Climate change, COP26 and the crucible of crisis: editorial introduction to the special issue

‘Crisis’ is a word whose currency is devalued by over-use, but there is no denying the severity of the twin crises currently gripping the world. The immediate, tragic urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic dominates the headlines, overshadowing the longer-term, chronic crisis of climate change. Yet it is the latter which poses the far greater menace, constituting a genuinely existential threat. ‘Crisis’ is directly derived from the original Greek ‘krisis’ meaning ‘decision’, and climate change represents a crisis in this original sense – decision time, a fork in the road. The basic science has long been settled; what has been lacking is courageous decision-making. The response of national governments to the pandemic demonstrates very strikingly the immense economic firepower which can rapidly be brought to bear when dire need is diagnosed, properly acknowledged and acted on. Rapid, costly decisions have flowed from the crucible of threat. Climate change has been thoroughly diagnosed. Increasingly, it is being properly acknowledged. What is required now is the concomitant decisions and actions. As a recent evaluation of climate change negotiations puts it, it is time for politicians to ‘look beyond their electoral noses towards long-term planetary security … [and] to lift their sights from burdens to opportunities and to the fate of future generations’ (Kinley et al., 2021, p. 2).¹

COP26 is the next best opportunity for such decisions to be made. Originally scheduled to take place in November 2020 but postponed by the pandemic, COP26 – the next meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – is now scheduled to gather in Glasgow in November 2021. Scotland is a thoroughly appropriate setting for this critical meeting because it has, for several years, been pursuing some of the world’s boldest climate change policies, adopting the ambitious goal of achieving net carbon neutrality by 2045, aiming to phase out the sale of fossil fuel vehicles by 2030, already generating 90% of its electricity from renewable sources and creating a Just Transition Commission to ensure that the profound changes are effected in as socially equitable fashion as possible. Furthermore, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society has been playing a proactive role in creating a supportive and informed political and civil context for climate change action, not least through its Climate Solutions programme (www.rsgs.org/climate-solutions). COP26 will therefore take place in an atmosphere conducive to the urgent and fearless decisions that are needed.

The ‘think pieces’ in this special issue of the Scottish Geographical Journal were commissioned with the aim of providing a broad, reflective, personalised, regionalised and analytical framing for COP26. They are drawn from a wide range of perspectives and capture the myriad and urgent challenges raised by the climate crisis. They come from scholars, activists and policymakers from within and beyond academia, across the sciences and humanities, across generations, and from around the world (from Scotland and Sweden to the Amazon and Australia). We felt that it was especially important to show (with a number of the contributions) how and why creativity and the imagination, and the initiatives of artists and writers, and academic perspectives hewn from the humanities, are as vital to how to an event like COP26 should work as the input of scientists and experts from the worlds of business, government and technology. We assembled this issue cognisant of how the pandemic is adding a further layer of ‘crisis’ to the meaning of this ‘time of crisis’, as well as bringing new complexities and difficulties to the lives of some of our contributors. In these ways and more, the aim of the special issue is to bolster awareness at COP26, and much more widely, of the multifaceted and interlocking nature of the considerable planetary and policy challenges ahead, and of the need for diverse (artistic, scientific, pragmatic, creative, collaborative, principled and impassioned, and local and global) responses to them.

The pieces in this collection adopt diverse scales to reflect on the different facets of climate change, ranging from the global to the very local and from stories of long-term change to ones highlighting hope in a fleeting but significant moment. The opening paper by Mark Maslin situates COP26 within the 30-year story of international climate change negotiations since the establishment of the UNFCCC at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Maslin charts the highs and lows along ‘the road from Rio to Glasgow’, a journey shaped by evolving topographies of high politics, deep science and broad environmental social movements, and leading to the stark recognition of the climate emergency which sets the bar high for COP26. Since Rio, science has constructed an increasingly comprehensive understanding of the biophysical impacts of climate change. Doug Benn and David Sugden synthesise a range of evidence demonstrating how these impacts are transforming one critical part of the Earth system, namely Antarctica. Borrowing a title from a famously prescient paper by John Mercer published in 1978, they discuss the inherently unstable response of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to rising temperatures and show that Mercer’s characterisation of this inexorable process as a global ‘threat of disaster’ is no exaggeration. Continuing the theme of global-scale implications, influential sustainability thinker and writer Bill Adams shifts the focus to biodiversity conservation. In his piece entitled ‘Gene editing for climate: terraforming and biodiversity’, he responds to the proposal that terraforming the Earth using synthetic life created using the new tools of synthetic biology could help to counteract the impacts of anthropogenic carbon emissions. In his view, such Promethean employment of biology to reverse engineer the global climate – treating the genome as a resource to serve human needs – would fly in the face of all the principles of biodiversity conservation, a classic case of the ‘cure’ being worse than the disease.

