Why do peat and peatlands matter in modern Russian history? The introduction highlights peatlands as a prominent feature of Russia’s physical environment and reflects on their forgotten role as providers of fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It discusses the invisibility of peat and peatlands in most existing historical narratives of the fossil fuel age and identifies peat as a lens to reflect upon Russia’s place within global histories of economic growth and associated resource-use. Situating the book at the intersection of modern Russian, energy, and environmental history, the introduction underscores why the planetary predicament makes the seemingly marginal history of peat extraction a topic of global significance.

How did peatlands respond to human visions of growth and development? Peat extraction entangled humans and peatlands in a relationship marked by irritation, sometimes confrontation. Examining incidents of malaria outbreaks and fire at and around peat extraction sites, this chapter highlights the agency of peatlands in the history of Russia’s fossil economy. It identifies peat extraction sites as spaces of environmental injustice and points to a crucial irony running through the history of human–peatland relationships in imperial and Soviet Russia: Peatlands had long been imagined as dangerous and useless, but they turned into unsettling landscapes only once they became part of Russia’s industrial metabolism. Central Russia’s peatland environments were not just a backdrop to history but actively challenged and constrained the different ways in which people tried to make use of them.

The history of Russia’s peatlands is closely entangled with the environmental issues of our time. Although most peat extraction in central Russia ceased decades ago, the legacy of this history is ongoing. Drainage and industrial exploitation have turned peatlands from carbon sinks into powerful carbon emitters. Recognizing how this issue is rooted in a larger history of economic growth adds depth to our understanding of the current planetary predicament. Even though Russia may not soon become an ally in efforts to cure degraded peatlands, writing their history constitutes an important step in addressing the ecological amnesia surrounding these ecosystems and in developing more caring relationships with them.

The chapter examines global risks that are exceedingly complex and characterized by the long time horizons entailed in their governance. It argues that the dynamics of climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, and other system-spanning challenges are now forcing pragmatists and skeptics alike to push their thinking beyond the kinds of experiments in risk governance discussed in previous chapters. They suggest the need for profound socioeconomic transformation, eventually forcing deep structural political change at the system level. Complex and slow-moving crises with transnational dimensions will not be managed successfully by nation-states assigning priority to their own autonomy. The essential question comes back to the fore. Might the “insuring instinct” today be harnessed in zones that stretch the limits of risk calculation quickly enough to sustain more ambitious forms of collaborative governance? More specifically, can existing political authorities in vital and inherently complex policy arenas effectively deploy insurance narratives to move beyond voluntary and reversible intergovernmental arrangements without provoking self-defeating backlashes? The chapter reviews current analyses of key cases where private insurance reach their limits, but insurance metaphors promise to be politically useful.

The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and the V20 group of finance ministers address climate change impacts on vulnerable countries. This chapter introduces the interconnectedness of climate justice, economic resilience, and sustainable development. It highlights personal stories, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia and Jevanic Henry from Saint Lucia, who share their experiences of climate change’s impacts on their communities — covering both the economic loss and the emotional devastation caused to communities. We introduce the CVF’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor — a unique study of the impacts of climate change, including fresh modelling, covering biophysical, economics and health projections up to 2100. The global community via COP27 and COP28 have agreed on the urgency of both adaptation and mitigation strategies. Yet the speed of change is not sufficient. The fate of today’s most vulnerable will soon be the fate of the world.

This chapter focuses on dynamic water resource management for regenerative cities, emphasising the need for a more sustainable, circular approach to urban water management. As cities face increasing water scarcity, compounded by rapid urbanisation and climate change, traditional methods of water supply are no longer sufficient. The chapter advocates for a transition from linear water management systems towards more integrated and regenerative models. It introduces key concepts such as cities acting as water supply catchments, where urban areas manage and recycle their own water through innovative technologies like rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse, and advanced wastewater treatment. The chapter highlights global best practices, including Tokyo’s water-saving initiatives, Singapore’s closed water loop system, and China’s Sponge City programme, illustrating how cities can adopt diverse, multifunctional water strategies to secure their long-term water supply. Additionally, the chapter underscores the importance of blue–green infrastructure, which integrates natural and built systems to provide ecosystem services, mitigate flooding, and enhance urban resilience. By integrating dynamic water resource management with urban planning, cities can reduce their environmental footprint and foster sustainable development, making water security a central component of regenerative city planning.

FFramework climate laws have been enacted across a growing range of countries, and are often assumed to provide stability in terms of climate policymaking. This chapter provides a more nuanced assessment. I argue that, while some common design elements of framework climate laws do indeed serve to bring stability to climate policymaking, in many respects framework climate laws depart from the ideal design type envisioned by the literature on time inconsistency, commitment devices, and non-majoritarian institutions. Moreover, framework climate laws can actually serve to make explicit political conflicts and sectoral trade-offs, and can thus serve to politicize even as they depoliticize. Furthermore, by seeking to introduce stability to climate policymaking in the sense of stability in policy design over time, framework climate laws simultaneously and deliberately seek to undermine and challenge stability as status quo. The chapter draws on examples of framework climate laws principally in European countries to illustrate the argument.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book’s fifteen analytical chapters and is divided into six sections. Each section places several individual chapters in conversation with one another. First, we reflect on how the authors engaged with stability, across the four forms we developed in the introductory chapter, before the second section does the same regarding re/politicization. Third, we engage with the running theme throughout the book that stability and re/politicization are not dichotomous but rather interact, and indeed, one can be pursued to achieve the other. Fourth, we explore manifestations of depoliticization encountered within the book and find that, in practice, many regimes pursuing stability are less depoliticized than often assumed. Fifth, we bring in the importance of temporality to our studies, before finally offering concluding remarks on the book’s arguments and suggesting avenues for future research. Throughout the volume, we have presented the antagonism between stability and re/politicization in a deliberately flexible manner, and we hope others will find it – as well as our four novel forms of each approach – to be useful in their own analyses.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

Does decarbonization depend on policy stability that makes climate policies and institutional development irreversible, or does it depend on mastering a messy political conflict with uneven progress that might be inherent in large political economy transitions? This chapter draws on case studies of two large emerging powers, Brazil and South Africa, to argue that politicization of climate action seems inevitable in decarbonizing energy transitions. Fossil fuel coalitions are too powerful and the threat to them too existential to avoid politicization as they defend their interests. At the same time, Brazil shows that policy stability was a critical step in a large expansion of wind power there – not a full energy transition itself but providing an important alternative to fossil fuels. Both countries show that allies in the struggle against fossil fuels can be won and lost in non-climate political economies of energy transition. The potential for new industry and job creation, enhanced energy security, and impacts on communities that host infrastructure are all important to energy transition, with each following a political economy logic that may or may not focus on climate change.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.