Politics Of Climate Change Research Articles

Thinking with Children: Climate Change and the Democratic Politics of Renewal and Risk

AbstractClimate change poses serious political challenges to liberal democracies arising from the problem of short-termism and the priority accorded to the vested interests of present adults over the vulnerabilities of children and future generations. This article aims to analyse the justifications, benefits, and policy implications of centring children in climate change politics in order to overcome these problems. The central argument is that ‘thinking with children’ introduces normative vantage points for tackling climate change based on taking responsibility for future harms. Such a vantage point also produces new sites of contestation shaped by adult representations of the renewal and risk embodied in children. First, we outline what “thinking with children” means for democratic politics, focussing on how child-as method approaches centre the injustices faced by children and youth and the implications for the renewal of democracy. We then analyse how this normative shift to centre children addresses the problems of vested interests and short-termism by de-naturalising present adult interests, foregrounding impacts on young people as the future demos, and giving long-term priority to the affectedness of future generations. Finally, we analyse the policy implications that thinking with children offers, using a recent landmark court case in Australia to propose independent legal standing for children in public interest cases and the introduction of Child Impact Assessments in climate policymaking.

Individual attendance data for over 30 years of international climate change talks

The international community has formally negotiated over climate change since 1991. The annual meetings that host these negotiations have seen an ever-growing number of individuals representing countries, international organizations, or non-governmental organizations. These meetings and their attendees have accordingly become the focal point of international climate change cooperation for both the international community and scholars studying climate change politics. Yet, researchers have been unable to access and analyze comprehensive attendee-level data pertaining to these negotiations in terms of attendees’ names, genders, job titles, delegations, divisions, and affiliations. In applying text-as-data techniques to attendance roster PDFs, we extract and build attendee-level datasets for all annual negotiations held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its precursor, 1991–2023. These data include original language and English-translated information on 27,470 unique delegations and 310,200 attendees over a 32-year period. Summaries and validations in turn highlight the promise of our data for the study of attendance patterns and characteristics across delegations and over time.

“Do immigrants cause higher crime rates?” A cumulative cross-sectional general social survey data analysis

While empirical research in the United States has largely debunked the longstanding stereotypical image of immigrants as criminals, Americans have held onto their prejudices against immigrants. Anti-immigrant sentiments and Americans’ support for restrictive and punitive immigration laws and policies have frequently been triggered by political and media rhetoric. Politicians often sensationalize the unfounded claim that immigrants, especially the undocumented, cause higher crime rates. Given the persistent nature of these beliefs and the negative consequences on immigrant communities, researchers have examined factors that predict anti-immigrant sentiments in the U.S. Many of these studies have utilized the General Social Survey (GSS), cross-sectional datasets, broadly examining anti-immigrant attitudes of Americans and their support for restrictive policies and vice versa. These studies highlight political affiliation, race, sex, age, education, socio-economic status and cultural concerns as predictors of these beliefs. However, not many studies utilized cumulative cross-sectional data to grasp the nuanced nature of these beliefs and their consequences over the years. In addition, the GSS variable measuring the immigration and crime nexus was worded differently and contained fewer response categories in the year 2000 compared to other years. This may have implications for data outcomes. Thus, the current paper analyzed cumulative cross-sectional GSS datasets, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2014, and 2022, that had the variable, “Immigrants cause higher crime rates,” as a dependent variable, in association with predictor variables highlighted by previous studies. This article explains the notable differences in those who believed that immigrants cause higher crime rates in 2000 compared to other years. The current analysis enhances previous cross-sectional studies by showing the nuanced nature of the predictors in the backdrop of changing political climate every year. It supports previous studies in emphasizing the importance of respondents’ political affiliation, race and education as predictors. The article also brings attention to possible limitations arising from differences in response categories and other GSS data issues.

Science Fiction, Global Warming and Environmental Education in the Capitalocene

Abstract This essay explores ways in which environmental educators might break with their existing traditions of research and pedagogy by critically appraising climate histories and anticipated futures depicted by SF (science/speculative fiction) in print and audio-visual media. SF has engaged the politics of climate change for at least two centuries and, as a form of public pedagogy accessible to all generations, provides alternative visualisations of the problems arising from humanity’s destructive transformations of Earth’s climate and possible ways of ameliorating them.

