Geographies of Global Environmental Change References Revision

Gay-Antaki, 2022

• Feminist decolonial geography can trace the origin of dominant ideas around climate change and enunciate their location by challenging normative, disembodied and universal claims with the aim of identifying exclusionary structures and forming opportunities to create a more equitable knowledge base by drawing on the negotiating and navigating skills or border crosses

• Science is seen as objective and universal with an epistemic authority, it allows a Western man to represent his knowledge is the only one capable of achieving universal consciousness; this hidden location of the scientist is perhaps the greatest danger of the scientific method as it makes systems of oppression possible and reifies the dominance of the West in global imagination

• Western science is ‘to see everything from nowhere’; however, this knowledge impacts and obstructs different people in different ways; therefore, there is danger in disembodied decisions guided by capitalist economic interests that form narratives at the expense of women, people of colour and the environment

• An example is the narrative of staying below 2 degrees as a reasonable level of risk; however, many ecosystems already feel this impact and have reached their adaptation limit

• The practice of Western science systematically places people at disadvantage due to their gender, geography, race, religion, nationality, sexuality and colonial situation and removes them from contributing to climate change solutions; an embodied climate science would allow us to imagine alternatives and incorporate different perspectives to promote social and environmental justice for all

Lehman & Johnson, 2022

• Environmental geography is aware of science’s entanglements with imperial projects and racist logics, but it is difficult to imagine the discipline not tethered to technoscience; understanding this is key to promoting a relationship that is responsible for its inheritance through its transformation

• Western technoscience has been tied up with the ‘quantitative revolution’ and the division of nature and society where mastery of Nature was promoted; Geography has maintained connections to this positivist knowledge yet does acknowledge selective critiques of the legacy of imperialism, militarism and capitalism to recognise the need to be unfaithful heirs of Western technoscience 

• Worlds emerge at multi-scaled intersections, there is a need to explore other worlds that have not been normalised by Western technoscience by rearranging conditions and bringing new ways of knowing and worlds into being 

• Environmental geography has the ability to response, but must be configured and reconfigured across disciplines, species and kinds; there is a need to recognise problematic origins, confront them and transform them

Fredriksen, 2021

• In the spring of 2006, wild flamingos returned to Florida, but not to the places they had inhabited over 100 years ago in the Everglades and Florida Keys, but instead 80 miles north in Palm Beach County’s Stormwater Treatment Area 2, a human-made facility for filtering anthropogenic pollutants forming a new more-than-human encounter in the Anthropocene

• The flamingos were forced out by human harvesting for meat and feathers; however, as icons of Florida their return was framed as a story of hope amidst environmental doom, yet the violent histories and uncertain futures of wildlife in the Anthropocene should not be forgotten

• In Florida, stories of the Anthropocene are often reported through catastrophes such as super storms or flooding cities; however, there are also ambiguous stories such as the return of the flamingos that breaks down the tunnel vision of the planetary apocalypse to instead open up a space for reflection on multivariate ecological relationships and a consideration of the shifting assemblages of everyday life and death in the Anthropocene

• This story and ambiguity allows for a greater understanding of the true scope of environmental change in the Anthropocene

Whyte, 2017

• Indigenous and allied scholars are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropocentric climate change through work on resilience, declarations and academic papers

• Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges arising from their people’s living heritages and interactions with colonialism, capitalism and industrialisation; climate change can be seen as an ‘emergent form of life’ and an intensification of environmental change imposed on Indigenous peoples by colonialism; these perspectives will aid in decolonising approaches to addressing climate change and imagining the future

• Colonial invasion of Indigenous lands in the past led to rapid changes leaving Indigenous people vulnerable to harms to their lifestyles, cultures, health, economies and self-determination; oncoming vulnerability to climate change can be reshaped as an intensification of colonially-induced environmental changes

• Often, anthropocentric climate change affects Indigenous peoples earlier and more severely than other populations with impacts to habitats, health and ecosystems; there are also challenges for self-determination where Indigenous peoples must rely on emergency management seeing their voices silenced by the interests of states, corporations and local governments

• This can invoke an experience of deja vu for Indigenous peoples as reclamation and displacement are a part of colonially-induced environmental changes that have harmed Indigenous peoples before; perhaps the same practices that facilitated industrial expansion in the past are the same that deforest territories and create barriers to adaptation today

