Climate change solutions: Representations and interpretations

Addressing climate change requires a transformation of key sectors of society. For such change to take place, it is crucial to understand how people conceive of and relate to climatic changes, their consequences and potential solutions. Specifically, sinc e human understandings and opinions will both motivate and constrain climate solutions, effective transformation presupposes knowledge about how such understandings arise and spread through society as well as change over time. However, the connections be tween climate science, projected impacts, individual perception and policy are not straightforward. Representations and interpretations of climate change are functions of cultural, political, social, linguistic and cognitive structures and processes. It i s a difficult task to analyse them because they arise from different actors proposing varieties of causes of and solutions to climate change. Compounding this difficulty is the fact that climate change and climate solutions must be addressed from local, n ational and global perspectives, taking into account the various values, identities and ideological perspectives of groups and individuals. The structures and processes underlying conceptions of climate change have been studied separately in individual di sciplines such as psychology, linguistics, social anthropology and political science. However, a proper understanding of the issue area requires more than just the summation of knowledge from the individual disciplines. The novel, interdisciplinary projec t described in this proposal seeks to produce such integrated knowledge. The final outcome of the project will be full proposals for such interdisciplinary work.