Critical climate geographies

I Critical climate geographies: An absent presence

Our interjection into the ‘critical climate geographies’ narrative begins at the 2018 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) conference in Cardiff, where the organisers convened a meeting to discuss the revitalisation of the RGS-IBG Climate Change Research Group (CCRG). This effort was made to restore a scholarly collective that was on the verge of being disbanded, broken up, and absorbed into related groups, barely 10 years after its founding. At the time, the call came as a surprise to many of those who attended. The apparent demise of a dedicated climate research group within a disciplinary space whose history has often centred on the mapping of climates stood in stark contrast to the wider context of climate events and politics that year. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its influential special report on 1.5°C warming. Extinction Rebellion (XR) began its first wave of protests, occupying five bridges in London on November 17^th, 2018. Greta Thunberg’s speech at Davos a few months later would catapult her to global fame and galvanise the Fridays For Future movement into a worldwide force. Despite geographers living, writing, and thinking amongst these unfolding events, contributing to the IPCC’s reporting, providing critical viewpoints on socio-political causes and implications of events, and engaging in the civil society that shaped that year and those before it, there did not seem to be a cohesive sense of doing ‘climate geography’ together, nor indeed of being climate geographers at all.

Yet the CCRG’s near demise points to a wider issue. The sense that the wider social sciences, including geography, have had a one-way, ‘science-first’ relationship with studying climate change was articulated by John Urry, a sociologist who as recently as 2010 argued - perhaps controversially - that ‘the social sciences have been nowhere, barely even Johnny-come-latelies’ (Szerszynski and Urry, 2010: 3) in climate change research. Indeed, as Bulkeley (2019) later argued, there has long been an uncomfortable engagement between human geography and climate change, where the epistemological divide between human and physical geography has at times entrenched assumptions of a socio-natural divide. As a result of this discomfort, there is “a curiously ambiguous position within our discipline of both an explicit presence and an underlying absence” for climate change (ibid: 3).

Despite concerns in 2018, the CCRG was ultimately not disbanded. On the contrary, climate change has become a topic of such importance that Climate Changed Geographies was named as the chair’s theme of the 2023 RGS conference. Nevertheless, the awkward ambiguity of climate within the discipline remains cloyingly persistent. More recently still, the contradictory presence-yet-absence in the discipline of geography was demonstrated in an emerging debate in Ireland about the introduction of a school qualification on ‘Climate Action and Sustainable Development’, highlighting a desire for a new discipline to address social and political responses to climate change specifically. As Möller (2024) writes, geographers have taught these issues for years, yet the need for a debate highlights a disconnect between what geographers do and what the discipline of climate geography is perceived as doing, perhaps linked to the lack of a cohesive scholarly articulation of what climate geographies are or might be, and what climate geographers do.

There is a need, in other words, to turn the lens back on climate geography and it is here that ‘critical climate geographies’ have a crucial role to play. Nevertheless, what makes this such a challenge is the vast scale and sprawling diffusion of Geographic engagement with the climate. Geography is already a discipline that spans from natural scientific perspectives such as glaciology and climatology to post-structural social scientific perspectives that explore the discursive and emotional geographies of climate change. Yet this expanding landscape of climate geography remains unmapped, even in outline. Climate change is everywhere within geographical scholarship. Yet, it is not equally everywhere. Which themes, fields, sub-fields and innovations have proliferated the fastest within the discipline? Which appear most promising as catalysts for future work? And what remains to be done despite these efforts? With these questions in mind, this paper aims to sketch the most active and promising contours of critical climate Geography, past, present, and future.