Smith, 2008

• For Indigenous peoples, present anthropogenic environmental change can be viewed as an intensification of past colonial interactions; being forced to reflect on this brutal past can evoke an emotional pain in memory and a fear of what is to come in this rehashing of their past 

• This forms a new unique strand of emotional politics of the environment, ones that involve grief, differential priorities and altered perceptions of universal, scientific ‘environmental change’

Hulme, 2010

• Global environmental change brings forth new kinds of knowledge about multi-scale interactions between physical and social dimensions of the environment that is hard to govern; there is a need to understand the relationships between knowledge-making and human culture to recognise ambiguities and blind spots in our theorising of the changing world

• The global can be problematised as it can refer to globally systematic change or local changes that are globally cumulative, there is a need to move towards a less ‘scientisied’ approach to environmental change by integrating social sciences and critical knowledges

• Scale is important in questioning knowledge, as universal epistemologies claim to be ‘true’ irrespective of scale and place, this globalised knowledge erases geographical and cultural differences in a manner that centralises political power and social control such as the reification of a global mean temperature that has gained iconic status in policy and public discourse; however, this is inadequate and singular as it neglects regional and local signatures of a changing climate

• Global knowledge reified through climate models, boundaries, indices etc. are all decontextualised, top-down views of planetary knowledge that is detached from meaning; there is a need to understand that there are multiple ways of knowing environments and imaging the future that are appropriate to local cultural contexts 

• New kinds of global knowledges should recognise and respect geographical and cultural differences, we should embrace the plurality of knowledge of the multiplicity of global understandings of climates and cultures

Newman, 2025

• There is a haunting extinction story of a steep decline in the number of Arctic Terns returning to the island of Papa Westray in Orkney, Scotland; their waning presence haunts the island’s places and more-than-human inhabitants with a multiplying impact across the relational complexity of local ecology

• Hauntological effects of extinctions multiple across more-than-human landscapes and communities as the waning animal presence haunts landscapes with the silence of their song to humans as well as ecosystem impacts sees Skuas also declined as they would often steal fish from the Terns due to their better adaptation, they now lose this food source 

• The Northern Gannet/Solan Goose colony on a neighbouring island also see changes as they now engage in more flexible diets and behaviours due to the decline of the Terns; however this hope is haunted by the knowledge that this has only been made possible due to the decline of another species

O’Brien, 2011

• Human geography can play a role in shifting global environmental change research as discourse shifts from understanding and explaining problems to addressing them quickly and effectively; this can be achieved through integrating insights from the social sciences and humanities into a new science of global change that recognise the subjectivity of change

• There is a need for a deeper understanding of the role of humans and their social, cultural and political relations to foster meaningful transformations to human attitudes, behaviours and systems as well as shifting mainstream discourses to recognise the important contribution of the social sciences and humanities in championing subjective realities 

• The climate has been explored in a scientific manner; however there is a need to recognise multiple perspectives and challenge the idea of global climate change as an objective, observed reality; instead there should be attention to the politics and power or framing human-environment relationships

• The narrow focus on the local and global scales can also be challenges as there is a need to acknowledge the interdependencies of scales and understand processes that can be obscured when one is privileged over another; this can contribute to changing assumptions that global problems demand global solutions, but instead focus on place-based, context driven research that is sensitive to connections and linkages among processes, responses and outcomes

• Human geography can contribute to a shift in discourse on environmental change by shirting into human dimensions and transforming the future of global change; apocalyptic scenarios must be rejected in favour of alternative and desirable futures that involve humans as agents of change

Nayak & Jeffery, 2011

• The origins of Geography as a discipline are continually entangled with understandings of environmental change in the contemporary day

• The progression of Geography was summed up by Joseph Conrad as he described three stages of the subject’s institutionalisation; the first was ‘Geography Fabulous’ as a process of creating imaginative maps and theorising the unknown, there was then a progression to ‘Geography Militant’ where claims to scientific truth began to materialise with claims of Western intellectual superiority presented as ‘universal’

• This provided a theoretical framework for the emergence of ‘Geography Triumphant’ where European military and epistemological expansion took place based on theories of environmental determinism formed through exclusive Geographical Societies dominated by white, Western men

• From this one-dimensional and violent history came the evolution of perceptions of the ‘environment’ and the ‘global’; it is this link to scientific positivism and exclusive positionality that foregrounds their flaws in claims to universality and resultant unequal impacts

