Lay Rationalities of Climate Change (PDF)

Climate Change (CC) is now widely recognized as the major environmental problem facing the globe and is one of the pillars of the Europe Union 2020 strategy. Nowadays a lot of efforts have been put on scientific research in this area, particularly in the hard science field that take as their object the natural factors in the strict sense, implied therein. Nevertheless the knowledge that we have at present, that alerts us immediately to the multidimensionality of the CC, it tells us little about its social dimension. The relationship between nature and society are one of the dichotomies that researchers are struggling in finding scientifically informed understandings about the phenomena under study. Indeed it is not possible to understand climate change without identifying the relationships that are established between nature, society and its culture. Likewise it is not possible to work in this CC field, putting aside those dimensions. Climate change social dimension is fundamental to understand not only because CC has consequences on human communities, but also because human action affects the emergence, development and reaction to the phenomena. In this e-book we are interested in revealing the level of concepts and the level of social action, trying to contribute to the answer of questions like: How local populations explain, interpret and deal with climate change? What are the individual and collective actions in response to climate change? How do populations deal with Climate Change mitigation (risk perception and risk-mitigating)? What is the available traditional knowledge about Climate Change? How does the culture and believes deal with Climate Change?