The Chair's theme for the 2023 Annual International Conference is Climate changed geographies, selected by the Chair of conference, Professor Harriet Bulkeley (Durham University, UK), in conversation with the Society's Research Groups and with the Research and Higher Education Committee.
We welcome submissions for the conference programme which engage directly with this theme, as well as others focusing on all areas of geography.
We have put together a virtual issue of recent publications that speak to the conference theme.
Read the virtual issue
Climate changed geographies
If once confined to specialist branches of the physical sciences, understanding the nature, dynamics and meaning of climate change has now spilled out across the academy and society, becoming a subject of sociology, art, computing and chemistry and of course geography. Yet what it means to know and inhabit a climate changed academy, and how this in turn shapes how we come to understand climate change and the ways it is changing the worlds with and around us, is more often taken for granted than explored.
With the theme Climate changed geographies the RGS-IBG 2023 conference invites a conversation about how climate change is, and is not, changing our discipline – our ways of knowing, exploring, understanding and acting geographically – and with what consequences. It also opens up debates about the kinds of geographies – urban, political, social, cultural, economic, regional, glacial, fluvial and more – that are and are not being changed by climate change. It will bring specific focus to work across the discipline and in related fields that seeks to understand how climate change is impacting our social and natural worlds and the ways in which it is shaping imaginaries, identities, conflicts, communities, places and processes. Taking forward these ideas also means bringing questions of how the very notion of change has been addressed geographically. Across the wider lexicon used to describe and determine climate changed pasts and futures, notions of transition and increasingly transformation dominate. This theme invites geographers to consider how ideas of time and change, past, future and present are being addressed in the discipline and the ways in which these might be productively bought into dialogue with climate change.
Taking up this theme also opens up the possibility for us to explore different ways of doing the annual conference in relation to climate change. Building on past sustainability initiatives, we will be running one day of plenaries from hubs across the globe, and connected together across time zones.