Climate Change and #APSA2016

3 September 2016, 1118 EDT

With the G20 set to commence in Hangzhou, the United States and China today ratified the Paris Agreement, making it increasingly likely that it will enter into force by year’s end. This is a momentous occasion in climate diplomacy and speaks to the increasing political salience of this topic.

Yesterday, here at APSA, there was a fantastic roundtable on what political science has to say about this issue. The roundtable included some of the leading up and coming scholars writing about climate change including Jennifer Hadden, Johannes Urpelainen, Jessica Green, David Konisky, and Steven Vanderheiden.

Several of us Live-tweeted the event, which I’ve Storify-ied below. The panelists identified some of the important contributions in this space from David Victor, Matthew Hoffmann, Sikina Jinnah, Michelle Betsill, Robyn Eckersley,  among others.

They also identified big questions that merit more attention such as the need for more research on the politics of adaptation and maladaptation, studies of comparative domestic climate politics particularly in emerging economies, more research to leverage the extensive body of work on natural disasters, and understanding how public opinion can change and lead to behavior change.

The panelists also lamented how few scholars write on energy and the environment as their core issue. Jessica Green and Tom Hale have a forthcoming piece in PS that examines TRIP data to support these claims. Panelists talked about the challenges for PhD students to choose this line of work without senior faculty teaching and writing to pave the way and reliable funding to support academic work in this space. Interestingly, universities, other funders, and other disciplines are perhaps more interested than political scientists are in studying climate change.

The topic’s interdisciplinary nature and heavy start-up costs pose additional barriers to entry, but the discipline risks being left behind in what panelists regard as the overarching political challenge for the planet going forward. I hope junior scholars will see this is an opportunity for important research because this issue is not going away. See my Storify-ied tweets after the jump.