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When urgency feels distant: rethinking social perceptions of climate change among social sciences and humanities researchers
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Resumo(s)
Despite a high degree of intellectual and professional engagement with the climate crisis, researchers within the social sciences and humanities often perceive this phenomenon as temporally deferred and spatially distant. Drawing on survey data from 85 researchers—European and non-European—collected under the COST Action SHiFT (CA21166), this paper interrogates a disjunction between abstract awareness and lived immediacy. While 87.7% of respondents recognise climate change as a global threat, only 60.5% identify it as a serious local issue, and a mere 50.6% connect it to their daily lives. These findings reveal not so much a paradox as a patterned affective distance, shaped by socio-geographical location, generational positionalities, and divergent epistemic cultures. The study also highlights the mediating role of emotional and spiritual dispositions. For some, climate change is framed within theological or metaphysical narratives that attenuate the urgency of intervention; for others, unacknowledged emotional responses contribute to disengagement or inertia. At the same time, pockets of creativity and empathetic praxis—often among younger scholars—point toward emerging modes of climate engagement that resist conventional dichotomies between science and affect, knowledge and belief. Rather than interpreting this dissonance as a deficit, the paper calls for a reframing of climate engagement within higher education institutions. We argue for strategies rooted in place-based education, interdisciplinary collaboration, and emotionally attuned pedagogies. This study invites a recalibration of how we theorise climate engagement: not as a linear function of knowledge acquisition or moral commitment, but as a layered, dynamic process entangled with scales of perception, collective imaginaries, and affective infrastructures.
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Citação
Alves, F., Vidal, D.G., Rollo, M.F. (2026). When Urgency Feels Distant: Rethinking Social Perceptions of Climate Change Among Social Sciences and Humanities Researchers. In: Leal Filho, W., Trevisan, L.V., Caeiro, S., Mapar, M., Trindade, J. (eds) Sustainability Transition and Global Citizenship in the Digital Era: Innovations in Universities. World Sustainability Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-22076-9_30
Editora
Springer