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This chapter situates the INTERSECTION programme of research within wider international debates regarding the relationship between consumption and climate change. It explores how this relationship is addressed in arguments for environmental justice and sustainable development, and how it is reflected in international policy-making. This discussion highlights how climate change is typically cast as both an international and intergenerational injustice, or the convergence of a ‘global storm’ and an ‘intergenerational storm’. This chapter also situates the original contribution of the book within recent social science scholarship that explores how people live with a changing climate, advocating a ‘human sense’ of climate and social change, and outlines the main themes of the subsequent empirical chapters.

When asking people across diverse geographical and cultural contexts about the impact of climate change on their lives, it is important to take into account how the idea of climate – and thus of climate change – may be differently conceptualised. This chapter explores urban residents’ perceptions of living with a changing climate, the cultural construction of climate change, and how it is conflated with local weather and high-visibility environmental problems such as air pollution, tree felling, industrial waste and changing land use. It discusses how local explanatory narratives differ in their treatment of climate change as remote in space and time or immediate and locally-rooted; and how this affects the extent to which people feel it has a direct impact on their lives. It argues that residents across Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield were more or less anxious about climate change not only as a consequence of different levels of regional exposure, but also as a result of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate shocks, and the perceived physical deterioration or improvement of their immediate environment as a consequence of urban infrastructural change.

Taking ‘Youth Strike 4 Climate’ as a starting point, this chapter outlines how climate change is commonly framed as an issue of intergenerational injustice, and how this intersects with arguments for sustainable development. It introduces the INTERSECTION project, its empirical focus on the human sense of climate and social change in Jinja, Nanjing and Sheffield, the rationale for focussing on these cities and world regions, and the fieldwork undertaken to inform this book. It also critically reflects on methodological issues in cross-cultural and cross-national research, and how the research team addressed issues of cross-cultural comparability in the design, collection and analysis of data.