneven character, and entangled with a series of contemporary ‘crises’ and historical legacies—is generating new spaces, modes of governance, subjectivities and forms of resistance. He has published extensively on the links between climate change and human mobility, and more recently on the role of ‘the digital’ in reshaping adaptation, resilience, and justice.

Patrick Bigger is an Honorary Research Fellow at Lancaster University. In addition to work on US military operations and their climate impacts, his research focuses on private investment for biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation.

Ingrid Boas is an Associate Professor at the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University. Ingrid conducts research in the fields of environmental change, mobilities, and governance. Her PhD (University of Kent, 2014) examined the securitisation of climate migration, and was funded by the UK Economic Social Research Council. In 2016, she was awarded a personal grant with the Netherlands Scientific Organization to study environmental mobility in the digital age. Ingrid’s work has appeared in Global Environmental Politics, Environmental Politics, Geoforum, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Nature Climate Change, and in a monograph on climate migration and security with Routledge (2015).

Steffen Böhm is Professor in Organisation & Sustainability at University of Exeter Business School. His research focuses on the political economy and ecology of the sustainability transition. He has published five books: Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave, 2006), Against Automobility (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (Mayfly), The Atmosphere Business (Mayfly, 2009), and Ecocultures: Blueprints for Sustainable Communities (Routledge, 2015). The book Climate Activism (with Annika Skoglund) is forthcoming with Cambridge. More details at www.steffenboehm.net.

Patrick Bond is an Honorary Professor of Geography at Wits University, both in South Africa. His doctorate (1993) was in Geography under David Harvey’s supervision. Among his political ecology books are Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest (Merlin Press, 2002); Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation (Zed Books, 2006); and Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012).

Sarah Bracking is Professor of Climate and Society at King’s College London, UK. She is editor of Corruption and Development (Palgrave, 2007); author of Money and Power (Pluto, 2009) and The Financialisation of Power (Routledge, 2016); and co-editor with Sian Sullivan, Philip Woodhouse, and Aurora Fredrikson of Valuing Development, Environment and Conservation: Creating Values that Matter (Routledge, 2019). She is currently researching climate and development finance, climate insurance and the wider political economy of development in southern Africa.

Mirjam de Bruijn is Professor in Contemporary History and Anthropology of Africa at Leiden University and the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL). Her specific fields of interest are mobility, youth, social (in)security, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a basis in social anthropology. In 2016 she founded the organisation Voice4thought (www.Voice4Thought.org) and is director of the project Voice4Thought Académie, based in Mali. Mirjam teaches ‘innovative methods and methodology’ in the BA and MA African Studies programmes. Her recent publications are on ICTs and society, radicalisation, and youth.

Ute Dieckmann is an anthropologist at the University of Cologne and currently German Principal Investigator for Etosha-Kunene Histories (www.etosha-kunene-histories.net), supported by the German Research Foundation and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. For many years, she has worked at the Legal Assistance Centre in Windhoek, doing research with and advocacy for marginalised and indigenous communities in Namibia.

David Durand-Delacre is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Combining media analysis and interviews with academic researchers, journalists, NGOs, and policymakers, his thesis investigates the emergence and evolution of debates at the intersection of climate change and migration in France. David previously worked as an analyst for the United Nations Sustainable Development Network. In this role, he collected and analysed indicators for two editions of the network’s flagship Sustainable Development Report (2015 and 2016). From 2015 to 2018, he also volunteered and then became President of Réfugiés Bienvenue, a Paris-based NGO providing housing to homeless asylum seekers.

Alexander Dunlap is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. His work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development, and extractive projects more generally in both Latin America and Europe. He has published in Anarchist Studies, Geopolitics, Journal of Peasant Studies, CapitalismNatureSocialism, Political Geography, Journal of Political Ecology, Environment and Planning E, and a recent article in Globalizations.

James G. Dyke is a Senior Lecturer in Global Systems at the University of Exeter where he serves as the Assistant Director for the Global Systems Institute and programme director for the MSc Global Sustainability Solutions. He has previously held visiting positions at the Earth-Life Systems Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the School of Geography at the University of Southampton. He is an environmental columnist for UK newspaper the i. His book Fire, Storm & Flood: The Violence of Climate Change (2021) is published by Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury. More details can be found at jamesgdyke.info.

Carol Farbotko is an Adjunct Fellow in Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She is a cultural geographer with research interests in climate mobilities and the politics of climate risk. Much of her work is focused on climate change mobilities in the Pacific Islands.

