Climate Change and the Global Financial Crisis: A Case of Double Exposure

Despite widespread and growing public recognition of the linkages between environmental change and economic activities, geographic research efforts to date have paid only limited attention to the connections and interactions between climate change and globalization. As a consequence, critical linkages, feedbacks, and synergies between these two processes often go unnoticed. In this article, we draw on the framework of double exposure to motivate new research on the connections between climate change and globalization. The double exposure framework provides a generalized approach for analysis of the interactions between global environmental and economic changes, paying particular attention to the ways that the two interacting processes spread risk and vulnerability over both space and time. Focusing on the linkages between climate change and the ongoing financial crisis and using the case example of California's Central Valley, this article shows how application of the double exposure framework can provide new insights into social vulnerabilities and can inform efforts to respond and adapt to both processes. The article also illustrates how the double exposure framework can be used to inform and promote place-specific, geographic analyses of the complex interactions between large-scale environmental and economic shifts.