Climate change is a multi-layered earth system phenomenon measurable in a variety of natural and environmental settings: polar ice sheets, marine ecosystems, boreal forests, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. We tend to associate it most commonly with marked changes in the weather and particularly in extreme meteorological events, from superstorms to droughts and heatwaves, which are increasing in frequency and intensity across the globe.

But climate change is more than a scientific issue. It is also an inherently social process. Its causes are inherently human, from the way we have chosen to organise our way of life these past hundred years or so, by creating highcarbon societies dependent on fossil fuels and their myriad derivatives to the way we have encroached upon the natural environment and its diverse resources to maintain that particular way of life. We have lived a nonrenewable culture, one that was always going to reach the end of the line.

It is widely accepted that human activity precipitated global warming and as a result changed the planetary climate system. Experts agree that if we do not immediately mobilise to prevent an increase in the earth’s temperature beyond 1.5C degrees from pre-industrial levels, significant, irreversible damage will occur across multiple environments and ecosystems, scalar changes that will have cascading effects across all regions and societies on earth.

These will impact at local and planetary levels: from our secure habitats and species biodiversity to our mental and physical health, from the buildings we live in to the clothes we wear, the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Climate change will transform our political, economic and financial systems, our transport, energy and agricultural infrastructures. It will change employment, from the way we work to the kinds of jobs we have. Our leisure and consumption patterns will all be subject to a range of changes that will become more drastic and severe depending on the scale and rate of the temperature increase and its related feedbacks.

The solutions to the problems we now face in climate breakdown depend on our ability to realise the scale of this challenge and make the necessary societal changes and adaptations to confront and mitigate it. Many people are already experiencing adverse effects of climate change around the world. In other places, however, there remains a discernibly false sense of complacency that ‘it will not be as bad here’. This is wishful thinking. No matter where we come from, climate change will produce changes and present formidable challenges in many aspects of all our lives in the coming decades. The time to react, act and adapt to mitigate these threats is now. And it is important to emphasise that this is not all about loss and grief for the world we made. If we transition in the right way, one that is just and spread wide, we can create real gains from the social and technical transformation to low-carbon society.