thesis statement for climate action

Argumentative Essay Writing

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change

Make Your Case: A Guide to Writing an Argumentative Essay on Climate Change

Published on: Mar 2, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 31, 2024

What is an Argumentative Essay about Climate Change?

The main focus will be on trying to prove that global warming is caused by human activities. Your goal should be to convince your readers that human activity is causing climate change.

To achieve this, you will need to use a variety of research methods to collect data on the topic. You need to make an argument as to why climate change needs to be taken more seriously.

Argumentative Essay Outline about Climate Change

An argumentative essay about climate change requires a student to take an opinionated stance on the subject.

The outline of your paper should include the following sections:

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change Introduction

The first step is to introduce the topic and provide an overview of the main points you will cover in the essay.

This should include a brief description of what climate change is. Furthermore, it should include current research on how humans are contributing to global warming.

An example is:

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

Thesis Statement For Climate Change Argumentative Essay

The thesis statement should be a clear and concise description of your opinion on the topic. It should be established early in the essay and reiterated throughout.

For example, an argumentative essay about climate change could have a thesis statement such as:

âclimate change is caused by human activity and can be addressed through policy solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote cleaner energy sourcesâ.

Climate Change Argumentative Essay Conclusion

The conclusion should restate your thesis statement and summarize the main points of the essay.

It should also provide a call to action, encouraging readers to take steps toward addressing climate change.

For example,

Climate change is an urgent issue that must be addressed now if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences in the future. We must take action to reduce our emissions and transition to cleaner energy sources. It is up to us as citizens to demand policy solutions from our governments that will ensure a safe and sustainable future.

How To Write An Argumentative Essay On Climate Change

Writing an argumentative essay about climate change requires a student to take an opinionated stance on the subject.

Following are the steps to follow for writing an argumentative essay about climate change

Do Your Research

The first step is researching the topic and collecting evidence to back up your argument.

You should look at scientific research, articles, and data on climate change as well as current policy solutions.

Pick A Catchy Title

Once you have gathered your evidence, it is time to pick a title for your essay. It should be specific and concise.

Outline Your Essay

After selecting a title, create an outline of the main points you will include in the essay.

This should include an introduction, body paragraphs that provide evidence for your argument, and a conclusion.

Compose Your Essay

Finally, begin writing your essay. Start with an introduction that provides a brief overview of the main points you will cover and includes your thesis statement.

Then move on to the body paragraphs, providing evidence to back up your argument.

Finally, conclude the essay by restating your thesis statement and summarizing the main points.

Proofread and Revise

Once you have finished writing the essay, it is important to proofread and revise your work.

Check for any spelling or grammatical errors, and make sure the argument is clear and logical.

Finally, consider having someone else read over the essay for a fresh perspective.

By following these steps, you can create an effective argumentative essay on climate change. Good luck!

Examples Of Argumentative Essays About Climate Change

Climate Change is real and happening right now. It is one of the most urgent environmental issues that we face today.

Argumentative essays about this topic can help raise awareness that we need to protect our planet.

Below you will find some examples of argumentative essays on climate change written by CollegeEssay.orgâs expert essay writers.

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change And Global Warming

Persuasive Essay About Climate Change

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change In The Philippines

Argumentative Essay About Climate Change Caused By Humans

Geography Argumentative Essay About Climate Change

Check our extensive blog on argumentative essay examples to ace your next essay!

Good Argumentative Essay Topics About Climate Change

Choosing a great topic is essential to help your readers understand and engage with the issue.

Here are some suggestions:

Should governments fund projects that will reduce the effects of climate change?
Is it too late to stop global warming and climate change?
Are international treaties effective in reducing carbon dioxide emissions?
What are the economic implications of climate change?
Should renewable energy be mandated as a priority over traditional fossil fuels?
How can individuals help reduce their carbon footprint and fight climate change?
Are regulations on industry enough to reduce global warming and climate change?
Could geoengineering be used to mitigate climate change?
What are the social and political effects of global warming and climate change?
Should companies be held accountable for their contribution to climate change?

Check our comprehensive blog on argumentative essay topics to get more topic ideas!

We hope these topics and resources help you write a great argumentative essay about climate change.

Now that you know how to write an argumentative essay about climate change, itâs time to put your skills to the test.

Overwhelmed with assignments and thinking, "I wish someone could write me an essay "?

Our specialized writing service is here to turn that wish into reality. With a focus on quality, originality, and timely delivery, our team of professionals is committed to crafting essays that align perfectly with your academic goals.

And for those seeking an extra edge, our essay writer , an advanced AI tool, is ready to elevate your writing to new heights.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good introduction to climate change.

An introduction to a climate change essay can include a short description of why the topic is important and/or relevant.

It can also provide an overview of what will be discussed in the body of the essay.

The introduction should conclude with a clear, focused thesis statement that outlines the main argument in your essay.

What is a good thesis statement for climate change?

A good thesis statement for a climate change essay should state the main point or argument you will make in your essay.

You could argue that “The science behind climate change is irrefutable and must be addressed by governments, businesses, and individuals.”

Cathy A. (Medical school essay, Education)

For more than five years now, Cathy has been one of our most hardworking authors on the platform. With a Masters degree in mass communication, she knows the ins and outs of professional writing. Clients often leave her glowing reviews for being an amazing writer who takes her work very seriously.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That’s our Job!

Keep reading

Legal & Policies

Privacy Policy
Cookies Policy
Terms of Use
Refunds & Cancellations
Our Writers
Success Stories
Our Guarantees
Affiliate Program
Referral Program
AI Essay Writer

Disclaimer: All client orders are completed by our team of highly qualified human writers. The essays and papers provided by us are not to be used for submission but rather as learning models only.

6.4 Annotated Student Sample: “Slowing Climate Change” by Shawn Krukowski

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the features common to proposals.
Analyze the organizational structure of a proposal and how writers develop ideas.
Articulate how writers use and cite evidence to build credibility.
Identify sources of evidence within a text and in source citations.

Introduction

The proposal that follows was written by student Shawn Krukowski for a first-year composition course. Shawn’s assignment was to research a contemporary problem and propose one or more solutions. Deeply concerned about climate change, Shawn chose to research ways to slow the process. In his proposal, he recommends two solutions he thinks are most promising.

Living by Their Own Words

A call to action.

student sample text The earth’s climate is changing. Although the climate has been changing slowly for the past 22,000 years, the rate of change has increased dramatically. Previously, natural climate changes occurred gradually, sometimes extending over thousands of years. Since the mid-20th century, however, climate change has accelerated exponentially, a result primarily of human activities, and is reaching a crisis level. end student sample text

student sample text Critical as it is, however, climate change can be controlled. Thanks to current knowledge of science and existing technologies, it is possible to respond effectively. Although many concerned citizens, companies, and organizations in the private sector are taking action in their own spheres, other individuals, corporations, and organizations are ignoring, or even denying, the problem. What is needed to slow climate change is unified action in two key areas—mitigation and adaptation—spurred by government leadership in the United States and a global commitment to addressing the problem immediately. end student sample text

annotated text Introduction. The proposal opens with an overview of the problem and pivots to the solution in the second paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Thesis Statement. The thesis statement in last sentence of the introduction previews the organization of the proposal and the recommended solutions. end annotated text

Problem: Negative Effects of Climate Change

annotated text Heading. Centered, boldface headings mark major sections of the proposal. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The three paragraphs under this heading discuss the problem. end annotated text

annotated text Topic Sentence. The paragraph opens with a sentence stating the topics developed in the following paragraphs. end annotated text

student sample text For the 4,000 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures remained relatively constant, with a few dips of less than 1°C. Previous climate change occurred so gradually that life forms were able to adapt to it. Some species became extinct, but others survived and thrived. In just the past 100 years, however, temperatures have risen by approximately the same amount that they rose over the previous 4,000 years. end student sample text

annotated text Audience. Without knowing for sure the extent of readers’ knowledge of climate change, the writer provides background for them to understand the problem. end annotated text

student sample text The rapid increase in temperature has a negative global impact. First, as temperatures rise, glaciers and polar ice are melting at a faster rate; in fact, by the middle of this century, the Arctic Ocean is projected to be ice-free in summer. As a result, global sea levels are projected to rise from two to four feet by 2100 (U.S. Global Change Research Program [USGCRP], 2014a). If this rise actually does happen, many coastal ecosystems and human communities will disappear. end student sample text

annotated text Discussion of the Problem. The first main point of the problem is discussed in this paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Statistics as Evidence. The writer provides specific numbers and cites the source in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Transitions . The writer uses transitions here (first, as a result , and second in the next paragraph) and elsewhere to make connections between ideas and to enable readers to follow them more easily. At the same time, the transitions give the proposal coherence. end annotated text

student sample text Second, weather of all types is becoming more extreme: heat waves are hotter, cold snaps are colder, and precipitation patterns are changing, causing longer droughts and increased flooding. Oceans are becoming more acidic as they increase their absorption of carbon dioxide. This change affects coral reefs and other marine life. Since the 1980s, hurricanes have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration. As shown in Figure 6.5, the 2020 hurricane season was the most active on record, with 30 named storms, a recording-breaking 11 storms hitting the U.S. coastline (compared to 9 in 1916), and 10 named storms in September—the highest monthly number on record. Together, these storms caused more than $40 billion in damage. Not only was this the fifth consecutive above-normal hurricane season, it was preceded by four consecutive above-normal years in 1998 to 2001 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2020). end student sample text

annotated text Discussion of the Problem. The second main point of the problem is discussed in this paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Visual as Evidence. The writer refers to “Figure 6.4” in the text and places the figure below the paragraph. end annotated text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Visual. The writer gives the figure a number, a title, an explanatory note, and a source citation. The source is also cited in the list of references. end annotated text

Solutions: Mitigation and Adaptation

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the solutions section of the proposal. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The eight paragraphs under this heading discuss the solutions given in the thesis statement. end annotated text

student sample text To control the effects of climate change, immediate action in two key ways is needed: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigating climate change by reducing and stabilizing the carbon emissions that produce greenhouse gases is the only long-term way to avoid a disastrous future. In addition, adaptation is imperative to allow ecosystems, food systems, and development to become more sustainable. end student sample text

student sample text Mitigation and adaptation will not happen on their own; action on such a vast scale will require governments around the globe to take initiatives. The United States needs to cooperate with other nations and assume a leadership role in fighting climate change. end student sample text

annotated text Objective Stance. The writer presents evidence (facts, statistics, and examples) in neutral, unemotional language, which builds credibility, or ethos, with readers. end annotated text

annotated text Heading. The flush-left, boldface heading marks the first subsection of the solutions. end annotated text

annotated text Topic Sentence. The paragraph opens with a sentence stating the solution developed in the following paragraphs. end annotated text

student sample text The first challenge is to reduce the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Union of Concerned Scientists (2020) warns that “net zero” carbon emissions—meaning that no more carbon enters the atmosphere than is removed—needs to be reached by 2050 or sooner. As shown in Figure 6.6, reducing carbon emissions will require a massive effort, given the skyrocketing rate of increase of greenhouse gases since 1900 (USGCRP, 2014b). end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. In this paragraph, the writer synthesizes factual evidence from two sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Visual as Evidence. The writer refers to “Figure 6.5” in the text and places the figure below the paragraph. end annotated text

student sample text Significant national policy changes must be made and must include multiple approaches; here are two areas of concern: end student sample text

annotated text Presentation of Solutions. For clarity, the writer numbers the two items to be discussed. end annotated text

student sample text 1. Transportation systems. In the United States in 2018, more than one-quarter—28.2 percent—of emissions resulted from the consumption of fossil fuels for transportation. More than half of these emissions came from passenger cars, light-duty trucks, sport utility vehicles, and minivans (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2020). Priorities for mitigation should include using fuels that emit less carbon; improving fuel efficiency; and reducing the need for travel through urban planning, telecommuting and videoconferencing, and biking and pedestrian initiatives. end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Group Author. The parenthetical citation gives the group’s name, an abbreviation to be used in subsequent citations, and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text Curtailing travel has a demonstrable effect. Scientists have recorded a dramatic drop in emissions during government-imposed travel and business restrictions in 2020. Intended to slow the spread of COVID-19, these restrictions also decreased air pollution significantly. For example, during the first six weeks of restrictions in the San Francisco Bay area, traffic was reduced by about 45 percent, and emissions were roughly a quarter lower than the previous six weeks. Similar findings were observed around the globe, with reductions of up to 80 percent (Bourzac, 2020). end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: One Author. The parenthetical citation gives the author’s name and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text 2. Energy production. The second-largest source of emissions is the use of fossil fuels to produce energy, primarily electricity, which accounted for 26.9 percent of U.S. emissions (EPA, 2020). Fossil fuels can be replaced by solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal sources. Solar voltaic systems have the potential to become the least expensive energy in the world (Green America, 2020). Solar sources should be complemented by wind power, which tends to increase at night when the sun is absent. According to the Copenhagen Consensus, the most effective way to combat climate change is to increase investment in green research and development (Lomborg, 2020). Notable are successes in the countries of Morocco and The Gambia, both of which have committed to investing in national programs to limit emissions primarily by generating electricity from renewable sources (Mulvaney, 2019). end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. The writer develops the paragraph by synthesizing evidence from four sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

student sample text A second way to move toward net zero is to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Forests and oceans are so-called “sinks” that collect and store carbon (EPA, 2020). Tropical forests that once made up 12 percent of global land masses now cover only 5 percent, and the loss of these tropical forest sinks has caused 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (Green America, 2020). Worldwide reforestation is vital and demands both commitment and funding on a global scale. New technologies also allow “direct air capture,” which filers carbon from the air, and “carbon capture,” which prevents it from leaving smokestacks. end student sample text

student sample text All of these technologies should be governmentally supported and even mandated, where appropriate. end student sample text

annotated text Synthesis. The writer develops the paragraph by synthesizing evidence from two sources and cites them in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Heading. The flush-left, boldface heading marks the second subsection of the solutions. end annotated text

student sample text Historically, civilizations have adapted to climate changes, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Our modern civilization is largely the result of climate stability over the past 12,000 years. However, as the climate changes, humans must learn to adapt on a national, community, and individual level in many areas. While each country sets its own laws and regulations, certain principles apply worldwide. end student sample text

student sample text 1. Infrastructure. Buildings—residential, commercial, and industrial—produce about 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Biello, 2007). Stricter standards for new construction, plus incentives for investing in insulation and other improvements to existing structures, are needed. Development in high-risk areas needs to be discouraged. Improved roads and transportation systems would help reduce fuel use. Incentives for decreasing energy consumption are needed to reduce rising demands for power. end student sample text

student sample text 2. Food waste. More than 30 percent of the food produced in the United States is never consumed, and food waste causes 44 gigatons of carbon emissions a year (Green America, 2020). In a landfill, the nutrients in wasted food never return to the soil; instead, methane, a greenhouse gas, is produced. High-income countries such as the United States need to address wasteful processing and distribution systems. Low-income countries, on the other hand, need an infrastructure that supports proper food storage and handling. Educating consumers also must be a priority. end student sample text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: Group Author. The parenthetical citation gives the group’s name and the year of publication. end annotated text

student sample text 3. Consumerism. People living in consumer nations have become accustomed to abundance. Many purchases are nonessential yet consume fossil fuels to manufacture, package, market, and ship products. During World War II, the U.S. government promoted the slogan “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, or Do Without.” This attitude was widely accepted because people recognized a common purpose in the war effort. A similar shift in mindset is needed today. end student sample text

student sample text Adaptation is not only possible but also economically advantageous. One case study is Walmart, which is the world’s largest company by revenue. According to Dearn (2020), the company announced a plan to reduce its global emissions to zero by 2040. Among the goals is powering its facilities with 100 percent renewable energy and using electric vehicles with zero emissions. As of 2020, about 29 percent of its energy is from renewable sources. Although the 2040 goal applies to Walmart facilities only, plans are underway to reduce indirect emissions, such as those from its supply chain. According to CEO Doug McMillon, the company’s commitment is to “becoming a regenerative company—one that works to restore, renew and replenish in addition to preserving our planet, and encourages others to do the same” (Dearn, 2020). In addition to encouraging other corporations, these goals present a challenge to the government to take action on climate change. end student sample text

annotated text Extended Example as Evidence. The writer indicates where borrowed information from the source begins and ends, and cites the source in APA style. end annotated text

annotated text Source Citation in APA Style: One Author. The parenthetical citation gives only the year of publication because the author’s name is cited in the sentence. end annotated text

