Breakthrough Dialogues

Climate change, Jane Flegal argues, does not have a deadline. Yes — it’s an urgent problem that needs addressing, well, yesterday. But we aren’t about to fall from a cliff, or be hit by an asteroid. Jane, Program Officer at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust and adjunct faculty at Arizona State University, sees climate change as a long-term, ongoing condition: a risk management issue. That makes it completely unique from other, more discrete environmental problems. It’s a wicked problem with a million causal, interacting chains that have no real end, which means it requires wicked solutions: a diversified slew of innovation and policy, mitigation and adaptation. As a scholar immersed in the field of science and technology studies, Jane Flegal offers a practical, nuanced perspective on how we’re going to get through this mess.