Landscape and climate change

In this chapter we review the current and future trajectories of landscape in the study of climate change across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. There are three main challenges of writing such a review. First, as noted elsewhere in this volume, there are multiple and sometimes competing definitions of landscape. The intractability of these definitions is compounded by the fact that they do not always map neatly onto conventional academic disciplines. Landscape is a unit of analysis well understood in the natural sciences as a particular scale of spatial analysis which has featured heavily in the literature on climate change (Brierley 2010). Landscape, in this instance, comprises all the physical, biological and cultural phenomena interacting in a region, exhibiting historical ‘depth’ in the shape of the residues of antecedent landscapes. This landscape is the object of study for geomorphologists, palaeobotanists, ecologists, archaeologists and others interested in examining the interactions between human and biophysical elements. In addition, landscape has also been theorized as explicitly cultural, the product of human agency, imagination and socio-spatial relations. Much depends on the epistemological and ontological status of landscape in any given study. A second challenge lies in the enormous size and motility of climate change as a topic,

which, like landscape, exhibits cross-disciplinary appeal, its study located in everything from physics and biology to sociology and literature. Climate change as a global problem has moved relatively swiftly into high profile political debates over the past twenty years or so, with a concomitant diffusion from the natural sciences into the social sciences (Batterbury 2008). The study of the human dimensions of climate change has been growing in momentum through research which attempts to describe and evaluate perceptions of climate change, understand more about risk and assess the construction of policy. Nevertheless, the work of social scientists in respect of climate change is clearly felt to be incomplete, judging by recent calls that important work still needs to be done to understand how individuals and communities respond to climate change based on ‘their needs, values, cultures, capacities, institutional forms and environmental features’ (Barnett 2010: 314). This offers the possibility of enriching scientific research and policy development, creating improved knowledge of the complexity of human-environment

systems and providing a more nuanced and effective response to global challenges, such as climate change. Finally, not only are the scholarly realms in which landscape and climate change come

together very diverse, there is also a significant area of policy to consider as governments and agencies strive to manage current landscapes for future change. For example, the publication of The Natural Choice Natural Environment White Paper (Defra 2011; see also Lawton et al. (2010) Making Space for Nature) in the UK puts landscape-scale working squarely at the heart of a vision of environmental management that uses an ecosystem services approach. A range of institutional strategic documents attempt to both identify how climate change will affect each institution’s operations, priorities and mission, and communicate this in a way that attempts to build a consensus around a shared vision of the future, grounded in the management of landscapes. These include the Wildlife Trust’s (2008) A Living Landscape; Natural England’s (2008) The Natural Environment: Adapting to Climate Change; the National Trust’s (2005) Shifting Shores; and the National Association for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’s concept of ‘Landscapes for Life’ which has at its heart ‘acceptance of the need to factor climate change resilience into decision making’ (AONB 2011). Fortunately these challenges are offset by some significant gains when thinking about land-

scape in relation to climate change. Landscape grounds the study of climate change, lending a materiality to the arcane and frequently incomprehensible science of models and predictions. It connects disciplines by operating as the site at which multi-, trans-and inter-disciplinary conversations might be had, drawing in policy makers and landscape management professionals charged with protecting landscapes valued for their productivity, fragility, beauty or habitat. Finally, landscapes feature in the collective imaginaries of people and communities across the planet, for whom senses of place and purpose are located in the familiar surroundings of their everyday lives. We begin by identifying the definitional problems of climate change, followed by a discus-

sion of how landscape has been used to examine climate change in recent academic research across the natural sciences, applied contexts and the social sciences and humanities. We then examine how a focus on the concept of ‘climate and the ways it might change’ (Brace and Geoghegan 2011) enables a fuller consideration of the importance of landscape to studies of, and adaptation to, climate change. We conclude with some directions for future research on landscape and climate change.