Isabelle Fremeauxis apopular educator, action researcher and deserter of the neoliberal academy where for a decade she was Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. With Jay Jordan, Isabelle coordinates The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience. Co-authors of the film and book Paths Through Utopias (La Découverte, 2011), they live and work on the zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, where an international airport project was abandoned after 50 years of struggle.

Eeva Furman is the Director of the Environmental Policy Center at the Finnish Environment Institute. Her background is in marine biology, and for the last twenty years she has worked with environmental governance. Her core interests are science-policy-society, the co-creation of sustainability transformations, and active citizenship. Her background is in biodiversity governance, ecosystem service management and sustainable development, and she engages actively internationally. She co-authored The Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) with fourteen other scientists—the report was handed to the heads of the UN’s member states in the General Assembly held in September 2019. She is the Chair of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development.

Sharon Gardham received her MA in Environmental Humanities from Bath Spa University and has a degree in History and Heritage Management from the University of Gloucestershire. She is currently undertaking PhD research at Bath Spa involving a multi and trans-disciplinary examination of the Cotswold Commons.

Giovanna Gioli is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Bath Spa University. She has held research and teaching posts at several international universities, as well as a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh. She has also worked for various development organisations in South Asia, including the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Minna Halme is Professor of Sustainability Management at Aalto University School of Business. Her research focuses on co-creation of sustainable innovations in the context of grand challenges. She is Associate Editor of Organization & Environment, and on the editorial boards of several journals in the field of sustainability and management. She is a member of a number of national industry and public policy boards, including Finland’s Expert Panel for Sustainable Development, and sits on the advisory boards of Finland’s largest retailer SOK and the Central Chamber of Commerce. She is a co-founder of Aalto University’s cross-disciplinary Creative Sustainability Master’s programme, Aalto Sustainability Hub, and Aalto Global Impact.

Mike Hannis is Senior Lecturer in Ethics, Politics and Environment at Bath Spa University, UK. His academic publications include Freedom and Environment: Autonomy, Human Flourishing and the Political Philosophy of Sustainability (Routledge, 2016). He lives off-grid in Somerset, and is an editor and feature writer for The Land magazine.

Paul G. Harris (www.paulgharris.net) is the Chair Professor of Global and Environmental Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong and a Senior Research Fellow in the Earth System Governance global research alliance. He is author/editor of twenty-five books on climate change and global environmental politics, policy and justice. His most recent books include, as author, Pathologies of Climate Governance: International Relations, National Politics and Human Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and, as editor, A Research Agenda for Climate Justice (Edward Elgar, 2019).

M. Timm Hoffman is the Leslie Hill Chair of Plant Conservation in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Cape Town and is the Director of the Plant Conservation Unit. He uses repeat photography to understand long-term changes in the vegetation of southern Africa.

Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. His work illuminates the numerous ways in which the idea of climate change is deployed in public, political, religious, and scientific discourse, exploring both its historical, cultural and scientific origins and its contemporary meanings. He is the author of nine books on climate change, including most recently Climate Change: Key Ideas in Geography (Routledge, 2021), Contemporary Climate Change Debates (Routledge, 2020) and Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009). From 2000 to 2007 Hulme was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Saleemul Huq is an expert in the field of climate change, environment and development. He has worked extensively in the inter-linkages between climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development, from the perspective of developing countries, particularly the least developed countries (LDCs). He was a lead author of the chapter on ‘Adaptation and Sustainable Development’ in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and was one of the coordinating lead-authors of ‘Inter-relationships between adaptation and mitigation’ in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007). He has taught at Imperial College, the University of Dhaka, and the United Nations University. He was the founder, and is currently the Chairman, of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), a leading research and policy institute in Bangladesh.

Elodie Hut is a PhD candidate at the Hugo Observatory (University of Liège, Belgium), where she previously worked as a research assistant, conducting research for the MIGRADAPT project (on migration as a potential adaptation strategy to environmental changes). Prior to this, Elodie successively worked at the UNHCR and the IOM in South Africa, for GIZ in Senegal, and in a disaster risk reduction consultancy firm in South Africa. Elodie holds a Master’s degree in Humanitarian Action and Law from the Institute of International Humanitarian Studies of Aix-en-Provence, as well a second Master’s in International Relations from Sciences Po Aix.

