UC Merced Sociology Professor Paul Almeida is the editor of the newly published The Oxford Handbook of Climate Action, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary volume examining how societies around the world are responding to the urgent challenge of climate change.
Featuring 39 chapters by more than 60 authors, the handbook brings together scholarship on climate activism and policy across every continent. The volume presents major theoretical perspectives alongside concrete strategies for addressing climate change in the twenty-first century.
A central organizing theme of the handbook is the distinction between two broad forms of climate response: institutional climate action, involving governments, organizations and other formal institutions, and noninstitutional climate action, including grassroots organizing, social movements and activism.
The collection highlights the complexity of climate action and the importance of understanding climate change as not only a technological and environmental challenge, but also a fundamentally social and political one. Across its chapters, the handbook demonstrates why technological solutions alone are insufficient and underscores the indispensable contributions of the social sciences to understanding and addressing global warming.
Almeida’s work on the volume reflects the Department of Sociology’s commitment to understanding the social dimensions of some of the world’s most pressing challenges and to advancing research on collective action, social movements and global environmental change.
