Responding to environmental change: A new age for human geography?

Abstract

This progress report discusses the role that human geography can potentially play in a paradigm shift in global environmental change research. As the global discourse shifts from understanding and explaining environmental problems to addressing them quickly and effectively, there is a need to integrate insights from the social sciences and humanities into a new science of global change — a science that recognizes subjectivity and emphasizes the notion of change, including transformational social change. Four themes are presented as examples of why and how human geographers might lead in the development of this new science.