Geographies Of Climate Change Research Articles

Knowledge and (un)certainty in climate change education in India

AbstractThis paper explores teachers' conceptions of climate change knowledge, contributing to the growing body of work on the geographies of climate change. The paper focuses on the data generated through in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with a sample of 48 teachers in India to address the research question: What discourses about climate change knowledge are being constructed by teachers in India? We argue that teachers' lesson planning and searches for information are at the forefront of the changing ways in which individuals engage with, find out and construct meaning about climate change. These teachers' beliefs about climate change are very strongly held, even in the face of a perceived lack of expertise or understanding: climate change is described as the ‘need of the hour’, which this work understands as not only involving material impacts and processes but also important epistemological, collaborative needs through which education might contribute to public reasoning about climate change. Through this analysis we present a ‘certainty problematic’ as a heuristic device that foregrounds tensions between the inherent uncertainty of knowledge and (against climate denialism) certainty about anthropogenic climate change.

Navigating climate’s human geographies: Exploring the whereabouts of climate politics

Just as global institutions and environmental assessment processes embark on the latest effort to integrate more social science into global environmental change research, it appears that the social sciences of climate change are unable or unwilling to address this challenge. In this article, I explore the nature of these dynamics within human geography and argue that climate change occupies a curiously ambiguous position within our discipline of both an explicit presence and an underlying absence. Framed predominantly in terms of a biophysical challenge requiring some form of social response, work on climate change retains an assumed socio-nature divide – a position which has yet to be substantively challenged by the different strands of political ecology, new materialism and environmental humanities that now pervade the discipline. To advance new geographies of climate change, the article argues that our understanding of climate change needs to shift from that of a problem that needs specific responses to a condition that is constituted through specific forms of socio-spatial relation and in turn constitutes the politics, ethics and meaning of particular socio-spatial orderings, from the citizen to the city, the community to the corporation.

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Frances Ferguson has memorably described “the sharp, sudden consciousness” of climate change as one that “comes upon us like the ominous tones of an intruder bent on murder when the babysitter picks up the telephone receiver in a horror film: ‘I’m in the house’” (33). There is no refuge from this stranger within, nor from the feelings of panic his phone call incites. As I write these words, in the summer of 2018, the phone is ringing off the hook: above the Arctic Circle, record highs of 33°C/92°F were measured in Finland; a new record was set in Oman when the temperature did not drop below 42°C/108°F for twenty-four hours.1 Closer to home, outside my window, California is on fire. Extreme heat and dryness brought an early, vicious start to fire season, and in the Carr Fire near Redding, more than a thousand homes have burned down and seven people have died.2 The sky outside my office is thick and gray, and the air quality is poor—a reminder of these nearby conflagrations and the fiery future they portend. Our climate is changing, but must Victorian studies change too? The real question is, how could it not? For scholarship depends on scholars, and no matter how hard we try to inhabit a detached critical perspective, none of us are writing from Mars. Heatwaves, smoky skies, an incessant phone ringing in the background: these are the conditions in which we work. Sometimes these conditions take on an aspect of cosmic irony; in September 2017, members of the Vcologies working group met at the University of Houston to exchange work-in-progress on Victorian ecologies and ecological thought, and as it turned out, our meeting would take place in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a record-breaking storm that drew its strength from record-high ocean temperatures. Institutional and economic advantages mean, of course, that [End Page 537] many academics have been relatively well protected from the ravages of climate change so far—my office window keeps the smoke outside, the University of Houston did not flood—but five miles north of the university, in a historically Black neighborhood with a high flood risk, house after house was turned inside out: the sodden, wrecked contents of homes were piled in the street, pianos next to baby dolls next to lampshades (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Kashmere Gardens, Houston, September 16, 2017. Photograph by Nathan K. Hensley. If these circumstances dictate—and I think they do—that climate change must move into every field of academic debate and every part of the university curriculum, it is equally the case that unique aspects of nineteenth-century Britain and its Empire make our field particularly connected to the topic of climate change. For one thing, the geographies of climate change, including urban flood plain maps, bear a historical relation to European and American imperialism, and in a devastating turn of imperial modernity’s screw, the impacts of climate change are now being borne disproportionately by those least responsible for them and least able to weather them. Thus Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee begins Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, arguing that ideas about natural disaster today “grew out, in important ways, of the British imperial experience in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia” (2). Similarly, while it would be too simplistic to say [End Page 538] that Victorian England is answerable for the climate crisis, it would also be an error to discount its unique historical role in cultivating the fossil fuel economy and the resulting surge in greenhouse gas emissions.3 The “workshop of the world,” as Benjamin Disraeli famously referred to industrial England, relied on coal combustion to accelerate production and speed transportation, forever transforming the scope of consumption habits, global trade, and imperial market-making (Disraeli n. p.). Just as the climate has changed, then, our understanding of the past must transform along with it, and indeed, conventional notions of past, present, and future are troubled in any account of anthropogenic climate change...

Climate change induced transformations of agricultural systems: insights from a global model

Climate change might impact crop yields considerably and anticipated transformations of agricultural systems are needed in the coming decades to sustain affordable food provision. However, decision-making on transformational shifts in agricultural systems is plagued by uncertainties concerning the nature and geography of climate change, its impacts, and adequate responses. Locking agricultural systems into inadequate transformations costly to adjust is a significant risk and this acts as an incentive to delay action. It is crucial to gain insight into how much transformation is required from agricultural systems, how robust such strategies are, and how we can defuse the associated challenge for decision-making. While implementing a definition related to large changes in resource use into a global impact assessment modelling framework, we find transformational adaptations to be required of agricultural systems in most regions by 2050s in order to cope with climate change. However, these transformations widely differ across climate change scenarios: uncertainties in large-scale development of irrigation span in all continents from 2030s on, and affect two-thirds of regions by 2050s. Meanwhile, significant but uncertain reduction of major agricultural areas affects the Northern Hemisphere’s temperate latitudes, while increases to non-agricultural zones could be large but uncertain in one-third of regions. To help reducing the associated challenge for decision-making, we propose a methodology exploring which, when, where and why transformations could be required and uncertain, by means of scenario analysis.

Global variation in thermal tolerances and vulnerability of endotherms to climate change

The relationships among species' physiological capacities and the geographical variation of ambient climate are of key importance to understanding the distribution of life on the Earth. Furthermore, predictions of how species will respond to climate change will profit from the explicit consideration of their physiological tolerances. The climatic variability hypothesis, which predicts that climatic tolerances are broader in more variable climates, provides an analytical framework for studying these relationships between physiology and biogeography. However, direct empirical support for the hypothesis is mostly lacking for endotherms, and few studies have tried to integrate physiological data into assessments of species' climatic vulnerability at the global scale. Here, we test the climatic variability hypothesis for endotherms, with a comprehensive dataset on thermal tolerances derived from physiological experiments, and use these data to assess the vulnerability of species to projected climate change. We find the expected relationship between thermal tolerance and ambient climatic variability in birds, but not in mammals-a contrast possibly resulting from different adaptation strategies to ambient climate via behaviour, morphology or physiology. We show that currently most of the species are experiencing ambient temperatures well within their tolerance limits and that in the future many species may be able to tolerate projected temperature increases across significant proportions of their distributions. However, our findings also underline the high vulnerability of tropical regions to changes in temperature and other threats of anthropogenic global changes. Our study demonstrates that a better understanding of the interplay among species' physiology and the geography of climate change will advance assessments of species' vulnerability to climate change.