Climate Futures

Climate Futures
Author: Kum-Kum Bhavnani
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786997851

Approaching the issues of climate change and climate justice from a range of diverse perspectives including those of culture, gender, indigeneity, race, and sexuality, as well as challenging colonial histories and capitalist presents, Climate Futures boldly addresses the apparent inevitability of climate chaos. Seeking better explanations of the underlying causes and consequences of climate change, and mapping strategies toward a better future, or at a minimum, the most likely best-case world that we can get to, this book envisions planetary social movements robust enough to spark the necessary changes needed to achieve deeply sustainable and just economic, social, and political policies and practices. Bringing together insights from interdisciplinary scholars, policymakers, creatives and activists, Climate Futures argues for the need to get past us-and-them divides and acknowledge how lives of creatures far and near, human and non-human, are interconnected.

Farming for Our Future

Farming for Our Future
Author: PETER H.. ROSENBERG LEHNER (NATHAN A.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781585762378

Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.

Climate Adaptation Futures

Climate Adaptation Futures
Author: Jean P. Palutikof
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2013-02-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1118529472

Adaptation is the poor cousin of the climate change challenge - the glamour of international debate is around global mitigation agreements, while the bottom-up activities of adaptation, carried out in community halls and local government offices, are often overlooked. Yet, as international forums fail to deliver reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the world is realising that effective adaptation will be essential across all sectors to deal with the unavoidable impacts of climate change. The need to understand how to adapt effectively, and to develop appropriate adaptation options and actions, is becoming increasingly urgent. This book reports the current state of knowledge on climate change adaptation, and seeks to expose and debate key issues in adaptation research and practice. It is framed around a number of critical areas of adaptation theory and practice, including: Advances in adaptation thinking, Enabling frameworks and policy for adaptation, Engaging and communicating with practitioners, Key challenges in adaptation and development, Management of natural systems and agriculture under climate change, Ensuring water security under a changing climate, Urban infrastructure and livelihoods, and The nexus between extremes, disaster management and adaptation. It includes contributions from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in adaptation today. The book is based on key contributions from the First International Conference on Climate Change Adaptation ‘Climate Adaptation Futures’, held on the Gold Coast, Australia, in June 2010. That three-day meeting of over 1000 researchers and practitioners in adaptation from 50 countries was the first of its kind. Readership: The book is essential reading for a wide range of individuals involved in climate change adaptation, including: Researchers, Communication specialists, Decision-makers and policy makers (e.g. government staff, local council staff), On-ground adaptation practitioners (e.g. aid agencies, government workers, NGOs), Postgraduate and graduate students, and Consultants.

Future Scenarios

Future Scenarios
Author: David Holmgren
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2012-04-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1603582061

In Future Scenarios, permaculture co-originator and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren outlines four scenarios that bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of peak oil and climate change, and the generations-long era of “energy descent” that faces us. “Scenario planning,” Holmgren explains, “allows us to use stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail, or be transformed.” Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probable futures, explains Holmgren, range from the relatively benign Green Tech scenario to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario. As Adam Grubb, founder of the influential Energy Bulletin website, says, “These aren’t two-dimensional nightmarish scenarios designed to scare people into environmental action. They are compellingly fleshed-out visions of quite plausible alternative futures, which delve into energy, politics, agriculture, social, and even spiritual trends. What they do help make clear are the best strategies for preparing for and adapting to these possible futures.” Future Scenarios provides brilliant and balanced consideration of the world’s options and will prove to be one of the most important books of the year.

Our Shared Storm

Our Shared Storm
Author: Andrew Dana Hudson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0823299554

Through speculative fiction, five interlocking novelettes explore the possible realities of our climate future. What is the future of our climate? Given that our summers now regularly feature Arctic heat waves and wildfire blood skies, polar vortex winters that reach all the way down to Texas, and “100-year” storms that hit every few months, it may seem that catastrophe is a done deal. As grim as things are, however, we still have options. Combining fiction and nonfiction and employing speculative tools for scholarly purposes, Our Shared Storm explores not just one potential climate future but five possible outcomes dependent upon our actions today. Written by speculative-fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson, Our Shared Storm features five overlapping fictions to employ a futurist technique called “scenarios thinking.” Rather than try to predict how history will unfold—picking one out of many unpredictable and contingent branching paths—it instead creates a set of futures that represent major trends or counterposed possibilities, based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios known as the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The setting is the year 2054, during the Conference of the Parties global climate negotiations (a.k.a., The COP) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently for them—and human society—in each alternate universe. These five scenarios highlight the political, economic, and cultural possibilities of futures where investments in climate adaptation and mitigation promised today have been successfully completed, kicked down the road, or abandoned altogether. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize the planet. Our Shared Storm is an experiment in deploying practice-based research methods to explore the opportunities and challenges of using climate fiction to engage scientific and academic frameworks.

Brighter Climate Futures

Brighter Climate Futures
Author: Hari Lamba
Publisher:
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2020-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781587905285

The only book that provides a complete quantitative time bound GLOBAL plan that will provide plenty of clean renewable energy, rid us of the carbon emissions of fossil fuels, minimize global average temperature rise, and rejuvenate forests, coastal ecosystems and agriculture, for a clean and beautiful Earth with a good life for all.

The Future We Choose

The Future We Choose
Author: Christiana Figueres
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 052565836X

A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.

Risky Futures

Risky Futures
Author: Olga Ulturgasheva
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-08-12
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1800735944

The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.

Resilient Urban Futures

Resilient Urban Futures
Author: Zoé A. Hamstead
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030631311

This open access book addresses the way in which urban and urbanizing regions profoundly impact and are impacted by climate change. The editors and authors show why cities must wage simultaneous battles to curb global climate change trends while adapting and transforming to address local climate impacts. This book addresses how cities develop anticipatory and long-range planning capacities for more resilient futures, earnest collaboration across disciplines, and radical reconfigurations of the power regimes that have institutionalized the disenfranchisement of minority groups. Although planning processes consider visions for the future, the editors highlight a more ambitious long-term positive visioning approach that accounts for unpredictability, system dynamics and equity in decision-making. This volume brings the science of urban transformation together with practices of professionals who govern and manage our social, ecological and technological systems to design processes by which cities may achieve resilient urban futures in the face of climate change.

City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate

City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate
Author: Tony Fry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2014-08-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317659023

This book goes beyond current ways that the impact of climate change upon the city are understood. In doing so it addresses climate in a variety of its connotations. It looks to the nomadic behaviour patterns of the past for lessons for today’s population unsettlement, and argues that as human survival will increasingly be linked directly to movement, the city can no longer be defined as a constrained space. The impacts of climate change must be understood as a combination of the actual and the expected, and have to be addressed both practically and culturally. City Futures in an Age of Changing Climate looks at how cities can adapt and respond to the unsustainable conditions they are now facing. The book considers possible post-urban futures, exposing a range of very different urban forms, and addresses the concept of fragmentation; the breaking up of any coherent economic or cultural nucleic urban spaces. Urban planners, designers, development practitioners, and anyone seeking to understand what the future is likely to look like for our cities, and how to prepare for it, will find this an essential read.