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Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Quantifying the economic costs of global warming.

Christopher W. Callahan Follow

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8819-9442

Date of Award

Document type.

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Department or Program

Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society

First Advisor

Justin Mankin

Climate change poses a threat to the well-being of people across the globe. Rising global temperatures will increase the frequency and magnitude of extreme climate events, threatening the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable people. Yet the magnitude and persistence of these economic impacts are poorly understood, making it difficult both to design equitable mitigation and adaptation strategies and to hold emitters accountable for the impacts of their emissions. In this thesis, I combine methods from detection and attribution, climate projection, and causal inference to understand the global economic consequences of past and future climate change. I show that two extreme climate events that have not been previously integrated into climate-economy analyses---heat waves and El Niño events---reduce economic growth globally. But these impacts are highly unequal across the globe: Heat waves have their greatest effects in warm regions, and El Niño events primarily harm highly teleconnected countries. As a result, these effects fall most severely on the people that have contributed least to warming, a sign of the inequities embedded in the causes and consequences of global warming. To quantitively understand these inequities and support efforts to hold major emitters accountable for the impacts of their emissions, I develop an end-to-end attribution framework that links individual emitters to the economic effects of the warming induced by their emissions. I show that warming from the emissions of high-income countries in the global North have driven billions of dollars of economic losses in low-income, low-emitting countries. I then combine this framework with my previous results on extreme heat, showing that the emissions of major fossil fuel firms have intensified heat waves, and the resulting economic penalties, across the global tropics. These first-of-their-kind results lend scientific support to emerging discussions over climate liability and loss and damage payments. More broadly, these findings together highlight the already-emerging economic threat of global warming, raising the importance of climate mitigation and adaptation in order to avoid accelerating losses to the most vulnerable people around the globe.

Original Citation

Callahan, C.W. & Mankin, J.S. (2023) "Persistent effect of El Niño on global economic growth." Science , 10.1126/science.adf2983

Callahan, C.W. & Mankin, J.S. (2022) "Globally unequal effect of extreme heat on economic growth." Science Advances , 10.1126/sciadv.add3726

Callahan, C.W. & Mankin, J.S. (2022) “National attribution of historical climate damages.” Climatic Change , 10.1007/s10584-022-03387-y

Recommended Citation

Callahan, Christopher W., "Quantifying the Economic Costs of Global Warming" (2023). Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations . 175. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dissertations/175

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Home > GRADSCHOOL > GRADSCHOOL_DISSERTATIONS > 1354

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Understanding public perceptions of global warming.

etd-05312012-230503

Wanyun Shao , Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Geography and Anthropology

Document Type

Dissertation

In this dissertation, I investigate the determinants on Americans’ perceptions of global warming and individuals’ environmentally significant behaviors to reduce global warming. Specially, I examine how contextual variables, primarily represented by local weather and climate, attitudinal variables, and socio-demographic characteristics affect public opinion towards global warming, personal voluntary actions and willingness to address global warming. The research of this dissertation reveals some important findings. First, local weather and climate—represented by long-term temperature trends—is found to have significant effects on public perceptions of global warming and private-sector environmentally significant behaviors. In particular, the summer temperature trend over the past 10 years has consistently shown to have positive effects on public acceptance of anthropogenic global warming and concern for global warming. In other words, individuals are most sensitive to summer temperature and more likely to translate increasingly hot summers into perceptions of anthropogenic global warming and their concern for this issue. Second, consistent with the results of previous studies, global warming has become a politically polarized issue. Specifically, Democrats and political liberals are more likely than Republicans and political conservatives to accept the notion of anthropogenic global warming, show higher level of concern for global warming, and participate in private-sector environmentally significant behaviors to reduce global warming. Third, attitudinal variables play an important role in affecting public perceptions of global warming and individuals’ environmentally significant behaviors. For instance, personal attitudes toward scientists are found to be a strong group of predictors on public opinion toward global warming. In addition, attitudinal variables—including individuals’ environmental views and perceptions of global warming—outperform socio-demographic characteristics and contextual forces in explaining the variance of personal actions and public willingness to pay more to reduce global warming. Finally, objective macro-economic conditions, represented by county-level unemployment rate in this dissertation are not found to have any consistently significant effect on either public perceptions of global warming or individuals’ environmentally significant behaviors.

