Ground truth: Finding a “place” for climate change

Abstract

This review examines the interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between climate change and place. The concept of place is of interest to both humanistic geographers and environmental psychologists, who examine the ways in which individuals and groups interact with physical and cultural landscapes to form a sense of place and place attachments. As a multiscalar phenomenon that is global in its causes but local in its impacts, climate change presents several challenges to the concept of place. The relevant issues include 1) the extent to which climate-change impacts can be directly experienced, 2) the ways in which local place attachments can facilitate or impede adaptation to climate change, and 3) the grounding of climate-change mitigation in place. Drawing on literature from Earth science, human geography, and environmental psychology, the review explores how the global conceptualization of the environment prevalent in climate-change discourses can undermine notions of place, how deep connections to place can enhance the detection and attribution of climate change and contribute to climate resilience, and how climate activist movements reconcile the multiple spatial scales of climate change.