Objections to Taking Action

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the writer’s discussion of potential objections to the proposed solutions. end annotated text

annotated text Body. The writer devotes two paragraphs to objections. end annotated text

student sample text Despite scientific evidence, some people and groups deny that climate change is real or, if they admit it exists, insist it is not a valid concern. Those who think climate change is not a problem point to Earth’s millennia-long history of changing climate as evidence that life has always persisted. However, their claims do not consider the difference between “then” and “now.” Most of the change predates human civilization, which has benefited from thousands of years of stable climate. The rapid change since the Industrial Revolution is unprecedented in human history. end student sample text

student sample text Those who deny climate change or its dangers seek primarily to relax or remove pollution standards and regulations in order to protect, or maximize profit from, their industries. To date, their lobbying has been successful. For example, the world’s fossil-fuel industry received $5.3 trillion in 2015 alone, while the U.S. wind-energy industry received $12.3 billion in subsidies between 2000 and 2020 (Green America, 2020). end student sample text

Conclusion and Recommendation

annotated text Heading. The centered, boldface heading marks the start of the conclusion and recommendation. end annotated text

annotated text Conclusion and Recommendation. The proposal concludes with a restatement of the proposed solutions and a call to action. end annotated text

student sample text Greenhouse gases can be reduced to acceptable levels; the technology already exists. But that technology cannot function without strong governmental policies prioritizing the environment, coupled with serious investment in research and development of climate-friendly technologies. end student sample text

student sample text The United States government must place its full support behind efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate climate change. Rejoining the Paris Agreement is a good first step, but it is not enough. Citizens must demand that their elected officials at the local, state, and national levels accept responsibility to take action on both mitigation and adaptation. Without full governmental support, good intentions fall short of reaching net-zero emissions and cannot achieve the adaptation in attitude and lifestyle necessary for public compliance. There is no alternative to accepting this reality. Addressing climate change is too important to remain optional. end student sample text

Biello, D. (2007, May 25). Combatting climate change: Farming out global warming solutions. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/combating-climate-change-farming-forestry/

Bourzac, K. (2020, September 25). COVID-19 lockdowns had strange effects on air pollution across the globe. Chemical & Engineering News. https://cen.acs.org/environment/atmospheric-chemistry/COVID-19-lockdowns-had-strange-effects-on-air-pollution-across-the-globe/98/i37

Dearn, G. (2020, September 21). Walmart said it will eliminate its carbon footprint by 2040 — but not for its supply chain, which makes up the bulk of its emissions. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-targets-zero-carbon-emissions-2040-not-suppliers-2020-9

Green America (2020). Top 10 solutions to reverse climate change. https://www.greenamerica.org/climate-change-100-reasons-hope/top-10-solutions-reverse-climate-change.

Lomborg, B. (2020, July 17). The alarm about climate change is blinding us to sensible solutions. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-alarm-about-climate-change-is-blinding-us-to-sensible-solutions/

Mulvaney, K. (2019, September 19). Climate change report card: These countries are reaching targets. National Geographic . https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/climate-change-report-card-co2-emissions/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (2020, November 24). Record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season draws to an end. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/record-breaking-atlantic-hurricane-season-draws-to-end

Union of Concerned Scientists (2020). Climate solutions. https://www.ucsusa.org/climate/solutions

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2020). Sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse Gas Emissions. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

U.S. Global Change Research Program (2014a). Melting ice. National Climate Assessment. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/melting-ice

U.S. Global Change Research Program (2014b). Our changing climate. National Climate Assessment. https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/our-changing-climate#tab1-images

annotated text References Page in APA Style. All sources cited in the text of the report—and only those sources—are listed in alphabetical order with full publication information. See the Handbook for more on APA documentation style. end annotated text

The following link takes you to another model of an annotated sample paper on solutions to animal testing posted by the University of Arizona’s Global Campus Writing Center.

Discussion Questions

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/1-unit-introduction

Authors: Michelle Bachelor Robinson, Maria Jerskey, featuring Toby Fulwiler
Publisher/website: OpenStax
Book title: Writing Guide with Handbook
Publication date: Dec 21, 2021
Location: Houston, Texas
Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/1-unit-introduction
Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/6-4-annotated-student-sample-slowing-climate-change-by-shawn-krukowski

© Dec 19, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

The Center for Global Studies

Climate change argumentation.

Carmen Vanderhoof, Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Penn State

Carmen Vanderhoof is a doctoral candidate in Science Education at Penn State. Her research employs multimodal discourse analysis of elementary students engaged in a collaborative engineering design challenge in order to examine students’ decision-making practices. Prior to resuming graduate studies, she was a secondary science teacher and conducted molecular biology research.

Subject(s): Earth Science
Topic: Climate Change and Sustainability
Grade/Level: 9-12 (can be adapted to grades 6-8)
Objectives: Students will be able to write a scientific argument using evidence and reasoning to support claims. Students will also be able to reflect on the weaknesses in their own arguments in order to improve their argument and then respond to other arguments.
Suggested Time Allotment: 4-5 hours (extra time for extension)

This lesson is derived from Dr. Peter Buckland’s sustainability presentation for the Center for Global Studies . Dr. Peter Buckland, a Penn State alumnus, is a postdoctoral fellow for the Sustainability Institute. He has drawn together many resources for teaching about climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues.

While there are many resources for teaching about climate change and sustainability, it may be tough to figure out where to start. There are massive amounts of data available to the general public and students need help searching for good sources of evidence. Prior to launching into a search, it would be worthwhile figuring out what the students already know about climate change, where they learned it, and how they feel about efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. There are many options for eliciting prior knowledge, including taking online quizzes, whole-class discussion, or drawing concept maps. For this initial step, it is important that students feel comfortable to share, without engaging in disagreements. The main idea is to increase students’ understanding about global warming, rather than focus on the potential controversial nature of this topic.

A major goal of this unit is to engage students in co-constructing evidence-based explanations through individual writing, sharing, re-writing, group discussion, and whole group reflection. The argumentation format presented here contains claims supported by evidence and reasoning (Claims Evidence Reasoning – CER). Argumentation in this sense is different from how the word “argument” is used in everyday language. Argumentation is a collaborative process towards an end goal, rather than a competition to win (Duschl & Osborne, 2002). Scientific argumentation is the process of negotiating and communicating findings through a series of claims supported by evidence from various sources along with a rationale or reasoning linking the claim with the evidence. For students, making the link between claim and evidence can be the most difficult part of the process.

Where does the evidence come from?

Evidence and data are often used synonymously, but there is a difference. Evidence is “the representation of data in a form that undergirds an argument that works to answer the original question” (Hand et al., 2009, p. 129). This explains why even though scientists may use the same data to draw explanations from, the final product may take different forms depending on which parts of the data were used and how. For example, in a court case experts from opposing sides may use the same data to persuade the jury to reach different conclusions. Another way to explain this distinction to students is “the story built from the data that leads to a claim is the evidence” (Hand et al., 2009, p. 129). Evidence can come from many sources – results from controlled experiments, measurements, books, articles, websites, personal observations, etc. It is important to discuss with students the issue of the source’s reliability and accuracy. When using data freely available online, ask yourself: Who conducted the study? Who funded the research? Where was it published or presented?

What is a claim and how do I find it?

A scientific claim is a statement that answers a question or an inference based on information, rather than just personal opinion.

How can I connect the claim(s) with the evidence?

That’s where the justification or reasoning comes in. This portion of the argument explains why the evidence is relevant to the claim or how the evidence supports the claim.

Implementation

Learning context and connecting to state standards.

This interdisciplinary unit can be used in an earth science class or adapted to environmental science, chemistry, or physics. The key to adapting the lesson is guiding students to sources of data that fit the discipline they are studying.

For earth science , students can explain the difference between climate and weather, describe the factors associated with global climate change, and explore a variety of data sources to draw their evidence from. Pennsylvania Academic Standards for earth and space science (secondary): 3.3.12.A1, 3.3.12.A6, 3.3.10.A7.

For environmental science , students can analyze the costs and benefits of pollution control measures. Pennsylvania Academic Standards for Environment and Ecology (secondary): 4.5.12.C.

For chemistry and physics , students can explain the function of greenhouse gases, construct a model of the greenhouse effect, and model energy flow through the atmosphere. Pennsylvania Academic Standards for Physical Sciences (secondary): 3.2.10.B6.

New Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Connections

Human impacts and global climate change are directly addressed in the NGSS. Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI): HS-ESS3-3, HS-ESS3-4, HS-ESS3-5, HS-ESS3-6.

Lesson 1: Introduction to climate change

What are greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect? (sample answer: greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane contribute to overall heating of the atmosphere; these gases trap heat just like the glass in a greenhouse or in a car)
What is the difference between weather and climate? (sample answer: weather is the daily temperature and precipitation measurements, while climate is a much longer pattern over multiple years)

Drawing of the greenhouse effect – as individuals or in pairs, have students look up the greenhouse effect and draw a diagram to represent it; share out with the class

Optional: figure out students’ beliefs about global warming using the Yale Six Americas Survey (students answer a series of questions and at the end they are given one of the following categories: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, dismissive).

Lesson 2: Searching for and evaluating evidence

Compare different data sources and assess their credibility
Temperature
Precipitation
Storm surge
Ask the students to think about what types of claims they can make about climate change using the data they found (Sample claims: human activity is causing global warming or sea-level rise in the next fifty years will affect coastal cities like Amsterdam, Hong Kong, or New Orleans).

Lesson 3: Writing an argument using evidence

Claim – an inference or a statement that answers a question
Evidence – an outside source of information that supports the claim, often drawn from selected data
Reasoning – the justification/support for the claim; what connects the evidence with the claim
Extending arguments – have students exchange papers and notice the strengths of the other arguments they are reading (can do multiple cycles of reading); ask students to go back to their original argument and expand it with more evidence and/or more justification for why the evidence supports the claim
Anticipate Rebuttals – ask students to think and write about any weaknesses in their own argument

Lesson 4: Argumentation discussion

rebuttal – challenges a component of someone’s argument – for example, a challenge to the evidence used in the original argument
counterargument – a whole new argument that challenges the original argument
respect group members and their ideas
wait for group members to finish their turns before speaking
be mindful of your own contributions to the discussion (try not to take over the whole discussion so others can contribute too; conversely, if you didn’t already talk, find a way to bring in a new argument, expand on an existing argument, or challenge another argument)
Debate/discussion – In table groups have students share their arguments and practice rebuttals and counterarguments
Whole-group reflection – ask students to share key points from their discussion

Lesson 5: Argumentation in action case study

Mumbai, india case study.

Rishi is a thirteen year old boy who attends the Gayak Rafi Nagar Urdu Municipal school in Mumbai. There is a massive landfill called Deonar right across from his school. Every day 4,000 tons of waste are piled on top of the existing garbage spanning 132 hectares (roughly half a square mile). Rishi ventures out to the landfill after school to look for materials that he can later trade for a little bit of extra money to help his family. He feels lucky that he gets to go to school during the day; others are not so lucky. One of his friends, Aamir, had to stop going to school and work full time after his dad got injured. They often meet to chat while they dig through the garbage with sticks. Occasionally, they find books in okay shape, which aren’t worth anything in trade, but to them they are valuable.

One day Rishi was out to the market with his mom and saw the sky darken with a heavy smoke that blocked out the sun. They both hurried home and found out there was a state of emergency and the schools closed for two days. It took many days to put out the fire at Deonar. He heard his dad say that the fire was so bad that it could be seen from space. He wonders what it would be like to see Mumbai from up there. Some days he wishes the government would close down Deonar and clean it up. Other days he wonders what would happen to all the people that depend on it to live if the city shuts down Deonar.

Mumbai is one of the coastal cities that are considered vulnerable with increasing global temperature and sea level rise. The urban poor are most affected by climate change. Their shelter could be wiped out by a tropical storm and rebuilding would be very difficult.

Write a letter to a public official who may be able to influence policy in Mumbai.

What would you recommend they do? Should they close Deonar? What can they do to reduce air pollution in the city and prepare for possible storms? Remember to use evidence in your argument.

If students want to read the articles that inspired the case study direct them to: http://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/climate-change/

http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2012-07-06/top-20-cities-with-billions-at-risk-from-climate-change.html#slide16

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-26/smelly-dumps-drive-away-affordable-homes-in-land-starved-mumbai

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/asia/mumbai-giant-garbage-dump-fire/

Resources:

Lines of Evidence video from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/videos-multimedia/climate-change-lines-of-evidence-videos/
Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN)
Climate maps from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Sources of data from NASA
Explore the original source of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) study

Differentiated Instruction

For visual learners – use diagrams, encourage students to map out their arguments prior to writing them
For auditory learners – use the lines of evidence video
For ESL students – provide them with a variety of greenhouse gases diagrams, allow for a more flexible argument format and focus on general meaning-making – ex. using arrows to connect their sources of evidence to claims
For advanced learners – ask them to search through larger data sets and make comparisons between data from different sources; they can also research environmental policies and why they stalled out in congress
For learners that need more support – print out excerpts from articles; pinpoint the main ideas to help with the research; help students connect their evidence with their claims; consider allowing students to work in pairs to accomplish the writing task

Argument write-up – check that students’ arguments contain claims supported by evidence and reasoning and that they thought about possible weaknesses in their own arguments.

Case study letter – check that students included evidence in their letter.

References:

Duschl, R. A., & Osborne, J. (2002). Supporting and promoting argumentation discourse in science education.

Hand, B. et al. (2009) Negotiating Science: The Critical Role of Argumentation in Student Inquiry. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

McNeill, K. L., & Krajcik, J. (2012). Claim, evidence and reasoning: Supporting grade 5 – 8 students in constructing scientiﬁc explanations. New York, NY: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.

Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/basics/today/greenhouse-gases.html

http://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/climate-change/

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Environment Story Of The Day NPR hide caption

Environment

LISTEN & FOLLOW

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

"My message is that we'll be watching you.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

'This Is All Wrong,' Greta Thunberg Tells World Leaders At U.N. Climate Session

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

climate change
greta thunberg

Scholars' Bank

Politics of climate action plans: a critical discourse analysis.

Show full item record

Files in this item

View / Open Oliver_oregon_0171N_10415.pdf (format: PDF)

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Planning, Public Policy and Management Theses and Dissertations [29]
Theses and Dissertations [4115]

Search Scholars' Bank

All of scholars' bank.

By Issue Date

This Collection

Most Popular Items
Statistics by Country
Most Popular Authors

Cover Story

Climate change is our call to action

Organizations and policymakers are tapping into psychologists’ expertise to find ways to mitigate climate change and help people adapt to a warming world

By Kirsten Weir

November 2018, Vol 49, No. 10

Print version: page 42

Climate Change

When it comes to the science of climate change, psychology has long taken a back seat to the geophysical sciences. Now, more organizations and policymakers are recognizing the vital role that psychology can play in finding solutions to mitigate global warming—and helping people adapt to the inevitable changes to come.

"Psychology is about contributing to human well-being—climate change is a significant present and emerging threat to that well-being," says Patricia Winter, PhD, a research social scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station, in Albany, California. "There’s a place here for every subspecialty within psychology, if we work together to find it."