Atkins, 2022

• Right-wing populist politicians and commentators link net-zero policies to the cost of living crisis, characterise decarbonisation as undemocratic and affirm the need to accelerate policies that enable fracking; such narratives demonstrate the complexities of net-zero policies especially in contemporary populism where decarbonisation is framed as a top-down policy driving up bills and altering lives

• Populism contrasts the people to the political elite in a number of issues including energy and climate policies, this is exacerbated by online platforms where discussions of energy transitions play out such as in the hashtag #costofnetzero 

• Populist politicians and political commentators in the UK present net-zero policies as unwelcome, expensive and an undemocratic burden on households who already face financial pressure and uncertainty as a result of the cost of living crisis

• These challenges are not based on a denial of climate science but instead an opposition of the manner in which policies are imposed by a top-down elite with little care for the people and the intersectional impacts of the cost of living crisis

Vaha, 2017

• As sea level rise threatens to make some states completely uninhabitable, small island states serve as examples of those at the greatest risk and those who should be consulted in international legislation reshaping surrounding climate governance 

• The situation of small island states and their endangered populations now receive increasing attention within the Anthropocene as they are described as a place of ‘radical inequality’ where climate change will have severe and irreversible consequences to the most vulnerable; this is not only to individuals but also the future of entire political communities, generations, legal orders and global policies

• Successful climate governance must be capable of addressing notable uneven distributions of the effects of climate change, there is a need to help those in need wherever they are located and recognise that those who have contributed the most to climate change should bear the greatest responsibility 

• States should be key actors in achieving climate justice and island states should be guaranteed a moral recognition that they have not themselves significantly contributed to their extinction and therefore should not be punished for negative consequences; they call for the rederawing of territorial boundaries and the concept of large oceanic states

• There is also a need to move away from the language of politics and desperation for these states and instead form a hopeful imagery; despite their size small island states have been very successful in bringing their interests to international negotiation tables and have great soft power

Sultana, 2021

• The overlapping global socio-ecological crises of climate change and COVID have simultaneously dominated discussions since 2020 with connections exposing structural inequalities and systematic marginalisation

• Climate change amplifies, compounds and creates new injustices that are interconnected with COVID in an intersectional manner; this demonstrates the importance of investigating and addressing them through a nuanced feminist lens to understand the co-production of injustices

• While the pandemic is fast-moving and immediate, climate change is a case of slow violence that hits the same communities hardest in sacrifice zones formed from global colonialism, imperialism and injustices

• Often these communities are those who are systematically disadvantaged in decision making e.g. women, people of colour etc. who cannot easily access leadership roles

• Common intersectional axes to consider involve race, gender, class, disability, age, sexuality, religion and migrant status; understanding this helps to formulate policies that do not further marginalise people and reproduce socioecological inequalities

• An intersectional lens allows for a better understanding of the complex power structures and lived experiences of those coping with an adapting to the pandemic and climate change; there are opportunities for solidarity, agency and resistance

Robin, 2018

• Environmental studies were guided by the natural sciences in the 1960s, then broadened to include policy and the social sciences in the 1970s, before becoming concerned with the idea of ethics, responsibility and justice in the 1990s opening up a transdisciplinary mode of environmental studies

• Ethics should be taken beyond humans, and consider more-than-human others to solve complex problems and understand their uneven distribution both geographically and socially 

• Environmental justice demands multi-species justice and a recognition that ecosystems are conglomerations of human and non-species interactions that shape each other; this expression of the more-than-human conceptualises an ethical world that is more than the home of only human species

• This has led to developments such as the Rights of Nature becoming part of the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia

Kothari & Arnall, 2019

• Daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people’s everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives in ways that are often regarded as mundane and ordinary; it is this everyday perspective that is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it; there is also a consideration of human and non-human entanglements here

• In the Maldives, the everyday changes in the physical environment such as sand erosion, rubbish and expansion of the built environment are shifting people’s regular, routine activities leading to mundane forms of oppression where inequalities become normalised 

• The everyday is important in focusing on the present and individuals, rather than the future and the global; it can also provide a socionatural perspective where nature and society are entangled in forming everyday life