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Recommended Citation

Shao, Wanyun, "Understanding public perceptions of global warming" (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations . 1354. https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1354

Committee Chair

Garand, James

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.1354

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A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

Kashif abbass.

1 School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim

2 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Chemical Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xiaolingwei 200, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Huaming Song

Muntasir murshed.

3 School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, 1229 Bangladesh

4 Department of Journalism, Media and Communications, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Haider Mahmood

5 Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, 173, Alkharj, 11942 Saudi Arabia

Ijaz Younis

Associated data.

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Source : constructed by authors

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Main natural danger statistics for 1985–2020 at the global level

Source: EM-DAT ( 2020 )

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Examples of how various environmental changes affect various infectious diseases in humans

Source: Aron and Patz ( 2001 )

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table ​ Table3 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Essential considerations while mitigating the climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Source : Fischer ( 2019 )

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

• The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Author contribution

KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

Availability of data and material

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Contributor Information

Kashif Abbass, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@ssabbafihsak .

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim, Email: moc.kooltuo@888misaqnahseez .

Huaming Song, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@gnimauh .

Muntasir Murshed, Email: [email protected] .

Haider Mahmood, Email: moc.liamtoh@doomhamrediah .

Ijaz Younis, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@sinuoyzaji .

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• 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

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Global Warming Thesis Statement Ideas

Economic Impact of Coastal Erosion

Global warming is a complex problem that often sparks policy debates. When writing about it, stick to the facts and make sure that your thesis statement -- the central assertion of your essay -- is supported by research. Some global warming topics have produced extensive research worldwide and can serve as topical guides in formulating your thesis statement.

Manmade Causes versus Natural Causes

The causes of global warming are complex, including natural and man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. Use your thesis to highlight the difference between natural sources and man-made sources. For example, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen from 280 parts per million in the 18th century to 390 parts per million in 2010. Human activities release more than 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, or 135 times as much as volcanoes. Focus your thesis on this discrepancy, how man-made carbon dioxide sources such as fossil fuel consumption, have eclipsed natural sources of the gas.

Rising Temperatures and Declining Sea Ice

Your thesis statement may focus on the relationship between rising surface temperatures and declining sea ice, specifically ice in the Arctic. For instance, since 1901, sea surface temperatures have risen at an average rate of 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, with the highest rates of change occurring in the past three decades alone, according to the EPA.

Your thesis may establish the inverse relationship between these rising surface temperatures and the shrinking ice coverage in the Arctic. Arctic sea ice extent in December 2014, for instance, was the ninth lowest in the satellite record. The rate of decline for December ice alone is 3.4 percent per decade, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Effects of Melting Glaciers on Water Supply

Along with sea ice, many of the world’s glaciers are melting due to climate change. Since the 1960s, the U.S. Geological Survey has tracked the mass of two glaciers in Alaska and one in Washington state, all three of which have shrunk considerably in the past 40 years.

Research other mountain ranges and compare the glaciological data. Use your thesis to answer the question of what melting glaciers will mean for populations dependent on the ice flows for their fresh water supply. For example, much of Peru’s population depends on Andean glaciers not only for drinking water but for hydroelectricity.

Effects of Drought on Food Production

While global warming is projected to raise sea levels and flooding in coastal regions, it’s also been credited for changes in weather patterns and extreme drought, according to the EPA. In the arid American Southwest, for example, average annual temperatures have increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, leading to decreased snowpack, extreme drought, wildfires and fierce competition for remaining water supplies.

As drought still rages in this region, your thesis can explore the relationship between global warming and agriculture, specifically in California’s Central Valley, which provides produce for much of the country. It’s possible that hotter, longer growing seasons are beneficial to California crops, but that shrinking water supplies threaten the viability of commercial agriculture.

Ocean Acidification and Global Seafood Stocks

Increased carbon dioxide emissions don't just impact our air quality. These emissions also result in increased acidity of our planet's oceans. An immense range of shellfish and other molluscs, such as clams, oysters, crabs, lobsters and more, face immediate population decline due to ocean acidification weakening their calcium carbonate shells.

Your thesis can explore the mechanics of ocean acidification as well as the potential economic impact to the fisheries that rely upon these marine animals for survival. You can also explore the potential ecosystem impact for the predators that feed upon these animals.

