"Change the system, not the climate" is a common slogan of climate change activists. Yet when this idea comes into the academic and policy realm, it is easy to see how climate change discourse frequently asks the wrong questions. Reframing Climate Change encourages social scientists, policy-makers, and graduate students to critically consider how climate change is framed in scientific, social, and political spheres. It proposes ecological geopolitics as a frameworkfor understanding the extent to which climate change is a meaningful analytical focus, as well as the ways in which it can be detrimental, detracting attention from more productive lines of thought, research, and action.
The volume draws from multiple perspectives and disciplines to covera broadscope of climate change. Chapter topics range from climate science and security to climate justice and literacy. Although these familiar concepts are widely used by scholars and policy-makers, they are discussed here as frequently problematic when used as lenses through which to study climate change. Beyond merely reviewing current trends within these different approaches to climate change, the collection offers a thoughtful assessment of these approaches with an eye towards an overarching reconsideration of the current understanding of our relationship to climate change.
Reframing Climate Change is an essential resource for students, policy-makers, and anyone interested in understanding more about this important topic. Who decides what the priorities are? Who benefits from these priorities, and what kinds of systems or actions are justified or hindered? The key contribution of the book is the outlining of ecological geopolitics as a different way of understanding human-environment relationships including and beyond climate change issues.
"Climate change means different things to different people in different places. It does not have one cause and one solution, but many causes and many solutions. In Reframing Climate Change, O'Lear and Dalby have brought together an impressive group of political geographers and scientists who undermine the conventional singular narrative of climate change - 'the plan' as some have dubbed it - before helpfully opening up different ways of framing what is at stake. It is only with such a pluralist account of climate change that the business of politics can get done: to expose, argue over and decide between different visions people have of how the world should be."
Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate and Culture in the Department of Geography, King's College London, UK
"This book is essential reading for those who see or sense that climate change is more than an environmental issue. The authors argue that it is critical to challenge conventional framings of both problems and solutions by bringing in politics, power and new perspectives. Reframing Climate Change unravels some key assumptions that have the potential to transform approaches to security in the Anthropocene."
Karen O'Brien, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Norway
