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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.
In recent years, courts across the world have increasingly held governments accountable for addressing climate change. While such rulings have fueled optimism about constitutional law as a vehicle for climate ambition, this Article argues that the role of constitutional law in advancing climate goals is far more complex and contested. Constitutions encapsulate diverse and sometimes conflicting values, which can create tensions when courts adjudicate climate policies. As government climate measures become more concrete, conflicts arise between rights, institutional structures, and political realities. Drawing on examples from Germany, Canada, and Mexico, this Article highlights the challenges of adjudicative uncertainty, the underspecificity of constitutional norms, and the polyvocality of constitutional values in the context of climate change. This Article concludes with recommendations for judges to adopt a principled, context-sensitive approach to constitutional climate adjudication, balancing the urgency of climate action with the complexities of state capacity and constitutional structures.
Introducing the Special Issue on “Judging under Pressure,” this Article sets out three interlinked challenges facing constitutional courts, broadly understood: persisting inequalities, the climate crisis, and rising autocratization. The Articles in this Special Issue identify, analyze, and prescribe a set of judicial responses and strategies when judging under pressure. Some reimagine and recalibrate the role of judges, while others respond with doctrinal and theoretical innovation; yet, throughout, there is a recognition of judicial constraints and institutional fragility.
The rapid economic development experienced by Southeast Asia has come at the cost of considerable environmental degradation, including deforestation and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water and ocean pollution, rising greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing vulnerability to climate change. While sustainable development as a concept recognizes the fundamental importance of nature to future human well-being, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a set of policies falls far short of this ideal. The SDGs, particularly the environmental goals relating to life on land, life under water, and climate action, are essentially impossible to meet in Southeast Asia, as no country is on a sustainability trajectory, but these goals are superficial and modest at best anyway. Alternative approaches that recognize trade-offs and seek to integrate across solutions, that create spaces for inclusion, and which center equity and justice could help meet SDG goals, but face considerable challenges in implementation across Southeast Asia.
This article explores how pedagogy focused on affective possibilities of narrative genres can suggest new directions for climate fiction, potentially challenging the dystopian dominance in the climate crisis imaginary. We analyse a corpus of work produced by first year creative writing students. The students were given the task of “mashing” climate fiction with another genre (romance, horror, crime or any other genre of their choice) and asked to reflect on how this changed the emotional affect and tone of their narrative. Many students were still drawn to dystopian visions, reflecting how climate fiction has become entangled with this particular mode of storytelling, but the focus on reader affect resulted in the students adding layers of hope and agency. Many made use of the possibilities offered by genre: the whimsical allegory of fantasy, the critical thinking of realism, the active fear of horror and the comic potential of satire. By giving students the freedom to embed climate change into their preferred genre, and by asking them to consider the affective consequences of their choices, we offer challenges to the dominance of dystopian climate fiction, suggesting a different path to narratively engage with the climate crisis without descending into hopelessness.
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.
Houses of worship are often shelters after the storm. Yet, as climate change fuels natural disasters and communities increasingly rely on congregations during disaster recovery, are houses of worship ready to be houses of refuge? Examining clergy influence, does a higher concern about climate change by clergy result in improved congregational disaster readiness? Data for the study come from a 2019 nationwide survey of clergy. The survey includes measures of congregational disaster preparedness along with one of the first applications of the SASSY climate concern measure to clergy. Results show that clergy have mixed opinions about climate change and that congregations led by high climate-concern clergy are no more prepared for disasters than those led by unconcerned clergy. While seemingly a null result, understanding the relationship between leaders, climate change, and disaster preparedness benefits the study of leader influence on organizations, religion and climate change, and the politics of disaster resilience.
Climate change will impact wind and, therefore, wind power generation with largely unknown effects and magnitude. Climate models can provide insight and should be used for long-term power planning. In this work, we use Gaussian processes to predict power output given wind speeds from a global climate model. We validate the aggregated predictions from past climate model data with actual power generation, which supports using CMIP6 climate model data for multi-decadal wind power predictions and highlights the importance of being location-aware. We find that wind power projections for the two in-between climate scenarios, SSP2–4.5 and SSP3–7.0, closely align with actual wind power generation between 2015 and 2023. Our location-aware future predictions up to 2050 reveal only minor changes in yearly wind power generation. Our analysis also reveals larger uncertainty associated with Germany’s coastal areas in the North than Germany’s South, motivating wind power expansion in regions where the future wind is likely more reliable. Overall, our results indicate that wind energy will likely remain a reliable energy source.
Scholars often use survey experiments to evaluate political messages’ persuasive effects, but messages developed in the lab do not always persuade in real-world campaigns. In this research note, we report three experiments on one central obstacle in lab-to-field messaging applications: getting people’s attention. We first analyze a large-scale direct mail campaign run by an established non-profit that promotes conservative solutions to climate change. In this experiment, postcards with messages based on extant survey-experimental research did not cause changes in key climate attitudes. In a follow-up survey experiment, identical postcards induced attitude change— Re but only when participants were required to pay attention to them. A final field experiment highlights the difficulty of inducing attention; in another real-world campaign, postcards with eye-catching scratch-off panels performed no better than standard postcards. These findings illustrate the crucial role of attention and the complexity of translating messages developed in survey experiments into effective real-world campaigns.
The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the heat index over a 1-week period in the region where patients reside on those presenting to the emergency department (ED) with complaints of acute diarrhea and diagnosed with amoebic diarrhea based on their test results.
Methods
This study retrospectively analyzed patients who presented with acute diarrhea to a tertiary health care center over the course of 1 year, focusing on the association between symptomatic amoebic diarrhea cases and the 7-day average heat index prior to admission.