Jouni J. K. Jaakkola is Professor of Public Health at the University of Oulu and Research Professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. He has broad long-term interests in global health. From the early 1990s he has pursued an international academic career working in Norway, Russia, the US, Sweden, and the UK. In 2008 he established the Center for Environmental and Respiratory Health Research (CERH) at the University of Oulu. In 2014 CERH was designated as a WHO Collaborating Centre in Global Change, Environment and Public Health. His professional mission is to conduct research on topics which help to solve emerging global public health problems. He is a member of the Expert Panel for Sustainable Development.

Jay Jordan (formerly John Jordan) is an art activist described as a “magician of rebellion” by the press and a “Domestic Extremist” by the UK police. Co-founder of “Reclaim the Streets” (1995–2000) and the ClandestineInsurgent Rebel Clown Army,Jay has co-authored We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003) and A User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible (with Gavin Grindon, Minor Compositions, 2011). With Isabelle Fremeaux, Jay coordinates The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience. Co-authors of the film and book Paths Through Utopias (La Découverte, 2011), they live and work on the zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, where an international airport project was abandoned after 50 years of struggle.

Rami Kaplan is a political and organizational sociologist at Tel Aviv University. He studies various aspects of global corporate capitalism, including its historical emergence and spread, corporate power and social responsibility, global diffusion of organizational practices, transnational business elite networks, global environmental politics, and the spread of populist rationality. His comparative research spans the USA, the UK, Germany, Venezuela, the Philippines, Israel, and the supra-national level.

Cara Kennelly holds a Master’s by research in Carbon Accounting from Lancaster University and has supported a variety of carbon emissions research projects. She is currently the Sustainability Manager for VINCI Facilitie.

Mizan R. Khan is Deputy Director at the International Centre for Climate Change & Development (ICCCAD) and Programme Director of the LDC Universities’ Consortium on Climate Change (LUCCC) at ICCCAD, Independent University Bangladesh, Dhaka. He served at North South University (NSU), Dhaka as Chair of the Department of Environmental Science & Management (DESM) from 2003–2009 and was Director of External Affairs at NSU in 2015. He was also an Adjunct Professor at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Manitoba, Canada, from 2009–2013.

Wolfgang Knorr is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University. A physicist by training, he has published extensively on a broad range of climate and climate impacts research, including the global carbon cycle, climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, fire ecology, plant physiology, soil science, land surface-atmosphere feedbacks, and forestry for climate mitigation. He led a research group at the Max-Planck-Institutes for Meteorology and Biogeochemistry, served as the Deputy Leader of a major UK Earth system modeling research programme, and served for many years as editor for the American Physical Union, and as advisor to the European Commission and the European Space Agency.

Bruce Lankford is Emeritus Professor of Water and Irrigation Policy at the University of East Anglia, UK. He has more than thirty-five years of experience in agriculture, irrigation, and water resources management. His research interests are irrigation policy in Sub-Saharan Africa, serious games in natural resource management, irrigation efficiency and the paracommons, river basin management and water allocation, and irrigated catchment resilience.

Selma Lendelvo holds a PhD in Conservation Biology from the University of Namibia. She is Director of Grants Management and Resource Mobilisation at the University of Namibia (UNAM). She has been extensively involved in research with UNAM since 2001, mainly focusing on the field of environmental management and sustainable natural resources management across Namibia and abroad. She is interested in Natural Resources Management and Land Reform including wildlife management, community-based tourism, conservancy management, environmental management, rural development and gender. She is currently also the Namibian Principal Investigator for Etosha-Kunene Histories (www.etosha-kunene-histories.net).

David L. Levy is Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and was a co-founder of the Sustainable Solutions Lab there. David, an Aspen Institute Faculty Pioneer Award Winner, conducts research on corporate and societal responses to climate change. His work explores strategic contestation over the governance and finance of controversial issues engaging business, governments, and NGOs, such as climate change and sustainability standards. David has spoken and published widely on these topics, for both academic and practitioner audiences.

Samuel Lietaer is an environmental social scientist working on the subjective dimensions of human interactions with environmental change, with a focus on marginal regions of low-income countries. He is currently working for the MIGRADAPT research project in Senegal, alongside which he is writing a PhD thesis at the Centre d’Etudes du Développement Durable (CEDD) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Both the project and his PhD dig further into translocal mechanisms of (political) remittances serving as adaptation strategies to environmental changes in Senegalese home communities. Previously, Samuel obtained his Master’s in both Political Science and Law. He worked as a climate policy officer at 11.11.11, the overarching development NGO in Belgium. He also conducted research for the Belgian Development Cooperation in the field of climate-compatible private-sector development using perception approaches.

Lassi Linnanen is Professor of Environmental Economics and Management at LUT University, Lahti, Finland. Before joining academia, he was the CEO and co-founder of Gaia Group, a leading Finnish energy and environmental consultancy. He has also engaged in active management of over ten spin-off companies with business ideas around sustainable technology and management. He is a former member of the Finnish Climate Change Panel (2016–2019) and current Vice Chairman of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development (2019-).

Jari Lyytimäki (PhD) works as a Senior Researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute, Environmental Policy Centre. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests cover various fields of environmental studies, including climate and energy issues, sustainability indicators, media analysis, risk communication and societal utilisation of scientific results. He is one of the coordinators of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development.

Geoff Mann is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Global Political Economy at Simon Fraser University (Canada).

Shahrin Mannan is a Senior Research Officer at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) where, under the Locally Led Adaptation and Resilience programme, she currently manages three different projects related to community resilience, water, and livelihood security. She also manages ICCCAD’s recently launched small grants programme and is the lead for its gender programme. She is actively involved in training and mentoring national and international students, grassroot representatives both online and in-person, and organised a side event at the COP25 in Madrid, presenting work on “Strengthening Climate Actions: Need for Decentralizing Climate Finance”. By training, she is an urban planner, having graduated from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and later completing her Master’s in Development Studies at the University of Dhaka.

Mikko Mönkkönen is a Professor in Applied Ecology at the University of Jyväskylä. He leads the Boreal Ecosystems Research Group (BERG), a multidisciplinary research team studying the environmental and social impacts of natural resource use in boreal forests. This work combines socioeconomic scenario analyses, life-cycle analyses, environmental impact assessment using ecosystem service and biodiversity models, and forest planning optimisation tools. He is a member of Finland’s Expert Panel for Sustainable Development.

Sarah Louise Nash is a political scientist working on climate change politics and policy, especially at the intersection of climate change and human mobilities, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna. She holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for her project “Climate Diplomacy and Uneven Policy Responses on Climate Change and Human Mobility” (CLIMACY). Her first book, Negotiating Migration in the Context of Climate Change. International Policy and Discourse, was published in 2019 by Bristol University Press. Sarah holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg.

Benjamin Neimark is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK. He is a human geographer and political ecologist who focuses on the green economy, resource extraction, high-value commodity chains, smallholders, agrarian change and development. Although he has a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, he also conducts research on the US military as a climate actor.

Peter Newell is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and co-founder and Research Director of the Rapid Transition Alliance. He has undertaken research, advocacy and consultancy work on different aspects of climate change for over twenty-five years. He sits on the board of directors of Greenpeace UK, is a board member of the Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch and a member of the advisory board of the Greenhouse think-tank. His single and co-authored books include Climate for Change (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Governing Climate Change (Routledge, 2010), Climate Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Romie Nghitevelekwa holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Freiburg, Germany. She lectures in the subject areas of sociology of development, sociology of the environment, and rural sociology at the University of Namibia. Her research focuses on land reform, land rights, security of land tenure, land markets, land use and land-use change in rural areas, community conservation, rural socio-economic, and territorial restructuring. She is the author of Securing Land Rights: Communal Land Reform in Namibia (University of Namibia Press, 2020).

Peter North is Professor of Alternative Economies in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the politics of climate change and ecologically-focused social movements engaged in struggles about the implications of anthropogenic climate change and resource constraints for both humans and the wider ecosystems upon which we depend, and, using ‘diverse economies’ frameworks, understanding social and solidarity economies as tools for constructing more convivial, liveable, and sustainable worlds.

Daniel Nyberg is a Professor of Management at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research explores the political activities of corporations, with a particular focus on how corporations engage both internally and externally with the climate catastrophe.

Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester and Research Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. His research has focused for thirty years on the political economy, global governance, and cultural politics of climate change. His latest work is In Search of Climate Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Mechtilde Pinto holds a Bachelor’s degree in Tourism Management and is currently pursuing her Master’s degree at the University of Namibia. Her research focus areas and interests are in natural resource management, community-based conservation, and community based-tourism. With Selma Lendelvo and Sian Sullivan, she is a co-author of ’A perfect storm? COVID-19 and community-based conservation in Namibia’ (Namibian Journal of Environment, 2020).

Rick Rohde is a retired Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Research Associate at the University of Cape Town. His interests include the environmental history of cultural landscapes, and historical and political ecology, primarily in Namibia, South Africa and Scotland. Visual ethnography and outsider photography are abiding interests that have found expression in projects in Namibia and South Africa.

Patrick Sakdapolrak is Professor at the Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Austria, where he leads the Working Group for Population Geography and Demography. He is also a Research Scholar at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. His research field is at the interface of population dynamics, environmental change, and development processes, with a focus on the topics of migration and displacement as well as health and disease, mainly in South- and Southeast Asia and East Africa.

Arto O. Salonen is Professor of Social Pedagogy and Sustainable Well-Being at the University of Eastern Finland, Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies, and a member of the Expert Panel for Sustainable Development. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the following universities: the University of Helsinki (education), the Finnish National Defence University (sustainable development), and the University of Eastern Finland (eco-social wellbeing). The title of his doctoral dissertation was Sustainable Development and its Promotion in a Welfare Society in a Global Age. His recent empirical research is on sustainable food, mobility and consumption, as well as active citizenship.

Rebecca Sandover is a Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Exeter who undertakes Engaged Research focused on Sustainable Food Networks. Using a knowledge co-production approach, she has in recent years been investigating action toward the formation of sustainable food networks in the South West UK. Her research is particularly focused on building local food partnerships with local authorities, boosting access to sustainable local food, addressing food insecurity and addressing food-policy-related issues of health and wellbeing. She has been recently researching Public Participation in Climate Change policy making, exploring stakeholders’ perceptions of the Devon Climate Emergency’s Climate Assembly.

Katriina Siivonen is Vice Director and University Lecturer in Futures Studies at Finland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku (UTU), and Adjunct Professor in Cultural Heritage Studies (UTU). She holds several academic and societal board positions, including being Vice Chair of the Expert Panel for Sustainable Development in Finland, and she chairs the Advisory Board of the implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Finland. She is an expert in qualitative research, participatory methodology, identities, heritage futures, and cultural sustainability transformation, and leads research on these themes.

Katriina Soini is Adjunct Professor and a Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) in the field of Resilient Society. She has a background in Human Geography and her research has focused broadly on sustainability and sustainable governance in the rural context. Recently she has been working on sustainability transition/transformations and methods and theories of sustainability science. Soini has been leading a COST Action IS1007 on Culture and Sustainability and she is the editor of the Routledge Studies in Culture and Sustainable Development series. She is one of the coordinators of the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development.

Harald Sterly is a Senior Researcher at the Population Geography and Demography Working Group at the Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Austria. He works on the nexus of environmental migration with a special focus on the spatial and social aspects of migration, urbanisation, and technological change, and how the latter contribute to changes in vulnerable groups’ scope for agency and their vulnerability and resilience.

Sian Sullivan is Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University and UK Principal Investigator for Etosha-Kunene Histories (www.etosha-kunene-histories.net). She is an environmental anthropologist, cultural geographer and political ecologist working to recognise diversity in perceptions and representations of the natural world, amidst contemporary concern about climate change and species decline. Over the last few years she has led an Arts and Humanities Research Council project called Future Pasts (www.futurepasts.net) focusing on understandings of sustainability in the conservation and cultural landscapes of west Namibia. She has also researched the ‘financialisation of nature’—see The Natural Capital Myth (www.the-natural-capital-myth.net).

Tuuli Toivonen is a geographer and a Professor of Geoinformatics at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on spatial analyses and novel use of big and open data to support sustainable spatial planning. She is particularly interested in active and healthy mobility and the use of green spaces in urban areas and beyond. She is a member of a number of university and national policy boards, including Finland’s Expert Panel for Sustainable Development. She leads the Geography BSc and MSc study programmes and the multidisciplinary Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki.

Anne Tolvanen is a Professor in the ecology and multiple use of forests and the Programme Director of LandClimate research programme in the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). Her work concentrates on the reconciliation of land uses to mitigate climate change and safeguard biodiversity in a sustainable and controllable manner. Her group develops models and tools that are used in the planning and management of peatland and forest ecosystems. She represents Luke in numerous domestic and international boards and working groups related to natural resources use, including the Finnish Expert Panel for Sustainable Development and the Society of Ecological Restoration (SER).

Basundhara Tripathy Furlong is a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She is an anthropologist by training and her research interests include climate change, human mobility, gender, resilience, the anthropology-development nexus, and environment. She obtained her MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2012 and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Delhi in Sociology (Hons.). She was a Lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh and carried out empirical research in India and Bangladesh.

Kees van der Geest (PhD) is Head of the “Environment and Migration: Interactions and Choices” (EMIC) Section at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). As a human geographer he applies a people-centred perspective to study the impacts of climate change, human mobility, environmental risk, adaptation, livelihood resilience, and rural development. His work has contributed substantially to expanding the empirical evidence base on migration-environment linkages and impacts of climate change beyond adaptation (“loss and damage”). Kees has extensive fieldwork experience in the Global South, for example in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nepal, Marshall Islands and Bolivia.

Joel Wainwright is Professor of Geography at Ohio State University (USA).

Robert Watson is Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia. Robert is a physical chemist specialising in atmospheric science issues and a leading authority on the science of climate change due to human activity. His career spans research and advisory roles, including key roles with NASA, as a science policy adviser to US President Bill Clinton, and at the World Bank. For the UK government, Robert was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He has served as Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Inter Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Lorraine Whitmarsh is a Professor in Environmental Psychology, specialising in perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport, based in the Department of Psychology, University of Bath. She is Director of the ESRC-funded UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). She regularly advises governmental and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication, and is Lead Author for IPCC’s Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report. Her research projects have included studies of energy efficiency behaviours, waste reduction and carrier bag reuse, perceptions of smart technologies and electric vehicles, low-carbon lifestyles, and responses to climate change.

Christopher Wright is a Professor of Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School and key researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute. His research explores organisational responses to climate change, with a particular focus on corporate environmentalism, risk, identity, and future imaginings. He is the author (with Daniel Nyberg) of the book Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Introduction: Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis?

Steffen Böhm and Sian Sullivan

© 2021 Steffen Böhm and Sian Sullivan, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0265.29

(At Least) Five Decades of Knowing and (Not) Acting1

In all the talk about the Paris Agreement, reached at the twenty-first Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in 2015, it is sometimes forgotten that the world’s political leaders have held negotiations about climate change at the highest possible level for at least three decades. Many have known about climate change for a lot longer.

It was in the 1860s that the Irish scientist John Tyndall first established a link between CO2 and what then became known as the ‘greenhouse effect’, which was further evidenced by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (Pain 2009). In 1938, the British scientist and engineer Guy Stewart Callendar “documented a significant upward trend in temperatures for the first four decades of the 20th century and noted the systematic retreat of glaciers” (Plass et al. 2010: online). In 1956, the American scientist Gilbert Plass (1956) published a seminal paper called ‘Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change’, creating a clear link between increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature rises.

This scientific knowledge has thus been ‘out there’ for a very long time, and was also not unnoticed in the political arena. As early as 1965, the US President’s Science Advisory Committee

told President Lyndon Johnson that greenhouse warming was a matter of real concern. There could be ‘marked changes in climate,’ they reported, ‘not controllable through local or even national efforts.’ CO

2

needed attention as a possibly dangerous ‘pollutant’ (Weart 2021: online).

In the ‘mother country’ of fossil fuel burning, the United Kingdom, politicians became increasingly aware of climate change in the 1960s. In 1969, the House of Lords (the upper chamber in the UK parliamentary system) discussed railway policy and the hereditary peer Jestyn Philipps asked the following question:

[m]y Lords, can my noble friend say whether he and British Railways have taken account of the fact that what were abnormal temperatures last summer may not be abnormal if we continue to discharge CO2 into the air by the burning of various fossil carbons, so increasing the greenhouse effect? (Carbon Brief 2019a: online).

Public opinion, particularly in the highly industrialised, most polluting countries, had shifted markedly towards an awareness of environmental issues in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s influential and path-breaking book, Silent Spring, was published, becoming a bestseller worldwide. Anti-pollution, conservation and environmental protection movements sprang up everywhere. The first ‘Earth Day’ was held in the United States in 1970, becoming global in 1990 and marking the emergence of environmentalism as a serious social movement and political force (as also discussed by Hulme, this volume).2 The world’s first green political parties were founded in 1972, in the Australian state of Tasmania and in New Zealand. The German Green Party, which subsequently became one of the most successful national green parties worldwide, was founded in 1979. Climate change was written on the banners of these environmental activists from the start.

The rise of environmental consciousness from the 1960s onwards also made the bosses of fossil fuel companies take note. We now know that the corporate leaders of ExxonMobil, one of the biggest oil companies of the world, had known about climate change and the unsustainability of their business models since at least 1977 (Hall 2015), as also clarified by Wright and Nyberg, this volume. During the 1980s, Exxon and Shell had extensive internal discussions and memos on climate change (Franta 2018). We are constantly told that companies are always listening to what their customers want. Well, already in the 1970s it became clear that an increasing number of customers were worried about the degradation of nature and climate change in particular. Corporate leaders would have been aware of this shift in public consciousness and attention. Given that what companies hate most are business risks, and that climate change is the biggest risk to an oil and gas company’s business model, it would be logical to assume that these companies were making climate change risk assessments from these decades.

The 1980s saw the rapid expansion of environmentalism worldwide. In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published Our Common Future, which became known as the ‘Brundtland Report’, named after the Commission’s chairwoman Gro Harlem Brundtland. While the Report had a wider remit, focusing on a whole range of environmental issues, it clearly stated that there is

the serious probability of climate change generated by the ‘greenhouse effect’ of gases emitted to the atmosphere, the most important of which is carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from the combustion of fossil fuels (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 145–46).

It went on to say:

[a]fter reviewing the latest evidence on the greenhouse effect in October 1985 at a meeting in Villach, Austria, organized by the WMO, UNEP, and ICSU, scientists from 29 industrialized and developing countries concluded that climate change must be considered a ‘plausible and serious probability’ [...] They estimated that if present trends continue, the combined concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be equivalent to a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels, possibly as early as the 2030s, and could lead to a rise in global mean temperatures ‘greater than any in man’s [sic] history’. Current modelling studies and ‘experiments’ show a rise in globally averaged surface temperatures, for an effective CO2 doubling, of somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, with the warming becoming more pronounced at higher latitudes during winter than at the equator […]. An important concern is that a global temperature rise of 1.5–4.5°C, with perhaps a two to three times greater warming at the poles, would lead to a sea level rise of 25–140 centimetres. A rise in the upper part of this range would inundate low-lying coastal cities and agricultural areas, and many countries could expect their economic, social, and political structures to be severely disrupted (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 148).

The Brundtland Report and the continued gathering of scientific evidence catapulted climate change to the top of the political agenda of many countries at the end of the 1980s. On 23 June 1988—more than thirty years ago!—Dr James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, stated in a landmark testimony before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, that

[g]lobal warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming…In my opinion, the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now (Brulle 2018: online).

Climate change was no longer only a concern for tree-hugging activists—if it ever was confined in that way. Now, NASA scientists and the top political class in the richest countries of the world were not only informed about climate change but were actively talking about what to do about it.

This recognition of the urgency of climate change, and the high risk of not doing anything to turn it around or address its predicted impacts, contributed to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (Rio Summit) in 1992, which brought together leaders from government, business and NGOs from across the world, including most heads of state. At the Rio Summit, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—an official, international environmental treaty with binding obligations—was signed, coming into force in 1994.

The so-called Conference of the Parties (COP) is the UNFCCC’s main decision-making body and meets annually. At COP3 in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was signed, the first international agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. At COP21, in 2015, the landmark Paris Agreement was reached to commit states across the world to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Alongside these agreements under the UNFCCC, the United Nations has also included ‘Climate Action’ as one of seventeen global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015, framing SDG13 specifically as a call that governments “[t]ake urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”.3

Having arrived at 2021, however, scientific evidence for ongoing global temperature rises alongside industrial combustion of fossil fuels is now overwhelming. The simple graphic shown in Figure 1 communicates clearly where we are in terms of global temperature rises since 1850.

Fig. 1. Annual average temperatures for the world, 1850–2020, based on data by the UK Met Office, Graphics and lead scientist Ed Hawkins, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading. Creative Commons, https://showyourstripes.info/.

Climate scientists now agree

that 2011–2020 was the warmest decade on record, in a persistent long-term climate change trend. The warmest six years have all been since 2015, with 2016, 2019 and 2020 being the top three. The differences in average global temperatures among the three warmest years—2016, 2019 and 2020—are indistinguishably small. The average global temperature in 2020 was about 14.9°C, 1.2 (± 0.1) °C above the pre-industrial (1850–1900) level (WMO 2021: online).

