43 Socio-geographic perspectives on global change The global change debate is linked with equity Norman Backhaus & Ulrike Müller-Böker Department of Geography, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstr. 190, CH-8057 Zürich The following ideas and deliberations do not reflect the state of the art of the social sciences regarding climate change. Rather, we try to present a few insights and hypotheses regarding the global change discourse from the point of view of human geographers in order to contribute to an interdisciplinary dialogue. While formulated on a general level, our inputs can be adapted to the climate change discourse on mountains too. Understanding the discourse „Global change“, „climate change“, or „global warming“ have become key words in the environmental discourse. And since the publication of the IPCC’s reports, we experience media coverage of this phenomenon that had no parallels in the past. Partly it reminds us of the discussion about deforestation during the 1980s in the German speaking countries. The media hype then fuelled the environmental debate and the rise of green parties in Euro- pean parliaments. However, when the trees did not die in such numbers as was predicted by environmental organisations and scientists, the discussion stopped and the debate was regarded as an overreaction to exaggerated scientific predictions. Ever since, at least in central Europe, scientists and even more the media are careful not to overemphasise envi- ronmental problems. If it is true what Al Gore said in his award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, he and his crew did not find any significant, reviewed scientific publi- cation within the last few years that denied the human impact on climate change, whereas the media discourse was much more ambivalent and tried to also give room to opposing opinions. Thus the public as well as politicians were presented with a highly controversial debate, when at the same time for the majority of scientists the fact that there is a human impact on climate change was not contested anymore. Therefore, we can conclude that there are different positions that form individual threads with the discourse on climate change. These threads (i.e. the political, scientific, environmental, media etc. threads) are intertwined and inform each other. The importance of such a discourse does not depend on the gravity or urgency of an issue, but on a specific constellation within this discourse and on events that are connected to this discourse, so called discoursive events.