It does so by drawing on the expertise of a group of scholars convened towards this purpose by the RGS’ reinvigorated Climate Change Research Group [CCRG] in November 2022. In an event entitled Mapping the Landscape of Climate Geography, which brought together leading UK geographers from a diverse range of fields to sketch the contours of the discipline’s engagement with the climate, 23 UK and international scholars discussed their views on the primary engagement sites by climate geography and, subsequently, the fields within those sites. Whilst the workshop primarily consisted of UK geographers, we are aware that much of the critical climate geographical scholarship is produced elsewhere globally, and that many of the geographers present in the workshop actively researched geographies outside of the Anglo-perspective. In this sense, our positionality is that we are not UK geographers (and this paper is not about the shape of UK geography in relation to climate scholarship), but rather that we are global geographers working in UK institutions, who identify with being a ‘climate geographer’ in the broad sense of the term. Our discussions thus enabled examination of the perceived contributions made by human geographers to the field of critical climate geographies, the distillation of key avenues in which human geographers are currently advancing the field, and future possibilities. This has framed the structure of our review through the sections ‘Where we are now’, ‘Where we are going’, and ‘Where next’ - the landscapes within each are presented in the following three sections.

This paper draws together the diverse human geography perspectives from the workshop to outline pathways for critical geographical engagement with the climate, building upon and extending previous insights of the field of critical climate geographies to identify the distinctive perspectives that critical geographical scholarship brings. While no such task can hope or aim to be a fully comprehensive and systematic ‘mapping’ of climate geographies, we intend to add new insights of what it means to be a critical climate geographer based on previous and extant scholarly geographical interactions with climate change. Aiming to highlight the conceptual and practical commonalities that critical climate geographers share in their approaches, we outline the emerging landscape of critical climate geographies to foster a shared understanding of the field. Throughout this paper, we use ‘discipline’ to refer to Geography as an institutionalised academic domain; ‘subdiscipline’ to describe more established thematic areas within it, such as political or urban geography; and ‘field’ to describe more fluid or emergent areas of scholarship, such as climate geographies. ‘Critical climate geographies’ is thus treated as an interdisciplinary field: variegated, plural, not yet fully formalised within disciplinary boundaries, but nonetheless a site of growing cohesion, self-awareness, and importance to the future of the discipline.

II Where are we now?

Recent work on the epistemology of climate change has helped to situate critical climate geographies within the wider landscape of climate geography. For example, Aspinall (2010) identified two spheres of geography’s contribution to climate knowledge, highlighting, on the one hand, engagement with the physical aspects of understanding the climate: notably the domains of climatology, historical climate change, numerical modelling, and geomorphology. On the other hand, he foregrounded geographic contributions to the spatial mapping of climate impacts, including biogeographic responses, vulnerability, and inequality, but also - in a reflexive sense - human geographers’ critical contributions to science-policy debates and the social and political construction of climate change (ibid).

However, while Aspinall (2010) identified the physical and spatial mapping aspects of climate geography, our definition of critical geography extends further to interrogate the socio-political structures underlying these phenomena. Critical climate geographies challenge dominant paradigms and expose power relations, seeking to address inequalities and injustices associated with climate change (Swyngedouw, 2010). Geographers such as Brace and Geoghegan (2010), Edensor et al. (2019), and Garrard (2020), have critically engaged with the temporal politics of climate change, highlighting not only how the public perceives environmental time, how climate timeframes are communicated and intersect with these lived experiences, and who benefits from these framings. The resulting politics of climate time is shown to underpin competing discourses and political projects, emerging as a key critical lens on these frameworks.

Work of this sort has invigorated a critical nexus at the science-policy interface, in which communication and framing is shown to be an actor in the landscape of climate vulnerability. Bulkeley et al. (2019), for example, has shown how climate impacts might reshape forms of vulnerability and the possibilities for resilience and adaptation, even as the science-policy interface - including research on the factors that influence individual attitudes and behaviours, and the politics of governance systems - continue to focus on individual responsibility. Countering this convention, she has emphasised the contribution of geopolitics and securitisation to carbon markets, climate-induced migration, cities and climate change, alternative economies, climate and development, climate finance, corporate social responsibility, and carbon sequestration. In other words, she has shown how the framing of these problems shapes their manifestation.

