Free Articles on Climate Change

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Dancing in the monsoon. A still from Roland Joffé's City of Joy (1992)

Grieneisen and Zhang describe the recent “striking growth in funding and publication of climate change research” in a 2011 piece in Nature Climate Change. They point out, “A deeper understanding of current climate change and the mitigation of its potential future effects are among the greatest challenges facing modern science and society as a whole.”

So far, so obvious.

Equally obvious is how problematic it is to access the scholarly literature (I can’t for instance, get into Grieneisen and Zhang’s full text!), especially for independent researchers, grassroots practitioners or interdisciplinary researchers whose institutions may not necessarily subscribe to all the journals they require.

So here’s an initiative that makes a tiny, time-limited contribution: Taylor and Francis are providing free access to 140 articles on climate change picked from within their journals until the 31st of May 2012.

This won’t give everyone everything they need or want to read, but it’s something.

To access the articles, register here. Once your registration is confirmed, go here.

In the coming days and weeks, we’d like to identify a selection of papers that pertain to climate change impacts and adaptation within Ecocultures. It’d be great if our readers could help! If you do get a chance to access this trove of articles and pull up something that is relevant, please let us know via a comment to this post or on our Facebook page.

Happy reading!

Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets

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Upsetting the Offset. 2010. Edited by Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi. Mayfly Books.

Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures.

Endorsement for Upsetting the Offset: 

  • “If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom! But this book is far from resigned to that fate. After examining the case against carbon trading… the book turns to alternatives, to hope, to sanity, and to the future.’ Professor Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London 
  • “Anyone concerned about the future of the planet (is anyone not?) should read this book. The contributors give powerful evidence and argument to show that the carbon trading regimes favoured by the world’s elites will not work – and are, indeed, set to make things worse. But the message is not negative. There are alternatives, both effective and desirable.” Professor Ted Benton, University of Essex 
See more on the book on the publishers’ website.

Environmental Knowledge in Motion: Ingenuity and Perseverance of Hunters among North Greenland

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Dog sleds, North Greenland. Photo: Hayashi Naotaka

Background: This case study examines responses to climate change amongst hunters in Avanersuaq, North Greenland. It highlights how climate change impacts and adaptations interact with social, cultural and economic dimensions. Accordingly, the impact of climate change differs from place to place.  In addition, the perception of climate change varies from the local to the national levels. Just one example of this is that there is a growing expectation that climate change may bring an opportunity to the inhabitants of South Greenland, which makes South Greenland an interesting place to analyze.  This is very different from other places in the Circumpolar North, for example, Nunavut, Canada, where climate change is always thought to bring about a negative impact to the local people.  The study of Greenland always teaches me how the perception of environmental change influences and shapes the future vision of community.

Hayashi Naotaka

About the author: Having earned a B.Agri/Forestry (1995) at the University of Tokyo, Tokyo (ca. 36˚N), Hayashi Naotaka worked for the Government of Hokkaido (ca. 43˚N), the northernmost prefecture in Japan.  As a Forestry and Biological Technologist, he was involved mainly in forest protection, from entomological research to pest control, during 1995-2002.  This professional experience led him to study the social dimension of forest management in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton (ca. 53˚N), Canada.  His MA thesis is about the forest management cooperatively undertaken by a First Nation in northern Alberta (ca. 58˚N), the provincial government, and forest companies.  The study of the Cree people led to a general interest in the Circumpolar North.  Soon after, he moved on to the PhD program and chose to study the communities of North Greenland.