Traditionally, much of psychologists’ work on climate change has been in areas of behavior change, environmental decision-making and how to effectively communicate pro-environmental messages: How do you get people to reduce energy use? What incentives encourage people to buy electric cars?

Such research continues to be essential, says Robert Gifford, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who studies the interface of environmental, social and personality psychology.

"Climate change is a human problem. It’s the result of 7.6 billion people making decisions every single day. That right there makes it a psychological problem," he says. And psychology has the tools to address that problem, he adds. "We’re the experts on individual behavior, we know about messaging and how to create interventions."

Those interventions can promote sustainable behaviors among individuals, as well as societies, organizations and governments. Psychologists are behind such efforts as rewarding employees’ sustainable behaviors, working with cities to reduce their carbon footprint and conducting research to understand why and when people engage in green behaviors. (Read more about these approaches in the May Monitor article " Building a Sustainable Future .")

Helping people adapt

Yet even if we could halt greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will fuel warming for decades to come. We have no choice but to deal with the fallout.

"We certainly need to keep doing the work we’ve been doing, trying to change behavior," says Susan Clayton, PhD, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio. "[But] we also need to start thinking as a professional community about adaptation. The idea of psychological impacts is really beginning to gain interest and attention."

Researchers also predict that climate-related effects such as more frequent natural disasters, increased migration as well as loss of a sense of place will result in mental health impacts including feelings of loss and hopelessness, more mental health emergencies, and higher rates of aggression and violence, according to a 2017 report by APA and ecoAmerica titled Mental Health and Our Changing Climate .

Such findings highlight a reality that many working in the climate change space have already realized: Climate change isn’t just a problem for environmental psychologists; it’s a matter that clinical psychologists, too, cannot ignore.

Moving forward

For 30 years, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been the world’s authority on the science of climate change. In the past, their reports have focused primarily on the geophysical aspects of global warming. For the next installment of its assessment report, due out in 2021, the IPCC has made an effort to include psychologists in the outlining and writing process.

"The IPCC, for the first time in its history, has acknowledged the relevance and importance of psychological theory to helping build a more resilient future," says psychologist John Fraser, PhD, president and CEO of the social science think tank NewKnowledge and president of APA Div. 34 (Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology). "That is a radical departure from what we witnessed in the past."

Beyond the IPCC, climate change experts and activists in other disciplines are finally appreciating what psychology has to offer, says Clayton. "I’m seeing a lot of interdisciplinary organizations and projects where people are asking psychologists to be part of the team. There has definitely been an increase in the recognition by nonpsychologists that psychology has an important role to play in addressing climate change."

And the climate problem needs all the help it can get, from experts across disciplines, says Linda Silka, PhD, a social and community psychologist and a senior fellow at the University of Maine’s Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions.

"This is a challenge that is so complex, just having more data isn’t going to lead directly to solutions that everyone will agree on," she says, adding that psychologists can help bridge cross-disciplinary gaps to work toward solutions. For instance, she’s working on a National Science Foundation–funded project with engineering faculty and climate scientists at the University of New Hampshire. The project aims to use climate models to inform infrastructure development—understanding how higher temperatures will affect asphalt, for instance, or how to build bridges that will withstand rising seas. But the engineers and climate scientists weren’t used to speaking the same professional language, so they called on social scientists including Silka to help them work together more effectively.

"More people are seeing that they need someone who can help them find common ground—and that’s one of the tools psychologists have in their toolkit," Silka says.

Psychology and Climate Change Clayton, S., & Manning, C. (Eds.) Academic Press, 2018

Climate Change: What Psychology Can Offer in Terms of Insights and Solutions Van Lange, P.A.M., et al. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 2018

Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance Clayton, S., et al. APA and ecoAmerica, 2017

Beyond the Roots of Human Inaction: Fostering Collective Effort Toward Ecosystem Conservation Amel, E., et al. Science , 2017

10 trends to watch in 2019

Letters to the Editor

Send us a letter

Climate Change

UBC Resources & Guides
Articles & Databases
Archives & Historical Sources

UBC Theses & Dissertations

Reports & Policies
Data Sources & Visualizations
News & Social Media
Civic Engagement
Indigenous Perspectives
UBC Library Climate Action

Across UBC, faculty and students contribute to research on climate change. See below for recent theses on a few select topics, and search cIRcle , UBC's open access repository, for publications, theses/dissertation, and presentations to find more.

RSS feed searching the UBC Theses and Dissertations Collection for: "Global warming" OR "Climate change" OR "Greenhouse gas" OR "Renewable energy":

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
EThOS UK e-theses online service (UK's national thesis service)
NDLTD: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations A collaborative effort of the NDLTD, OCLC, VTLS, and Scirus, the NDLTD Union Catalog contains more than one million records of electronic theses and dissertations.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD)
OpenAire Explore

Open only to UBC students, faculty, staff and on-site Library users.

SciELO Scientific Electronic Library Online
UBC Library Guide: Theses and Dissertations A research guide for locating theses and dissertations from UBC, British Columbia, Canada, and International databases and repositories.
UBC Theses and Dissertations UBC graduate theses and dissertations are available through the Open Collections portal dating back to 1919.
<< Previous: Archives & Historical Sources
Next: Reports & Policies >>
Last Updated: Apr 22, 2024 11:15 AM
URL: https://guides.library.ubc.ca/climate

Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020 (2020)

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Further climate change is inevitable; if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, future changes will substantially exceed those that have occurred so far. There remains a range of estimates of the magnitude and regional expression of future change, but increases in the extremes of climate that can adversely affect natural ecosystems and human activities and infrastructure are expected.

Citizens and governments can choose among several options (or a mixture of those options) in response to this information: they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes; they can wait for changes to occur and accept the losses, damage, and suffering that arise; they can adapt to actual and expected changes as much as possible; or they can seek as yet unproven “geoengineering” solutions to counteract some of the climate changes that would otherwise occur. Each of these options has risks, attractions and costs, and what is actually done may be a mixture of these different options. Different nations and communities will vary in their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt. There is an important debate to be had about choices among these options, to decide what is best for each group or nation, and most importantly for the global population as a whole. The options have to be discussed at a global scale because in many cases those communities that are most vulnerable control few of the emissions, either past or future. Our description of the science of climate change, with both its facts and its uncertainties, is offered as a basis to inform that policy debate.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals served as the primary writing team for the 2014 and 2020 editions of this document:

Eric Wolff FRS, (UK lead), University of Cambridge
Inez Fung (NAS, US lead), University of California, Berkeley
Brian Hoskins FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change
John F.B. Mitchell FRS, UK Met Office
Tim Palmer FRS, University of Oxford
Benjamin Santer (NAS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
John Shepherd FRS, University of Southampton
Keith Shine FRS, University of Reading.
Susan Solomon (NAS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
John Walsh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

Staff support for the 2020 revision was provided by Richard Walker, Amanda Purcell, Nancy Huddleston, and Michael Hudson. We offer special thanks to Rebecca Lindsey and NOAA Climate.gov for providing data and figure updates.

The following individuals served as reviewers of the 2014 document in accordance with procedures approved by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences:

Richard Alley (NAS), Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
Alec Broers FRS, Former President of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Harry Elderfield FRS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Joanna Haigh FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London
Isaac Held (NAS), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
John Kutzbach (NAS), Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin
Jerry Meehl, Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London
John Pyle FRS, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey
Gabrielle Walker, Journalist
Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia

The Support for the 2014 Edition was provided by NAS Endowment Funds. We offer sincere thanks to the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Endowment for NAS Missions for supporting the production of this 2020 Edition.

F OR FURTHER READING

For more detailed discussion of the topics addressed in this document (including references to the underlying original research), see:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019: Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [ https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc ]
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2019: Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259 ]
Royal Society, 2018: Greenhouse gas removal [ https://raeng.org.uk/greenhousegasremoval ]
U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), 2018: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov ]
IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C [ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 ]
USGCRP, 2017: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume I: Climate Science Special Reports [ https://science2017.globalchange.gov ]
NASEM, 2016: Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852 ]
IPCC, 2013: Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group 1. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 ]
NRC, 2013: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373 ]
NRC, 2011: Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877 ]
Royal Society 2010: Climate Change: A Summary of the Science [ https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science ]
NRC, 2010: America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12782 ]

Much of the original data underlying the scientific findings discussed here are available at:

https://data.ucar.edu/
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu
https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu
https://ess-dive.lbl.gov/
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu
http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/

was established to advise the United States on scientific and technical issues when President Lincoln signed a Congressional charter in 1863. The National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, has issued numerous reports on the causes of and potential responses to climate change. Climate change resources from the National Research Council are available at .

is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists. Its members are drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. It is the national academy of science in the UK. The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science, and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. More information on the Society’s climate change work is available at

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth's climate. The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, with their similar missions to promote the use of science to benefit society and to inform critical policy debates, produced the original Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2014. It was written and reviewed by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists. This new edition, prepared by the same author team, has been updated with the most recent climate data and scientific analyses, all of which reinforce our understanding of human-caused climate change.

Scientific information is a vital component for society to make informed decisions about how to reduce the magnitude of climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. This booklet serves as a key reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and others seeking authoritative answers about the current state of climate-change science.

READ FREE ONLINE

Welcome to OpenBook!

You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name.

...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter .

Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

View our suggested citation for this chapter.

Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

Get Email Updates

Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

Knowledge Base
How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

Start with a question
Write your initial answer
Develop your answer
Refine your thesis statement

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

Why you hold this position
What they’ll learn from your essay
The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

Ad hominem fallacy
Post hoc fallacy
Appeal to authority fallacy
False cause fallacy
Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

Choosing Essay Topic
Write a College Essay
Write a Diversity Essay
College Essay Format & Structure
Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

(AI) Tools

Grammar Checker
Paraphrasing Tool
Text Summarizer
AI Detector
Plagiarism Checker
Citation Generator

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

It gives your writing direction and focus.
It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

Ask a question about your topic .
Write your initial answer.
Develop your answer by including reasons.
Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, August 15). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved June 13, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

Other students also liked, how to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples, how to write topic sentences | 4 steps, examples & purpose, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, what is your plagiarism score.

Home > School, College, or Department > Honors > Honors Theses > 1498

University Honors Theses

Building climate resilience: how climate groups can channel anxiety and grief into action.

Martin Lemke , Portland State University Follow

First Advisor

Dr. Cynthia Mohr

Date of Award

Spring 6-10-2024

Document Type

Degree name.

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Psychology and University Honors

Eco-Anxiety, Climate Grief, Climate Despair, Climate Resilience, Climate Support Group, Climate-Aware, Climate Circle

As the impacts of climate change increasingly stress the ecological and social systems of the planet there is also a greater incidence of psychological struggles related to climate instability. Climate change is a significant source of psychological distress for many individuals, often manifesting as climate anxiety and grief. This thesis explores research and therapeutic experience that has been generated as the discipline of psychology seeks to meet this rising challenge. In particular, the fields of ecopsychology, psychodynamic therapy, existential psychology and Indigenous knowledge contributed the majority of the insight to the conclusions drawn along with contributions from potentially applicable emotions research outside of the climate field. A synthesis of best practices is proposed to support the creation of peer based climate groups. By addressing the emotional, psychological, and ecological dimensions of climate distress, the aim is to empower individuals to move beyond anxiety and grief towards values-driven action and a sense of agency despite deep environmental uncertainty.

Recommended Citation

Lemke, Martin, "Building Climate Resilience: How Climate Groups Can Channel Anxiety and Grief into Action" (2024). University Honors Theses. Paper 1498.

Since June 11, 2024

Included in

Counseling Psychology Commons , Transpersonal Psychology Commons

Advanced Search

Notify me via email or RSS
Featured Collections
All Authors
Schools & Colleges
Dissertations & Theses
PDXOpen Textbooks
Conferences
Collections
Disciplines
Faculty Expert Gallery
Submit Research
Faculty Profiles
Terms of Use
Feedback Form

Home | About | My Account | Accessibility Statement | Portland State University

Privacy Copyright

Oratorical Speech about Climate Change

Ai generator.

Good [morning/afternoon/evening] everyone,

Today, I stand before you to address one of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change. Climate change is not just an environmental issue; it is a global challenge that affects every aspect of our lives. From the air we breathe to the food we eat, the impacts of climate change are far-reaching and profound. As we explore the significance of climate change, let us understand its consequences and the urgent need for action.

Understanding Climate Change

Climate change refers to significant changes in global temperatures and weather patterns over time. While climate change is a natural phenomenon, scientific evidence shows that human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, are accelerating these changes at an unprecedented rate. The result is a warming planet, rising sea levels, and more frequent and severe weather events.

The Impact on Our Planet

The consequences of climate change are already visible. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense. These changes threaten the delicate balance of our ecosystems, endangering plant and animal species and disrupting natural habitats. The loss of biodiversity has far-reaching implications for our planet’s health and our own well-being.

The Human Toll

Climate change also has significant impacts on human health and livelihoods. Rising temperatures contribute to the spread of diseases, exacerbate respiratory problems, and increase the frequency of heat-related illnesses. Communities around the world are facing water shortages, food insecurity, and displacement due to extreme weather events and rising sea levels. The most vulnerable populations, including those in developing countries, are disproportionately affected, highlighting the need for climate justice.

The Economic Consequences

The economic impact of climate change is substantial. Damage to infrastructure, loss of agricultural productivity, and increased healthcare costs are just a few examples of the financial burdens caused by climate change. Investing in climate resilience and sustainable practices is not only essential for protecting our environment but also for safeguarding our economies. By transitioning to renewable energy sources, promoting energy efficiency, and adopting sustainable practices, we can create jobs, stimulate economic growth, and reduce our carbon footprint.

The Path Forward: Mitigation and Adaptation

Addressing climate change requires a two-pronged approach: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow down global warming. This can be achieved through a variety of means, including transitioning to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, improving energy efficiency, and promoting sustainable transportation. Policies that incentivize green practices and penalize polluting activities are crucial for driving systemic change.

Adaptation, on the other hand, involves adjusting to the current and anticipated impacts of climate change. This includes building resilient infrastructure, developing early warning systems for extreme weather events, and implementing sustainable agricultural practices. By preparing for the inevitable changes, we can minimize the damage and protect our communities.

The Role of Individuals and Communities

While government policies and international agreements are vital, individual actions also play a crucial role in combating climate change. Each of us can make a difference by adopting sustainable practices in our daily lives. Simple actions such as reducing energy consumption, minimizing waste, supporting local and sustainable products, and advocating for climate action can collectively have a significant impact. Educating ourselves and others about the importance of environmental stewardship is also essential for fostering a culture of sustainability.

The Power of Collective Action

Addressing climate change requires global cooperation and collective action. International agreements such as the Paris Agreement are essential for setting targets and holding countries accountable. However, these agreements must be backed by concrete actions and commitments. By working together, governments, businesses, communities, and individuals can drive meaningful change and create a sustainable future for generations to come.

In conclusion, climate change is an urgent and complex challenge that requires immediate and sustained action. Its impacts on our planet, health, and economies are profound, and the need for mitigation and adaptation is critical. By embracing renewable energy, adopting sustainable practices, and working together on a global scale, we can combat climate change and protect our planet. Let us commit to taking action today, recognizing our collective responsibility, and striving for a future where our environment and communities can thrive.

Text prompt

Instructive
Professional

10 Examples of Public speaking

20 Examples of Gas lighting

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

View all journals
Explore content
About the journal
Publish with us
Sign up for alerts
Open access
Published: 29 March 2022

Themes of climate change agency: a qualitative study on how people construct agency in relation to climate change

Heidi Toivonen ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6554-2228 1

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 9 , Article number: 102 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

12k Accesses

11 Citations

11 Altmetric

Metrics details

Environmental studies
Language and linguistics

This study analyzes how people discursively construct their (non)agency—how they display abilities and capacities to act, or the lack thereof—vis-à-vis climate change. The paper presents the results of a detailed discursive and thematic analysis of 28 interview transcripts: 12 broad agency themes representing different ways of constructing human (non)agency in relation to climate change. The most common agency theme was Collective, followed by Individual, Critical, and Threatened agency. Climate change skepticism was displayed mostly within Critical agency, where the speakers presented themselves as intellectual and critically thinking individuals, drawing from scientific rhetoric while criticizing and misrepresenting climate science. The constructions of Collective agency emerged as a form of agency that displays a sense of meaningfulness related to socially embedded actions. The construction of agency in relation to climate change is very detailed discursive work, as people draw from multiple societal discourses to craft varied discursive positions of experiencing, knowing, and doing in relation to it. The paper suggests ways for climate communications to take into account these multiple themes of agency.

