Introduction

This chapter examines how urban residents in Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield understand and narrate their experiences of ‘climate and the ways it might change’ (Brace and Geoghegan, 2010: 3). Scholars have highlighted a gulf between expert and lay knowledges of climate change, in particular the contrast between the abstract spatialities and timeframes of global geoscience, and local, grounded experiences of living with a changing climate. This suggests a vital role for social science in understanding the kinds of environmental knowledge that is privileged and valued by ordinary citizens, in particular how ‘big’ environmental concerns and everyday ‘small’ environments are connected (Phoenix et al, 2017). Bickerstaff and Walker (2001) argue that public understandings of global environmental change inevitably involve judgement, interpretation and ‘sense-making’, modes of perception that are inextricably tied to the local context. When asking people across diverse geographical and cultural contexts about the impact of climate change on their lives, it is important to take into account how the idea of climate – and thus of climate change – may be differently conceptualized (Sheridan, 2012; Eguavoen, 2013; Hulme, 2017).

Across Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield, our data reveals how residents similarly conflate climate change, weather and more visible, local environmental problems. However, their explanatory narratives differ in their treatment of climate change as remote in space and time or immediate and locally rooted, and this affects the extent to which people perceive climate change has a direct impact on their lives. We also explore generational perceptions of environmental change in the context of (de)industrialization of the urban landscape, contrasting the experience of the former ‘Steel City’ of Sheffield with narratives of urbanization and environmental decline in Jinja and Nanjing.

Introduction

Drawing on a unique data set, the previous chapters have discussed how residents of Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield engage selectively with the ‘global storm’ and the ‘intergenerational storm’ of climate change. This chapter focuses on the INTERSECTION programme's complementary use of intergenerational community-based research and creative practice to respond to some of the themes and challenges raised. It includes three case studies: a Write About Time workshop led by Sheffield poet Helen Mort; participatory research to support environmental knowledge sharing in Jinja; and a Sustainability Dancer public artwork created by Sheffield sculptor Anthony Bennett. Through these case studies we explore the potential for creative practice to cultivate longitudinal thinking, provoke intergenerational dialogue and inspire sustainable action. To conclude, reflecting on findings from across the programme, we discuss what our research contributes to understandings of environmental justice.

Intergenerational community-based research and creative Practice

The rationale for incorporating community-based, participatory and creative methodologies alongside conventional social research within the INTERSECTION programme was to explore the potential for coproduction, collaboration and arts practice to foster intergenerational dialogue.

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.

Introduction

This chapter considers what it means to consume sustainably in Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield, in particular how residents’ views on resource consumption are interwoven with anxieties about intergenerational value change (Inglehart, 2008). Sustainable consumption research has often neglected the Global South (Dermody et al, 2015; Ariztia et al, 2016; Liu, Valentine et al, 2018), or else it has emphasized the interdependencies of Northern consumers and Southern producers (Shanahan and Carlsson-Kanyama, 2005). There is, however, growing recognition of the globalization of consumer lifestyles and aspirations, and concern over the ecological implications of ‘new consumer’ trends in developing and transition countries (Myers and Kent, 2003). Our case study cities have very different histories and cultures of consumption, and we do not suggest equivalence in the impact or necessity of reducing consumption in each place. Rather, we are interested in how urban residents perceive local cultures of consumption and connect this with ideas about sustainable resource use. In this respect, we find common ground across Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield in narratives of scarcity, frugality and waste, and in the characterization of unsustainable consumption as a generational problem.

“People who once lived a poor life can spend money on what they like”

At different paces and drawing on different embedded histories in each city, urban residents identified ways in which local cultures of consumption had changed in living memory.

Introduction

Local ontologies of climate change – how people see the relationship between themselves, others and the changing climate – play an important role in mitigation, adaptation and willingness to assume responsibility for environmental stewardship. In this chapter, we examine contrasting moral readings of climate change, considering how urban residents’ perceptions of climate change in terms of its remoteness or proximity are interwoven with beliefs about the blameworthiness of local and global actors, individual efficacy and personal agency (Jamieson, 2010). The extent to which people view climate change as a distant problem for them, there and then (Marshall, 2014) has significant implications for public engagement. We consider both spatial and temporal framings of responsibility for climate change, including ‘industrial’ and ‘universal’ blame stances (Rudiak-Gould, 2014), how notions of caring for the future vis-à-vis direct descendants contribute to a relatively short-term ‘generational timescape’ (White, 2017), how livelihood insecurity risks ‘unimagining’ the future, and ambivalence towards historical responsibility.

Who is responsible for what? Climate change blame Narratives

The term ‘anthropogenic climate change’ casts human beings as culpable agents who have caused climate change, but climate change blame narratives can range from everyone to no one, variously placing responsibility with fossil fuel companies, affluent consumers, local and national government officials, a provoked God, capitalism, technological hubris, and past or present generations (Rudiak-Gould, 2014; Hulme, 2017). Climate change complicates conventional understandings of moral responsibility, because ‘it is not a matter of a clearly identifiable individual acting intentionally so as to inflict an identifiable harm on another identifiable individual, closely related in time and space’ (Jamieson, 2010: 437).

As we finish this book, schoolchildren are organizing mass walkouts under the banner of ‘Youth Strike 4 Climate’ as part of a global campaign for action on climate change. The movement, which began with 15-year-old Greta Thunberg protesting outside the Swedish Parliament, is the latest to draw attention to the intergenerational injustice of climate change, with today's politicians and adults blamed for short-changing the future. ‘We are going to have to pay for the older generation's mistakes’, one of the school strikers told the BBC (2019). In diverse international contexts, there is growing concern that prior and current generations have made choices that will severely curtail the ability of future generations to pursue their interests and to lead liveable lives (Vanderbeck and Worth, 2014).

Whether knowingly or not, the arguments put forward by these young protesters echo arguments for sustainable development that first rose to prominence in the late 1980s, such as those advanced by the publication of the Bruntland Commission report Our Common Future. Bruntland's definition of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987: 16) has become a common touchstone for sustainability advocates (Agyeman et al, 2002). Developing in parallel to sustainable development discourses, public debate on climate change has often focused on the need to safeguard the future, for example in the stark warning from Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, that ‘unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled’ (citied in Marshall, 2014: 29). These arguments are familiar, but coming from young people they sound unrehearsed, angry, and more urgent.

As Greta's one-girl school strike became international news, inspiring a movement of youth-led protests from Australia to Uganda, a new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the future catastrophe these young people hope to avoid is closer than we may imagine.