ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Durkheim’s notion of solidarity. As it is argued in Sociological Social Work, the profession has adopted increasingly individualist discourses, such as those associated with the therapeutic turn in society. The chapter highlights the role that society plays in individual experience. Impacts of climate change are already especially severe for those who are poor and with constrained or limited individual and/or collective means to cushion the impacts of climate change, and/or adapt their homes, means of production, living circumstances and environmental practices as the weather changes. Social workers have a crucial role to play in interventions related to climate change, and in some contexts this will be a direct role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, while in other contexts it will be a more indirect role such as working with communities, families and women and men who are experiencing the impacts of climate change. These ideas of social solidarity have resonance to the social work mission.
