Introduction

This chapter seeks to situate the INTERSECTION programme of research within wider international debates regarding the relationship between consumption and climate change. We consider how this relationship is addressed in arguments for environmental justice and sustainable development, and how it is reflected in international policymaking. Our discussion highlights how climate change is typically cast as both an international and intergenerational injustice, or the convergence of a ‘global storm’ and an ‘intergenerational storm’ (Gardiner, 2006). This demonstrates the need for research with both a cross-national and cross-generational perspective that explores people's lived experiences of climate change and how they relate this to their own and other people's historical and contemporary patterns of consumption. We situate our research within recent social science scholarship that explores how people live with a changing climate, advocating a ‘human sense’ of climate and social change (Hulme, 2017). Finally, we introduce the main themes and original contribution of our work in Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield with an overview of the subsequent chapters, which are based on the analysis of a unique body of primary data.

Consumption and climate change

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, unsustainable forms of consumption have contributed to global environmental degradation and climate change. The link between consumption and climate change is well-established, with overwhelming evidence of unprecedented levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels largely attributed to global economic growth, driven by mass-production and consumption (IPCC, 2014: 4). Natural and social scientists have argued that the scale of human impact on the planet is now so significant that it constitutes a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which represents ‘a threshold marking a sharp change in the relationship of humans to the natural world’ (Hamilton et al, 2015: 3). To illustrate just how transformational industrialization has been of our capacity to consume natural resources, Berners-Lee and Clark (2013) observe that annual energy consumption today is equivalent to each person on the planet having more than 100 full-time servants doing manual work on their behalf.