If you have even the slightest interest in climate change, read this thoughtful, rigorous, and enlightening book! It is simultaneously a primer on vulnerability, a road map to climate change as a social justice issue (not just an environmental one) and its policy implications, and a sourcebook on some key indicators of vulnerability. Informed by theory and grounded in empirical data, the authors lay out multiple paths into understanding the ‘relationship between climate change and the key social dimensions of vulnerability, social justice and equity’. With a keen attention to difference and the importance of context, they explore questions of climate change at multiple scales, to different genders and their intersections, and in varying contexts including indigenous knowledge systems, cities, drylands, forests, armed conflict and policy formation. The brevity of the chapter on gender highlights the crucial need for additional and more careful work in this arena. Multiple chapters debunk popularly held assertions based on inappropriate research designs, crucial missing data, conjecture and worst case scenarios. For example, Clionadlh Raleigh and Lisa Jordan meticulously demonstrate why ‘environmental refugee’ is not a useful concept. Data on the geographical distribution of different environmental hazards and their consequences make clear the importance of context in addressing climate change. Jesse Ribot's phrase, ‘vulnerability does not fall from the sky’, provides an evocative take home message. Vulnerability to climate change damage is created on the ground by governments, economic systems, and unequal social relationships of power and representation not just by biophysical factors.