We Are Not Ready for Climate Change

There is a whole new history in the making: How will cities address the overwhelming surge in the recognition of climate change? One major challenge is that we have still not secured the correspondence between our constructed world and that other world we now refer to as “climate change.”

Unlike the history of our major innovations in the past century, we are now running into a wall—the limits of our “innovations.” There was a time when an innovation was an eagerly recognized positive. This pre-eminence of innovation is no longer our fallback position, that which could always still impress. We have entered a world that contains radical elements for which we are not prepared. Yes, there are scientists and activists who are ready, who have done the hard work—but they are a minority and are not always succeeding in impressing or persuading us.

This not being prepared, not having recognized a major shift when it started, is a familiar experience across the decades and centuries. But one difference today is that we are out of time. Fire and water have exploded on the scene—from Australia to Brazil. And we were not ready.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, a Member of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired until 2015, and a Penn IUR Scholar. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy; inequality, gendering, and digitization are three key variables running though her work.

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