Results
A total of 1406 patients were included in the analysis, of whom 251 (17.9%) were diagnosed with amebiasis, while 1155 (82.1%) were classified as non-amebiasis. Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified an increased 7-day heat index average (OR: 1.12, 95% CI: 1.099-1.141, P < 0.001) as independent predictors of amebiasis. The proportion of amebiasis cases demonstrated a moderate positive correlation with the heat index at lag 0 (r = 0.55, P < 0.001), peaking at lag 4 (r = 0.57, P < 0.001). This correlation remained statistically significant up to lag 14 (r = 0.46, P = 0.013) but weakened substantially at longer lags
Conclusions
This study determined that in diarrhea patients presenting to the ED, the average increase in the heat index during the week prior to admission influenced the detection rate of amoebic infections.
Situated amidst the breathtaking Himalayas and the Arabian Sea, Pakistan grapples with escalating environmental challenges, compounded by the impending threat of climate change. This article delves into the imperative of reshaping primary education in Pakistan to address the pressing issues of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The article endeavours a content analysis of the themes prevailing in the primary textbooks which uphold anthropocentric and capitalist values. Recognising education as a catalyst for change, the article argues for a paradigm shift, particularly within the realms of primary school science and general knowledge education, by integrating eco-justice pedagogies and contemplative approaches. Prevailing educational paradigms, heavily influenced by Western perspectives, often reinforce anthropocentric and capitalist ideologies that prioritise human exploitation of nature. To address these inherent shortcomings, the article advocates for cultivating a love for nature from an early age as a means of fostering a profound connection between children and the natural world.
The coda demonstrates the ongoing significance of the landscape of genius for contemporary environmentalism by interpreting how Thoreau’s association with Walden Pond has been invoked in response to climate change. It uses extensive research into the psychology, sociology, and politics of climate change in order to assess what effects those invocations are likely to have and to suggest how scholars and activists can engage with Thoreau most impactfully in relation to the issue. More broadly, the coda also theorizes a new relational approach to the environmental humanities, which draws on recent developments in posthumanism, actor–network theory, systems theory, Anthropocene scholarship, and other environmental theory to explore how systems of culture intersect with and impact various other systems: social, political, economic, ecological, geochemical, etc. This method has many similarities to Traditional Ecological Knowledge. It conceptualizes knowledge as fundamentally relational and performative and redefines the humanities as a form of self-reflexive ethical agency, through which we can comprehend and (re)balance our various relations.
A remarkable shift in climate change misinformation has taken over social media streams. The conversation is no longer totally absorbed with denying that climate change exists. Instead, the ‘New Denial’ is bent on condemning solutions to climate change and their supporters. Our study meticulously analyzed this shift, using extensive methods to untangle the content of over 200,000 Tweets from 2021 to 2023. We found that the New Denial is a heated political debate that often calls up common far-right arguments, falsely accuses climate solutions as ineffective and risky, and attacks climate solution supporters.
Technical summary
Over the past five years, a ‘New Denial’ has emerged in regards to climate change misinformation on social media. This shift marks a transition of the dominance of rhetoric centered around denial of climate change science to attacks that seek to undermine and cast doubt on proposed climate solutions and those who support them. While much of the academic literature to date has explored misinformation about climate science, there is a great need to explore this shift and seek out increased understanding of misinformation around climate change solutions specifically. In this paper, we employ a mixed-methods analysis, drawing on data from Twitter from 2021 to 2023, to analyze the content of climate solution misinformation. We find that the New Denial is frequently centered on politically-laden debates nestled in common narratives on the right, often attacking supporters of climate solutions as harbingering ulterior motives for climate solutions that are fundamentally flawed. We use these insights to reflect on targeted interventions for climate solution misinformation on social media.
Social media summary
A New Denial is sweeping social media, no longer bent on denying climate science. It's new target: climate solutions and the people pushing for them.
This article argues that, as they are currently designed, UN climate talks fail to address the environmental catastrophe they aim to address. While dialogue is the primary means through which the world’s population can get together, discuss the scope and nature of the problem, and put appropriate measures into action, these talks are, year after year, employed as a way to create the illusion that democratic decision-making occurs. As a result, these kinds of events can only succeed in entrenching positions, exacerbating the impasse at which we currently find ourselves. This, in turn, solidifies the notion that we indeed need to engage in a dialogue about climate change, thus perpetuating a never-ending cycle that protects, under the veneer of planetary engagement, the continuation of capitalist business as usual. The article, therefore, proposes that a dialogic path to finding a solution to the climate catastrophe can only be successful if climate talks are rethought, placing at the helm voices from the most affected populations in the Global South. Otherwise, these talks will continue to fail in making a significant change that ensures the possibility of an environmentally just and viable future for the planet.
Dengue virus (DENV) remains a pressing global health challenge, primarily transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the biological, environmental, and molecular factors influencing DENV transmission, drawing upon 120 peer-reviewed studies. The narrative analysis highlights the mosquito’s vector competence, shaped by genetic variability, midgut barriers, and immune responses. Environmental drivers particularly temperature, humidity, and urbanization emerge as critical determinants of transmission dynamics. A meta-analysis of 30 studies reveals a strong positive correlation (r = 0.85, p < 0.01) between temperature (25 °C–30 °C) and transmission efficiency. Proteomic studies further detail molecular interactions facilitating viral entry and replication. Although novel interventions such as Wolbachia-based biocontrol and genetic modification show promise, context-specific implementation remains challenging, especially in low-resource settings. Key research gaps include the impact of climate change, co-infections with other arboviruses, and the long-term efficacy of vector control innovations. Prioritizing interdisciplinary approaches and adapting strategies to local contexts are vital to reducing the dengue burden and informing future public health responses.