Introduction: A Wealth of Lived Experience

We need to understand better the societal responses to the idea and reality of climate change. Analysis of lived experiences enables us to embark on that task. Lived experiences, however, even when we try to make sense of them as collective experiences, are extremely diverse. This chapter describes and analyses the experiences of flood victims in affluent countries, vulnerable forest communities in two poor countries, opposition to mitigation attempts, and two environmental activists. From these it creates a conceptualisation that is based on the interplay of broad contextual influences, proximate influences resulting from climate-related events, and the human capacity to reflect and learn from action and engagement with one another. It ends by providing three building blocks for the book as a whole: the conceptualisation that it has generated, the comparison with dominant scientific accounts of climate change, and the challenge of public engagement, action and policy for intervention.