Foreword: The Politics of Climate Change

Abstract

In 2012, then aspiring presidential candidate (and current President of the United States) Donald Trump tweeted that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Five years later, President Trump pushes for the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Accord. Meanwhile, it is commonplace by now to say that the world has entered the Anthropocene, referring to the way that human activity has permanently changed the Earth’s ecosystem and is the most important factor shaping it at the present. Intuitively speaking, the consequences of climate change on global, regional and domestic politics are expected to be profound. But what are the consequences of climate change on state to state, state to non-state, non-state to non-state relations?