The effects and management of climate change are a daily part of most scientific disciplines and public debate. We live in an unusual context that exacerbates socioeconomic, cultural, and political dynamics that, like Marc Augé ‘s (1993) non-places , transform the relationship between humans and nature into a constant transit, where ecosystems are nothing more than transit stations for large multinationals and states.

Together, they establish a relationship under the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, where social cooperation is based on market criteria. Under this logic of modernity separated from nature, analyzing climate change narratives helps us understand how we understand the current world and interpret contemporary sociocultural and political events.

Over the past six decades, various narratives have emerged as the growing severity of climate change and the search for effective strategies for its governance became apparent.

The national and international public sphere is resonating with debate about how to respond to the consensus on climate change and its devastating consequences, how to mitigate it, and how to adapt to it. A new term has even been coined, the Anthropocene , which refers to the impacts of anthropogenic activity on the planet, including climate change. It refers to the direct cause, which is anthropos ( ἄνθρωπος ), meaning “human being.”

Climate change narratives

In one of the latest studies in the field of climate narratives, three key narratives have been identified —apocalyptic environmentalism, green capitalism, and degrowth—whose evolution illustrates how we have narrated climate change, the role of humans in the Anthropocene, and the scenarios that confront us as risks and possibilities.

These are dichotomous and binary narratives due to the predominance and influence of green capitalism and degrowth. These movements are presented in a continuous spiral of competition and rivalry to seize narrative spaces and promote their climate actions through the backdrop they represent.

These narratives have created diverse frameworks for action and policy implementation for climate governance.

• Apocalyptic environmentalism predicts an imminent, practically irreversible collapse after decades of warning about the urgent need for radical policies to address climate change and its effects.
• Green capitalism, which emerged in the 1980s, has been linked to metanarratives such as sustainable development and the green economy.
• Degrowth, which emerged in the same period, has had a great intellectual impact, but so far has not become a real political alternative, overshadowed by the dominant discourse of progress and economic growth.

Even though the 2008 global crisis highlighted the fragility of the neoliberal system in managing natural resources and the lack of effective strategies to mitigate environmental impact, the warnings about overproduction, overexploitation, and climate overshoot were already well known. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself stated in 2021 that exceeding the 1.5°C threshold was inevitable. It didn’t take long: it was exceeded in 2024 .

Highlighting the diversity of narratives is not merely an academic exercise. It allows us to understand the types of arguments that support the actions of political actors, their practical effects, and their ethical implications. For example, funding programs for developing countries particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change may respond to diverse narratives that provide very different diagnoses and project very different economic models.

Are we all equally responsible?

Hence, when we talk about the effects of anthropogenic climate change, we must ask ourselves: which human being caused the problem, and where ? Do the concepts of overproduction, overexploitation, or climate overshoot mean the same thing in Germany as they do in Algeria? Is a North Atlantic state more responsible for these phenomena than a state located in the Maghreb region?

Undoubtedly, global inequalities and historical responsibility for emissions add a level of complexity that the green capitalism narrative fails to address holistically.

Based on data , Germany emitted 681.81 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂eq) in 2023, placing it among the 20 most polluting countries in the world. Meanwhile, Algeria emitted 256.79 Mt CO₂eq in the same year.

Thus, it is necessary to highlight the problems posed by climate narratives. It is essential to question the approach to green capitalism, which is based on certain conceptions of sustainable development and the green economy. These perspectives simply shift the problem of green capitalism to other spheres. Furthermore, they depoliticize climate change by shifting our attention from “how” to manage it to the concept of “green” presented in these climate narratives.

In this sense, focusing attention on technical or economic issues avoids addressing the structural factors of contemporary capitalism that underlie environmental degradation, such as inequality, the excessive exploitation of natural resources, and global power dynamics.

Another example of the limitations of narratives is economic degrowth . The concept of degrowth, while proposing a critique of the economic growth paradigm, must necessarily be linked to the principles of global justice and historical reparation. While this perspective questions the association between CO₂ emissions and progress, and challenges the notion that pollution generated by the mass production of goods and materials is indicative of technological advancement, it is also imperative to consider the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.

This principle, enshrined at the 1992 Earth Summit and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), highlights the disparity between emissions from industrialized and developing countries, highlighting a structural inequality in the distribution of the global carbon footprint.

Two opposing views

In this context, what and how we have narrated climate change is fundamentally divided into two poles that are not only different but even opposed: one that promotes green capitalism and the other that structurally denies the contemporary model of exploitation, that is, degrowth.

Thus, climate change narratives must be understood as the medium or vehicle that organizes sociocultural and political events, connected by a meaning that shapes our understanding of the world. And in this sense, we must also ask ourselves to what extent climate narratives shape the narrative itself; that is, to what extent and in what way the discursive production of green capitalism or degrowth reflects power struggles characteristic of global capitalist societies.

Even further, we face the challenge of trying to break with these polarizing dynamics and attempt to represent climate change through other narratives, the product of other socially and territorially subaltern geographies that show other non-places to propose non-hegemonic ways of addressing climate change.

Author Bios: Zarina Kulaeva is a PhD Candidate and Ivan Serrano Balaguer is Professor of Political Science both at UOC – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya