Climate Change Policy

Abstract

This entry examines debates in geography and related disciplines on climate change policy. It begins by reviewing some of the main challenges facing climate policy, where attention is drawn to disputes over burden sharing between countries in the Global North and the Global South on action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the capacity of countries and communities to adapt to the effects of climate change. It then examines the characteristics of climate mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damages policies, and debates about the boundaries and goals of climate policy. Following this, climate politics and governance at the international, national, and transnational scales are examined, where particular attention is paid to the increasingly multi‐actor and multiscalar nature of climate governance and critical scholarship on carbon markets and the implications of these trends for traditional “state‐centric” conceptualizations of climate policy. The entry concludes by examining key debates on adaptation and loss and damages policy.