Bulkeley thus reframes the question Where does human geography fit into the study of climate change? in its entirety. Arguing that the role of geography is not in responding to the social lacunae left by the gaps in physical data, nor even in deciding what societal responses to these findings should be, but rather ontological, she situates the role of the discipline in asking how climate change is “made, remade, held together, contested, is always in a state of unbecoming” (2019:11). For climate geographers, this represents a fundamental shift in mindset: from being ‘climate geographers’ in a descriptive sense, to being ‘critical climate geographers’ with the power to initiate societal change. As such, whilst for Aspinall, the diverse scope of geography as a discipline is important in advancing its contribution, for Bulkeley, this integrative middle ground between human and physical geography underpins climate change’s ambivalent, dialectical, and contradictory presence-yet-absence in geography. Rather than viewing climate change as an objective problem to which a societal response is required, climate change emerges through an antagonistic framing as a condition actively shaping new forms of politics.

This is a crucial standpoint, yet it presents a definitional challenge. In the early decades of the 2000s, for example, many human geographers were concerned, alongside political scientists, with climate governance and its diverse scales and multilevel aspects. This included urban/local scales and Bulkeley’s focus on cities and urban governance of climate change (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003; Bulkeley et al., 2009; Granberg and Elander, 2007) and urban experimentation (Bulkeley and Cástan Broto, 2013; Bulkeley et al., 2019). Yet it has also extended to the transnational (Andonova et al., 2009), highlighting both multi-level (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006; Gustavsson et al., 2009) and polycentric (Jordan et al., 2015) governance interactions, as well as profiling the re-emergence of national territoriality and sovereignty governance (Kythreotis, 2012) and, more recently, missing interconnections of multi-scalar climate governance (Kythreotis et al., 2023). Notably, it also attended to how discourses of climate change are embroiled with those of securitisation globally, and within the United Kingdom’s security policy specifically (Gemenne et al., 2014; Methmann and Oels, 2015; Peters, 2018), green authoritarianism and a post-politics of scale (Kythreotis, 2023), and attended to blind spots over the interaction and amplification of climate risks across scales (Challinor et al., 2017).

More recently, human geographers have been especially prominent in developing historical accounts of the development of discursive and material economies – such as developing social histories of climate politics (Jäger and O’Riordan, 2019), contextualising the emergence of key policy hooks such as the 2-degree target (Randalls, 2010) or how economic theories of cost-benefit analysis have shaped ideas of optimal climate change (Randalls, 2011) and the uncomfortable epistemic politics of climate and colonialism (Mahony and Endfield, 2018; Mahony and Hulme, 2018). In doing so, human geographers have demonstrated that climate is not only a physical phenomenon but also a social one (Offen, 2014), shaping specific cultural and material economies (c.f. Caprotti, 2012). And these economies in turn, including carbon economies, have been the subject of critique by geographers who seek to understand and address their impact on society (Blakey, 2021; Bridge et al., 2020; Jordhus-Lier et al., 2022; Lovell and Ghaleigh, 2013).

This spirit of reflexive self-awareness has seen geographers play an enthusiastic role in attending to the knowledge politics of climate change. Indeed, for many, this has been their critical meat and drink. Following early work in geography that emphasised the social dimensions of climate science (Demeritt, 2001) and in political science, where Foucauldian approaches were employed to highlight how viewing the earth from space via remote sensing has produced new ways of understanding environmental governance that privilege the planetary scale and calculative practices (Lövbrand et al., 2009; Lövbrand and Stripple, 2011) human geographers have been active alongside Science, Technology and Society [STS] scholars in highlighting the politics of making climate policy knowledge. Notably, work in this area has critiqued the making of global knowledge (Hulme and Mahony, 2010; Mahony and Hulme, 2016), contested objectivity of knowledge (Grindsted, 2014; Mahony, 2015) and emphasised the importance of moving beyond modelling as a singular source of information (Demeritt and Wainwright, 2005; Hulme, 2011).