In other words, we have already seen a 1.2 degrees Celsius temperature rise globally, which makes it all but certain that we will fail to meet the 1.5 degrees commitment made by the UNFCCC’s COP21 in Paris in 2015 – as confirmed in the recently published first instalment of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2021). If current trends persist, and even if countries meet their Paris Agreement obligations, many climate scientists now warn that we are heading towards at least 3 degrees Celsius change compared to pre-industrial levels (UN 2019).

Common but Differentiated Responsibilities?

The UNFCCC treaty agreed in Rio in 1992 clearly acknowledged that the rich, highly developed and industrialised countries have a historical responsibility to take a lead in combating climate change, given that countries such as the UK, the US, France, Germany, etc. have been pumping greenhouse gases at scale into the atmosphere for at least three hundred years. The treaty says in Article 3, Principle 1:

The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof (UN 1992: 9).

The Kyoto Protocol, the first landmark, international agreement to commit to Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reductions, repeated this commitment:

[a]ll Parties, taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities and their specific national and regional development priorities, objectives and circumstances (UN 1998: 9).

The key phrase here is ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, acknowledging that climate change is a global ‘commons’ problem (as further discussed in Lankford’s chapter, this volume), but that different countries have different responsibilities in relation to their contributions to this problem. Carbon emissions do not respect national borders: if a large, coal-fired power station is built in one country, it ultimately affects the climate on the whole planet. In saying that responsibilities are ‘differentiated’, Global South countries are acknowledged to have not been the cause of climate change, and to have not emitted massive amounts of GHG for very long, with the inference that they cannot be expected to sort out the mess that Global North countries—the rich, industrialised nations with their expansionary colonising histories—have caused.

A glance at global history reveals how closely energy and GHG emissions have been linked to both economic growth and colonial expansion. The Netherlands was the first country to develop a taste for exponential industrial growth back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which would have been unthinkable without the availability of cheap domestic peat, as well as timber from Norwegian and Baltic forests (Moore 2010). One reason that Britain took over Holland’s imperial leadership was due to its vast reserves of coal mined at great profit through the use of cheap labour, with the burning of coal taking off at the end of the eighteenth century, and growing exponentially in the nineteenth century (Malm 2016). Then came oil and gas, which have helped make the United States of America the global imperial master from the early twentieth century onwards (Foster 2006).

There is thus more than 250 years of fossil fuel burning by the Global North to account for. Many climate justice activists advocate for some form of reparations to be paid by the North to the poorest countries of the planet, particularly those that are already struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing climate, whether in the form of rising sea levels, increasing drought (as considered in the chapter by Lendelvo and colleagues, this volume), failed harvests, or bigger and more forceful weather events such as storms. The fact that approximately 80% of historical carbon emissions have to be attributed to the rich world (Centre for Global Development 2015), and are already causing havoc in many countries around the world, cannot simply be wished away.

In the Paris Agreement of 2015, ‘common and differentiated responsibilities’ were again mentioned repeatedly, for example in Article 4, Paragraph 19:

[a]ll Parties should strive to formulate and communicate long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies, mindful of Article 2 taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances (UN 2015: 6).

Yet, this principle has gradually been pushed into the background, and the discourse of ‘differentiation’ is now almost a fringe occurrence. The rapid rises of emissions, particularly in China and India, are often cited as reasons for why these fast-industrialising countries now also have to curb their emissions. Clearly, they have their own responsibilities and they need to be held to account: China, in particular, is now the largest GHG emitter by far in the world. Let us bear in mind, however, that India’s carbon emissions per capita are still about a seventh of the figure for the United States (Carbon Brief 2019b), and China’s rapidly rising emissions are to a great extent driven by export-driven industries, producing consumer goods for the rest of the world, particularly the Global North (Yang, Yuantao et al. 2020). If we add up historical per capita emissions over the past three hundred years, then China’s carbon emissions—with its vast population—lag far behind those countries that industrialised first (Centre for Global Development 2015).

Western European countries like to portray themselves in green, responsible colours, highlighting that their carbon emissions are significantly lower than the Kyoto baseline of 1990. The UK, for example, which is hosting COP26 in Glasgow in 2021,4 frequently and happily declares that “[i]n 2019, total UK greenhouse gas emissions were provisionally 45.2 per cent lower than in 1990” (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 2020). What is conveniently forgotten is that the UK’s apparent success in lowering GHG emissions is largely due to the early adoption of gas, which has lower emissions than coal and oil, in the early 1990s, i.e. before Kyoto. There are clearly carbon reduction successes in many Global North countries. The power generation sector in the UK, for example, has now phased out coal almost completely,5