Social Sciences Take Center Stage on the Road to Carbon Neutrality

The race to a carbon neutral society is usually told through the language of engineering: solar capacity, battery chemistry, grid interconnection, and hydrogen supply chains. A new book review published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences argues that this framing misses the point. In a review of Climate Change Issues and Social Sciences: Towards a Carbon Neutral Society, edited by Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu of Waseda University, reviewer Ömer Gökhan Ulum examines whether the social sciences can deliver a credible roadmap for decarbonization, and finds both a genuinely original contribution and some significant blind spots.

The volume under review, published by Springer Nature in 2026, comprises fifteen chapters drawn primarily from researchers at Waseda University. Its central claim is ambitious: the transition to carbon neutrality is not merely a technological substitution problem but a cultural, ethical, and institutional transformation. That framing places the book squarely in conversation with a growing body of scholarship on climate justice, just transition, the political economy of climate change, and decarbonization in Asia, and the review explicitly evaluates the book’s claims against these established literatures and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

What makes the collection unusual is its breadth of intellectual terrain. Among the chapters catalogued in the review’s bibliography are analyses of intergenerational altruism and intergenerational equity as a source of the emissions gap; an account of new sustainability disclosure requirements for listed companies in Japan; a study of historical institutionalism as a way of explaining and overcoming barriers to urban carbon neutrality through transport-land use coordination; case studies of how policies affect traditional resource management in the Subak system of Bali, Indonesia; an assessment of green logistics and its effects on carbon neutrality; a case study in Cambodia on the impact of climate change on vulnerable families in Southeast Asia; and a philosophical reassessment of individual moral responsibility within collective climate harm. There is even a chapter on environmental and cultural history and the history of imagination, described through the striking imagery of dandelion and white chrysanthemum drops.

This range is precisely the point of the review’s most positive verdict. Ulum acknowledges the book’s original contribution to the culture-climate relationship, a dimension often treated as a soft afterthought in climate policy debates dominated by economic modeling and technology roadmaps. By insisting that cultural values, ethical commitments, and institutional arrangements shape what decarbonization is politically possible, the volume pushes back against the assumption that better technology alone will deliver net zero. The chapter on shared responsibility, for instance, engages a question that has long troubled moral philosophers: how to apportion individual responsibility for a harm, like climate change, that is produced collectively by billions of small contributions.

The chapter on intergenerational equity carries similar weight. Climate change is, at its core, an intergenerational transfer problem: present emitters enjoy the benefits of fossil energy while future generations absorb the climate damages. Framing the emissions gap as a question of intergenerational altruism connects formal economics to ethics, asking whether and how the welfare of people not yet born should be counted in today’s policy choices. That question sits behind every discount rate used in cost-benefit analyses of climate policy, and the fact that a social science volume makes it a central theme rather than a footnote is notable.

Other chapters ground these abstract concerns in concrete governance challenges. The analysis of sustainability disclosure requirements for Japanese listed companies addresses one of the fastest-moving arenas of climate regulation, in which corporations are increasingly required to report climate-related risks and transition plans. The historical institutionalism chapter explains why cities, despite their technical potential for carbon neutrality, remain locked into car-dependent, land-use patterns that resist change. And the Bali case study shows how top-down climate and conservation policies can collide with traditional resource management systems, a cautionary tale about decarbonization policies that ignore local institutions.

The volume is not without problems, and the review is unusually candid about them. The first is the narrow institutional and geographic scope of the author base. Because the contributors come primarily from a single university, the collection risks presenting a particular national and disciplinary perspective as if it were a general account of the transition to carbon neutrality. Reviews of edited volumes routinely flag unevenness, but the concern here is subtler: a book about the cultural and institutional dimensions of climate action, written almost entirely by researchers embedded in one institutional culture, inevitably limits the range of cultures and institutions it can genuinely illuminate.

The second problem concerns the book’s claim to speak for Asia. The review notes that the Asian context claimed by the volume excludes major economies such as China and India, the two most populous countries on Earth and two of the world’s largest emitters. Any framework that aspires to describe decarbonization in Asia while omitting these economies faces an obvious applicability problem. Climate policy in China and India involves distinctive political economies, energy systems, and development trajectories, and a transition methodology developed without reference to them will have limited transferability across the region.

Related to this is the review’s criticism of the transition methodology itself. The volume’s framework for moving to a carbon neutral society, the reviewer argues, falls short in terms of applicability: the analysis of how societies actually change is thinner than the analysis of why they should. And the collection, for all its attention to ethics and institutions, neglects issues of power, inequality, financing, and conflicts among stakeholders. These omissions matter. Political economy scholarship on climate change has documented in detail how fossil fuel interests, labor movements, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries shape transition outcomes, while climate justice research has shown that decarbonization policies can redistribute burdens in ways that harm the least advantaged. A roadmap that does not specify who pays, who decides, and who loses is vulnerable to the same critiques it might level at purely technological accounts.

The broader lesson of the review extends well beyond one book. As governments codify net zero targets into law and investors scrutinize corporate transition plans, the social sciences are being asked not just to interpret decarbonization but to design it. That task requires integration across disciplines that have historically worked apart: economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history. The volume edited by Akao and Washizu demonstrates how much such integration can reveal, from the moral status of future generations to the institutional lock-in of urban form and the fate of centuries-old irrigation systems under modern environmental policy. The review’s critique demonstrates how far the field still has to go, particularly in accounting for power and finance, and in testing its frameworks against the diverse realities of the Asian continent. The path to carbon neutrality, on this evidence, will be decided as much in institutions, cultures, and distributional politics as in laboratories and power plants, and the scholars best equipped to trace that path must be as numerous and varied as the societies the transition is meant to transform.

Subject of Research: A book review assessing social science perspectives on achieving a carbon neutral society

Article Title: Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu. Climate change issues and social sciences towards a carbon neutral society

Article References: Ulum, Ö. G. (2026). Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu. Climate change issues and social sciences towards a carbon neutral society. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01146-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01146-4

Keywords: carbon neutrality, climate change, social sciences, climate justice, just transition, intergenerational equity, decarbonization, sustainability disclosure, Asia, Waseda University, political economy, SDGs