New Open-Access Book Showcases Next-Generation Thinking on Climate Futures

A new open-access book, developed through the Priestley Climate Scholars programme at the University of Leeds, brings together diverse perspectives on one of society's greatest challenges: how to build fairer and more sustainable climate futures.

Climate Futures Across Disciplines: A Next Generation Approach, co-edited by Professor Richard Beardsworth, Professor Viktoria Spaiser and Susan Ann Samuel, is now freely available to read online. The volume represents a collaborative effort by Priestley Climate Scholars at the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures to strengthen interdisciplinary climate change research through intergenerational collaboration.

Bringing together contributors from a wide range of academic disciplines, the book explores climate futures through innovative approaches that connect the arts, social sciences, law, governance, engineering and environmental sciences. The collection showcases how interdisciplinary thinking can generate new insights and actionable solutions for addressing the climate crisis.

The volume features a foreword by Professor Piers Forster CBE, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures, and a guest note from Leeds MP, Alex Sobel, highlighting the importance of collaborative approaches to climate action.

Piers said the following in his foreword;

[this book] shows how our PhD students are already making a huge difference to society, delivering new ideas to the world.

A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration of Climate Futures

The book's chapters span an impressive breadth of topics and perspectives, including:

• Creative climate communication through giant puppetry and participatory public engagement.
• Lessons from the Pliocene climate, around three million years ago, to better understand the dynamics, limits and implications of warmer future climates.
• Arts-based and ecosomatic practices that foster ecological awareness and help reimagine climate futures.
• Systems-thinking approaches to exploring a fair and equitable net-zero transport transition in the UK by 2050.
• The role of electricity market design in delivering a clean and reliable power system.
• Climate adaptation through water governance and international aid in West Java, Indonesia.
• The development of equitable and climate-adaptive sanitation systems to support resilient urban futures.
• Community-led approaches to improving water infrastructure in Adukrom, a gold mining settlement in Ghana.
• Critical analysis of Article 6 carbon markets following the Paris Agreement.
• The role of the right to a healthy environment in advancing climate justice through legal and political frameworks.

The collection concludes with reflections from the editors on the key lessons emerging from the volume, its limitations and future directions for climate futures research.

Collaboration for Climate Action

The book reflects the ambition of the Priestley Climate Scholars programme to foster meaningful collaboration across disciplines and generations of researchers. By bringing together diverse forms of knowledge and expertise, the volume demonstrates how innovative thinking can help tackle the complex social, environmental and political dimensions of climate change.

The result is a timely contribution that is both intellectually ambitious and grounded in real-world challenges, offering inspiration for researchers, policymakers and practitioners alike.

As it says in the conclusion section of the book:

For the Priestley Climate Scholars who became authors of this volume, this project was a passionate exercise in doing justice to oneself. Susan Ann Samuel recounts how the authors had to “choose” being part of this project along with their doctoral work, jobs, and/or research. It was not easy. But for the authors, this was a pursuit of hope—that their research could, individually and collectively, tell a story: a story of resilience, strength, and deep conviction.

Read Climate Futures Across Disciplines: A Next Generation Approach for free: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/read-online/2be484fe-23c0-4041-8fb8-03db96876fda/book/epub?context=ubx