Social identities in climate action

Closing the concern-action gap through relational climate conversations: insights from US climate activists

Practices of climate responsibility

Introduction.

Climate change presents a profound challenge to human agency (see e.g. the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, IPCC, 2022 ). It demands us to come to terms with humans having become a destructive geophysical agent causing changes in vast natural historical timescales (Chakrabarty, 2009 , 2012 ). Climate change might push people towards a sense of complete loss of agency, the feeling that there is nothing we can do (Braidotti, 2019 ), especially as the question of whether it is already too late to prevent dangerous climate change is discussed in serious science circles (Moser, 2020 ). The challenge of rethinking a realistic, multifaceted notion of human agency is ever more complex and pressing.

In this paper, I take a detailed, qualitative look at how people construct positions of (non)agency in relation to climate change. Presenting the results of a detailed language-oriented analysis of an interview study conducted with 28 interviewees representing 11 different nationalities, I show how they construct themselves as agents of feeling, knowing, and doing in relation to climate change. I take a critical stance to the overly individualistic and simplistic perspectives on the psychology of climate change action. I attempt to contribute to developing a wider understanding of agency, taking into account how collective discourses afford individuals to take various (non)agentic positions to climate change. Placing myself at the crossroads of climate psychology and science communications, I start with a concise review at relevant research literature from a variety of disciplines.

Climate change refers to the scientifically identifiable periodic modification of the climate of the Earth, persisting for an extended period and caused by various geologic, chemical, biological, geographic, and human factors (IPCC, 2019 ; Jackson, 2021 ). In contemporary language use as well as in this paper, in alignment with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the term refers to the warming trend spanning the entire 20th century and the first decades of 21st century, occurring in addition to natural climate variability and attributable directly or indirectly to human activities such as carbon dioxide emissions (IPCC, 2019 ; Jackson, 2021 ; UNFCCC, 2011 ).

A central notion in this paper is agency . Climate change debates anchor a variety of notions of human agency as being responsible of (or not) and able to mitigate (or not) climate change and its effects. Climate change education and communication have moved on from grappling with how to convince people that it is indeed human agency that is responsible for creating climate change and have increasingly directed their efforts at communicating about mitigation and adaptation possibilities. These are challenging tasks, not the least because climate change as a phenomenon tends to be experienced in Western countries as remote, invisible, and complex, yet its scientifically accurate presentations can also cause difficult and paralyzing feelings, counteracting any initiative to motivate people into action (e.g. Moser, 2010 ; Moser and Dilling, 2011 ; Monroe et al., 2019 ; Norgaard, 2011 ; Verlie, 2020 ). As climate communication is increasingly facing its tasks in the times of “it’s perhaps already too late”, further insights into how to understand human expressions of agency are needed.

Traditionally, agency has been defined as an internal psychological mechanism, capacity to act intentionally, also carrying the implications that an agent is separate from others, aware of their own actions, and able to reflect upon these deeds (Alkire, 2005 ; Harré, 1993 ; Kögler, 2010 ; Pope, 1998 ; Yamamoto, 2006 ). Recent work within environmental education has defined agency as “an individual’s perception of their own capability to author responses that effect change in the world” (Walsh and Cordero, 2019 ). Such a view of agency merely as “capability” to impact change in the world frames it as an internal attribute of a single human being and ties it into perceivable “external” impacts, thus narrowing what could potentially be understood as agency. Behaviorally oriented climate psychology, also dominated by this individualistic and overly rational view on human action, has led to the promotion of suboptimal, information-focused climate intervention strategies (Whitmarsh et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, the traditional Western notion of human agency as separate from and superior to nature, dispositioned to control it, is precisely the ideology that has justified the unlimited exploitation of the nonhuman world, leading to the current climate crisis (Adeney et al., 2020 ; Hoggett, 2019 ; Plumwood, 2009 ). Further need for finding alternative ways to understand human agency emerges from the fact that narrow conceptualizations of agency as human goal-directed activity might be suitable for quantitative survey purposes (Alkire, 2005 ) but are not alone sufficient to capture the variety in how people actually discuss their experiences of and actions in relation to climate change. Climate psychology, education, and communications have noted the need to go beyond understandings of the human as a logical agent taking rational action and the co-implied belief that people need to be informed better in order to help them take climate action (e.g. Hoggett, 2019 ; Moser and Dilling, 2011 ; Verlie, 2017 ).

Following a discourse analytical approach, agency is here understood not as a psychological attribute but as something discursively constructed in interaction (e.g. Toivonen et al., 2019 ; Toivonen, 2019 ). I define agency as the discursive attribution of a variety of aspects of being—ableness or the lack thereof both to oneself and to other humans in relation to climate change. Thus, I also take into account the phenomenon of ascribing nonagency—the construction of lacking or otherwise troubled being-ableness (Toivonen et al., 2019 ). To keep the approach to agency as open and flexible as possible, a dialogue with multiple ways of approaching climate change agency in other fields is needed.

A concept closely related to that of agency, albeit usually defined in a narrower manner, is that of efficacy . A central differentiation has been made between individual efficacy —individual’s belief in their capacity of mitigating climate change—and collective or group efficacy —belief in one’s ingroup or in the system as a whole being able to cooperate to take action on climate change (Chen, 2015 ; Fritsche et al., 2018 ; Hornsey et al., 2021 ; Roser-Renouf et al., 2014 ; van Zomeren et al., 2010 ). Bostrom et al. ( 2019 ) differentiate between personal self-efficacy and response efficacy (belief in the ease of taking a certain mitigation action versus its perceived impact) at the personal and at the collective level. The notion of participative efficacy beliefs , the beliefs that one’s own individual actions are a crucial contribution to collective climate action, seems especially promising (Bamberg et al., 2015 ; Jugert et al., 2016 ; van Zomeren et al., 2013 ). Efficacy research has given valuable contributions to our understanding, yet is limited to rather narrow definitions; to give an example, I argue that focusing on the perceived ease of taking a certain action captures only a glimpse of what agency can be, and eventually, is completely different from perceiving oneself as actually able or not to take that action.

Previous language-oriented research has demonstrated the staggering multiplicity of climate change views and experiences. Perceptions of climate change vary both within and between different societies (Christmann et al., 2014 ), building on different vocabularies and epistemologies, understandings of causality and reality, and approaches to science (O’Brien and Leichenko, 2019 ). It has been discussed for decades how the authority of science is diminishing in the mix of formal and informal scientific communications, nonexpert opinions, and dramatized media stories about climate change (Boykoff, 2008 ; Minol et al., 2007 ; Schäfer, 2012 ; Weingart et al., 2000 ). One of the most widely noted climate change narratives is the apocalypse, which seems to leave very little room for human agency to operate. Presentations of massive future disasters are still flourishing in societal debates, literature, and media, even if their value in mobilizing effective climate action has been questioned (Cole, 2021 ; Crist, 2007 ; Fiskio, 2012 ; Hinkel et al., 2020 ; Stoknes, 2015 ). Another common trend in dominant Western discourses underlines the power of individual human agency, framing climate change as solvable by individual lifestyle management solutions (Adeney et al., 2020 ; Siperstein, 2016 ).

Important threads in previous research have focused on understanding climate change passivity and skepticism/denialism. Studies on denialism and skepticism have pointed out how people objecting to standard scientific views on climate change invest in coming across as scientifically reasoning and, paradoxically, often draw from scientific discourses while crafting unscientific accounts (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019 ; Jylhä, 2018 ; Sharman, 2014 ). Climate change denial seems to be linked to the preference of keeping existing social and human vs. nonhuman nature hierarchies and power inequalities untouched (Jylhä, 2016 ; Jylhä et al., 2016 , 2021 ; Jylhä and Akrami, 2015 ) and might actually be part of a more general anti-egalitarian, exclusionary, and conservative worldview (Jylhä and Hellmer, 2020 ; Jylhä et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, considerable scholarship is investigating the dynamics behind the slow and ineffective response to climate change seen in many parts of the world. Previous studies using interviews have shown that people frequently frame climate change as a distant, uncertain problem instead of a local issue touching them personally, even if they would have personal experience of climate change related natural catastrophes (Whitmarsh, 2008 ). Simply showing images of climate change impacts can cause people to take distance, struggling to understand how they could do anything about it (O’Neill et al., 2013 ). In her notable sociological account of a rural Norwegian community, Norgaard ( 2011 ) analyzes how distancing from climate change is achieved by socially constructed emotion and knowledge management strategies. Milkoreit ( 2017 ) has framed the ineffectiveness of human response as a failure of collective imagination: We have failed to imagine solution pathways to a sustainable future.

A considerable multidisciplinary scholarship has been building a relational ontology, criticizing the notion of the autonomous, rational individual of traditional liberal humanism (Barad, 2003 ; Braidotti, 2019 ; Haraway, 2016 ) and problematizing how the notion of agency has intricate ties with an anthropocentric understanding of subjectivity and power (Marchand, 2018 ). New materialists have advanced the notion of agency as something that does not reside within individual human minds, but emerges from complex networks of different beings, processes, and phenomena (Barad, 2003 ; Braidotti, 2019 ; Haraway, 2016 ). Verlie has emphasized the need for environmental education and climate justice to challenge human-centric, individualistic ideas of agency and acknowledge how climate change actions emerge from the complex entanglements between humans and the climate (e.g. Verlie, 2017 , 2019a , 2019b , 2020 , 2021 ).

In this study, I ask “How do people construct their own (non)agency or the (non)agency of humans in general in relation to climate change?” by detailed analysis of interview data. Next, I proceed to explicate the methodology and analysis of the interview study.

I conducted 28 semi-structured interviews on Zoom videocalls, 17 interviews in English and 11 in Finnish. The participants were volunteers recruited by posting on various social media platforms (Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn) and mailing lists of environmental organizations and university departments as well as by snowballing my personal networks. The participants’ ages varied between 21–83 and they represented 11 different nationalities. 16 of the participants self-identified as women and 12 as men. Four participants had professional background in working with climate change, and some declared having particularly committed pro-environmental lifestyles. All participants signed an informed consent form prior to the interviews and, if they so requested, received their anonymized interview transcript by email for commentary.

The interview protocol included questions concerning the participant’s thoughts about the environment, nonhuman animals, and climate change as well as their experiences and thoughts of environment-related fiction. In the first part of the interview, the interviewees were presented with an environmentally themed story which they discussed; results concerning these parts of the interview have been presented in another paper (Toivonen and Caracciolo, under review). This study focuses on those parts of the interviews where climate change was discussed.

The participants were asked e.g. what climate change means to them, how they see the role of human actions in climate change, and how they see their own chances to do something about it. A few participants specified that they know climate change happens also due to non-human factors, but said they understand that in this context we are discussing human-caused global warming. One participant denied believing in human-caused warming of the climate, instead constructing ice age as a more likely climate change threat.

I transcribed the interviews verbatim into English producing a thorough orthographic transcript that included all spoken words and sounds (Braun and Clarke, 2012 ). In the sections of the transcriptions included in the analysis, the interviewees either responded to a question explicitly concerning climate change or spontaneously, as a part of their answer to another kind of question, diverted to the topic of climate change.

I first read the anonymized transcripts drawing from discourse analytical methodology (see e.g. Potter, 2004 ), paying attention to all different ways the participants expressed human abilities, capacities, acting, doing, etc. in relation to climate change. I started organizing these different discursive positions of agency (or the lack of it, non-agency) into different classes that in the later Thematic Analysis stage of the analysis developed into groups with their own specific “codes” and that were further related to wider patterns of meaning, “themes”. With a discursive position of (non)agency I refer to a verbal expression that has an active verb and that presents the speaker (or other humans and people in general) as able or not able to do something in relation to climate change (see also Toivonen et al., 2019 ).

In the next phase, I further analyzed the anonymized transcripts with Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006 , 2012 ; Clarke and Braun, 2017 ; Maguire and Delahunt, 2017 ). TA provided a structured framework to identify and organize patterns of meaning (themes) while allowing to identify what is shared in how a topic is discussed (Braun and Clarke, 2012 ). Because I combined a discourse analytic close reading with a TA approach, my analytical method could be described as “thematic DA” (e.g. Taylor and Ussher, 2001 ). In alignment with the constructionist worldview underlying much of discourse analytic work, I applied thematic analysis as a constructionist method, thus, assuming that people’s constructions of human agency in response to climate change are constituted in and through discourse and that cultural and societal discourses play a role in how people discuss climate change. I applied TA mainly as an inductive method with a data driven approach (Braun and Clarke, 2012 ); however, my reading was also drawing from the theoretical notion of discursive (non)agency (Toivonen, 2019 ).

In the initial coding phase, I paid attention to the discursive positions of (non)agency and addressed these as the basic units of the raw data, collating them with codes denoting classes of (non)agency positions (Clarke and Braun, 2017 ). I initially coded for expressions of agency and then expanded to coding also nonagency, the expressed lack of agency, because the participants often spoke about e.g. not being able to understand or influence climate change. In practice, the smallest basic codable unit of analysis was a clause, a group of words consisting of a subject and a predicate. For example:

I do what I can.

The position above would have been coded with “My own personal actions”. In case the clause in which the position was constructed was within a longer sentence that had a superordinate structure adding something to the meaning of the clause, the unit of analysis was this longer sentence. For example:

I do what I can, but I don’t think my actions make any real difference.

The discursive position above would have been coded with “My individual actions don’t matter in the big picture”. The participants usually produced more than one sentence when crafting a particular position in relation to climate change and thus, several consecutive sentences could be coded with the same code. Below is an (invented) example that would have been coded with “My individual actions don’t matter in the big picture”.

I do what I can, but I don’t think my actions make any real difference. Anything I can do is just a drop in a bucket and I think I just keep doing things to soothe my guilty consciousness.

I coded the entire data set collating interview extracts relevant to each code. I used open coding, that is, I kept modifying the codes throughout the process (Maguire and Delahunt, 2017 ). Next, I moved on to search for themes. I grouped coded extracts into broader meaning patterns concerning human agency that seemed to share the same organizing core idea. In case I as the interviewer made a comment in the middle of an extract belonging to a certain agency theme, the extract was counted as two separate ones, either falling under the same theme or not, depending on how the participant proceeded in constructing human agency. In case I was merely encouraging the interviewee to continue with interjections such as “Yeah”, thus not changing the trajectory of the talk, the extract was counted as one example of a particular theme. In some cases, a theme was constructed with repeated expressions that crafted similar (non)agentic positions and were thus coded with the same code. In some cases, one extract of a theme included several codes. Below is an example of an extract that represents one theme, but involves two different codes: “Individual as a part of a community doing something” and “People doing something”:

I think that the small actions of each individual are important. Because it goes on as this mass thing, if-. Exactly, if everyone does it, then it counts.

The extract represents the theme “Collective agency”, where the core meaning was that individuals can do something together to fight climate change. Themes are thus patterns of meaning -ways of discussing human (non)agency- that consist of at least one, usually more discursive positions of human agency; hence, each theme involves one or more “codes”.

I reviewed and modified the themes, proceeding to check whether they work in relation to each other, the data, and previous literature discussing agency-related notions. While writing the research report, I conducted one final rereading of the data. The analysis concluded with 351 data extracts categorized under 12 broader themes of agency.

