Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change: Transforming Knowledge and Practice for Our Global Future

In the opening chapter, Roy Bhaskar makes use of the extensive resources of critical realism to articulate a comprehensive framework for multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary understanding, one which duly takes account of ontological as well as epistemological considerations. Many of the subsequent chapters seek to show how this general approach can be used to make intellectual sense of the complex phenomena in and around the issue of climate change, including our response to it.

Among the issues discussed, in a number of graphic and compelling studies, by a range of distinguished contributors, both activists and scholars, are:

• The dangers of reducing all environmental, energy and climate gas issues to questions of carbon dioxide emissions
• The problems of integrating natural and social scientific work and the perils of monodisciplinary tunnel vision
• The consequences of the neglect of issues of consumption in climate policy
• The desirability of a care-based ethics and of the integration of cultural considerations into climate policy
• The problem of relating theoretical knowledge to practical action in contemporary democratic societies

Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change is essential reading for all serious students of the fight against climate change, the interactions between governmental bodies, and critical realism.