Understanding Climate Change: Science, Policy, and Practice

Conversations about climate change are filled with challenges involving complex data, deeply held values, and political issues. Understanding Climate Change provides readers with a concise, accessible, and holistic picture of the climate change problem, including both the scientific and human dimensions.

Understanding Climate Change examines climate change as both a scientific and a public policy issue. Sarah L. Burch and Sara E. Harris explain the basics of the climate system, climate models and prediction, and human and biophysical impacts, as well as strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing adaptability, and enabling climate change governance. The authors examine the connections between climate change and other pressing issues, such as human health, poverty, and other environmental problems, and they explore the ways that sustainable responses to climate change can simultaneously address those issues.

An effective and integrated introduction to an urgent and controversial issue, Understanding Climate Change contains the tools needed for students, instructors, and decision-makers to become constructive participants in the human response to climate change.

Sarah L. Burch is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Governance and Innovation in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. She is a Lead Author in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.


Sara E. Harris is a professor of teaching in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of British Columbia, where she has taught since 2005. In 2017, she started a stint in the Faculty of Science Dean’s Office as Associate Dean Academic. She has the true honour of being a member of the marvelous 2015 3M National Teaching Fellow cohort.