The version of TA applied here is developed within the qualitative paradigm and not for use in the (post)positivist approaches; the validity of TA is not assessed by referring to intercoder reliability but by acknowledging the active role of the researcher (Clarke and Braun, 2017 ; Neuendorf, 2019 ). The validity of this analysis arises from openly discussing the analytical process and from referring back to previous studies to see if similar agency concepts had been already acknowledged elsewhere. The task of confirming whether or not the same codes and themes arise in different contexts with different participants is an important one to uptake in further research.

The results consist of 12 broad themes of human agency in relation to climate change (Table 1 ). The themes are listed from highest to lowest frequency in this interview data. The abbreviation “CC” refers to climate change.

All participants constructed agency in relation to climate change with more than one theme during their interview and combined these themes in various ways. The themes presented in the Table fall under three wider theme groups that can be also understood as climate change discourses: (1) Human concrete action in creating and solving the problem of climate change (includes the themes of Collective, Individual, Limited, Causing, Ambivalent, External), (2) Climate change is a complex concept and requires critical mental action (Critical, Reflective), and (3) Climate change influences us and our human agency (Threatened, Experiential, Influenced, Benefitting).

As Table 1 shows, the most common theme was Collective (58 occurrences), followed by Individual (46), Critical (36), and Threatened (35).

The next sections provide a description and a data extract of each agency theme. There is no space to discuss the codes that are prevalent in each theme. Some extracts show the interplay of two or more codes while some, often because they are only a sample of a longer account, only demonstrate one code. The themes are presented in the same order as in the Table. The participants are referred to with their pseudonyms and the letter “H” refers to me, the interviewer. The extracts have been slightly edited to ensure participant anonymity and to enhance readability. Most interviews were conducted in English with non-native speakers, and occasional unidiomatic expressions are still present in the extracts as I have tried to remain faithful to the interviewee’s own words.

The participants constructed people as able to mitigate climate change by collective action. In different variations of the theme, the participants either constructed their own actions as having some kind of social or cumulative impact, or discussed actions that humans as a collective have taken or could/should take. Often, this theme emerged as collective calls to action, as the speakers were underlining that collective action is important and needed to mitigate climate change.

In Joanne’s example below, voting functions as a concrete example of an individual action with visible nation-level consequences.

Joanne: And now of course the question is where do we invest. Do we invest on green energy or do we invest on the reopening of coal mines. These have significant consequences in all ways so that yeah, the decision makers and private persons in that sense. Who are we voting for to make decisions on these things? So everyone does have a small straw of responsibility here in terms of where we are going.

Joanne’s example begins with “we” (probably referring to her nation) facing the choice of investing in an environmentally friendly manner or not. “Decision makers” and “private persons” appear in a cut off sentence without an active verb, but presumably as potential agents. In the action of voting, it is “we” and “everyone” that is given “a small straw of responsibility”; this interesting metaphor creates the impression that an individual’s possibilities for action are not very big or sturdy, but there is a moral obligation to use this chance and vote. This responsibility to act is constructed as influencing where we, the society, are going in the future in terms of energy use, not as a responsibility towards e.g. the nonhuman environment. Typical for most of the examples of Collective agency, the speaker did not construct a very concrete pathway from their own actions to the collective ones and from there to the impact on climate change. In only one example of this theme the speaker specified how their individual action has ripple effects in their close community, at the wider economic levels of society, and eventually on climate change. Yet, Joanne’s extract is more specific in its suggested collective action than most other examples as it goes beyond statements of “we should do something about it”.

The speakers constructed humans as potentially able to mitigate climate change by individual level actions. In some variations, individual people in general were positioned as able to influence, and in others, the participant talked about their own personal action possibilities. Many constructed a sphere where an individual’s actions matter, and then displayed how they try to do their best within this area. These constructions resonate with Robison’s ( 2019 ) observations on how people often draw a clear boundary around what is their own responsibility and what options are open to them. In this study, constructing such a personal “lot” often involved listing both climate change specific actions and generally environmentally friendly actions the participants have taken or could take. Such listings sometimes gave the impression that the interviewee was merely repeating actions they knew represent socially desirable, standard eco-friendly behavior instead of talking concretely about their own actions. The participants who did talk about their own concrete actions often toned down the attitude and persistence with which they act.

Caroline: Of course individual people also have a significant role . I have calculated my own carbon footprint and those… There are these calculators with which one can calculate how big a carbon footprint one leaves. I had—I think it was smaller than average .

C: And then one thinks about… And actually I have also thought about my work, going to work from also that perspective. I run, I don’t use car or bus or anything, so that… I’m sure that in some things I’m a terrible spender, but in this thing I try to save nature, or I have always been like that . So that it somehow… In some things like these where one can so then one aims to make a difference . So yes, people do have a very big difference in this, or the power.

Caroline’s account starts from her statement underlining that of course individual people have agency in respect to climate change. Interestingly, also such participants who elsewhere in their interview doubted the impact of one person’s actions (theme Ambivalent ), had this theme appear in their interviews with this type of emphasis on an individual chances to play a role. Caroline’s metaphor of personal actions is the carbon footprint —a common occurrence within this theme—and like many participants, she mentions her footprint is smaller than average. Running to work is not only constructed as a choice but as related to something she has always been , reflecting the common occurrence within this theme, where participants constructed their environmental actions as something they are or as their lifestyle . However, like Caroline who mentions that she is surely “a terrible spender” in some ways, the interviewees often downplayed their individual actions. Many of the dynamics discussed here, especially questions about climate actions as something that one is and as a lifestyle question, come close to studies on identity-related concepts such as environmental identity (Stapleton, 2015 ; Vesely et al., 2021 ; Walsh and Cordero, 2019 ).

Yet another discursive feature that was seen across other extracts in theme Individual is how Caroline constructs her personal actions as doing what one can . In many interviews, framing one’s own sphere of agency with “doing what one can” did not seem to imply that the speaker in any absolute sense tries out all possible options to do what they humanly can. Rather, the phrase “doing what one can” translated as “doing what is not too time consuming or unpleasant” while implying that there are limits or restrictions to what a single person can do.

The participants constructed their own agency as that of a critical agent being able to spot, analyze, and criticize problematic climate change discourses, narratives, and understandings that somehow misrepresent climate change. Climate change was approached as a mediated phenomenon misunderstood by many people, excluding the speaker. This theme often served in climate change skeptical accounts, as the speaker constructed for him—or herself a superior critical position in relation to what were presented as dubious and exaggerating climate change discourses.

In Gary’s account below, which is a part of a longer extract, climate change is connected with environmental extremist misbeliefs. Trying to debunk them becomes an attempt to show climate change does not exist as imagined by what he has previously called “average people”.

Gary: Look, also this fact of the cars that they are destroying the environment and… Diesel cars you know, I mean, Diesel cars are the devil blah-blah-blah or whatever. Look at the numbers at the data , I mean the quality of the air in the city for instance in this country that they have this war against this type of cars. It didn’t change significantly when there were one kinds of the car around during the lockdown. But this was not publicized that much . These are things that should be… understood. You must believe that we do the worst possible things to the environment. But you know how many people, normal people they actually know that some kilometers beyond their feet is going on a nuclear reaction? The worst bomb we ever built, it’s nothing compared to what is happening when you go into the mantle or down into the planet. They don’t know that. They believe that they gathered the evidence that they will destroy the planet one day with this. No, we can destroy us.

This account presents Gary as a critical agent able to see through misinformation that is not transparent to “normal people”. Typically of theme Critical, Gary vaguely refers to scientific evidence (“look at the numbers”) in arguing that Diesel cars are not as big a polluter as people tend to think, but displays this evidence as something that has not been publicized much—thus, he has privileged access to information that “they”, the ignorant others, do not. He mentions that in our culture, the norm is that you have to believe that humans do the worst kind of things to the environment, moving on to debunk this claim by explaining that the power of the earth roaming beneath our feet is much greater than the power of any bomb humans could build. Thus, climate change becomes connected with claims such as “Diesel cars destroy the environment” and “humans have the power to destroy the planet”, and by disqualifying these claims, Gary is attempting to show that humans cannot have caused climate change by themselves and that most people are blinded by misunderstandings. As is reflected in Gary’s example, this theme often likened taking climate change seriously with naive or emotionally driven environmentalism, resembling results from previous studies (Tollemache, 2019 ; Westcott, 2019 ).

The interviewees constructed human agency as severely compromised and threatened by climate change. They acknowledged how climate change impacts wider ecosystems and sometimes recognized the differences in how people from various parts of the world are being exposed to it.

Uri: Well, it certainly—what it means is that the earth is… is heading for a disaster , essentially. That if we don’t… And I don’t say- I don’t have any answers on how to how to do this, but if you don’t, if we don’t do things to mitigate climate change then I think that it — it’s only gonna be more difficult to live in in our environment . Vis-à-vis the—what’s happening in Texas for instance.

Uri presents climate change first as a disastrous threat to all life in general and then to humans in particular. In this theme, it was common to point to the urgent need for humans to act to avoid even direr future consequences. Many mentioned current or recent natural catastrophes as examples of what is already taking place—Uri was referring to the weather conditions causing problems in Texas in the winter 2021. Like Uri’s, almost all of the variations of the theme were also fairly human centric, and climate change was sometimes presented as a force pushing humans to the verge of extinction. The variations of the theme drew from common Apocalyptic stories and grammatically, used dramatic presence and future tense to construct a sense of proximate and ever-escalating, practically unsolvable threats. The hesitations present in Uri’s example, such as a false start with “if we don’t”, followed by a downplay of his own authority in knowing what should be done, imply that such dramatic accounts of threatened human life are challenging to negotiate. Differing from the previous theme, in this one many speakers did not seem willing to present themselves as experts with definitive answers, but underlined the profound uncertainty of the situation.

The participants either constructed human agency as too weak to have caused climate change to begin with, or so lacking that humans will simply not be able to solve the problem. As shown in the example from Beth, an extract from a larger account, “people” were often displayed as simply and categorically not able to do what climate change is requiring, as they are selfish, comfort-seeking, and consumption-oriented.

Beth: Our culture is based on consumption and individualism and… It’s really difficult for us to change that that we couldn’t do all the things we want to do because of climate change… if you follow the conversation about when we—when they are trying to curb the gas consumption, cars, people are screaming to high heavens!

In Beth’s example, it is our collective culture that rests on individualism and consumption; then again, it is difficult for “us”, to a collective that also includes her, to accept not being able to do all things that we want to. She starts out by “we” but then changes to “they” in describing the attempt to reduce the gas consumption, which strikes protest. Her expression of people “screaming to high heavens” invokes an image of childlike selfishness. Within this theme, people were often depicted as so flawed in their character that any of the big collaborative movements needed to fight climate change would never be possible. In one variation of the theme in one of the interviews, this theme repeatedly occurred as a way to express that humans are too small and insignificant to have been able to cause climate change in the first place.

The participants constructed human agency as thinking, learning, imagining, discussing, and reflecting on the complexity of climate change. The speakers explicitly displayed themselves as tackling the challenge of climate agency intellectually, talked about the global and differentiated influences of climate change, and/or described climate change as something humans need to face by cognitive activity.

Ollie: What is really missing is complexity thinking . We really have to start thinking about the world not in terms of an equation with two variables, you know, supply and demand, but we have to think a lot more broadly on many many things , and I- this is completely missing in politics everywhere. And that’s why I think we need an emotional kick in the butt . I think people like Greta Thunberg and also as I say good fiction, really good fiction books and shows, theater plays, have a real big role to play here, absolutely.

Ollie is asking for more complex thinking to replace the old, economically driven and reductionistic thinking. It is the unspecified “we” that needs this thinking, but the first person “I” is the one thinking humans need “an emotional kick”. This metaphor represents an interesting bridge from the emotional realm into this theme that otherwise tends to highlight cognitive operations. Ollie positions Greta Thunberg along with various forms of culture as able to help people towards more complex thinking. Here he merely mentions books, but in other variations of theme Reflective elsewhere in his interview he, as many other participants, discussed the act of (solitary) reading as an important act to understand climate change better.

Human agency was underlined as having caused climate change or, in some cases, as having contributed to it. Sometimes the speaker included themselves in the collective responsible for creating climate change; sometimes, a detached entity such as “humanity” was displayed as responsible. In more climate change skeptical accounts, human agency was constructed as only one potential driver of climate change.

Adam: So I guess I’m realizing now I’m sort of artificially separating myself from climate change which is perhaps not the correct thing to do, because I am just as responsible for creating it as any other human on this planet . So it does have an agency and it is, I guess, primarily related to the agency of humans who modify and shape the natural environment in destructive ways .

Adam’s example shows him connecting his own individual agency with that of other humans and proceeding to construct a human collective as responsible for climate change. Discursively speaking, this example is a very soft and modest way of constructing human agency as having caused climate change; climate change is presented as “primarily related to the agency of humans”. Moreover, people are not displayed directly involved in doing something that causes climate change, they are merely shaping the environment “in destructive ways”. None of the examples of this theme problematized such displays of even distribution of responsibility to all humans in creating climate change. The construction of human agency was also fairly abstract: Mostly, no specific action patterns of humans influencing the climate were mentioned, and only a few participants specified by mentioning human “lifestyle” or humans’ intrinsic “laziness” as contributing to climate change.

The participants constructed their agency as conflicted. They displayed how their individual actions don’t matter in the big picture unless “the big actors” (such as big countries or corporations) change their policies, too, despaired about what or how to do, or created a more psychological conflict. In the last case, they displayed themselves as not doing what they should do or as doing something they should not. Thus, this theme shows the participants grappling with the problem of akrasia -doing something against one’s own judgment of what is the best thing to do (Steward, 1998 ).

Diana: I am paralyzed by it, because I don’t know what action will truly change anything… and what action is just throwing… a stone to space. Not even sea, but space, where it just gets lost and it’s pointless.

Diana’s example, part of a longer account classified as Ambivalent, illustrates the bleak manner some participants discussed their feeling that they don’t know what actions would truly change anything. She uses the metaphor “throwing a stone to space” to describe how climate change action seems pointless—you don’t see where your stone lands and whether it creates any effects. The speakers mentioned feeling guilty and anxious and described their actions as “purely egoistic” or “hypocritical”. Some variations of the theme showed a division between actions such as getting to talk directly to the decision makers like Greta Thunberg does versus doing pointless “small things” to soothe one’s consciousness. The theme resonates with previous results showing some people experience any meaningful climate change action as impossible in the face of big powers outside their control (Lertzman, 2019 ; Tollemache, 2019 ).

Experiential

The participants constructed themselves as experiencing, sensing, or feeling agents. The speakers explained having made personal observations of climate change in their local surroundings, discussed feelings evoked by climate change, or stated in a more detached manner that the impact of climate change can be e.g. “seen”.

Gary: I can feel on my skin the… global warming , let’s say. I honestly thought it was mostly a theory of something regarding… white bears, but in the last years I have been realizing that it’s not actually like that. I mean I see it, I realized it .

In this example, Gary is an experiencing agent sensing the increased temperatures. It is because of the sensory observations and because he has “seen” climate change that he has been convinced it is not just a silly theory regarding polar bears. Like in Gary’s example, sensing and observing the impacts of climate change was often constructed as a proof that the phenomenon does exist. In one case, this theme occurred when the speaker displayed their lack of direct personal observation as casting doubt on the existence of climate change. In the interviews of three participants, this theme emerged when they talked about feeling despair when being exposed to books or documentaries about climate change.

Human agency was constructed as something external to and detached from the speaker. A vague, unspecified agency was attributed to decision makers, countries, corporations, or science. Sometimes, humans in general, constructed as a distanced agent excluding the speaker, were presented as holding agency.