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• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Causes of Climate Change
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Climate Change Indicators in the United States
• National Snow and Ice Data Center: Artic Sea Ice News and Analysis
• U.S. Geological Survey: 3-Glacier Mass Balance Summary
• National Geographic: Signs from Earth: The Big Thaw
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Climate Impacts in the Southwest
• Alaska Public Media: Ocean Acidification

About the Author

Scott Neuffer is an award-winning journalist and writer who lives in Nevada. He holds a bachelor's degree in English and spent five years as an education and business reporter for Sierra Nevada Media Group. His first collection of short stories, "Scars of the New Order," was published in 2014.

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Humans are causing global warming

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How do you forecast the future of the Earth’s climate? It’s a question that becomes increasingly important as the planet warms and weather patterns become more extreme—from the record-breaking heat waves of the summer of 2023 to more frequent and severe storms, droughts, floods, and many other devastating events.

Because the climate is entering a state that scientists have never before been able to observe, predicting the impact of global warming is more challenging than ever. Should climatologists rely on complex computer simulations to forecast the impact on weather patterns in the future? Or should they look to geological history to see what the weather was actually like in the distant past when the planet was much warmer?

“Both,” says Kara Hartig. As a PhD student at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Griffin GSAS), Hartig applies physics to the study of the Earth’s climate. Leveraging both computer models and data gleaned from the fossil record, she studies outbreaks of frigid air over North America––often referred to as a break in the “polar vortex”—to better understand these phenomena, their dependence on larger weather patterns, and the possibilities for the future of climate change.

A Global Simulation

In her PhD thesis project, Hartig examines how cold air masses over the US Midwest behave and how they come to be. “Is it just a matter of taking air that was already cold out of somewhere that’s colder than here and bringing it into North America,” she asks, “or are there things that change the temperature of the air as it travels?” By answering these questions, Hartig hopes to help predict how cold air masses may behave in the future as they pass through regions warmed by climate change.

Much of Hartig’s work involves using a complex climate simulation that runs on supercomputers located at Harvard and in Colorado. The simulation brings together models of many smaller-scale factors—both on their own and in response to one another—to try to account for the way elements of the climate might change over time.

“One input into your model might be how much heat and water make their way off of the ocean surface and into the atmosphere,” Hartig says. “But another might be how much heat makes it back to the land surface from the atmosphere due to the increased concentration of CO2. Those components are both evolving on their own and interacting with each other.”

Using the computer models, Hartig can get a picture of what might happen to the surface of the land underneath a mass of frigid air, or how clouds forming within or above the air masses might influence temperature. That allows her to simulate the movements of cold air masses, tracking their paths backward through time to better understand how they behave—and how they might shape weather patterns in the future.

“Let’s say we identify a feature that turns out to be really important to these cold air outbreaks––for example, the amount of heat coming into the atmosphere off of the Earth’s surface, whether that’s land or ocean,” she explains. “In the future, we’re likely to lose a whole lot of Arctic sea ice and expose the ocean. That will send a lot more heat into the atmosphere. Just off that single mechanism, you might be able to make a prediction for what’s going to happen with cold air outbreaks.” Knowing and identifying the warning signs for changes caused by the movement of air masses can help countries prepare for the extreme environmental events to come.

In the future, we’re likely to lose a whole lot of Arctic sea ice and expose the ocean. That will send a lot more heat into the atmosphere. Just off that single mechanism, you might be able to make a prediction for what’s going to happen with cold air outbreaks. —Kara Hartig

The Past Is Present

In addition to computer simulations, Hartig draws on geologic data to help make predictions about a warming world. Of course, finding information on what the Earth’s climate was like 50 million years ago is a challenge in itself. It’s not as if there are air samples from the Eocene Epoch lying around in a lab somewhere. Luckily, the fields of biology and paleontology can give climate scientists useful evidence.

“Often, living things are sensitive to conditions like temperature,” Hartig says. “When they die and are fossilized, they preserve in the rocks some of that information about what the climate was like.”