Evaluation of Energy Security Submits on Climate Change; Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord

The rise and incessant increase of Industrialization, modernization and advance technology have attributed to a greater challenge in contemporary international politics. It has brought about a shift in major discuss and study of international relations and politics from the anarchical nature of nation states to climate change. This research work focuses on the hypocrisy in United Nation, a case study of the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen submit. It highlights the various submit held to find solution to climate change, the discrepancy and hypocritical politics or decision in the United Nation, solutions agreed from various submit and as well the United nation contribution to climate change. It adopted a qualitative method of research with data’s from written literature and journals from different scholars and UN articles. Realism was adopted as theoretical frame work which shows that sates will go to any extents to defends her interest not minding the global disaster, which has influenced the decisions and as brought about rational and immoral decisions from some advance or rich nations. It concludes that, the hypocritical nature of some states has posed more threats to the issues at hand, due to the use of fossil fuels, every wealthy nation today became wealthy, the world's largest development agencies refuse to support the use of fossil fuels, which poor countries may employ to escape poverty at the insistence of wealthier nations not minding the fact that they contribute more to global emission than the poor nations. The study therefore recommends that, a legal frame work need to be set, nation states need to forget political and ideological differences and rather corporate to find solution to the gory situation. Lastly, advance countries who contributed more to global emission should be held accountable and should as well finance poor countries to implement the policies.

Showing climate action: exploring Fridays for Future Germany’s visual activism on Flickr

This article examines how Fridays for Future Germany (FFFG) uses photographs of climate protests to convey the politics of climate change to wider audiences. The author argues that FFFG is an ideal-type form of visual activism in which visual imagery is central to its climate activism. The article builds on climate change communication scholarship and visual social movement studies to contribute an inquiry about FFFG’s visual activism. The focus is on FFFG’s visual self-representations on the social media platform Flickr, which promises to give insights into its strategies of self-legitimation. The empirical analysis discusses the recurring visual patterns in FFFG’s visual activism based on illustrative examples and provides an interpretive reading about the implications of certain ways of seeing and showing climate action. The conclusion puts the findings in a wider political context, highlighting the importance of visualization in the (self-)legitimation of FFFG in debates about global climate governance.

(Re) framing the politics of climate change: resilience, reparative critique and affective life in situations of extreme heat

ABSTRACT One of the ways we know climate change is through the emergencies that make it present. But how does the connection between singular events (emergencies) and a meta-stable condition (climate change) become perceivable to us? Through what knowledges? And with what political implications? In this paper I apply these questions to deepen critical understanding of government-orchestrated efforts to enhance climate resilience. Pursuing an alternative pathway to critiques that reduce resilience to neoliberalism, I bring resilience into dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s concept of situations. The importance of situations rests in its ability to diversify our understanding of the emergencies to which resilience responds. Initially, situations prompt us to explore emergencies fundamentally as ruptures in people’s ongoing affective encounter with the world. They also capture how our experience of emergencies is colored by the broader historical significance they hold as critical events that change collective life. And, as with all events read through affect, situations are also an object of mediation. Thinking with situations, I demonstrate how, through resilience, government actors mediate our sense of the relationship between emergencies, on one hand, and climate change as an epochal condition, on the other. By distributing responsibility, resilience allows a wide catalogue of voices to influence common perceptions of this relationship and, consequently, evidences potential to integrate what Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick calls reparative critique into climate consciousness by highlighting the ramifications climate-related emergencies have on specific communities because of environmental harms visited upon them over time and orienting future action towards attending to these harms. I make this argument through research into the US’ Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to raise situational awareness of extreme heat risk. While seeking to mobilize people’s embodied knowledges in sensing imminent danger, these practices push concurrently for understanding, and acting upon, climate change vulnerability by its entanglement with violent processes that underpinned the modernization projects fundamental to American life now.

Decarbonization under geoeconomic distress? Energy shocks, carbon lock‐ins, and Germany's pathway toward net zero

AbstractHow can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic shocks through investment, operational, and political channels. Using macro‐ and company‐level data and document analysis, we empirically test our framework using Germany's decarbonization governance following the cutoff of its Russian gas supply in 2022 as a case study. We find that this shock had negative short‐term effects on decarbonization via the operational channel, mixed effects via the political channel, and positive long‐term effects via the investment channel. Our framework and findings contribute to establishing climate change and energy politics as core issues for future political economy research.

