WIREs: A New Approach to Understanding Climate Change

Published in association with the Royal Meteorological Society and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), WIREs Climate Change brings together experts from across the climate change spectrum, including the social sciences as well as the physical and environmental sciences, to offer authoritative reviews, discussions and debates on every facet of climate change research.

"Climate change has to be understood both as physical change and increasingly as an idea that is changing society and the way people think of the future," said Editor-In-Chief Professor Mike Hulme. "Researchers have to understand and illuminate the ways different facets of the phenomenon are shaping each other."

Recent events in Copenhagen attest to the lack of global consensus on many issues surrounding mitigation and adaptation to climate change. In the inaugural issue of WIREs Climate Change, debates over the ethics of climate change can be found alongside reviews of the political effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol.

"Interdisciplinary research is a widely lauded aspiration and a frequently claimed necessity in advancing human understanding of troubling or important phenomena, and climate change is without doubt one of these," adds Hulme. "We believe that WIREs Climate Change is a project that can play an active role in the construction of new knowledge about climate change by stimulating research reviews that demand new ways of thinking in both author and readers."