Abstract

The geographical literature is contributing with critical insights to the debate on issues connected with climate change asking for a cultural shift on responses. In particular, geographers focus on the implications of mitigation and adaptation policies considering ethical, social, political, and legal aspects. Looking at global mitigation responses, they focus on the complex spatial relations deriving from making carbon into a commodity. They highlight the underlying capitalist vision consisting in continual capital accumulation and growth. As a result, it emerges that approaches and processes determined by solutions like carbon offsets, CO2 lonialism, and GHG inventories do not foundationally address the real causes of the crisis. Looking at adaptation, the geographical literature highlights the need to link adaptation policies to broader processes of socioenvironmental change considering sociocultural, economic, political, financial, and governance processes and involving relations and negotiations at different geographical scales. There is also a debate on the limits to adaptation that indicates transformation as a way to go beyond adaptation: transformation challenges the status quo, threatening those who benefit from current systems and structures.Geographers are giving an important contribution in asking for a cultural shift on developing and managing climate change responses also thanks to the debate on scales, giving insights on the kind of processes that determine the production of scales of action, the kind of knowledge and expertise that dominate, and the priorities favored at different scales. In particular, the geographical literature is focusing on the role of the rescaling of environmental governance in creating its own governance objects, like “the global climate.”The chapter also considers the contribution of the geographical literature to change the perspective of the IPCC on topics like vulnerability, resilience, mitigation, and adaptation policies and to introduce transformation, between the fourth and fifth assessment reports. In particular, the geographical research allowed the IPCC to situate these topics within sociopolitical and socioenvironmental processes.