• Beach and coastal erosion is occurring in the Maldives as well as waste being deposited on beaches; tourists have moved from the ‘tourist’ beach to the North beach due to the smell of smoke burning the rubbish but this changes the cultural character of the island as locals must shift their activities due to inappropriate tourist activities such as wearing bikinis and drinking alcohol

Wang & Lo, 2021

• Growing attention to the idea of a just transition away from fossil fuel energy has led to diverse definitions of the term centering around five main themes: the transition as labour-oriented, integrated frameworks for justice, a socio-technical transition, governance strategies and public perception

• The low-carbon transition is a multifaceted phenomenon entailing considerable benefits and risks that will be inequitably distributed with renewable energy hardly benefited marginalised groups; this low-carbon future will not create a just world but instead form new injustices and vulnerabilities whilst also failing to address pre-existing structural drivers of injustice

• A holistic framework sees that those most affected are likely to be low-income households, those with house concerns and in rural areas as well as intersecting with race, class and gender; there is a question of whom the just transition is for

• The question of governance addresses injustice in political systems due to a lack of transparency and public participation in decision-making; there is a need for more attention to be paid to the power dynamics of the transition and how powerful actors are often able to prioritise certain strategies, groups and industries

• The concept of the just transition may create opportunities to unite different groups and theories to overturn the injustices associated with a low carbon energy transition

Pulido & De Lara, 2018

• Environmental justice among multi-racial groups is an extension of the Black Radical Transition’s epistemic legacy and historical commitment to racial justice, this aids in reshaping our understanding of anti-racist organising and can help map geographies, temporalities and inter-racial solidarity between different organisations

• True environmental justice argues for a model of abolitionist social movement that invites interracial convergence to imagine urban political ecologies that are free of the spaces necessary for racial capitalism to thrive; this interdisciplinary approach breaks down barriers that have kept race, ecology and space separate

• There is a need to focus on abolitionist theories which seek the destruction of racial regimes and racial capitalism to liberate Black lives and Indigenous lands, this should occur across borders and combat the crisis of modernity that has led to the joint exploration of nature and labour

• Cities have been produced through these racialised logics to allow racism to be pervasive in landscapes and therefore cannot be separated from questions of justice and the environment

• It is important now to reimagine radical futures as spaces for convergence and epistemic communities that draw on intersections of urban political ecologists, border thinkers and the abolition of racial capitalism

McNamara & Farbotko, 2017

• The impacts of climate change have been and are predicted to be concentrated in tropical areas such as the Pacific Islands with rising sea levels, droughts and more frequent intense storms occurring the region; these low-lying islands are deemed to be likely uninhabitable in the future with migration suggested as a vital adaptation response; however island leaders and civil society groups oppose this inevitable resettlement

• The Pacific Climate Warriors is a grassroots network of young people from the Pacific Islands who take action to peacefully protect islands from the impact of climate change, to resist narratives of their homelands inevitably disappearing and instead defend their rights and cultures

• Narratives of ‘doomed’ hamper the adaptive capacity of the islands and overlook successes that have drawn on Indigenous knowledges to conserve resources and respond to stressors; there is a need to challenge the dominant paternalism in science and management and instead see humanity as heterogenous, political and able to respond

• The Climate Warriors are determined to advocate for their homelands and cultures and call for justice for the dispropionate burden they face related to increasing emissions, their largest campaign sought to demand fossil fuel responsibility by blocking the world’s largest coal port in Newcastle Australia

• This sees community groups refuse to accommodate ideas of Pacific Islanders as destined to be passive victims of climate change and deny the worst case scenario of migration but instead demand action and accountability from major polluters to protect their islands, cultures and lives

Tanasescu, 2013

• In 2008 Ecuador became the first country to guarantee rights to nature by incorporating this in a rewriting of the state’s constitution

• Natalia Greene began lobbying the Constitutional Assembly on behalf of the rights of nature and was initially met with a number of dissenting voices in April 2008 but by June efforts to convince assembly members began to see success

• This sees the marginal history of Nature become incorporated into mainstream political debate; this is occurring in multidirectional and unpredictable ways around the world with places such as New Zealand and Bolivia applying them slightly differently; however, the rights of nature are advancing

Lorimer & Driessen, 2014

• There are two conceptions of an experiment, one being the modern scientific understanding and the second being the wild experiment that considers the nonhuman world as found, unpredictable and messy

