Unbounding the future: New directions for climate‐changed geographies

Abstract

AbstractThis commentary reflects on the contributions that human geography has made to climate change research, as well as future directions for human geographic work on climate change. I suggest that one of the key achievements of the field is to render climate change a boundary object: an entity whose interpretive flexibility allows it to become a shared object of knowledge that, in principle, facilitates collaboration across disparate communities of practice. However, the ways in which that contribution has been made, and made possible, have effects that ripple elsewhere. While the subfield of political ecology and its historiographical methods have played vital roles in laying the intellectual foundations for human geographic work on climate change, and thus its ability to construct climate change as a boundary object in the first place, I suggest that they and other neo‐Marxian approaches to the study of the (climate‐changing) environment tend to diminish human geographic engagement with the future as an object of scholarly inquiry. To address that limitation and help push climate‐changed geographies in novel directions, I suggest that climate‐changed futures be engaged problematically. I then conclude with a discussion of key empirical domains—chiefly climate reparations and climate adaptation—where such problem‐oriented work may be productively applied.