Searching for a Mobilizing Narrative on Climate Change. (March 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Jerneck, Anne
• Other Names: Olsson Lennart guest-editor.; Hourcade Jean-Charles guest-editor.; Köhler Jonathan guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Journal of environment & development. Volume 23:Number 1(2014:Mar.)
• Page Start: 15
• Page End: 40
• Publication Date: 2014-03
• Subjects: climate change -- development -- globalization -- inequality -- sustainability; Economic development -- Environmental aspects -- Periodicals; Environmental policy -- Economic aspects -- Periodicals; 338.9005
• DOI: 10.1177/1070496513507259
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1070-4965

Abstract

Global environmental change is real and everywhere, and so is inequality. Such a warmer, stormier, and divided world will create highly differentiated socioecological impacts and responses to climate change with stronger effects on people, places, and livelihoods that contributed the least. This necessitates mitigation, adaptation, and a solid understanding of their interactions with persistent problems such as poverty because uneven distribution of impacts and responses may reinforce existing inequality and vulnerability. Within a frame of political ecology, sociology, and sustainability science and informed by three transnational discourses—sustainability, development, and globalization—this article suggests a mobilizing narrative to think and act. In this format, the narrative must include direction (toward sustainability), distribution (global inclusiveness), and diversity (multiple approaches, methods, and solutions). It must also support arenas for multiscalar dialogs and practices while aiming to replace deep divisiveness and distorted understandings that prevent the emergence of just and synergetic responses to climate change.