On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Prof. Mark Pennington interviews Prof. Michael Hulme from Cambridge University. This episode is titled “Culture, Science, and the Predicament of Climate Change”, where he suggests looking at climate change challenges as predicaments for human societies to cope with.

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The Guest

Professor Michael Hulme is Professor of Human Geography and Fellow and Geography Director of Studies at Pembroke College at Cambridge University.

He studies the cultural and epistemic construction of the idea of climate change, and its discursive and material effects, drawing upon scientific, social scientific and humanities insight. His work has appeared in academic journals in the sciences, social sciences and humanities and has profoundly shaped the way in which the idea of climate-change is being studied, communicated and mobilised, in both the academy and public life.

From 2000 to 2007, he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a multi-institutional and inter-disciplinary research centre based at the University of East Anglia (UEA). For 12 years prior to establishing the Tyndall Centre, he worked in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at UEA. While working in CRU, he specialised in the compilation and analysis of global climate datasets and the construction and application of climate change scenarios for impact, adaptation and integrated assessment. He led the preparation of a series of climate scenarios and reports for the UK Government and in 2007 received a personalised certificate from the Nobel Peace Prize committee in recognition of my ‘significant contribution’ to the work of the United Nations’ IPCC. Since 2008, he has also been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change, with a Citescore (2019) of 12.4.

Professor Hulme’s most recent book, published in July 2021, is ‘Climate Change‘ in the Routledge Series Key Ideas in Geography. Prior to this, he published Contemporary Climate Change Debates: A Student Primer (Routledge, 2020), an edited collection which presents 15 important debates raised by climate change, each addressed by pairs of leading scholars from around the world.