Host Gill Plunkett introduces a new series of four podcasts exploring the long view of climate change by interviewing the authors of 'Climate and Society in Ireland', a collection of essays commissioned by the Royal Irish Academy.

'Climate and Society in Ireland' provides a multi-period, interdisciplinary perspective on one of the most important challenges currently facing humanity. Combining syntheses of existing knowledge with new insights and approaches, contributors explore the varied environmental, climatic and social changes that occurred in Ireland from early prehistory to the early 21st century. The essays in the volume engage with a diversity of pertinent themes, including the impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland; weather-related food scarcities during medieval times that led to violence and plague outbreaks; changing representations of weather in poetry written in Ireland between 1600 and 1820; and how Ireland is now on the threshold of taking the radical steps necessary to shed its ‘climate laggard’ status and embark on the road to a post-carbon society. The book is available from our website: https://www.ria.ie/climate-and-society-ireland