Personalising climate change—how activists from Fridays for Future visualise climate action on Instagram

The visual communication of climate change by social movements has become an emerging subject of research in recent years. Much of the existing literature on visual climate change communication focuses on how environmental movements and protests are depicted by mainstream media outlets. This exploratory study examines the visual climate change communication by social movements themselves. Its focus is on one ‘new narrator’ in the mediated politics of climate change: Fridays for Future (FFF), arguably one of the most significant communicators of climate change. The research question seeks to understand how FFF activists narrate climate action through images posted on Instagram. I discuss examples from major branches of FFF and contribute to existing research by emphasising personalisation as a powerful tool in climate storytelling. The paper’s visual thematic analysis presents three themes that illustrate the personalisation of climate storytelling by FFF activists: localising the effects of global climate change, using performances to convey climate messages, and visualising contentious politics. The implications of this research further underpin the need to recognise climate activists as important actors in the visual communication of climate change.

IR, climate politics, and change: opportunities for productive engagement?

‘Change’ or ‘transformation’ are longstanding preoccupations of both International Relations (IR) and global climate change politics scholarship. Yet, the two fields largely occupy independent axiological, epistemological, normative, and ontological spaces that have led to misunderstandings, mutual criticisms, and a lack of serious engagement on these questions. The result is missed opportunities to transform IR, misdiagnoses of political dynamics of climate change, and, perversely, the limited influence of political analysis on wider climate change scholarship. This article identifies understandings of change and transformation relevant to both fields and introduces a productive epistemological and ontological shift for analyzing and normatively engaging with change in the face of uncertainty. It then introduces practical research strategies for policy-relevant and forward-looking scholarship that moves from explaining change to identifying causal logics and dynamic processes that can reinforce (or undermine) change and transformation. It concludes with illustrative analyzes of trajectories and possible limits of two macro policy changes with transformative potential: the 1.5-degree Celsius aspirational target in the Paris Agreement, and the proliferation of ‘net zero’ policies around the world.

The varying levels of contrasting adaptation in Central Asia’s climate change politics

ABSTRACT Central Asia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. There is, however, a lack of research on how local businesses, political elites and the general public perceive the need for comprehensive greening initiatives to address its consequences. To account for the material and ideational factors influencing clean energy transition in Central Asian petrostates, I offer an alternative analytic framework that I call ‘contrasting adaptation’. I argue that the energy transition has resulted in two contradictory responses at multiple levels of political governance: a formal response that is broadly supportive of new ‘green’ identities and policies, and an informal response that seeks to delay plans to decarbonize local business models and continues to prioritize ‘old’ oil and gas activities through new transnational networks. Drawing on a model of actor interactions at different levels of climate governance, I examine ‘contrasting adaptation’ – its constituent policies and discourse – to provide a better theorized framework for understanding climate politics in Central Asia. I use comparative analysis of the climate policies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two Central Asian petrostates that pledged to carbon neutrality, informed by documentary and textual sources, and discourse analysis.

‘Who is going to talk about my grandad? Who is going to talk about me?’: Spatial politics in the advocacy of youth from the MENA region at COP 27

ABSTRACT In this article, we focus on the advocacy of youth from the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region in the U.N. COP process through interviews (n = 12) with youth from the MENA region who participated in or organized around the 2022 COP 27 climate negotiations in Egypt. The perspectives of youth climate advocates in the region are relatively absent in the existing scholarly literature and there is a significant need for additional research about youth climate advocacy beyond the activism of white, western and wealthy young people (see Neas, S., Ward, A., & Bowman, B. [2022]. Young people’s climate activism: A review of the literature. Frontiers in Political Science, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.940876). Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews (n = 12) supplemented by context drawn from digital media about youth climate advocacy in the MENA region, our findings characterize the: (1) priorities and claims; (2) perceptions of influence and participation; and (3) motivations for and challenges to youth climate advocacy across the region. We argue for intersectional analysis of youth climate advocacy in the COP process and beyond and describe the importance of examining the uneven spatial politics of climate change and transnational youth advocacy.