Cat: Perhaps the biggest problem is exactly this that our mechanisms to take some decisions in the long run are very very small . Democracy—a good model, or how did Churchill put it, a shitty model but the best we have, but… in many countries, something is done in cycles of four and six years , and then comes the next lot and turns the ship to the other direction, so in the big picture, it is not moving forward… the development. And then, business is the driver , so that the big vast financial actors, big businesses so … Because that is our driver all the time, the economic growth and… and business , so… It does get a little bit overrun.

Cat’s account shows a row of external agents: “our mechanisms”, the political decision making systems, “the next lot” (of newly elected politicians), “business” and “economic growth”. “The development” is not moving forward and climate change, hiding behind the noun “it”, gets overrun. In this theme, the individual human or human collectives do not appear to have much agency, and the speaker is detached from the systems within which all action and power are located.

In some variations of this theme, in placing agency on science and technology, the speaker constructed climate change as a solvable and thus, not a serious problem. With its focus on external agents this theme resonates with some previous research showing the tendency to hope that agents outside the speaker would step up and commit to some visionary or collective action (Robison, 2019 ; Tollemache, 2019 ).

The participants constructed human agency as influenced by climate change; it changes humans’ living conditions or challenges them to act and think differently. These changes were not constructed as threatening human lives but as pushing people for transformations in how they organize their lives as individuals and communities.

Adam: I don’t know it’s just sort of like an intervention. Like as if as if humans are like these addicts to a particular way of living and being in the world and climate change is like, you know, the intervention moment where we have to think differently about the way we live our lives .

The metaphor of “intervention” places humans as a collective hopelessly attached to their consumption-oriented ways of living, challenged by climate change, an external agent that comes to people’s lives to ask them to rethink their lifestyles. The long history of anthropogenic climate change is reduced to an “intervention moment” asking the currently living people, including Adam, to think differently about their lifestyles. The account does not include any specifics as to what this change entails in practice. As the example of Adam hints with the metaphor of “intervention”, this theme could have developed to the direction of discussing the deep mutual entanglements of humans and climate change. This never happened in this data, supporting the notion that people do not usually address the nonhuman environment in relational terms and that constructing human agency as emerging from entanglements with the nonhuman is a difficult task (Verlie, 2020 ; Zegers, 2019 ).

Benefitting

The participants constructed themselves as personally benefitting from climate change either because it makes their living conditions easier due to milder weather or gives them more work. The individual’s increased agency was presented in a rather implicit manner.

Larry: I don’t mean it, but jokingly I say that my, you know, my work is in working with the effects of climate change, not preventing it, so. More disasters, more work for me . But that comes with a like sarcastic—that’s not what I actually think.

Larry’s example shows how the participants acknowledged that saying one has benefitted from climate change is perhaps socially undesirable, and framed their accounts as humor, used different hedging strategies, and/or nonverbal communication to underline that they know what they say might be unexpected. Larry’s presentation of climate change as indirectly enhancing his agency is embedded within downplaying expressions such as “I don’t mean it”. Larry frames his statement of climate change bringing him more work as something that he “jokingly says” and as a remark he might make in some other context, but not as something he truly means to say in this interview. The theme points to the importance of recognizing that in ecological destruction, there are winners and losers, and formulating the (albeit fragile and temporary) winner position is a complex discursive task requiring face keeping work.

This paper has discussed 12 broad themes of agency that the interviewees constructed with regards to climate change. Next, I will briefly discuss the themes in relation to previous literature, zoom in on Critical agency, and make some suggestions to climate communications.

The themes involve a rich variety of agencies that negotiate and reach beyond many predominant climate change discourses currently circulating within Western societies. With Individual agency, the participants put themselves in dialog with the notion of a self-reflective climate agent monitoring their carbon footprints (e.g. Siperstein, 2016 ). Yet, both Critical and Ambivalent agency themes included criticism on such emphasis on one individual’s influence as unrealistic and guilt provoking. The apocalyptic climate change stories (e.g. Cole, 2021 ) were a resource for many examples of Threatened agency, but within Critical agency, such notions were problematized as too reductive and counterproductive. Moreover, the participants could not be classified in terms of what kind of themes emerged in their interview. Also seemingly incompatible themes could occur within the same interview; for example, the same participant could construct themselves as trying to take climate change mitigation actions (Individual), doubting the effectiveness of such actions in the big picture (Ambivalent), and adopt a critical position towards climate change as something not supported by mathematics (Critical). This resonates with the understanding that many people hold very contradictory feelings and thoughts about climate change (Hoggett, 2019 ).

Discursively speaking, many of the themes came across as quite vague in how human agency was constructed. Climate action was often discussed in terms of relatively generic, merely potential individual actions (Individual), meaningless and hopeless attempts to act (Ambivalence, Limited), or in terms of what is done somewhere else by someone else (External). The prevalence of Reflective and Critical themes suggests that climate change is often approached as a mediated phenomenon, known from the media and other sources, and requiring first and foremost thinking and other cognitive activities. Even if some of the interviewees live in areas where climate change has caused vast ecological disasters, their personal experience seemed to be translated more into detailed descriptions of what climate change threats look like than to motivated talk about adaptive and mitigating actions. I suggest, in alignment with previous papers, that it is important to continue fostering concrete, shared, collective imaginations about possible futures with attention to how an individual’s thinking and experiences can be bridged with the broader collective level of action (Milkoreit, 2017 ; Monroe et al., 2019 ).

Furthermore, the human-centeredness of most agency themes points to the potential of drawing from more relational ontologies (Verlie, 2017 , 2019a , 2019b , 2020 , 2021 ) in enriching the ways people construct agency. While the themes were mostly not resonating with the idea that individual humans could rationally control climate change, they also did not include much alternatives to such human-centrism. Only Influenced agency hinted towards thinking where humans and climate change influence each other and humans need to address climate change from within this entanglement. Discourses acknowledging the potential of a more relationally attuned agency should be made more available to people as resources for constructing climate change agency.

The most common theme in this interview data was Collective, where humans were displayed as able and willing to do things as a “we”. Fiskio ( 2012 ) has criticized the narrative that people need to face the catastrophe with a sense of purpose and community for romantization and utopian hopes. In the theme Collective observed here, the speakers did not talk much about the future but stayed in the here-and-now, and romantization or utopian hopes were not present in the accounts. The theme seems to counteract the hopelessness of individual actions present in Ambivalent agency and the emphasis on simple, individual actions in Individual agency, while constructing the meaning of one’s individual actions in relation to bigger human collectives. This theme might come close to what Moser ( 2010 ) means with narratives that help people make sense of their actions within the wider social and ecological contexts while enabling them to construct a socially desirable identity. It also resonates with research emphasizing the importance of bridging one’s individual thinking and actions with larger collective manifestations of agency that have a relevant impact on climate change (Bamberg et al., 2015 ; Jugert et al., 2016 ; Milkoreit, 2017 ; van Zomeren et al., 2013 ). Yet, such routes from the individual to the collective level seem to be difficult to construct. This interview data included only one concrete example of how one individual’s specific action (refusing to drive their children to school but biking instead) has larger ripple effects all the way up to the level of fossil fuel economy and climate change.

Arguments against the existence of human-caused climate change were crafted within the themes Experiential, Critical, and Limited agency. Within Experiential agency, not having personal experience of the effects of climate change was constructed as crucial evidence against the existence of it. Some extracts of Limited agency underlined that humans are too small and insignificant to have caused climate change. Most displays of doubt and skepticism occurred within Critical agency and hence, were linked with displaying oneself as having critical skills to pinpoint the simplicity of prevailing societal discourses and the lacking understanding of other people. Doubting climate change was not associated with harboring conspiracy theories or with explicit doubt towards science (Jacques and Knox, 2016 ; Lewandowsky et al., 2013 ). Doubt was constructed in relation to supposedly narrow, exaggerated, or naïve narratives and beliefs held by other people. Scientific rhetoric and concepts were commonly employed in ways that failed to follow any remotely scientific logic. These findings are in alignment with much previous research underlining how climate change skepticism and denial are embedded within an attempt to appear scientific and rational (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019 ; Jylhä, 2018 ; Sharman, 2014 ). Some examples of Critical agency drew from media representations of climate change as still a debated issue within climate science (Jylhä, 2018 ) and emphasized the speaker’s media reading skills. These findings are also in alignment with Hamilton ( 2011 ) who argues that the dissemination of climate denialism has led many people to consider themselves well informed on the topic of climate change, even if they do not understand its basic ideas and seem to have no contact with the primary research literature.

I suggest that it might be fruitful to address people who have skeptical or denialist beliefs acknowledging their self-presentation as rationally and scientifically thinking individuals and allowing them to stay critical while leveraging this position to counter misconceptions. Furthermore, in Critical agency, no difference was made between climate change as a force proper versus as a phenomenon mediated by societal discourses, which enabled the speakers to use criticism of the discursive representations in counterarguing the existence of climate change per se. It might be important to support the audience’s investments in critical agency by helping them to understand how to separate climate change as a scientifically proven phenomenon from societal and media disputes. It might be especially relevant to do this in ways that do not put too much pressure on the general conservative worldview and the social identity investments behind climate change denial (Jylhä and Hellmer, 2020 ; Jylhä et al., 2020 ; Kahan, 2010 , 2015 ).

The qualitative nature of this study and the relatively small sample size limit the generalizability of the findings. Further work is needed to investigate whether similar agency themes would emerge in other contexts. The relatively high educational level of the participants presents a further limitation for generalizability. Further research could investigate how people from more varied educational backgrounds construct climate change agency. Yet another potential research topic would be to study how people respond to narratives written to emphasize a particular agency theme and whether these could be leveraged in nudging people towards climate aware actions.

This paper has demonstrated the discursive variability of agency constructions and drawn attention to some of the general themes and their discursive qualities that emerge in climate change conversations. More specifically, I have pointed out that many of the agency constructions come across as vague, external, or intellectualizing, thus perhaps reflecting emotional detachment from climate change (see e.g. Norgaard, 2011 ). This points to the need to continue fostering discourses and stories that feed the public imagination of practical ways of acting that also connect with and have ripple effects on larger community and social levels. Another aspect combining most of the agency constructions was their human-centeredness, illustrating that more relationally oriented thinking on human–nonhuman interrelatedness is needed to enrich discourses available to people figuring out their agencies in relation to climate change.

Different agency themes open and (partly) close different ways of seeing climate change and taking action to address it. Acknowledging the variety of climate change agencies can help in continuing to steer richer discussions on how to keep human agency transforming toward more collaborative, relationally oriented, and flexible forms needed to tackle the forthcoming, increasingly complex developments of the climate crisis.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during this study are not publicly available due to them being interview transcripts, the publication of which would severely compromise the anonymity and privacy of the individual participants. The anonymized interview transcripts are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Adeney TJ, Williams M, Zalasiewicz J (2020) The anthropocene: a multidisciplinary approach. Polity Press, Cambridge

Google Scholar

Alkire S (2005) Subjective quantitative studies of human agency. Soc Indic Res 74:217–260. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-005-6525-0

Article Google Scholar

Bamberg S, Rees J, Seebauer S (2015) Collective climate action: determinants of participation intention in community-based pro-environmental initiatives. J Environ Psychol 43:155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.06.006

Barad K (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3):801–831

Bloomfield EF, Tillery D (2019) The circulation of climate change denial online: Rhetorical and networking strategies on Facebook. Environ Commun 13(1):23–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1527378

Bostrom A, Hayes AL, Crosman KM (2019) Efficacy, action, and support for reducing climate change risks. Risk Anal 39(4):805–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13210

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Braidotti R (2019) Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press, Cambridge

Braun V, Clarke V (2012) Thematic analysis. In: Cooper H (ed) APA handbook of research methods in psychology, vol 2. Research designs: quantitative, qualitative, neuropsychological, and biological. American Psychological Association, pp. 57–71

Braun V, Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 3(2):77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063o

Boykoff MT (2008) The cultural politics of climate change discourse in UK tabloids. Political Geogr 27:549–569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.05.002

Chakrabarty D (2009) The climate of history: four theses. Crit Inq 35(2):197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640

Chakrabarty D (2012) Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change. New Lit Hist 43(1):1–18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23259358

Chen MF (2015) Self-efficacy or collective efficacy within the cognitive theory of stress model: Which more effectively explains people’s self-reported proenvironmental behavior? J Environ Psychol 42:66–75

Christmann GB, Balgar K, Mahlkow N (2014) Local constructions of vulnerability and resilience in the context of climate change. A comparison of Lübeck and Rostock. Soc Sci 3:142–159. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci3010142

Clarke V, Braun V (2017) Thematic analysis. J Posit Psychol 12(3):297–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1262613

Cole MB (2021) ‘At the heart of human politics’: agency and responsibility in the contemporary climate novel. Environ Polit. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1902699

Crist E (2007) Beyond the climate crisis: a critique of climate change discourse. Telos 141:29–55

ADS Google Scholar

Fiskio J (2012) Apocalypse and ecotopia: narratives in global climate change discourse. Race Cl 19:12–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43496858

Fritsche I, Barth M, Jugert P et al. (2018) A social identity model of pro-environmental action (SIMPEA). Psychol Rev 125(2):245–269. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000090

Hamilton LC (2011) Education, politics and opinions about climate change: evidence for interaction effects. Clim Change 104:231–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-010-9957-8

Article ADS Google Scholar

Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press

Harré R (1993) Social being. Blackwell, Oxford

Hinkel J, Mangalagiu D, Bisaro A et al. (2020) Transformative narratives for climate action. Clim Change 160:495–506. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02761-y

Hoggett P (ed.) (2019) Climate psychology: on indifference to disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Hornsey MJ, Chapman CM, Oelrichs DM (2021) Ripple effects: can information about the collective impact of individual actions boost perceived efficacy about climate change? J Exp Soc Psychol 97:104217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104217

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022) Climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press (in press)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2019) Annex I: Glossary [van Diemen R (ed.)]. In: Shukla PR, Skea J, Calvo Buendia E, Masson-Delmotte V, Pörtner HO, Roberts DC, Zhai P, Slade R, Connors S, van Diemen R, Ferrat M, Haughey E, Luz S, Neogi S, Pathak M, Petzold J, Portugal Pereira J, Vyas P, Huntley E, Kissick K, Belkacemi M, Malley J (eds.) Climate change and land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems (in press).