That fossil record can provide evidence that the environment had particular conditions that allowed those species to survive. Hartig cites the Green River region of Wyoming, where winter temperatures typically fall well below freezing in today’s climate. According to fossil evidence, though, crocodiles, palm trees, and some species of large tropical turtles all occupied the landscape there during the warmer climate period of the Eocene. “Those reptiles cannot survive below-freezing temperatures for more than a few hours at a time,” Hartig says. “That gives us a hard biological limit on the absolute coldest temperatures that could have been present because we know that these species were there for millions, maybe even tens of millions of years continuously.”

Existing computer models of Eocene climate conditions have consistently produced simulated scenarios with cold air outbreaks over Wyoming, even though fossil evidence demonstrates that those conditions could not have existed there at that time. This means that there are mechanisms at play for which the models have not accounted––and which climate scientists do not yet fully understand.

That’s where Hartig’s research comes in. Using information from the fossil record, she is developing an improved theoretical understanding of which climate factors are the most important influences on temperature around Green River, Wyoming, accounting for what the past tells us about Eocene temperature conditions there.

“For example, plants are most responsive to the average wintertime temperature, so I know that my climate simulation should produce a particular average temperature in regions with certain species of plants if I want it to be a good match to the Eocene,” she says. “But there are lots of ways to produce the same average: you could have a very narrow distribution, or one with long tails to both warm and cold temperatures, or a very skewed distribution that may be bunched up around the average but with a very long tail into cold extremes. So, I need another constraint on the minimum winter temperature, which is where reptiles come in. Turtles and crocodiles can't survive more than about a day below freezing, so if you find a significant number of reptiles over a large area, then you know the absolute minimum temperature allowable there is right around freezing.”

After adapting the computer model of the Eocene using the constraints from Green River fossils, Hartig can run her simulation for a long time to generate data representing hundreds of Midwestern cold snaps. By looking at the variations in a particular parameter across all of these cold snaps, such as cloud formation patterns or interactions between air masses, she can generate data about how a cold air mass moves and evolves over a simulated span of time. Analyzing this kind of data leads her to a more thorough understanding of the fundamental physical mechanisms behind how cold air masses behave––and these theoretical principles can then be applied to better models of the Earth’s climate future.

Simulations of the Eocene cannot simply be reused to predict conditions in the impending future. Too much has changed since then. The Earth’s continents have shifted their locations over the past 50 million years, for example, and the composition of the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere is also quite different today. But Hartig combines her broader theoretical findings about cold air outbreaks––based on Eocene evidence––with models that are built for projecting the future. “The climate that we’re emulating,” she explains, “is not necessarily a near future climate. It’s more like in the year 2300 if we continue to emit greenhouse gases at a very high rate.” By improving how this future period is computationally modeled, Hartig produces simulations that give better predictions of how the Earth’s climate will develop in years to come––and of how life on our planet may be impacted.

Interdisciplinary Interests

Hartig was led to study the Earth’s climate by a passion for an interdisciplinary approach to science. Her research today employs a “physics- and math-based analysis,” but at times also incorporates biology and ecology—for instance, in trying to understand fossil records. “I have to know something about how different types of animals and plants react to temperature,” she explains. “I have to know something about how the ocean functions, and the atmosphere, and how ice as a material is able to transmit energy, which is more of an engineering question. I get to do a little bit of everything, which has always been something I liked about science.”

This way of using a broad set of methods to answer questions also drew her to Harvard Griffin GSAS. “The subfield of physics that I wanted to do is called soft matter, which is often not done in a physics department because it’s commonly categorized as an engineering topic,” Hartig says. “But there are a ton of people who do soft matter here at Harvard, and it’s really easy to do interdisciplinary projects with faculty outside of your own department.” Hartig’s research has ultimately led her to work with faculty and graduate students both in her home department, physics and in other departments including Earth and planetary sciences and applied mathematics.

I have an interest in the details of climate science but don’t always get a chance to look ‘under the hood’ at what goes into climate modeling. So, looking at Kara’s work gave me an opportunity to see a lot of the details of research into a particular topic. —Professor John Huth

John Huth, Donner Professor of Science in Harvard’s Department of Physics and the chair of Hartig’s thesis committee, says that cross-disciplinary projects like hers are exciting for faculty to support. “I have an interest in the details of climate science but don’t always get a chance to look ‘under the hood’ at what goes into climate modeling,” he says. “So, looking at Kara’s work gave me an opportunity to see a lot of the details of research into a particular topic. What is a bit surprising is that I not only could get to understand it but also ask what turned out to be sensible questions.”

