It's not every day you hear that the climate change debate needs to be "more political and less scientific" — but that is exactly what Mike Hulme is calling for.
The 2015 Paris agreement was declared "a victory for climate science", but Professor Hulme — who used to work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — is not convinced that the Paris deal will work.
In fact, he said he thought climate change was in danger of becoming a "fetish" and that rallying cries to "save the planet by limiting global warming to 2 degrees" could distract us from the "political logjam" in front of us.
"We can actually only deal with climate through the human imagination."
A human geographer at the University of Cambridge, Professor Hulme once advocated globally-negotiated national emission targets, but said he now thought the future lay with more local solutions — involving new "political coalitions" of unlikely bedfellows.
He said a focus on immediate "co-benefits" would give governments, businesses and individuals the incentives they needed to move away from fossil fuels or to create carbon sinks.
Think solar panels or wind farms for those without access to electricity; planting forests that protect catchments and provide shade from the searing heat; or replacing coal-fired power stations — not simply to cut carbon emissions, but to reduce deaths from air pollution.
This approach could be attractive to hundreds of millions of people across the planet, regardless of their views on global warming, Professor Hulme argued.
Recent research into local climate action in Australia supported this focus on co-benefits.
"Sometimes, framing actions as [tackling] climate change will not bring people into a community meeting. But framing it as making savings on energy bills will gain more traction," said Macquarie University geographer Donna Houston, who hosted a postgraduate workshop with Professor Hulme in Sydney last week.
Dr Houston said she thought climate change could still be a "very abstract concept" for many people, and for others it could feel "politicised in some way".
Her research found that when local councillors or community members were trying to gain support for climate action, they sometimes gave it a different label, such as "sustainability".
"It was often easier not to refer to climate change," she said.
"And anything that had co-benefits was a lot easier to get up and running."
More support for co-benefits
Co-benefits are "critically important", according to David Karoly, who heads up the CSIRO's Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub.
He is on the advisory board of the Climate and Health Alliance, a coalition of doctors worried about the immediate health effects of air pollution from burning fossil fuels.
Professor Karoly said the recent decrease in greenhouse emissions in the US, as well as a slowdown in China's emissions growth, were both encouraged by health co-benefits.
He pointed to the Lock the Gate coalition, which opposes coal seam gas developments on agricultural land and sees conservative radio host "Alan Jones … working closely with climate change mitigation advocates".
Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales, pointed to other examples.
"There are places in Texas that are rapidly taking up rooftop solar — even though most people there are pretty sceptical about global warming — because it enables them to be independent," Professor Sherwood said.
