The absences in climate’s human geographies

The positioning of climate change in relation to other environmental problems

In ‘The whereabouts of climate politics’, climate change is framed as a distinctive problem, that warrants special attention, and the status of climate change is assumed or taken for granted. In other words, the starting point of the paper elevates climate change as more critical than other environmental or social problems, and this is an issue which perhaps deserves closer attention. As scholars have commented, there are other significant global environmental and social problems, for example, plastic waste, disease, poverty, environmental toxins or pollution of the oceans and waterways (Dunlap, 2007, Middleton, 2008), and climate change can act to crowd out these problems. Given that the article is about locating climate politics, it would be valuable to locate and contextualize climate change alongside broader sustainable development goals (Fleurbaey et al., 2014), with an explanation of why climate change is the focal point of the paper.

Relatedly, in setting out the case for focusing on climate change, the paper might briefly consider some of the particular physical science characteristics of climate change. While this suggestion sits somewhat uncomfortably with Bulkeley’s core argument – that we should endeavour to not position climate change as a physical science problem – there are nonetheless certain characteristics of climate change that structure how it is understood and the nature of our societal response to date. These include: that it is a global problem, and its long time frame to take effect, with the resulting absence of an immediate crisis; features all described as making climate change a ‘moral storm’ (Gardiner, 2006) and a ‘wicked problem’ to solve (Lazarus, 2009). While there is a risk here in repeating the mistake of making climate change ‘out there’ (Castree, 2015; see also Hulme, 2008), these are also unavoidable characteristics of climate change as a physical problem that necessarily structure how we frame and govern it, and that I think would benefit from being made explicit in Bulkeley’s intervention.

Looking to the future

The second absence observed in ‘The whereabouts of climate politics’ is its scant attention to the future. There is an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of the article temporally, reaching beyond its current focus on contemporary times and the near past, to include the future. As scholars have noted, looking ahead to imagine our future climate-changed world can act as an impetus to action and value shifts (Berkhout et al., 2002). A number of approaches have been used to facilitate such future-thinking, including visualization and scenarios (Moss et al., 2010); for example, the research by Shaw et al. (2009) in visualizing alternative year 2100 climate change scenarios in 3D at a local level, for it is at a local level where climate change is judged to be most meaningful to decision-makers and stakeholders.

Another way of thinking about the future is through the arts and humanities, such as the rather bleak future possibilities raised in novels and films such as Cormac MaCarthy’s The Road (2006) , and the MaddAddam trilogy of books by Margaret Atwood (2003, 2009, 2013). The genre of literature climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, is attracting increasing scholarly attention (see e.g. Johns-Putra, 2016, Mehnert, 2016), including as a means of stimulating action to address climate change (Holmes, 2014, Schneider-Mayerson, 2018).

A future-orientated perspective can perhaps help us as academics to consider what we might wish that our leading scholars had been attentive to, during this period, the early 21st century. For me personally, thinking more carefully about the possibilities of what our future climate changed world might look like does not make me wish we had spent more time analysing and fretting about disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps other feel the same – helping us collectively to further raise our heads above our disciplinary silos, and, to think anew about the profound effect of climate change and its future reach into all areas of academia – the need for experts in conflict, disaster management, migration, eco-fiction, future studies, design and the laws of war, as Bulkeley argues. That we need to work together more collaboratively is clear. But the methods and strategies to encourage us to do this are far from clear. By stretching the boundaries of climate change social science scholarship to the future, we might harness our imagination and our creativity to help us navigate the tricky paths ahead.