During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Oxford-based Scottish geographer Andrew Herbertson constructed a framework for comprehending and categorising climate and its interrelations: natural regions. Along with a large circle of students and collaborators, Herbertson promoted natural regions as the conceptual keystone for geographical teaching and research. This article shows how natural regions theory conceived of climate as an object that was differently defined in different academic disciplines. Geography’s climate, according to Herbertson and his supporters, was defined by its relations with other spatially distributed phenomena rather than being the quantifiable and isolable entity of modern climatology. Building on recent work in the history of cartography foregrounding map use and reception, the article also argues that natural regions were products of particular modes of map reading, comparison, and synthesis. Although maps were arguably the most influential medium for communicating natural regions, they also proved limited as bearers of the multiscalar version of climate that Herbertson and his successors sought to convey. Finally, the article explains how natural regions and associated conceptions of climate came to be sidelined in the mid-twentieth century as geographers foregrounded human agency in region formation and adopted climatology’s definitions and analytical tools. Revisiting the life and death of theories of natural regions illuminates the contested significance of climate in the discipline of geography, and contributes to ongoing efforts to pluralise the history of climate sciences.

在 20 世纪的前 15 年，居住在牛津的苏格兰地理学家安德鲁·赫伯森 (Andrew Herbertson) 构建了一个框架来理解和分类气候及其相互关系：自然区域。与一大群学生和合作者一起，赫伯森将自然区域作为地理教学和研究的概念基石。本文展示了自然区域理论如何将气候视为在不同学科中有不同定义的对象。根据赫伯森及其支持者的说法，地理学的气候是由它与其他空间分布现象的关系来定义的，而不是现代气候学中可量化和可分离的实体。基于最近在制图历史上突出地图使用和接受的工作，该文章还认为，自然区域是特定地图阅读、比较和综合模式的产物。尽管地图可以说是交流自然区域最有影响力的媒介，但事实证明，它们在承载赫伯森及其继任者试图传达的多尺度气候版本方面也有局限性。最后，本文解释了自然区域和相关的气候概念在 20 世纪中叶是如何被边缘化的，因为地理学家在区域形成中突出了人类的作用，并采用了气候学的定义和分析工具。重温自然区域理论的生死存亡阐明了气候在地理学学科中具有争议的重要性，并有助于不断努力使气候科学史多元化。