This critical position emerges in part from the experience of participation. Human geographers have been at the forefront of research on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (for example, see work by Barnett, 2003; Adger, 2006; Liverman, 2013; O'Brien, 2012). In addition to their contributions to climate change assessments, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, human geographers have developed a political attention to knowledge-shaping processes through ethnographic work with advisory bodies (Dudley et al., 2022; Owens 2000, 2010; Owens et al., 2006; Turnpenny et al., 2013) and the study of specific knowledge processes, such as knowledge translation (Machen, 2018). They have highlighted the contributions to climate science and policy of lay knowledge (Brace and Geoghegan, 2010), indigenous knowledge (Chanza and De Wit, 2016) and contested the epistemological makeup of scholarly communities that have gathered around climate change or the Anthropocene (Castree ,2015b; Hulme and Mahony, 2010) arguing that geography as a discipline is particularly well suited to addressing the conceptual challenges that the Anthropocene presents (Johnson et al., 2014).

Within this, a key theme has been the nexus of climate and conflict: a recurrent concern of human geographers (Adger et al., 2013; Mach et al., 2020) that has been extended through critical engagements with climate migration (Adger and De Campos, 2020; Parsons, 2019), and the imbrications of climate migration and race and racism (Baldwin, 2016, 2022) as well as differential geographies of health (Curtis and Oven, 2012). This is, however, a vibrantly contested area of work. Indeed, this is part of the point. As Watson et al. (2023) argue, for example, to better understand the implications of climate change on global society and security from a geographical perspective, it is essential to develop a more holistic understanding of the interplay among climate, conflict, and migration. So, to this end, climate geographers have engaged productively with the ways in which the historical and present political economy shapes the landscape of climate change and its policy responses. Work by Sultana (2023, 2022) and Yusoff (2018) among others, highlights how the legacy of colonialism – and its undergirding racial logic – underpins the epistemology of climate science. By asking “whose growth in whose planetary boundaries?” (Sultana, 2023: 1), for example, this burgeoning body of work returns the weight of politics to ‘the uneven anthropogenic use and abuse of the planet’s biosphere and common pool resources’. The result is a reflexive lens on the questions we ask, who gets to speak, and the imbricated consequences for society, environment and the humans embedded within them.

Indeed, this nexus of the climatic, the epistemic, and the political has increasingly underpinned attention to the emerging digital landscape of climate geographies. For example, Nost (2015) has highlighted that governing ecosystems via software creates social relations that legitimise the neoliberalization and financialization of nature. At the same time, several scholars have explored the role of social media platforms in the circulation and understanding of climate knowledge (Pearce et al., 2019; Tuitjer and Dirksmeier, 2021). Machen and Nost (2021) then further explore the epistemic commitments that thinking about climate through algorithmic devices entails and how these epistemic commitments intersect with operations of hegemonic power. In a different vein, recent geographic scholarship has also attempted to counter and subvert these top-down hegemonic narratives, for example, by proposing speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of the climate crisis, in which ‘earth images may transcend their dominant roles as scientific tools and cultural allegories and become tactical devices for imagining and acting otherwise’ (Engelmann et al., 2022: 237).

Complementing their engagement with the technical dimensions of climate sensing, critical climate geographers have engaged enthusiastically with the embodied and the human. Notably, research in this area has explored the personal and emotional impacts of climate grief (Head, 2016; Moser, 2021) and the gradual damage caused by the slow violence of environmental degradation (O’Lear, 2016). Additionally, they have investigated the role of emotions in politics, such as how enjoyment can influence political action (Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2023) and how emotions can drive transformative change (Ryan, 2016). Geographical studies now emphasise the importance of starting with a ground-level understanding of climate, including its emotional and affective dimensions, to comprehend mobility and change (Parsons, 2019). Seeking always to interpret the transformative potential of these frames, much attention has focused also on how these emotional, embodied, and discursive frames contribute to political subjectivities (Bond et al., 2020; Dowling, 2009) and public participation in decision-making (Chilvers et al., 2022; Pallett et al., 2019).

