Forty years ago last month, about 70 climate scientists and environmental policy analysts convened in the Austria town of Villach for a conference organized under the auspices of UNEP, the WMO and ICSU titled, ‘An Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and of Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts’. This meeting is widely regarded as laying the foundations for establishing an ‘international climate change regime’ for controlling human influences on the climate system.  Managing the risks of a changing global climate has been framed in many ways over the intervening 40 years.  During this period, the world has warmed by nearly 1°C but—perhaps more importantly—it has also changed geopolitically in unpredicted ways.  In this talk, I will briefly survey the changing policy framing of climate change since Villach in 1985, and what these frames have and have not achieved.  As the international climate regime originally designed in the 1990s continues to strain, and begins to fragment, new ways of thinking about the ‘climate issue’ are needed. Rather than being a planetary emergency, climate change feels more like a political epic: “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”

Bio: Mike Hulme is professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge.  Prior to joining Cambridge in 2017, he held academic positions at King’s College London, the University of East Anglia, the University of Salford (1984-1988), and been a visiting academic at the University of Zimbabwe (Harare) and at the Rachel Carson Centre at Ludwig Maximilian University, Münich.  Hulme’s work illuminates the numerous ways in which the idea of climate change is deployed in public, political, religious and scientific discourse.  He is the author of over 170 peer-reviewed articles and 12 books on climate change including, most recently, ‘Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism’ (Polity, 2023) and, co-editor, ‘A Critical Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ (CUP, 2022).  He is the author of the widely acclaimed ‘Why We Disagree About Climate Change’ (CUP, 2009).  From 2000 to 2007, Hulme was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and between 2009 and 2020 was the founding editor-in-chief of the review journal WIREs Climate Change.  In 2007 he received a personal certificate recognising his contribution to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC.

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The David Bradford Energy and Environmental Policy Seminar Series is coordinated by the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE), and co-sponsored by the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI). This seminar is also co-sponsored by the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination.

This in-person event is open to the public. Princeton University community members do not need to RSVP. Members of the general public should RSVP to ccrosby@princeton.edu and will be accommodated as space allows.

This seminar will be livestreamed at http://mediacentrallive.princeton.edu/ and videos of the recordings are posted on C-PREE's YouTube channel within a week or two after the event.

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