ABSTRACT
This Introduction outlines the origins, aims, and intellectual contribution of Climate Futures Across Disciplines: A Next Generation Approach. The volume emerges from the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds and reflects the Centre’s commitment to fostering interdisciplinary engagement among a selected cohort of early-career researchers (“the Priestley Scholars”). Contributors were invited to situate their doctoral work within the horizon of climate futures, extending their disciplinary expertise towards wider societal, ecological, and political questions. Rather than analysing the most severe high-emissions pathways, the chapters examine climate futures at grounded, practicable scales: Energy systems, transport networks, sanitation infrastructures, river basins, legal norms, artistic practices, and perceptual experience. This orientation reveals both the value of situated analyses and the challenge of linking them to the global dynamics of accelerating climate risk. The Introduction synthesises the book’s three-part structure: The imagination of climate futures through arts-based practice and deep-time science, the design of climate-relevant systems in transport, electricity, and water governance, and the governance of climate futures through sanitation, extractive economies, carbon markets, and environmental rights. It concludes by identifying unresolved questions concerning political mobilisation, structural inertia, and interdisciplinary integration, positioning the volume as both a contribution to climate scholarship and a foundation for future work.