Hartig also says she found the environment within the physics department especially welcoming. “Beginning with my visit as an admitted student, I could tell that the community was strong here. Students were really positive about it. I felt very supported.” Hartig has also found valuable support networks through participation in affinity groups for women and gender minorities in physics and the geosciences, both at Harvard and in academic professional organizations.

After finishing her PhD, Hartig hopes to continue working in climate science research. “One of my favorite things about being a climate scientist,” she says, “is that people are just curious about it. We all have some personal experience of climate.”

While she clearly has a passion for science, Hartig is also committed to addressing a problem that impacts all living things on Earth—a calling she believes is both a blessing and a tragedy. She’s hopeful that the benefits of the former will win out over the dangers of the latter.

“It's a blessing because there is funding and interest and the chance to work on fundamental science that is also socially relevant,” she says. “But it’s also a tragedy because the reason for the funding and the interest and the social relevance is an impending global environmental and humanitarian crisis. I wish it wasn't so urgent that we understand the implications of climate change for extreme weather events, but the more we do understand, the better we can prepare.”

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New Satellite Will Combat Climate Change

Its development overseen by Professor Steven Wofsy, PhD '71, MethaneSAT entered Earth’s orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket launched on Monday. It could soon play a key role in combating climate change. 

Before ‘Forever’

With her 2024 Harvard Horizons project, PhD student Heidi Pickard seeks to uncover the prevalence of the precursors of toxic 'forever chemicals' in our water and food and assess their impact on the environment and health.

What Happens When a Wind Farm Comes to a Coal Town?

On National Public Radio, PhD student Eleanor Krause says coal mines can't always be replaced with wind turbines to provide alternative sources of energy production and alternative sources of jobs.

Find Your Center: Nourishment for the Body and Mind

During stressful times, the Student Center food literacy wellness fellows help students relax and connect. They also hope to enable members of the Harvard Griffin GSAS community to make environmentally responsible choices, boost overall health, and leave the Boston area a better place than they found it. 

Tundra warming unleashes surprising carbon release

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes | Photo of Dr. Strack in her field site in northern Alberta taken by Jason Cagampan.

A new study published in Nature finds large stocks of carbon in tundra soils might release four times more carbon due to climate warming.

The study is the first-of-its-kind that shows our warming climate shifts the dynamics of tundra environments and makes them release trapped carbon. These changes could transform tundra ecosystems from carbon sinks into a carbon source, exacerbating the effects of climate change.

"We knew from earlier studies that we were likely to find an increase in respiration with warming, but our study reveals a remarkable increase, nearly four times greater than previously estimated from the tundra although it fluctuated over time and space," says Dr. Sybryn Maes from Umea University in Sweden and lead author of the study.

Open-top chambers (OTCs) provide a controlled, warmed environment for studying the tundra ecosystem respiration response to climate warming in Latnjajaure, Sweden. © Sybryn Maes

A team of more than 70 international scientists united ecosystem respiration measurements performed with flux chambers in tundra warming experiments to better understand the patterns of carbon release in response to climate warming. The photo shows an open-top chamber in which respiration is being measured on Svalbard.© Matteo Petit Bon

This study represents the first assessment of the respiration response to warming across such a broad environmental gradient in the tundra, incorporating a comprehensive set of environmental drivers. © Matteo Petit Bon

The team of over 70 scientists included Dr. Maria Strack in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management. They used a tool called open-top chambers, which act like mini-greenhouses, to simulate climate warming around the world. T he researchers compared data from inside and outside the se devices and found the devices led to a 1.4°C rise in air temperature and a 0.4°C increase in soil temperature, accompanied by a 1.6% decrease in soil moisture. This warming triggered a remarkable 30% increase in carbon release that persisted for at least 25 years after the start of the experimental warming.

The study also revealed that the size of the increase varied depending on local soil conditions such as nitrogen and pH levels and it showed that the sustained response across decades does not wane in the long term, which was unclear until now.

“The increase in carbon dioxide release that we observed came from both greater soil and plant activity,” Strack says. “Future work will need to figure out if these increases in plant growth are enough to balance out the observed increase in carbon emission.”