A plethora of perspectives have emerged to underscore this importance in recent years, highlighting how climate viewpoints are shaped by socioeconomic status (Weckroth and Ala-Mantila, 2022), place (Brown et al., 2019; Howarth and Parsons, 2021), power and politics (Nightingale, 2017), governance (Adger et al., 2009), psychology (Clayton et al., 2015); vulnerability (O’Brien and Wolf, 2010) and geographical scale (Kythreotis et al., 2021). Indeed, this impetus towards change is one of the most consistent dimensions of the field. Despite their consistent foregrounding of intractability, the contested geographies of climate change have tended to retain a common interest in the generative politics of policy (Head and Gibson, 2012). This means not only how policy might be improved but also possibilities for more fundamental transformation (Chatterton, 2016; O’Brien, 2010) and a more radical sense still of how climate imaginaries and technologies shape futures to be acted upon (Anderson, 2010; Braun, 2015; Machen et al., 2023; Mahony and Randalls, 2020). And as ever, reflexivity has been key, with scholarship on climate justice (Henrique and Tschakert, 2020) complemented by concerns for equity both in climate policy (Klinsky et al., 2017; Liverman, 2009) and in institutional spaces of decision-making (Gay-Antaki and Liverman, 2018).

Whilst typological generalisation of what is already a vast and rapidly growing field of work is challenging, two broad, cross-cutting themes may be identified that both connect the varied approaches and underpin geography’s general disciplinary contribution to the study of climate change. Specifically, the focus on climate epistemologies and climate values, which underpin the fundamental lenses through which geographers have faced the climate crisis. Here, Climate epistemologies reference the persistent goal of deconstructing the work that produces the climate as an object of global governance, examining the implications of different epistemic commitments and forms of climate governance, and exploring possibilities for contesting/resisting/reappropriating new ways of seeing via technology (Bakker and Ritts, 2018; Goldstein and Nost, 2022) . As Jasanoff (2017) argues, these different ways of seeing and understanding climate matter because they generate standpoints with both an epistemic and a political difference, from which to address “the often-messy processes of linking scientific knowledge to decision-making within different policies” (Mahony and Hulme, 2018: 395).

Just as epistemic framings shape not only what we know about the climate but also what we see of it, such framings also produce and are produced by our climate values, necessitating practical attention to the politics underpinning climate knowledge, its frames, its assumptions and its effects (Kythreotis et al., 2019). Returning attention and scrutiny to these values has had a mixed response in contemporary climate geographies. On the one hand, recent geographical climate change literature has witnessed a growing attention to values, considered significant factors in public engagement with climate science (Corner et al., 2014), climate scepticism (McCright and Dunlap, 2011; Poortinga et al., 2011), disagreement (Hulme, 2009) pro-environmental behaviour (Lorenzoni et al., 2007), risk perception (Leiserowitz, 2006) and in the assessment of climate impacts (Wolf et al., 2013), as well as future policy acceptance (Demski et al., 2015; Nilsson et al., 2004).

Yet at the same time, the concept of values itself has been problematised for its implicit essentialism (Hajer, 1995), fragmented theoretical legacy (Corner et al., 2014), malleability (Hulme, 2009) and the problematic relationship between values and behaviour that creates a ‘value-action gap’ in which pro-environmental behaviours are seen as only loosely correlated with pro-environmental action (Pepper et al., 2009; Poortinga et al., 2004). As a result, perhaps ironically, many of the most prominent engagements with values and climate change have taken place outside of geography (c.f. Moellendorf, 2014; Morrow, 2020). Nevertheless, the notion of climate values now offers an increasingly definitional point in critical climate geographies, drawing together what seemed two decades previously as irreconcilable strands of climate governance: environmental data generation/knowledge epistemologies and the cultural politics of the environment.

III Where are we going?