Jacques PJ, Knox CC (2016) Hurricanes and hegemony: a qualitative analysis of micro-level climate change denial discourses. Environ Polit 25:831–852. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1189233

Jackson ST (2021) Climate change. Encycl Br https://www.britannica.com/science/climate-change

Jugert P, Greenaway KH, Barth M et al. (2016) Collective efficacy increases pro-environmental intentions through increasing self-efficacy. J Environ Psychol 48:12–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2016.08.003

Jylhä KM (2018) Denial versus reality of climate change. In: DellaSala DA, Goldstein MI (eds.) Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 487–492

Chapter Google Scholar

Jylhä KM (2016) Ideological roots of climate change denial: resistance to change, acceptance of inequality, or both? Dissertation, Uppsala University

Jylhä KM, Akrami N (2015) Social dominance orientation and climate change denial: the role of dominance and system justification. Pers Individ Differ 86:108–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.05.041

Jylhä KM, Cantal C, Akrami N et al. (2016) Denial of anthropogenic climate change: social dominance orientation helps explain the conservative male effect in Brazil and Sweden. Pers Individ Differ 98:184–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.04.020

Jylhä KM, Hellmer K (2020) Right‐wing populism and climate change denial: the roles of exclusionary and anti‐egalitarian preferences, conservative ideology, and antiestablishment attitudes. Anal Soc Issues Public Policy 20(1):315–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12203

Jylhä KM, Strimling P, Rydgren J (2020) Climate change denial among radical right-wing supporters. Sustainability 12(23):10226. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310226

Jylhä KM, Tam KP, Milfont TL (2021) Acceptance of group‐based dominance and climate change denial: a cross‐cultural study in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Sweden. Asian J Soc Psychol 24(2):198–207. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12444

Kahan DM (2015) Climate-science communication and the measurement problem. Polit Psychol 36:1–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12244

Kahan DM (2010) Fixing the communications failure. Nature 463:296–97. https://doi.org/10.1038/463296a

Article ADS CAS PubMed Google Scholar

Kögler H-H (2010) Recognition and the resurgence of intentional agency. Inquiry 53:450–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2010.516677

Lertzman R (2019) New methods for investigating new dangers. In: Hoggett P (ed.) Climate psychology: on indifference to disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 25–39

Lewandowsky S, Oberauer K, Gignac GE (2013) NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science. Psychol Sci 24:622–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612457686

Maguire M, Delahunt B (2017) Doing a thematic analysis: a practical, step-by-step guide for learning and teaching scholars. AISHE-J 9(3):3351–33514. http://ojs.aishe.org/index.php/aishe-j/article/view/335

Marchand JS (2018) Non-human agency. In: Braidotti R, Hlavajova M (eds.) Posthuman glossary. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 292–295

Milkoreit M (2017) Imaginary politics: climate change and making the future. Elem Sci Anthr 5:62. https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.249

Minol K, Spelsberg G, Schulte E, Morris N (2007) Portals, blogs and co.: the role of the Internet as a medium of science communication. Biotechnol J Healthc Nutr Technol 2(9):1129–1140. https://doi.org/10.1002/biot.200700163

Article CAS Google Scholar

Monroe MC, Plate RR, Oxarart A et al. (2019) Identifying effective climate change education strategies: a systematic review of the research. Environ Educ Res 25(6):791–812. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1360842

Moser SC (2020) The work after “It’s too late”(to prevent dangerous climate change). Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change 11(1):e606. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.606

Moser SC (2010) Communicating climate change: history, challenges, process and future directions. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change 1:31–53. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.11

Moser SC, Dilling L (2011) Communicating change science: closing the science-action gap. In: Dryzek JS, Norgaard RB, Schlosberg D (eds.) The Oxford handbook of climate change and society. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 161–174

Neuendorf KA (2019) Content analysis and thematic analysis. In: Brough P (ed.) Advanced research methods for applied psychology: design, analysis, and reporting. Taylor and Francis, New York, NY, pp. 211–223

Norgaard KM (2011) Living in denial: climate change, emotions, and everyday life. The MIT Press, Cambridge

Book Google Scholar

O'Brien K, Leichenko R (2019) Toward an integrative discourse on climate change. Dialogues Hum Geogr 9(1):33–37

O’Neill SJ, Boykoff M, Niemeyer S et al. (2013) On the use of imagery for climate change engagement. Glob Environ Change 23(2):413–421

Plumwood V (2009) Nature in the active voice. Aust Humanit Rev 46. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/05/01/nature-in-the-active-voice/

Pope R (1998) The English studies book: an introduction to language, literature and culture. Routledge, London

Potter J (2004) Discourse analysis. In: Hardy M, Bryman A (eds.) Handbook of data analysis. Sage, London, pp. 607–624

Robison R (2019) Emotional work as a necessity: a psychosocial analysis of low-carbon energy collaboration stories. In: Hoggett P (ed.) Climate psychology: on indifference to disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 85–106

Roser-Renouf C, Maibach EW, Leiserowitz A et al. (2014) The genesis of climate change activism: from key beliefs to political action. Clim Change 125(2):163–178

Schäfer MS (2012) Online communication on climate change and climate politics: a literature review. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change 3:527–543. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.191

Sharman A (2014) Mapping the climate sceptical blogosphere. Glob Environ Change 26:159–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.03.003

Siperstein S (2016) Climate change in literature and culture: conversion, speculation, education. Dissertation, University of Oregon

Stapleton SR (2015) Environmental identity development through social interactions, action, and recognition. J Environ Educ 46(2):94–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2014.1000813

Steward H (1998) Akrasia. The Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy. Taylor and Francis

Stoknes P (2015) What we think about when we try not to think about global warming. Toward a new psychology of climate action. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction

Taylor GW, Ussher JM (2001) Making sense of S&M: a discourse analytic account. Sexualities 4(3):293–314

Toivonen H (2019) Constructions of agency and nonagency in psychotherapy: The 10 discursive tools model. Dissertation, University of Jyväskylä

Toivonen H, Wahlström J, Kurri K (2019) Constructing nonagency at the beginning of psychotherapy: the 10DT model. J Constr Psychol 32(2):160–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2018.1433088

Toivonen H, Caracciolo M. Storytalk and complex constructions of nonhuman agency: an interview-based investigation. Narrat Inq (in press).

Tollemache R (2019) We have to talk about… climate change. In: Hoggett P (ed.) Climate psychology: on indifference to disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 217–237

UNFCCC, The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2011) Fact sheet: climate change science—the status of climate change science today. https://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf/press_factsh_science.pdf Accessed Jun 24 2021

van Zomeren M, Saguy T, Schellhaas FM (2013) Believing in “making a difference” to collective efforts: participative efficacy beliefs as a unique predictor of collective action. Group Process Intergroup Relat 16(5):618–634. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430212467476

van Zomeren M, Spears R, Leach CW (2010) Experimental evidence for a dual pathway model analysis of coping with the climate crisis. J Environ Psychol 30(4):339–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.02.006

Verlie B (2021) Climate justice in more-than-human worlds. Environ Polit 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1981081

Verlie B (2020) From action to intra-action? Agency, identity and ‘goals’ in a relational approach to climate change education. Environ Educ Res 26(9-10):1266–1280. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2018.1497147

Verlie B (2019a) “Climatic-affective atmospheres”: a conceptual tool for affective scholarship in a changing climate. Emot Space Soc 33:100623. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2019.100623

Verlie B (2019b) Bearing worlds: learning to live-with climate change. Environ Educ Res 25(5):751–766. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1637823

Verlie B (2017) Rethinking climate education: climate as entanglement. Educ Stud 53(6):560–572. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2017.1357555

Vesely S, Masson T, Chokrai P et al. (2021) Climate change action as a project of identity: eight meta-analyses. Glob Environ Change 70:102322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102322

Walsh EM, Cordero E (2019) Youth science expertise, environmental identity, and agency in climate action filmmaking. Environ Educ Res 25(5):656–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1569206

Weingart P, Engels A, Pansegrau P (2000) Risks of communication: discourses on climate change in science, politics, and the mass media. Public Underst Sci 9:261–283. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/9/3/304

Westcott G (2019) Attitudes to climate change in some English local authorities: varying sense of agency in denial and hope. In: Hoggett P (ed.) Climate psychology: on indifference to disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 195–215

Whitmarsh L (2008) Are flood victims more concerned about climate change than other people? The role of direct experience in risk perception and behavioural response. J Risk Res 11(3):351–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669870701552235

Whitmarsh L, Poortinga W, Capstick S (2021) Behaviour change to address climate change. Curr Opin Psychol 42:76–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.04.002

Yamamoto M (2006) Agency and impersonality: their linguistic and cultural manifestations. John Benjamins, Amsterdam

Zegers R (2019) Leading with nature in mind. In: Hoggett P (ed.) Climate psychology: on indifference to disaster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 177–193

Download references

Acknowledgements

I started writing this paper as a postdoctoral researcher at the stimulating environment of the ERC—funded NARMESH project at the University of Ghent, Belgium. The project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 714 166). I am very grateful for Professor Marco Caracciolo and for Dr. Gry Ulstein for their insightful feedback on the early versions of the manuscript. Many thanks also to Tanja Vainikainen, M.Sc., for checking the language of the paper. Lastly, I also wish to present my thanks for my new colleagues at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, for their interest and support for my research.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Twente, Twente, the Netherlands

Heidi Toivonen

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heidi Toivonen .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The author declares no competing interests.

Ethical approval

Approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University. The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Toivonen, H. Themes of climate change agency: a qualitative study on how people construct agency in relation to climate change. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 102 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01111-w

Download citation

Received : 09 August 2021

Accepted : 02 March 2022

Published : 29 March 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01111-w

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

Op-ed: Building accountability to achieve feminist climate justice

Share to Facebook
Share to Twitter
Share to LinkedIn
Share to E-mail

Feminist climate justice seeks a world where everyone can flourish on a healthy and sustainable planet, where those in power serve and are accountable to all, particularly marginalized groups such as women and girls. Achieving this will take action on many fronts—to strengthen democracy, human rights, and global collaboration.

A mother and her children walk through ruined housing in the wake of Hurricane Iota in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Photo: UNICEF/Inti Ocon/AFP-Services.

Ending environmental destruction and reversing climate change, including the implementation of the landmark Paris Agreement, are an integral part of the Sustainable Development Goals . In the latest assessment of progress, the Global Stocktake , governments acknowledged their collective failure to limit global warming to 1.5°C. In fact, the UN’s latest assessment is that we are on track to double that increase by the end of this century on a planet that will become less and less habitable.

We stand at a critical juncture. Activists have long called for faster and bolder action, with women, often indigenous or young women, at the forefront of these demands. Under the banner of feminist climate justice, they have envisioned a world in which care for people and planet is prioritized over corporate profits and elite power. UN Women has aligned itself with these demands. Our latest publication, “Feminist climate justice: A framework for action” , explores what policymakers need to do to achieve this vision in practice.

As well as the nuts and bolts of policy, the framework document also looks at why progress has been so slow. If the evidence is clear and the vision compelling, what accounts for the weak response of governments? What is blocking the deep transformations needed to ensure our collective survival and a just and sustainable future for all? In short, how do we ensure accountability for climate action?

The path to accountability for feminist climate justice is fraught with unequal power dynamics and bottlenecks to progress. We identify three major areas where action is needed, showcasing the pathways feminist movements are already actively pursuing.

Prioritize human rights-based approaches over market-centric solutions

Achieving feminist climate justice requires a shift away from prevailing economic models that prioritize profit over people, perpetuating environmental degradation and gender inequalities. Yet implementing climate commitments persistently favours market-based solutions, while leaving corporations largely unchecked and poorly regulated. As a result, women’s priorities are often sidelined. Take, for example, women smallholder farmers in the Global South. They produce 30 per cent of the world’s food but are often shut out of value chains dominated by global agribusiness, which is also responsible for the decimation of biodiversity. Action by and accountability of the private sector are both sorely needed. But the sector’s presence in global climate talks has, for the most part, been characterized by evasion of its responsibilities and greenwashing.

We should turn things on their head and prioritize the needs of marginalized groups that bear the brunt of the climate crises over market-centric fixes, which only promise more of the same. Sustainable solutions that create multiple wins are needed. School feeding programs, for example, address children’s hunger while generating opportunities for small-scale women farmers to provide nutritious food, produced in environmentally sustainable ways. Since women are usually responsible for providing food for their households, these programs also support family incomes and reduce women’s unpaid work.

A human-rights approach also requires public finance that recognizes the historical responsibility of the Global North for the lion’s share of global emissions. The promise of USD 100 billion in annual climate finance, made by donor countries in 2009, is still unfulfilled. What little finance is available does not reach women in the most vulnerable countries, and is typically provided as loans, trapping countries in the Global South in a vicious cycle of debt, austerity, and climate crises.

Alongside the right policies and adequate financing, bottom-up accountability tools can ensure that policies are implemented in ways that include women and are attentive to their needs. For instance, participatory budgeting and gender-responsive climate budgeting—being tested in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Benin, and Rwanda—are showing promise in revealing where resources are going, and providing the evidence that policymakers need to direct finance to gender-responsive climate policies and programs. UN Women, in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls, is launching a gender equality and climate policy scorecard. This will systematically monitor gender-responsive national climate policies, further contributing to accountability efforts.

Strengthen democracies as the basis for progressive climate decision-making

While such tools are important, accountability can only be achieved through the strengthening of democratic states and processes. At a time when combating climate change requires global cooperation and robust, democratic state action, the power and legitimacy of both have been seriously curtailed. Indeed, in a year in which billions of people will go to the polls, the strength of democracy globally has declined to levels not seen since the Cold War. Significant declines in measures of women’s rights to open dialogue, media freedom, and the conduct of free and fair elections across the globe have been registered. This has not only limited space for the vital work of civil society organizations but has also led to alarming levels of distrust in public institutions and expert knowledge, creating fertile ground for climate denialism and exclusionary and misogynist leaders.

Countering exclusionary politics and top-down decision-making means reinvigorating democratic institutions and multilateralism. Urgent reform of the international financial architecture, as advocated by the United Nations Secretary-General, is essential to ensure democratic decision-making and gender balance in multilateral spaces. At the national level, women’s rights and autonomous women’s organizations are central to the health and strength of democracies. Feminists have been instrumental in spearheading pro-democracy movements. They have advocated for climate planning and implementation that is participatory and inclusive, while recognizing the link between women’s representation in parliaments and stronger climate change policies . Governments will submit a new round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in 2025, which provides an opportunity to ensure that women’s ministries and civil society organizations are at the table. Supporting grassroot initiatives and movements, including feminist organizations, and ensuring they are well resourced are key to enriching democratic deliberations and alternatives.

Foster solidarity across classes, borders, and hemispheres

Averting environmental destruction requires “all hands on deck”. We urgently need to build solidarity between social groups, economic classes, and countries. However, deepening socio-economic inequalities, patriarchal political discourses, and colonial legacies contribute to fragmentation, hindering collective action. Women activists face immense challenges, enduring violence and too often paying with their lives for defending their livelihoods and precious ecosystems.

To counteract this, action is needed to promote coalitions and protect civic space. In climate negotiations, alliances among states can bridge geopolitical divisions, to elevate ambitions and create mutual accountability. The High Ambition Coalition, for example, was a Member State coalition that proved critical to getting the Paris Agreement over the line. Following a request by 132 countries, the International Court of Justice has agreed to provide an advisory opinion concerning climate change, which should clarify states’ human rights obligations. At regional level, collaborations between feminists, indigenous groups, and environmental movements have resulted in landmark accords, such as the Escazú Agreement in Latin America and the Caribbean. The agreement prevents, for the first time, the criminalization of environmental human rights defenders.

Overcoming accountability bottlenecks is an essential part of the journey toward feminist climate justice. The journey requires concerted efforts, collective action, and a steadfast commitment to promoting human rights and care. Accountability, rooted in inclusive democracy, will be the driving force that transforms aspirations into tangible and lasting change.

2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
Climate change
Accountability
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Human rights–based approach
Environmental protection
Decision-making
Women’s movements
Governance and national planning
Human rights
Leadership and political participation

‘Refugee women’s voices matter’ – Meet Grace Neima Khemis, the first woman Chairperson of her Refugee Welfare Committee

Statement: Women’s leadership and collective action are crucial for our common future

UN Women co-hosted a Gender Equality Forum from 25 to 26 May in Antigua and Barbuda, ahead of the fourth International Conference on SIDS. Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown

UN Women advocates for gender equality at 4th International Conference on Small Island Developing States

Search the United Nations

What Is Climate Change
Myth Busters
Renewable Energy
Finance & Justice
Initiatives
Sustainable Development Goals
Paris Agreement
Climate Ambition Summit 2023
Climate Conferences
Press Material
Communications Tips

What Is Climate Change?

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun’s activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change , primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures.

The main greenhouse gases that are causing climate change include carbon dioxide and methane. These come from using gasoline for driving a car or coal for heating a building, for example. Clearing land and cutting down forests can also release carbon dioxide. Agriculture, oil and gas operations are major sources of methane emissions. Energy, industry, transport, buildings, agriculture and land use are among the main sectors causing greenhouse gases.

Illustration reads: $90 Trillion for infrastructure by 2030

Humans are responsible for global warming

Climate scientists have showed that humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years. Human activities like the ones mentioned above are causing greenhouse gases that are warming the world faster than at any time in at least the last two thousand years.

The average temperature of the Earth’s surface is now about 1.2°C warmer than it was in the late 1800s (before the industrial revolution) and warmer than at any time in the last 100,000 years. The last decade (2011-2020) was the warmest on record , and each of the last four decades has been warmer than any previous decade since 1850.

