Climate Adaptation – who will we become in a warming world?

Climate change has become an everyday reality. Communities, businesses, and nations are being battered by impacts that would have seemed impossibly apocalyptic a decade ago: unprecedented heat waves, destructive storms, crop failures, floods, and wildfires. Global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is too slow, and we are likely to breach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as soon as 2050. As the global temperature increases, so does the likelihood of exceeding tipping points, bringing further environmental destabilisation with serious consequences for all forms of life.

The causes and physical consequences of this predicament have been exhaustively established by scientists and modellers. The possibilities for decarbonisation, and its challenges, are also well covered in the academic literature. Far less examined are the implications of plausible climate change trajectories for human societies and cultures.

In Climate Adaptation, forthcoming in Oxford Intersections, we seek to offer a thought-provoking body of work from across disciplines, including from the humanities, social sciences, arts, and from Indigenous scholarship. Our central question is “Who will we become?” In seeking answers, Climate Adaptation highlights opportunities to rethink our relationships with one another, with knowledge, and with the world. We seek to stimulate new ways of thinking and taking action for greater resilience to climate instability. Here are a few of the approaches our contributors are taking.

Learning from the past

In a world in which unprecedented levels of production and consumption have become normalised, it is difficult (but necessary) to consider how current economic and social systems could be destabilised by climate change, and how humans might respond. We can learn much from the past. Our contributors explore topics such as:

How have Indigenous cultures survived and sustained themselves despite massive environmental, political, and social change?

What lessons can be drawn from history and prehistory, of the experiences of societies that faced climatic and environmental shocks, especially those that adjusted and thrived?

Rethinking governance, justice, and responsibility

Many existing institutions, laws, and governance arrangements are unprepared for the rate and scale of climate change and are scrambling to adjust. We explore how adaptation at all scales—from local to global—can be restorative and equitable, especially with regards to future generations and those that are already structurally disadvantaged. What transformations are necessary in dominant institutions, organisations, and systems of governance?

Our contributors necessarily think boldly, as addressing these questions will require not simply modifying existing systems, but, in many cases, transforming them to become fit for a changing world.

The importance of place

While the effects are global, climate change is by its very nature a localised experience. Each place, and the people of that place, are impacted in distinctive ways. In many climate-impacted locations, communities and organisations are already taking action designed for their needs and circumstances, often collaborating across governance scales. Our contributors explore topics such as:

What can be learnt from innovative approaches (often at local and regional scales) for addressing the immediate impacts and long-term challenges?

How can place-based communities work collaboratively with central and local governments to lead or help shape their own climate responses?

Between optimism and catastrophe

Public discussions about climate futures are generally framed between two extremes. In the optimistic view, it is possible to achieve a sufficiently radical transformation of global politics, businesses, infrastructures, technologies, and behaviours to halve global GHG emissions in the handful of years before 2030, and for these to continue to drop rapidly to net zero over the following 20 years. In the pessimistic view, this is unachievable and we are thus facing a dystopian world dominated by conflict, mass migrations, hunger, disease, and despair. The former now appears to be unlikely; the latter, unimaginably terrifying. Neither perspective provides a way to explore the space in between extremes.

Our experiences of climate change are already starting to reveal its social, economic, and cultural implications. Our contributors explore its likely ramifications, along with ways to envision and create positive narratives of alternate futures. Is our ability to transform and adapt hampered by our capacity to imagine different ways of being?

Climate Adaptation, forthcoming in Oxford Intersections, explores the fundamental question of we will become—individually and collectively, locally and globally—when old certainties melt away, and new realities have become the everyday experience.

Leading the commissioning of articles on these questions is our brilliant team of section editors which encompasses scholars from the global south and global north, Indigenous scholars, early-career and seasoned scholars, and multiple disciplines and knowledge systems.

Climate Adaptation will be launched in Fall 2026. If you’re interested in getting involved, let us know.

_{Featured image by Caleb Cook on Unsplash.}