As interventions such as these demonstrate, critical climate geographers have found, after several decades of concerted contribution to climate discourse and policy, a common and distinctive voice. What began as a bearish engagement with a topic viewed as important but inescapably connected to natural science has permeated every corner of the discipline, to produce something both fundamentally Geographic, and also novel in its relationship to the environment. Having previously sought to protect the ‘fragile consensus’ around global climate action (Broadbent et al., 2016), recent years have seen critical scholars develop the confidence to challenge and re-politicise climate change by approaching it on novel terms. Only now are the diverse hybrids of climate scholarship that have emerged from this engagement beginning to reconnect and coalesce, laying the ground for a novel geographical body of scholarship on the changing climate.

Critical climate geographers today share a largely consensual viewpoint on climate as a “multiple and dynamic condition” shaped by political, socio-economic, and cultural forces: a perspective conditioned by the discipline. After all, Geography is, at its core, an (inter)disciplinary subject (Baerwald, 2010). The cleft nature of the geographic discipline necessitates an awareness of the possibilities of ‘an interdisciplinary discipline’ almost by default (Baerwald, 2010; Goudie, 2016). And this interdisciplinary viewpoint has presented a unique set of epistemological and ontological challenges (Sui and DeLyser, 2011), to which critical climate geographers have dedicated substantial efforts in recent years. In particular, we identify four areas where critical climate geographers engage with vigour. Linked in their pursuit of cross- and interdisciplinary reflexivity, each field reflects a deep engagement with the history of the discipline of Geography, and a clear sense of where this inheritance can lead climate scholarship. Rather than simply problems to be solved, these areas of contested engagement constitute, we argue, a self-aware consolidation of the field, not just as geographers engaging with climate questions, but also of harnessing a shared sense of historical reflexivity to bear on critical present-day questions.

IV Where next?

In highlighting the contributions that critical geographers have made to climate change, Bulkeley (2019) suggests that questioning the a priori divisions between the social and the natural is particularly important. This ontological positioning enables critical geographers to move beyond interventions that position social science as responses to an objective (bio-physically defined) problem and instead see climate as a condition in which the problem framing matters as much as the response. Her core message is that rather than being carved off as an environmental concern or a bridging device between the findings of science and the implications for society, recognising “climate-as-condition creates new progressive possibilities for politics and action” (2019:16). Critical climate geographers must thus ensure that the values and epistemologies of the field remain as inclusive as possible to enable these progressive possibilities for politics and action to emerge.

For geographers, the emergence of climate change as a social scientific agenda is rooted, as ever, in Geography’s particular histories and architectures. This has always been a discipline with a split personality; its physical and human dimensions exist in a sometimes uneasy yet durable relationship. In fact, one of the strengths of Geography as a discipline is that it draws its analytical innovativeness from many other cognate social science disciplines. Our world, Geographers recognise, can only be interpreted fully when informed by epistemological self-awareness. And it is this awareness of climate change as a confluence of inter-epistemological dialogue, that is, if not unique to Geography, then at least particularly well suited to it. Inheriting an uneasy legacy brings purpose: both a vital and critically important asset. Since geographers have always engaged with the interplay between environmental and social dimensions, they are especially well placed to assess how the prevailing power and politics of the day shape the frames employed to interpret them.

Crucially, this reflexive, historically situated perspective offers not only an awareness of the deep imbrication of power within the scholarship and policy of environmental management but also the means and obligation to unpack how ‘knowledge has been shaped by Anglo-Western experiences and epistemologies’ (Collins, 2022: 1243). Critical climate geographers, in other words, bear a legacy that presents a critical path forward: the opportunity to trace the complex landscape of power that underpins environmental analysis, asking who stands to benefit from each frame and who to lose. By situating climate policy within this broader landscape of power, this novel realm of geographical thinking can push back against the technocratic tendencies of adaptation, sustainable development, and green growth, highlighting the conflicts, contestations and consolidations that drive them. In embracing critical climate geographies, the field is uniquely positioned to challenge dominant paradigms and address the complex socio-political dimensions of climate change. Critical climate geographies, viewed in this way, may become less an “underlying absence” (Bulkeley, 2019: 3) than a convergent centrepoint and critical mirror to climate scholarship more broadly: a field of meeting and reflection on the spatialities of climates, and the hybrid climate-societies.