Indigenous autonomy and decentralization in Colombia's quest for peace

AbstractColombia's constitution recognizes territorial autonomy as an inalienable right of its indigenous peoples, much like other countries across Latin America. Yet, for indigenous people exercising those rights, Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world. Why do states grant extensive rights to indigenous peoples and then fail to uphold them? This article approaches that question through an analysis of decentralization amid Colombia's armed conflict. It examines how crises that prompted a decentralization of governance during the conflict created political opportunities for indigenous rights in Colombia. Subsequent shifts in the conflict, however, including competition for control of extractive industries, put indigenous autonomy at odds with all the conflicting parties' interests. To resolve these challenges, the article suggests that the politics of climate change has created new political opportunities for indigenous autonomy throughout Latin America. It calls for investing in indigenous self‐governance to both protect the environment and secure peace.

Surveying the landscape of environmental social science: a bibliometric and network analysis

Social science research on the environment has grown exponentially in the past four decades alongside increasing awareness that environmental risks, such as climate change, cannot be understood by natural science interventions alone. While prior research examines how specific disciplines, like sociology, have attended to the environment or how specific problems have been engaged across disciplines, less attention has been offered to the entire landscape of research on the environment in the social sciences. In this article, we ask: What is the landscape of environmental social science? Focusing on 124,906 social scientific articles from the Web of Science, we analyze the relationship between journals publishing research on the environment. Specifically, we construct journal citation networks and topic models on bibliographic records from 1990 to 2022. Results suggest that journals form coherent communities associated with both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research topics, indicating that journal communities may be a central organizing feature of ESS. Moreover, research topics prevalent in this field have changed over time, potentially in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of climate change politics. As scholars want to influence policy and industrial practice, their research implicitly reflects values consistent with the current political economic order. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for the field of environmental social science.

Industrial relations as power, place and time: the case of Queensland coal mining

ABSTRACT How has the coal mining industry been changing as employers and unions organise their power resources to control and remake spaces of working and living? The most obvious likely changes are those driven by climate change policies. These are, however, only the most obvious, albeit fundamental, transformations facing coal mining workforces and unions. In the massive export coalfields of the State of Queensland, which have been central to the Australian politics of climate change, a less discussed phenomenon has been unfolding, a remaking of place and power in industrial relations. Employer-driven changes, namely automation, the geography of work and bargaining processes, and workforce composition, have presented themselves as the immediate threats to local traditions of work and social practice, not climate policy. ‘Power resources approaches’, when spatialised, historicised and entwined with labour process analysis, help to explain the breadth of employer-driven change and the unevenness of union responses.

The Role of International Cooperation and Policy Implementation through Political Commitment: An Analysis of COP26 Glasgow Summit in Addressing Climate Change

The interminable international politics of climate change is putting the planet in danger. This article tries to explore the challenges intertwined in the success of climate change. The international politics of climate change seems to have found to be putting the planet in danger and in the risky zone to the life of all. This seems to have found to have tried to explore the challenges intertwined in the success of climate change. The article is derived from the secondary sources of data and it has been found that the de-limit carbon emission directly hampers emerging world in which developing world are reluctant. Secondly, the green economy is found to be infancy. This seems to have found to be unable to meet the needs of the developing world. Western World is seeming to have been found to be blamed for the massive destruction of planet for their mammoth economic growth. The survival of planet or economic growth is found to be the prime question of our time. The poor countries have been found to be in the need of creating jobs, employments and having the boom of the economy as the Western nations have done. So, the poor nations have to be encouraged to create the employments and economic growth not by destroying the ecology and environment but by conserving the climate and ecological condition sound simultaneously. The Western advanced nations have to become more responsible to support the poor countries to have their sustainable development and saving the planet, Earth side by side. The politics in climate change must be avoided since it is concerned to the life of all who are dwelling on the earth.

