The social dimensions of climate change: climate change, capitalism and sustainable wellbeing

Climate change threatens human wellbeing across the world and into the future. It poses an existential challenge with no past parallels: ‘a truly complex and diabolical policy problem’ (Steffen 2011). Human wellbeing obviously depends on Earth’s support systems, and these are many and varied and, crucially, interactive. For the past 10 000 years – the Holocene – these systems have maintained a relatively stable state, forming the ecological foundations for the emergence of human civilisation. Now a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, has been identified, where human activities start to have a significant – and negative – global impact on Earth’s ecosystems.