Paper short abstract:

How do the social organization of time and social production of risk contribute to people’s understandings of climate change, identification of which climate impacts matter and at what timescale, and what are appropriate solutions? Questions are explored using theoretical and empirical insights.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have long examined how temporality and risk are differently understood across diverse cultures. Here, these anthropological insights are extended to explore how culturally- and context-specific perceptions of time, risk, and uncertainty contribute to understanding climate change and planning for climate-driven impacts. The paper presents illustrations from diverse contexts: Tuvalu, a low lying Pacific Island country facing sea level rise and shifting precipitation patterns; Alaskan coastal communities contending with sea ice loss and coastal erosion; and cities along the Colorado Front Range of the Rocky Mountains experiencing extreme flooding and drought. In each context, specific notions about time, risk, and uncertainty underlie how people in these communities perceive environmental transformations and manage threats. Importantly, these fundamental notions may differ from the assumptions about time, risk, and uncertainty that are held by those who produce climate information and who propose large-scale climate policies. The implications is that infusing more diverse understandings of time and planning, risk and risk reduction, and what is knowable or how much uncertainty is acceptable, into the production of climate science and policy might serve to expand how we think about climate challenges and, in turn, how we design strategies to address them.