EDITORIAL article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Population, Environment and Development
This article is part of the Research TopicAdaptive Frontiers in the Anthropocene: Human-Environment Dynamics in the Face of Climate ChangeView all 6 articles
Editorial: Adaptive Frontiers in the Anthropocene: Human-Environment Dynamics in the Face of Climate Change
Provisionally accepted
- 1Research Group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
- 2Urban Environmental Policy Research Group, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- 3Department of Earth Sciences, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan
- 4Department of Sociology & Criminology, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan
- 5Department of Geography, Karabük University, Karabük, Türkiye
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The first paper investigates the frontier of the socio-cultural foundations of cooperation surrounding climate as a public good. In this experimental study on young Chinese participants, Pansini and Shi (2025) show that collectivist values support higher mitigation in climate-related social dilemmas, such as air pollution and reforestation. They enunciated that the collective values can further help resolve climate-related social dilemmas that are hard to address in individualistic settings. Their threshold public goods game reveals that groups embedded in collectivist value systems achieved substantially higher success rates in funding reforestation initiatives than did individualistic societies. Their findings show that climate responses, including both adaptation and mitigation, are not solely technical matters but are fundamentally shaped by cultural and behavioral factors. Social learning, shared civic norms, and prosocial preferences can move groups toward cooperative action even when outcomes are uncertain.A second adaptive frontier emerges within organizations operating in climate-affected settings.
Keywords: adaptive frontiers, anthropocene, climate adaptation, environmental justice, Human-environment dynamics
Received: 07 Dec 2025; Accepted: 19 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mobeen, Hussain and Khan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Muhammad Mobeen
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