Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Many accounts of climate change depict disasters striking faraway places: melting ice caps, fearsome hurricanes, all-consuming fires. How can seeing the consequences of human impacts up close help us grasp how global warming affects us and our neighbors? This book is a travelogue that spotlights what a changing climate looks like on the local level—for wherever local happens to be. Michael M. Gunter, Jr. takes readers around the United States to bear witness to the many faces of the climate crisis. He argues that conscientious travel broadens understanding of climate change and makes its dangers concrete and immediate. Vivid vignettes explore the consequences for people and communities: sea level rise in Virginia, floods sweeping inland in Tennessee, Maine lobsters migrating away from American territorial waters, and imperiled ecosystems in national parks, from Alaskan permafrost to the Florida Keys. But Gunter finds inspiring initiatives to mitigate and adapt to these threats, including wind turbines in a tiny Texas town, green building construction in Kansas, and walkable urbanism in Portland, Oregon. These projects are already making a difference—and they underscore the importance of local action. Drawing on interviews with government officials, industry leaders, and alternative energy activists, Climate Travels emphasizes direct personal experience and the centrality of environmental justice. Showing how travel can help bring the reality of climate change home, it offers readers a hopeful message about how to take action on the local level themselves.

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

The contribution of tourism to climate change and the likely effects of climate change on tourist destinations have been well reported and discussed, however there is a lack of evidence-based systematic advice as to how the industry should respond. This book addresses the gap between our increasing understanding of the drivers and consequences of climate change, and practical advice for mitigation and adaptation. This text acknowledges the importance of a sound conceptual understanding of climate change and considers how the industry might best respond. This approach relies upon the roles of supportive policies and institutions and is presented through critically assessed case studies from across the world. These examples support an overall framework which provides a methodology for translating adaptation and mitigation policies into practice.

Written by a leading geographer of climate, this book offers a unique guide to students and general readers alike for making sense of this profound, far-reaching, and contested idea. It presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present, and a future. In ten carefully crafted chapters, Climate Change offers a synoptic and inter-disciplinary understanding of the idea of climate change from its varied historical and cultural origins; to its construction more recently through scientific endeavour; to the multiple ways in which political, social, and cultural movements in today’s world seek to make sense of and act upon it; to the possible futures of climate, however it may be governed and imagined. The central claim of the book is that the full breadth and power of the idea of climate change can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. This vantage point is what the book offers, written from the perspective of a geographer whose career work on climate change has drawn across the full range of academic disciplines. The book highlights the work of leading geographers in relation to climate change; examples, illustrations, and case study boxes are drawn from different cultures around the world, and questions are posed for use in class discussions. The book is written as a student text, suitable for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses that embrace climate change from within social science and humanities disciplines. Science students studying climate change on inter-disciplinary programmes will also benefit from reading it, as too will the general reader looking for a fresh and distinctive account of climate change.

Climate change is the single most important global environmental and development issue facing the world today and has emerged as a major topic in tourism studies. Climate change is already affecting the tourism industry and is anticipated to have profound implications for tourism in the twenty-first century, including consumer holiday choices, the geographic patterns of tourism demand, the competitiveness and sustainability of destinations and the contribution of tourism to international development. Tourism and Climate Change: Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of climate change and tourism at the tourist, enterprise, destination and global scales. Major themes include the implications of climate change and climate policy for tourism sectors and destinations around the world, tourist perceptions of climate change impacts, tourism’s global contribution to climate change, adaptation and mitigation responses by all major tourism stakeholders, and the integral links between climate change and sustainable tourism. It combines a thorough scientific assessment of the climate-tourism interrelationships with discussion of emerging mitigation and adaptation practice, showcasing international examples throughout the tourism sector as well as actions by other sectors that will have important implications for tourism. Written by three leading academics in this field, this critical contribution highlights the challenges of climate change within the tourism community and provides a foundation for decision making for both reducing the risks, and taking advantage of the opportunities, associated with climate change. This comprehensive discussion of the complexities of climate change and tourism is essential reading for students, academics, business leaders and government policy makers.