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New theoretical approaches like actor–network theory have become influential in human geography, questioning previous approaches to addressing human–environment relations. In this paper, I use the example of a controversial, forest-based climate protection scheme, REDD+, to show how these approaches are changing research foci and practices – from an analysis of the neoliberalization of nature to the making of markets and from the effects on human users to those on non-humans.

Adapting to the impacts of climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. How we perceive climate change impacts plays an important role in this. Our study shows that previous research on climate change perceptions predominantly examines affected actors and their individual behavior, neglecting perceptions of decision-makers and perceptions of the collective and institutional level of climate change. This desideratum may contribute to a lack of perspectives on adaptation policies.

This contribution would like to give an introduction to the anthropologically and phenomenologically founded philosophy of corporeality, which can be connected to human geography, in order to enable a deeper understanding of our human-environment relationship. That is, because Phenomenology and Philosophical Anthropology are still marginal in human geography as a source of knowledge of spatial-social facts.

Our paper develops a theoretical framework to help one understand what is lost when changes due to climate change are irreversible. In particular, we focus on the existential aspect of such loss as opposed to, for instance, the economic aspect. We argue that phenomenological theory can help one appreciate the full existential nature of loss from climate change, namely not only the loss of objects or even land but also the loss of whole ways of relating to the world.

The authors of this editorial call for a more consistent opening of population geography in epistemological, methodological and theoretical respects. They want to point out possibilities of connection to debates that have already found a firm place in other fields of human geography. At the same time, it is a concern to emphasize the necessity of continuously subjecting the discussion of the phenomenon of population to critical scrutiny, both within (human) geography and outside of it.

Halford J. Mackinder's heartland theory became one of the most popular and cited geopolitical concepts in the 20th century. Through a complex process of trans- and international reception and adaption, the theory lost its attachment to its original geographical and historical parameters. Its translation from text into a simplified representation in maps accompanied the process of popularization and made the theory an instrument of legitimizing political actions in the public sphere.

Scientific freedom involves three aspects: Freedom as power and privilege, freedom as a right of defence, and freedom as autonomy for self-regulation. But how to decide in science when science itself has marked all scientific criteria as contingent? At this point, the article proposes to acknowledge the decision-making challenges in science, to engage in theory-theoretical dialogues and thus to preserve autonomy.