Regional geographies of climate change

Abstract

This essay is a commentary on Peter Taylor's article ‘The geographical ontology challenge in attending to anthropogenic climate change: regional geography revisited’. Taylor's article develops, in the context climate change, several themes that he has outlined during his long career. This commentary focuses particularly on the contested (discursive) regional, regional geographical and state‐centric frames critically examined in Taylor's paper. Despite the mushrooming literature on climate change, ontological issues related to regionality/spatialities explored by Taylor have been largely overlooked. He introduces a useful multi‐scalar and multi‐dimensional framework for problematizing the ontologies of the spatialities related to climate change emergency. This commentary focuses on this framework in the context of regional geography. Since regional/territorial, particularly state‐centric frames are frequently taken for granted, Taylor's proposal is very welcome and provides a valuable addition not only to the debate on climate change but also to the ongoing resurgence of regional geography and regional thinking.

Juggling Complexities

“…Back to Scott: the regions used in data systems should not become alternative spatial data to state‐istics; another simple spatial framing of the world. Paasi's (2023) contribution assures us this need not happen.…”

“…Anssi Paasi (2023) locates my promotion and creation of regions within the large corpus of geographical scholarship on the natures of regions. He identifies three interpretations of region: (i) taken‐for–granted or ‘pre‐scientific’ category; (ii) discipline defining (i.e.…”