From Green to Black: A Voluminous Political Ecology of the Extraction–Conservation Nexus

Within political ecology research, a dominant focus on the hard physicality of the world limits engagement with how events taking place on land mediate and are mediated by other material spaces like the atmosphere. This article engages with burgeoning research on the extraction–conservation nexus to show how the clearly demarcated land-based boundaries on which nexus thinking relies limit an awareness of how processes of conservation and extraction cohere and take shape in and through the aerial atmosphere. The article substantiates this argument with case studies on Guyana and Suriname, two countries that have been working on avoiding deforestation through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation for over a decade in the aim of mitigating climate change. In each case, we examine three years of news reporting on recent, major oil finds in the Guyana-Suriname Basin. The news reports, set against longer term research, demonstrate a narrative pivot from “green,” land-based avoided deforestation narratives to “black,” offshore extractive ones. The reports show that reference to the competing atmospheric effects of the mutual pursuit of these activities is scarce, even at a time of rapidly intensifying climate change. Hence, we argue that a voluminous analysis of the extraction–conservation nexus integrating a vertical awareness of the ever-present and unbounded atmosphere harbors potential for orienting a less contradictory politics of climate change—one that recognizes how activities deemed oppositional on land take shape in the shared, unbounded atmosphere. These activities consequently go on to affect other spaces and places in indirect, often unpredictable ways.

Expertise, moral subversion, and climate deregulation

The weaponizing of scientific expertise to oppose regulation has been extensively studied. However, the relevant studies, belonging to the emerging discipline of agnotology, remain focused on the analysis of empirical corruption: of misinformation, doubt mongering, and other practices that cynically deploy expertise to render audiences ignorant of empirical facts. This paper explores the wrongful deployment of expertise beyond empirical corruption. To do so, I develop a broader framework of morally subversive expertise, building on recent work in political philosophy (Howard, 2016). Expertise is subversive if it sets up its audience to fail morally, either intentionally or negligently. I distinguish three modes of subversive expertise: empirical subversion (the focus of agnotology), normative subversion and motivational subversion. Drawing on these distinctions, I offer a revisionary account of the Trump Administration’s regulatory science as a case study. I show that the Trump Administration’s use of expertise to dismantle climate regulation, contra the standard charge, cannot be explained using the resources of agnotology alone: the Administration produced highly reliable climate assessments, detailing the risks of climate change, candidly admitting the harms of its proposed policies, and still successfully deployed these findings to justify massive climate deregulation. The lesson of the analysis is that dismissing the expertise that underpins climate deregulation as empirically corrupt ‘anti-science’ both obscures its actual role in the politics of climate change and understates its wrongfulness: it misses the breadth of the assault on moral agency that sustains climate injustice.

The social construction of sustainable futures: how models and scenarios limit climate mitigation possibilities

ABSTRACT This article shines a light on the act of social construction of climate change mitigation as a policy issue at the hands of expert bodies enjoying epistemic power, notably the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) as key tools. This is crucial to the politics of tackling climate change as IPCC models and scenarios profoundly shape what are seen as viable futures and mitigation policy options. Analysing how technocratic governance bodies broach climate change, its mitigation, and the associated economic costs and implications, reveals contestations within the technocratic politics of climate change. The particular social construction of mitigation as a policy issue through IAMs and IPCC scenarios has important and real socio-ecological consequences. This engagement with the technocratic politics of mitigation problematises five key assumptions that are fed into modelling, and reveals why and how they matter politically. We also highlight ways in which contestable assumptions built into IPCC IAMs undermine their credibility and usefulness for planning mitigation strategies.

Health engagement in national climate commitments of small island developing states: A content analysis of Caribbean nationally determined contributions

ObjectiveTo investigate how health is incorporated into the NDCs of Caribbean SIDS and their financing challenges. MethodsThe study analysed the NDCs of sixteen Caribbean SIDS using content analysis to investigate their level of engagement with health. ResultsCaribbean SIDS have a high level of reference with health in their NDCs relative to other developing countries which is expected to increase as they update them. All sixteen countries included health in their NDCs, mostly with regard to adaptation to be achieved by 2025/2030. Five countries provided targets in health aimed at increasing climate resilience. This may be explained by the region's poor health profile, high exposure to climate change and disasters, inadequate health infrastructure and resources and dependence on external finance. There was hardly any information on how countries intend to finance their health goals. ConclusionInclusion of health in Caribbean SIDS NDCs could increase obligation to climate action at domestic and regional levels and attract international climate finance. The Caribbean should seek out funds that make finance available to tackle health-related risks from climate change. It is imperative that Caribbean SIDS compute and state their climate finance needs in health if they are to attract international finance and raise donor and investor confidence. Caribbean SIDS have the opportunity to advocate for and be an example for the integration of health into climate change policy and politics to encourage global cooperation, boost countries’ climate change aspirations and ramp up international climate finance.