The researchers note that Canada exhibits greater sensitivity to warming, but additional field work is key to addressing the outstanding uncertainties and refine predictions.

“Investment in long-term northern research stations is key to understanding how these regions will respond to climate change,” Strack says. “This study is an excellent example of the important insights that can be gained when standard methods are adopted by research teams allowing comparison among studies.”

In the future, this real-world data on the relationship between soil conditions and respiration can improve climate models used to predict future carbon emissions. The more real-world information we can input into models, the better predictions will be.

The study, Environmental drivers of increased ecosystem respiration in a warming tundra , appears in the journal Nature.

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Disease-resistant strains of carp provide advancements in aquaculture, enhance gefilte fish quality

by Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A new study led by Prof. Lior David from the Faculty of Agriculture at the Hebrew University investigated the infectivity of disease-resistant and susceptible fish by examining their roles as shedders (infecting) and cohabitants (infected) in various combinations. The study focused on common carp; a species that's commonly cultivated in aquaculture.

Infectious diseases pose significant challenges to the health and welfare of both humans and animals. While breeding genetically resistant animals is a sustainable solution for healthy food production, providing unique research opportunities, the relationship between resistance and infectivity remains poorly understood.

The study revealed that fish resistant to the virus exhibited lower viral loads in their spleens and demonstrated higher survival rates compared to susceptible fish. Susceptible fish infected by resistant counterparts experienced reduced mortality rates compared to those infected by other susceptible fish. Additionally, tanks housing resistant fish exhibited decreased viral levels in the water, leading to lower infection of other fish within the tank.

The research paper , titled "Disease resistance and infectivity of virus susceptible and resistant common carp strains," is published in Scientific Reports .

Prof. Lior David, the lead researcher of the study, commented, "The study provides experimental evidence that resistance to cyprinid herpes virus type 3 reduces infectivity due to a host mechanism that restricts viral replication and pathogen shedding. This not only benefits aquaculture production but also contributes to reducing virus propagation and disease spread in natural water bodies."

These results demonstrate that disease-resistant fish not only survive better but also reduce the infection rate in others. This has significant implications for aquaculture production and disease epidemiology. The study highlights the importance of breeding disease-resistant animals for sustainable food production and animal welfare .

Journal information: Scientific Reports

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Warming Ocean Could Harm Octopus Vision

• by Andy Fell
• April 16, 2024

A few degrees of ocean warming could leave octopuses unable to see, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Adelaide, Australia and UC Davis. Embryo octopus raised in warmer waters lacked proteins essential to vision and had a high mortality rate.  

The work was led by Qiaz Hua, at the time a graduate student working with Bronwyn Gillanders at the University of Adelaide. Hua had contacted Dietmar Kültz, professor of animal science at UC Davis, to act as an external advisor on her Ph.D. thesis. Kültz’s lab studies how environmental stresses affect the profile of proteins (the proteome) produced by aquatic animals.

Hua raised hatchling octopuses in the lab under three temperature conditions: 19 C controls; 22 C, corresponding to present-day summer ocean temperatures off southern Australia; and 25 C, predicted for the end of this century. She worked with the Southern Keeled octopus, Octopus berrima, a common species on the south Australian coast. Octopuses rely heavily on vision to find food, avoid predators and communicate with each other. 

Analyses in Kültz’s lab at UC Davis showed that octopuses raised under projected future temperatures lacked crystallin, an important structural protein in the lens of both octopus and human eyes, and other eye-related proteins. They also showed signs of cellular stress responses and had a much lower survival rate compared to embryos raised under control and present-day conditions.

The results suggest that in a warming ocean, octopuses are likely to have impaired vision if they even survive to maturity, Hua said in a news release.

“Our study shows that even for a highly adaptable taxon like octopuses, they may not be able to survive future ocean changes,” she said.

The paper was published April 4 in Global Change Biology . Additional authors on the paper are Kathryn Wiltshire at the University of Adelaide and Zoe Doubleday at the University of South Australia. The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Media Resources

Projected ocean temperatures impair key proteins used in vision of octopus hatchlings (Global Change Biology)

Heat stress from ocean warming harms octopus vision (University of Adelaide news release)

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