A growing body of research stresses the importance of religion in understanding and addressing climate change. However, so far, little is known about the relationship between Muslim communities and climate change. Globally, Muslims constitute the second largest faith group, and there is a strong concentration of Muslims in regions that are particularly affected by global warming. This review synthesizes existing research about climate change and Muslim communities. It addresses (a) Islamic environmentalism, (b) Muslim perceptions of climate change, and (c) mitigation strategies of Muslim communities. The analysis shows that there is no uniform interpretation of climate change among Muslims. Based on their interpretations of Islam, Muslims have generated different approaches to climate change. A small section of Muslim environmentalists engages in public campaigning to raise greater concern about climate change, seeks to reduce carbon emissions through sociotechnological transition efforts, and disseminates proenvironmental interpretations of Islam. However, it remains unclear to what extent these activities generate broader changes in the daily activities of Muslim communities and organizations. Contributions to this research field are often theoretical and stress theological and normative aspects of Islam. Empirical studies have particularly addressed Indonesia and the United Kingdom, whereas knowledge about Muslim climate activism in other world regions is fragmented. Against this backdrop, there is a need for comparative studies that consider regional and religious differences among Muslims and address the role of Muslim environmentalism in climate change mitigation and adaptation at the international, national, and local scales.This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge

This article explores the role of religion in local energy transition processes. By combining insights from (a) sustainability studies and (b) academic contributions on religion and sustainability, a theoretical approach for describing the role of religion in local energy transitions is developed. Religion is conceived of as a subsystem among other local subsystems that potentially contribute via their competences to energy transition processes. Three potential functions of religion are identified: (1) campaigning and intermediation in the public sphere; (2) ‘materialization’ of transitions in the form of participation in projects related to sustainable transitions; (3) dissemination of values and worldviews that empower environmental attitudes and action. These functions are studied in the case of the energy transition in Emden, a city in north-western Germany. Although religion attends, to some degree, each of the three functions, it does not assume a dominant role relative to other local subsystems. Actors from other social subsystems appear to take over these functions in a more efficient way. Consequently, in this highly environmentally active region, there are few indicators of a specific function of religion. These results shed a critical light on the previously held assumption that religion has a crucial impact on sustainability transitions.

Scholarship has suggested a “greening” of religions, supposing that faith communities increasingly become environmentally friendly and use their potentials to address environmental challenges. This contribution points to the problems of the supposed “greening” by indicating the ongoing disagreements in many religious traditions over environmental engagement. The disagreements show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain that involves actors with different interests, backgrounds, and understandings of their traditions. The authors illustrate that tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism, becoming manifest in different views and theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. They distinguish between four types of tensions: (1) intradenominational tensions, (2) interdenominational tensions, (3) interreligious tensions, and (4) religious-societal tensions. By drawing attention to the tensions of religious environmentalism, this contribution sheds light on the struggles and limitations that religious environmentalists face in their ambitions to address climate change and other environmental challenges.

Since Lever-Tracy’s call for stronger sociological engagement with climate change in 2008, the number of climate-related contributions to leading sociological journals has increased. Yet, they still represent a small percentage of contributions overall. Reviewing the 37 articles published in eight top-ranked sociology journals until 2018, the authors of the present article identify five main subfields of research: (a) reflections on the role of the social sciences, (b) politics, (c) economy and consumption, (d) media and public perceptions, and (e) global flows. They conclude that the rise in contributions since 2008 indicates that climate change creates some resonance in the disciplinary core of mainstream sociology but that most sociological climate change research is undertaken and published in inter- and transdisciplinary spaces beyond the boundaries of the discipline. Emphasizing that climate change research can provide important epistemic resources for the discipline, the authors argue that sociology would benefit from being more responsive to it.

Local energy transitions involve various types of actors (e.g., politicians, businesses, public administrators, and citizens) that differ in their objectives, values, problem-related perspectives, and professional jargons: these differences risk deterring the collaboration that is needed to pursue energy transitions as encompassing socio-technological transformations. Based on a boundary work-approach, this contribution studies the interplay of actors in these transitions. The approach suggests that boundary bridging arrangements (e.g., boundary objects, boundary settings, and boundary organizations) evolve in local energy transitions, facilitating communication across the boundaries between the various types of actors. In applying the boundary work approach to the energy transitions in two German cities, the article explores the potentials and limitations of this approach.