Many people think climate change mainly means warmer temperatures. But temperature rise is only the beginning of the story. Because the Earth is a system, where everything is connected, changes in one area can influence changes in all others.

The consequences of climate change now include, among others, intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, catastrophic storms and declining biodiversity.

People are experiencing climate change in diverse ways

Climate change can affect our health , ability to grow food, housing, safety and work. Some of us are already more vulnerable to climate impacts, such as people living in small island nations and other developing countries. Conditions like sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion have advanced to the point where whole communities have had to relocate, and protracted droughts are putting people at risk of famine. In the future, the number of people displaced by weather-related events is expected to rise.

Every increase in global warming matters

In a series of UN reports , thousands of scientists and government reviewers agreed that limiting global temperature rise to no more than 1.5°C would help us avoid the worst climate impacts and maintain a livable climate. Yet policies currently in place point to a 3°C temperature rise by the end of the century.

The emissions that cause climate change come from every part of the world and affect everyone, but some countries produce much more than others .The seven biggest emitters alone (China, the United States of America, India, the European Union, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and Brazil) accounted for about half of all global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.

Everyone must take climate action, but people and countries creating more of the problem have a greater responsibility to act first.

Photocomposition: an image of the world globe looking worried to a thermometer with raising temperatures

We face a huge challenge but already know many solutions

Many climate change solutions can deliver economic benefits while improving our lives and protecting the environment. We also have global frameworks and agreements to guide progress, such as the Sustainable Development Goals , the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement . Three broad categories of action are: cutting emissions, adapting to climate impacts and financing required adjustments.

Switching energy systems from fossil fuels to renewables like solar or wind will reduce the emissions driving climate change. But we have to act now. While a growing number of countries is committing to net zero emissions by 2050, emissions must be cut in half by 2030 to keep warming below 1.5°C. Achieving this means huge declines in the use of coal, oil and gas: over two-thirds of today’s proven reserves of fossil fuels need to be kept in the ground by 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change.

Adapting to climate consequences protects people, homes, businesses, livelihoods, infrastructure and natural ecosystems. It covers current impacts and those likely in the future. Adaptation will be required everywhere, but must be prioritized now for the most vulnerable people with the fewest resources to cope with climate hazards. The rate of return can be high. Early warning systems for disasters, for instance, save lives and property, and can deliver benefits up to 10 times the initial cost.

We can pay the bill now, or pay dearly in the future

Climate action requires significant financial investments by governments and businesses. But climate inaction is vastly more expensive. One critical step is for industrialized countries to fulfil their commitment to provide $100 billion a year to developing countries so they can adapt and move towards greener economies.

To get familiar with some of the more technical terms used in connection with climate change, consult the Climate Dictionary .

Learn more about…

photocomposition: two hands, each one holding a megaphone

The facts on climate and energy

Climate change is a hot topic – with myths and falsehoods circulating widely. Find some essential facts here .

The science

See the latest climate reports from the United Nations as well as climate action facts .

Causes and Effects

Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, which poses many risks to all forms of life on Earth. Learn more .

From the Secretary-General

Read the UN Chief’s latest statements on climate action.

What is net zero? Why is it important? Our net-zero page explains why we need steep emissions cuts now and what efforts are underway.

Renewable energy – powering a safer future

What is renewable energy and why does it matter? Learn more about why the shift to renewables is our only hope for a brighter and safer world.

How will the world foot the bill? We explain the issues and the value of financing climate action.

What is climate adaptation? Why is it so important for every country? Find out how we can protect lives and livelihoods as the climate changes.

Climate Issues

Learn more about how climate change impacts are felt across different sectors and ecosystems.

Why women are key to climate action

Women and girls are on the frontlines of the climate crisis and uniquely situated to drive action. Find out why it’s time to invest in women.

Facts and figures

What is climate change?
Causes and effects
Myth busters

Cutting emissions

Explaining net zero
High-level expert group on net zero
Checklists for credibility of net-zero pledges
Greenwashing
What you can do

Clean energy

Renewable energy – key to a safer future
What is renewable energy
Five ways to speed up the energy transition
Why invest in renewable energy
Clean energy stories
A just transition

Adapting to climate change

Climate adaptation
Early warnings for all
Youth voices

Financing climate action

Finance and justice
Loss and damage
$100 billion commitment
Why finance climate action
Biodiversity
Human Security

International cooperation

What are Nationally Determined Contributions
Acceleration Agenda
Climate Ambition Summit
Climate conferences (COPs)
Youth Advisory Group
Action initiatives
Secretary-General’s speeches
Press material
Fact sheets
Communications tips

Agriculture & Environment
Architecture & Design
Arts & Humanities
Business & Management
Campus Affairs
Law & Policy
Science & Technology
Social Sciences
Sports & Recreation
Story Archive
For Journalists

U of M System ranks fifth in US in sustainability impact

Collage of images including a river, individual standing in a field looking away, and X-ray

For the third year in a row, the University of Minnesota participated in the Times Higher Ed (THE) Impact Rankings . The 2024 rankings evaluated 2,152 universities from 125 countries/regions, comparing their efforts to conduct teaching, research, outreach and stewardship that support a more sustainable, equitable and healthy future.

The U of M tied for fifth in the U.S. overall and in the top 10% worldwide. Notably, the U of M ranked among the top five in the U.S. for its work related to:

Clean water (No. 2 in the U.S., No. 26 in the world)
Climate action (No. 3 in the U.S., No. 53 in the world)
Zero hunger (No. 5 in the U.S., No. 24 in the world)
Health and well-being (tying for No. 5 in the U.S., No. 85 in the world)

“The University of Minnesota is one of America’s leading research universities and we are resolute in our commitment to fostering a sustainable future in Minnesota and beyond,” said Interim President Jeff Ettinger. “The results of this year's Times Higher Ed Impact Rankings reflect our unwavering dedication to this critical work, our systemwide ethos of responsible stewardship and our focus on shaping a better tomorrow for generations to come.”

THE Impact Rankings apply 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at achieving a better world by 2030, goals adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015. These goals provide a shared blueprint for measuring progress and impact in advancing peace and prosperity for people and the planet.

The U of M is one of the few institutions worldwide to submit to the THE Impact Rankings as a university system, a point that distinguishes its results from its peers. The final submission included examples gathered from every U of M campus, statewide Extension and research station offices, and other systemwide initiatives.

“This year’s results demonstrate the University is improving its performance in — and expanding to address — areas of critical importance for Minnesota and the world, such as clean water,” said Shane Stennes, the University’s chief sustainability officer. “Over the past year, we implemented plans for how the U of M will address climate change on our campuses while growing the impact of University scholarship and engagement on climate issues.”

A full overview of the rankings and the methodology can be found on the THE Impact Ranking website . Further details of the University’s work related to the SDGs are available on the U of M SDG Initiative website .

About the UMN Sustainable Development Goals Initiative The University of Minnesota Sustainable Development Goals Initiative seeks to support and promote transdisciplinary research, teaching, and partnerships to mobilize the resources at the University to advance a more socially and environmentally sustainable future in Minnesota, the U.S., and the globe through grants, information, and opportunities linked to SDG targets and indicators. The Initiative is supported by the Global Programs and Strategy Alliance in partnership with several administrative units including the Office for Public Engagement and the Office of Sustainability .

Categories:
Agriculture and Environment
Environmental health
Sustainability
Link to share current story on Twitter
Link to share current story on Facebook
Link to share current story via email

Ready, set, go!

From a revolutionary new paper-drying technique to a new take on cancer therapy, the “3-minute thesis” competition offers a glimpse into outstanding graduate student research.

Myah Walker in a bright red dress holding a chicken with a decorative rug background. Photo by Shelly Mosman

The chicken and the egg

Myah Walker spent years working in commercial egg production and now serves with the Minnesota Board of Animal Health.

Editor's picks

Creating meaningful engagement

Civic engagement student Kat Rohn thinks often about how change happens and what leads to the most meaningful changes in our communities.

Paige Novak, brown hair and black blouse, stand before large, gray commercial vats.

Energy drink

U of M researchers explore the energy potential of wastewater from breweries.

IMAGES

≫ Climate Change and Global Warming Issue Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com
≫ Global Climate Change Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com
Write A Short Essay On Global Warming
≫ Global Warming, Climate Change, and the Biological Effects Free Essay
Read the Draft of the Climate Change Report
Climate Action Implementation Plan

VIDEO

Sonam P. Wangdi LDC Chair
Athenian Riverscapes as climate-adaptive Urban Figures
#38: Teaching About Climate Change with Kieran Wharton '22, Environmental Studies
CALL TO ACTION: Pledge in Tackling Climate Change
ESSAY
Complete English essay for CSS

COMMENTS

How to write an effective climate change thesis statement
Naturally, humans have the ability to adapt to new environmental changes. As climate change happens, people are devising new ways of survival. Humans adapt to their surroundings by modifying the ...
PDF Taking Action: Identifying Motives Behind Climate Activism
In this thesis, climate change activism is defined as taking concrete actions to ... action on problems like climate change. This led me to the question of whether environmental education about climate change was living up to its goal of motivating activism around climate issues. Ultimately, I decided to broaden this into, "What
Argumentative Essay About Climate Change
An introduction to a climate change essay can include a short description of why the topic is important and/or relevant. It can also provide an overview of what will be discussed in the body of the essay. The introduction should conclude with a clear, focused thesis statement that outlines the main argument in your essay.
6.4 Annotated Student Sample: "Slowing Climate Change ...
The thesis statement in last sentence of the introduction previews the organization of the proposal and the recommended solutions. end annotated text. ... (Dearn, 2020). In addition to encouraging other corporations, these goals present a challenge to the government to take action on climate change. end student sample text.
PDF POLITICS OF CLIMATE ACTION PLANS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS by
June 2012. THESIS APPROVAL PAGE. Student: Hannah E. Oliver. Title: Politics of Climate Action Plans: A Critical Discourse Analysis. This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Community and Regional Planning in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management by:
Climate Change Argumentation
Summary. Subject (s): Earth Science. Topic: Climate Change and Sustainability. Grade/Level: 9-12 (can be adapted to grades 6-8) Objectives: Students will be able to write a scientific argument using evidence and reasoning to support claims. Students will also be able to reflect on the weaknesses in their own arguments in order to improve their ...
PDF Addressing climate change through climate action
Thus, Climate Action welcomes stud-ies on mobilization and the role of communication and media in addressing climate change. In many cases, citizens and local governments collab-orate and form ...
Addressing climate change through climate action
npj Climate Action (2023) This editorial introduces the journal Climate Action to its audience and defines its aims and scope. It first calls for the need to understand climate action as the ...
Addressing the Issue of Climate Change Denial
This Thesis is brought to you by the Honors College at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in ... overcome before serious action to mitigate climate change can begin. The purpose of this paper is not to attempt to extensively prove the existence and variations of climate change denialism. Rather, the goal of this paper is to ...
PDF Reinventing Climate Change Education
Statements and views expressed in this report are solely those of the author(s) and do not imply endorsement by Harvard University, Harvard Kennedy School, or the Belfer Center for Science and ... The small Municipality of Ii in Finland provides an example of climate action at the municipal level. Ii demonstrates that when participatory
PDF Thesis an Exploration of Communication Strategies Influencing Public
This study includes an overview of Schwartz's Norm Activation Theory (1977) and a discussion of how communication may be used to activate peoples' personal norms and potentially increase climate change mitigating behaviors among the American public. The fifth chapter summarizes the analyses in the preceding chapters.
PDF Climate Change Impacts on Health: The Urban Poor in the World's Megacities
presently implementing strategies to combat climate change with different approaches and results. The evidence shows that a well-planned climate change risk-assessment and management plan modeled on the specific needs and conditions of each urban city will provide a viable advantage in order to combat climate change and its health impacts on
PDF A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and
reduction targets, and intend to rely on climate finance mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund to provide significant monetary support (Biru, 2015). In the context of the recent climate talks, this paper will focus on the extent to which climate action plans and policies impact a country's economic growth. Since the INDC model
Accelerating climate research and action in cities through ...
Cities have become increasingly recognized as key sites for climate research and action. Recently, these efforts have been significantly advanced through science-policy-practice partnerships. The ...
Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit
By. NPR Staff. United Nations via YouTube. Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's ...
Politics of Climate Action Plans: A Critical Discourse Analysis
This inaction at the federal level has prompted local governments to take the lead on reducing greenhouse gas emissions through Climate Action Plans (CAP). This thesis explores the environmental discourses that are at work in the CAP adoption process of three cities that historically vote for democratic candidates and republican candidates ...
Climate change is our call to action
Researchers also predict that climate-related effects such as more frequent natural disasters, increased migration as well as loss of a sense of place will result in mental health impacts including feelings of loss and hopelessness, more mental health emergencies, and higher rates of aggression and violence, according to a 2017 report by APA and ecoAmerica titled Mental Health and Our Changing ...
Theses
Across UBC, faculty and students contribute to research on climate change. See below for recent theses on a few select topics, and search cIRcle, UBC's open access repository, for publications, theses/dissertation, and presentations to find more. RSS feed searching the UBC Theses and Dissertations Collection for: "Global warming" OR "Climate ...
Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020
C ONCLUSION. This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of ...
PDF Topic B: Global Climate Change
Topic B: Global Climate Change. Topic B: Global Climate Change. Statement of the Problem Global warming may be the chief and most complicated environmental problem to potentially affect our planet. The climate has been warming fast since the Industrial Revolution, because human activities are altering the composition of our atmosphere.
How to Write a Thesis Statement
Step 2: Write your initial answer. After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process. The internet has had more of a positive than a negative effect on education.
PDF Welcome to the University of Liverpool Repository
Welcome to the University of Liverpool Repository - The University of ...
"Building Climate Resilience: How Climate Groups Can Channel Anxiety a
As the impacts of climate change increasingly stress the ecological and social systems of the planet there is also a greater incidence of psychological struggles related to climate instability. Climate change is a significant source of psychological distress for many individuals, often manifesting as climate anxiety and grief. This thesis explores research and therapeutic experience that has ...
Oratorical Speech about Climate Change
From the air we breathe to the food we eat, the impacts of climate change are far-reaching and profound. As we explore the significance of climate change, let us understand its consequences and the urgent need for action. Understanding Climate Change. Climate change refers to significant changes in global temperatures and weather patterns over ...
Secretary-General's special address on climate action "A Moment of
It means the G20 aligning their national climate action plans, their energy strategies, and their plans for fossil fuel production and consumption, within a 1.5 degree future. ... Statements on 05 ...
Themes of climate change agency: a qualitative study on how people
This study analyzes how people discursively construct their (non)agency—how they display abilities and capacities to act, or the lack thereof—vis-à-vis climate change. The paper presents the ...
Op-ed: Building accountability to achieve feminist climate justice
19 March 2024. Constanza Tabbush and Laura Turquet. Feminist climate justice seeks a world where everyone can flourish on a healthy and sustainable planet, where those in power serve and are accountable to all, particularly marginalized groups such as women and girls. Achieving this will take action on many fronts—to strengthen democracy ...
What Is Climate Change?
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun's activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s ...
June Climate Meetings Take Modest Steps Forward; Steep ...
UN Climate Change News, 13 June 2024 - The Bonn Climate Change Conference concluded today after two weeks of intensive work across a range of issues where progress is needed on the path to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) this November in Baku, Azerbaijan. "We've taken modest steps forward here in Bonn," said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell in his closing speech.
U of M System ranks fifth in US in sustainability impact
Climate action (No. 3 in the U.S., No. 53 in the world) Zero hunger (No. 5 in the U.S., No. 24 in the world) ... we implemented plans for how the U of M will address climate change on our campuses while growing the impact of University scholarship and engagement on climate issues." ... the "3-minute thesis" competition offers a glimpse ...