In ‘The international politics of COP26’, the international relations of the environment expert John Vogler shows how the specifics of climate change discussion, at this gathering and elsewhere, cannot be isolated from ‘great power politics’, and how a ‘deteriorating international situation threatens to make a successful outcome to the Glasgow conference much more difficult to achieve than its predecessor at Paris in 2015’. Among other things, Vogler alights on the significance of scale – the scale at which climate change, and political discussion and policymaking around it, are conceived and expedited. Other contributors also emphasise that COP26 is as much an affective crisis of meaning and human and non-human existence as it is a political and scientific one of deliberation, explanation and forecasting, and in profoundly ‘scaled’ ways too. Coming from the other end of the scale to Vogler, Léa Weimann (a University of St Andrews student in Sustainable Development) and Hanna Lundström (the University’s Sustainability Coordinator) discuss two climate strikes on West Sands Beach in St Andrews, Scotland. ‘A Line in the Sand for Climate Change’ explores how these profoundly ‘local’ actions connected different generations in the University and town community and helped to place the climate crisis in a wider political and media spotlight in the UK. Continuing the Scottish focus, Leslie Mabon, Neil Crawford and colleagues report on the fruits of an expert workshop on how best to facilitate transdisciplinary climate action by and for marginalised communities within the climate emergency. Climate justice and the importance of ensuring a ‘just transition’ across society is a notable focus here, reflecting the comparative strength of this agenda within Scotland. They note, however, how the exigencies of the COVID-19 crisis have impeded progress, and society’s response to the pandemic is the focus of the contribution from David Sugden and colleagues. These contributors ask whether lessons from the UK’s response can usefully be applied to how climate change is tackled more widely, and they identify a range of both positive and sobering insights.

Intergenerational anxieties and hopes, different activist scales and vantage points, and their different geographical and political underpinnings, aims and effects, are the focal point of three further contributions by: Stop the Climate Chaos Scotland organisation (SCCS); Mike Robinson, the Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (who has links with SCCS, and is one of the UK’s leading environmental activists); and Grandparents For Future, a Swedish facebook group, many members of which are the grandparents of the youngsters associated with the inspiring Fridays For Future network of climate strikers launched by Greta Thunberg. The contribution by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs similarly considers the relationship between political and moral claims and struggles around climate change, in this case in relation to the rights and losses and future of indigenous peoples. Such generational and political struggles, and the specific histories and scenarios they bring in their train, also infuse the three pieces by Sarah Dupont, Margaret Jolly, and Anita Lundberg (who has an invitation to COP26), and the poem by multiple award-winning artist, scholar and educator Craig Santos Perez from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). They all work through the ways in which human relations with land, environment and nature are integral to what it will take to abate or reverse planetary ruin and build progressive and feasible policies and political movements around this quest. In ‘An Awakening’, Dupont, the Founder and President of the Amazon Aid Foundation, and producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary film River of Gold (about illegal alluvial gold mining in the Amazon), gives a personal reflection on her journey through the climate crisis, and a message of hope as well as despair about the fate of Amazonian biodiversity and prospects for ecological preservation. Jolly, a leading Pacific anthropologist, gives a harrowing personal and political reflection on Australia’s recent wildfires and the zeitgeist of environmental calamity there and in a wider Pacific setting, again with messages of courage and hopefulness about ‘resilience’. In two further contributions from this part of the world, Lundberg, Editor of the pioneering journal eTropic, thinks about the ‘tropicality’ of climate and the climate crisis in the South Pacific, with specific reference to Bali and dance as a mode of creativity and resistance. In his poem ‘Praise Song for Oceania’, Perez both laments the power of human destruction but also acclaims the powers of redemption to be found in the relations of mutuality and respect that shape how the indigenous peoples of Oceania live on and with the earth (an outlook linking this piece to the one from British Columbia).

Ian Boyd’s piece is a lament of a very different kind, rueing the deep-rooted addiction to material consumption that pervades societies around the world, and identifying the breaking of this addiction as a central but challenging priority if dramatic reductions in emissions are to be achieved. He uncompromisingly calls for decision-makers to grasp the politically unpalatable nettle of addressing what he dubs ‘the consumption disease’. A pair of optimistic interviews follow, one with Mark Carney, former Governor the Bank of England, and the other with Erik Solheim, former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. The former focuses on the worlds of finance and business, highlighting the powerfully positive role they can (and must) play in creating a net zero economy. The second is a similarly welcome antidote to the depressing drumbeat of doom and disaster which dominates media coverage of climate change. While acknowledging the scale of the challenge, Solheim is resolutely upbeat in focusing on encouraging trends on numerous fronts, trends which provide grounds for hope. The optimism in these two interviews mirrors the wider shift in the climate change narrative from burden sharing to an emphasis on opportunities and possibilities (Kinley et al., 2021). Finally, concluding this special issue is a contribution from Mike Hulme, one of geography’s leading scholars and thinkers on the climate crisis. He looks far beyond COP26 to reflect on the possible futures of the idea of climate change and what it may signify for future generations, exploring the implications of three different framings of climate change – as an engineering problem, as the locus of politics, and as a human predicament. Sceptical of engineering ‘solutions’, he highlights the often overlooked power of stories in guiding us through predicaments, and hence the importance of weaving creative insights from diverse cultures and religious traditions into the scientific and political threads of a hopeful climate change tapestry. As noted above, the inclusion of poetic and artistic contributions in this issue is an example of this approach, seeking to harness a rich diversity of understandings to the existential task of changing climate change. It is decision time – a moment of krisis – and it is our profound hope that those who gather in Scotland for COP26 will have the courage and wisdom to forge far-sighted, just agreements which will make ‘Glasgow’ a by-word for climate optimism. It has been our pleasure and privilege to work with such a wide and distinguished range of contributors and to connect, however remotely in these coronavirus times, with their different interests and expertise, and the urgency of their creative and courageous messages.

Notes

1 We are grateful to Mark Maslin for bringing this pertinent paper to our attention.