Collection 3, Human responses to climate change

Collection 3, Human responses to climate change

A collection exploring human responses to climate change in the past, the present and the future

Research articles

Need of a Global Wetland Restoration Programme: Lessons from Finland

Tero Mustonen

A restoration programme for peatlands in the Finnish boreal (northern mostly coniferous) landscapes points to a positive solution for creating biodiversity hotspots, carbon sinks (sites that trap and store carbon) and water protection measures. Restoration and rewilding can also alleviate equity issues associated with conservation and Indigenous and traditional communities. As an example, the river Jukajoki is recovering after a decade from fish deaths resulting from degraded peatland discharge. Exportability of wetland restoration could be achieved across the ‘boreal space’,…

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Community membership as a driver of climate action: From rural hunters to progressive activists

Jessica Love-Nichols, Julia Coombs Fine, Delcia Orona, Forest Ophelia Stuart, Rohit Reddy Karnaty and Shawn Van Valkenburgh

In this paper we show how community membership can motivate climate activism in two very different contexts: for politically conservative hunters and fishers in the western United States, and for progressive climate activists in the US and UK. In the first context, we describe how members of the right-wing hunting community emphasize their collective identity through shared ways of communicating, and as a result, encourage climate activism and challenge the political polarization around climate action. In the second context, we…

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Human reactions to climate change: a social psychological perspective

Rusi Jaspal and Brigitte Nerlich

Climate change is a significant global challenge but also a controversial topic. In this article, we present an integrative theoretical framework and discuss the social psychological aspects of climate change, focusing on how it is communicated and understood, and how people respond to it. First, we focus on linguistic constructions of climate change and its mitigation measures, drawing on tenets of social representations theory. Second, we outline the individual and group levels of identity and their relevance to understanding how…

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Putting the brakes on climate change – it’s about more than just CO2.

Kathleen A. Mar

Climate change mitigation is about more than just CO2. Mitigating a suite of additional pollutants is important for limiting climate change: in particular, taking action on what are known as “short-lived climate-forcing pollutants” (SLCPs). Although it is common to report the effect of non-CO2 climate warmers in terms of “CO2 equivalence” they aren’t simply “equivalent” – their effects on climate and ecosystem are distinct. In the case of SLCPs, one important difference is in the time horizon: SLCPs have the…

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