Governance: Climate Change and Land Use in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Climate change is disrupting the fundamental conditions of human life, while exacerbating existing inequities by placing further burdens on communities that are already vulnerable. For economic geographers, the challenge is to fundamentally reconsider our economies and the physical, social and environmental infrastructures that underpin them. Climate change also presents an opportunity to transform our social and economic systems and to better integrate social and ecological outcomes. In reducing social values to economic exchange value, a range of social and environmental attributes are stripped out of economic valuation. Climate change requires attention to two critical dynamics: (1) managing the balance of time between socio-economic and environmental systems, and (2) understanding the flows of hydrocarbon cycles and their interrelationship with ecosystems. A sustainable economy would not compress resource values so that their only form of recognition might be the profitability of their exchange, but it should instead give them space for expression, consideration and realization. Rather than address climate change in a silo, as a by-product of fossil-fuel-based energy, climate change should instead be considered within a system of planetary boundaries. Land-based industries, such as forestry, water provision, energy, agriculture, fisheries and even real estate should be integrated through comprehensive systems approaches. In this way, resilience strategies could address not just critical physical infrastructure but also the socio-economic and cultural interdependencies of human and natural systems. This is the only way to truly address a problem with the scope and scale of climate change.