Abstract
We need to understand better the societal responses to the idea and reality of climate change. Analysis of lived experiences enables us to embark on that task. Lived experiences, however, even when we try to make sense of them as collective experiences, are extremely diverse. This chapter describes and analyses the experiences of flood victims in affluent countries, vulnerable forest communities in two poor countries, opposition to mitigation attempts, and two environmental activists. From these it creates a conceptualisation that is based on the interplay of broad contextual influences, proximate influences resulting from climate-related events, and the human capacity to reflect and learn from action and engagement with one another. It ends by providing three building blocks for the book as a whole: the conceptualisation that it has generated, the comparison with dominant scientific accounts of climate change, and the challenge of public engagement, action and policy for intervention.
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Notes
- 1.
As well as mitigation, which usually refers to reducing carbon emissions so as to limit global warming and its consequences for the climate, human action also involves adaptation to current and potential future impacts. Examples of the latter include flood defences, breeding drought-resistant crops and so forth, Adaptation and mitigation are considered further in Chap. 6.
- 2.
There is some confusion over terminology. REDD+ is also known popularly as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (plus some further supplementary text). For the purposes of this book, there is no need to enter into this issue.
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Abbott, D., Wilson, G. (2015). Introduction: A Wealth of Lived Experience. In: The Lived Experience of Climate Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17945-2_1
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