scholarly journals The politics of anticipation: the IPCC and the negative emissions technologies experience

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silke Beck ◽  
Martin Mahony

Non-technical summaryIn the post-Paris political landscape, the relationship between science and politics is changing. We discuss what this means for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), using recent controversies over negative emissions technologies (NETs) as a window into the fraught politics of producing policy-relevant pathways and scenarios. We suggest that pathways and scenarios have a ‘world-making’ power, potentially shaping the world in their own image and creating new political realities. Assessment bodies like the IPCC need to reflect on this power, and the implications of changing political contexts, in new ways.

Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


Author(s):  
Sutyajeet Soneja ◽  
Gina Tsarouchi ◽  
Darren Lumbroso ◽  
Dao Khanh Tung

Abstract Purpose of review The purpose of this review is to summarize research articles that provide risk estimates for the historical and future impact that climate change has had upon dengue published from 2007 through 2019. Recent findings Findings from 30 studies on historical health estimates, with the majority of the studies conducted in Asia, emphasized the importance of temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity, as well as lag effects, when trying to understand how climate change can impact the risk of contracting dengue. Furthermore, 35 studies presented findings on future health risk based upon climate projection scenarios, with a third of them showcasing global level estimates and findings across the articles emphasizing the need to understand risk at a localized level as the impacts from climate change will be experienced inequitably across different geographies in the future. Summary Dengue is one of the most rapidly spreading viral diseases in the world, with ~390 million people infected worldwide annually. Several factors have contributed towards its proliferation, including climate change. Multiple studies have previously been conducted examining the relationship between dengue and climate change, both from a historical and a future risk perspective. We searched the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health (NIEHS) Climate Change and Health Portal for literature (spanning January 2007 to September 2019) providing historical and future health risk estimates of contracting dengue infection in relation to climate variables worldwide. With an overview of the evidence of the historical and future health risk posed by dengue from climate change across different regions of the world, this review article enables the research and policy community to understand where the knowledge gaps are and what areas need to be addressed in order to implement localized adaptation measures to mitigate the health risks posed by future dengue infection.


2020 ◽  
pp. 096366252097601
Author(s):  
Nicole Kay ◽  
Sandrine Gaymard

Climate change is a global environmental issue and its outcome will affect societies around the world. In recent years, we have seen a growing literature on media coverage of climate change, but, to date, no study has assessed the situation in Cameroon, although it is considered to be one of the world’s most affected and vulnerable regions. This study attempted to address this deficit by analysing how climate change is represented in the Cameroonian media. A similarity analysis was performed on three newspapers published in 2013–2016. Results showed that climate coverage focused on politics and international involvement. It seems disconnected from local realities, potentially opening up a spatial and social psychological distance. The relationship between the representation of climate change and that of poverty is an area for further exploration.


Author(s):  
Matthew Kelly

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.


2021 ◽  
pp. 775-812
Author(s):  
Alan Boyle ◽  
Catherine Redgwell

This chapter looks at the relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and international trade in terms of international environmental law. Twenty-five years after the WTO system came into operation it appears that neither trade law nor environmental law have trumped each other. Rather, there has been a process of accommodation which is still ongoing. The chapter ends by making some conclusions on the arguments presented in this book and the issues currently being faced. The current policy of encouraging free trade cannot always be made environmentally friendly and this will always be the case. The problem becomes clear if we consider climate change. Free trade and globalisation by nature exacerbates the difficulties of regulating environmental issues. In addition, one of the key problems with sustainable development as a concept is that there has been too much emphasis on development, and not nearly enough on sustainability, then a policy of promoting free trade is part of that problem.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Laurie Parsons

This article discusses the relationship between climate change and migration in the context of the UK. After a brief overview of climate migration scholarship, it examines the framing of climate migration as a crisis in UK policy discourse, highlighting the disjuncture between policy and academic scholarship in this respect. Subsequently, it examines the reasons for this schism, exploring both the framing of climate migration within the UK media landscape and the securitisation of the topic within UK government policy. Finally, the article explores how the UK�s political landscape undergirds the political logic of climate finance, emphasising the role of British domestic politics in shaping the boundaries and direction of climate change as it manifests in governance. The article closes by exploring potential new directions in UK climate migration policy.


Author(s):  
Hartmut Wessler ◽  
Julia Lück ◽  
Antal Wozniak

The annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences, officially called Conferences of the Parties (COPs), are the main drivers of media attention to climate change around the world. Even more so than the Rio and Rio+20 “Earth Summits” (1992 and 2012) and the meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the COPs offer multiple access points for the communicative engagement of all kinds of stakeholders. COPs convene up to 20,000 people in one place for two weeks, including national delegations, civil society and business representatives, scientific organizations, representatives from other international organizations, as well as journalists from around the world. While intergovernmental negotiation under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) constitutes the core of COP business, these multifunctional events also offer arenas for civil society mobilization, economic lobbying, as well as expert communication and knowledge transfer. The media image of the COPs emerges as a product of distinct networks of coproduction constituted by journalists, professional communicators from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and national delegations. Production structures at the COPs are relatively globalized with uniform access rules for journalists from all over the world, a few transnational news agencies dominating distribution of both basic information and news visuals, and dense localized interaction between public relations (PR) professionals and journalists. Photo opportunities created by globally coordinated environmental NGOs meet the selection of journalists much better than the visual strategies pursued by delegation spokespeople. This gives NGOs the upper hand in the visual framing contest, whereas in textual framing NGOs are sidelined and national politicians clearly dominate media coverage. The globalized production environment leads to relatively similar patterns of basic news framing in national media coverage of the COPs that reflect overarching ways of approaching the topic: through a focus on problems and victims; a perspective on civil society demands and solutions; an emphasis on conflict in negotiations; or a focus on the benefits of clean energy production. News narratives, on the other hand, give journalists from different countries more leeway in adapting COP news to national audiences’ presumed interests and preoccupations. Even after the adoption of a new global treaty at COP21 in Paris in 2015 that specifies emission reduction targets for all participating countries, the annual UN Climate Change Conferences are likely to remain in the media spotlight. Future research could look more systematically at the impact of global civil society and media in monitoring the national contributions to climate change mitigation introduced in the Paris Agreement and shoring up even more ambitious commitments needed to reach the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius as compared to pre-industrial levels.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Hyoung Song

In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.


Author(s):  
Nkiru Theresa Meludu ◽  
Toyin Abolade

AbstractCoronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) is a current pandemic causing lockdown of cities and countries. The nature of this disease and the global cases are still considered as deadly all over the world. Analogous was drawn between the current COVID-19 pandemic and some of the other contemporary crises of the world as regards to climate change in addition to food shortage. Also, Survey Monkey instrument was used to generate emperical evidences from 514 respondents on covid-19 awareness and the effect on food security. Effects of diseases on climate change, such as the increasing frequency and strength of extreme weather events or the expanding range and spread of diseases was considered. Then, the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change was investigated. Prior to the pandemic, climate change already had adverse effects on agriculture and vice versa, which led to food insecurity. The need for fruits as well as leafy and root vegetables in peri-urban and urban areas is increasing, as well as the food shortage. A drop in agricultural production will be expected in the future if the pandemic continues for a few more months. The perception and adherence to the preventive measures for this pandemic were determined to reduce its spread and lessen its effect on agricultural production as well as to improve food security


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