• In the Anthropocene there are a number of questions on how science should be conducted, who environmentalists should trust and what to do if Nature were to end; environmentalism now seeks to conduct a series of wild experiments involving open-ended, uncertain and political negotiations between people and wildlife involving multiple expertise not all of which are human; these leave the lab to find an unpredictable and uncertain experimental landscape where public and political conjunction is promoted and agency is provided to nonhuman actors

• The OVP is an example of this; however, received much backlash as it was seen as a pure wilderness, yet was highly artificial and led to a number of animal deaths, disagreements on what is natural and demands for intervention from citizens showing how environmental decisions are always ethical and political choices

• Drawing on this, environmentalism should shift from protecting a fixed, pure Nature to experimenting with dynamic, uncertain ecosystems and involving the public in decision making in a manner that is democratic and adaptive to improve environmental governance

Moore, 2017

• Challenges the idea of the Anthropocene where planetary breakdown is attributed to human activities to instead propose the Capitalocene where it is the economic system of capitalism that has led to the economic crisis

• This is due to capitalism’s way of organising nature based on colonial expansion, global trade and industrial nature where nature became treated as external and cheap alongside labour, bodies, food, energy and raw materials

• The endless systematic growth and creative destruction of nature to form new frontiers for capitalist production by depleting nature is what has led to the ecological crisis 

• This links to the Black Radical Tradition’s perspective of climate justice as intersecting with the systematic injustices created by racial capitalism that cheapens both Nature and Black lives

Said, 1979

• The Orient was almost a European invention, it is not a fact of nature and is not merely there but it is based on a history of thought, imagery and vocabulary drawing from a style of thought based on an ontological separation between the Orient and the Occident that is recreated in works of culture ever since

• The ideas, culture and history of the Orient cannot be seriously understood without understanding the power operations behind it, the relationship between the Orient and the Occident is one of domination and hegemony that justified ruling, dominating and restructuring from the West

• The structure of the Orient is nothing more than a structure of lies mainly produced by the British and French cultural enterprise over India and the Bible lands in their own interests

• It is this recreation of of the Orient in speech, cultural artefacts and ideas that allowed it to become embedded in socially accepted discourses and become an unquestioned reality

Bordner et al., 2020

• In the island states of Oceanic, colonial power dynamics profoundly shape climate vulnerability and response as they become dependent on outsider funders to adapt in a manner that reproduces colonial subordination and forms an ‘inverse sovereignty’

• In the Republic of the Marshall Islands this is particularly important as without swift and large scale adaptation they will be uninhabitable by the mid-century and the population will be forced to migrate as climate refugees; Marshallese decision makers and leaders are committed to large scale aggressive adaptation in place to preserve national identity and sovereignty; but reliance on external funding is a major barrier to this as external funders see migration as inevitable and even desirable; this is especially painful against a history of forced migration due to US nuclear weapons testing

• Neocolonial dynamics work to deprive island states of sovereignty over adaptation strategies and permanently threaten national sovereignty through loss of habitable territories 

• Climate vulnerability cannot be separated from preexisting social processes and institutionalised inequalities resulting from colonial rule and conduct including dispossession, forced relocation and assimilation as well as economic dependency meaning funders now control resources needed for climate adaptation and control the agenda 

• Marshallese leaders perceive their adaptation plans as discounted to prioritise funder priorities and continue colonial narratives that islanders lack agency and capacity to drive their own development and adapt to climate change on their own terms

Nixon, 2011

• There is a need to rethink slow violence as the type of violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, that is delayed in its destruction and dispersed across time and space; it is typically not viewed as violence at all

• As violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate, explosive and is instantly visible, there is a lack of attention to slow violence that is incremental and accretive; this can take shape in terms of climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, deforestation, radioactive aftermath of wars, acidifying oceans and many other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes

• There is a representational obstacle that hinders our efforts to mobilise and act decisively against slow violence and the long dyings that are staggered; there should be new efforts to politically and emotionally strategically represent slow violence in the media to publicise stories of compounding, temporally dispersed and multiplying slow violences in a way that is equally cataclysmic to instantaneous, explosive violence

• The environmentalism of the poor is key to slow violence, as it is the people lacking resources who are the primary casualties of slow violence as their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of slow violence that permeates their lives; this is changing the status of environmental activism among the poor in the Global South

Teaiwa, 2015

• British, Australian and New Zealand phosphate mining has had a great impact on the Pacific Islands of Oceania, specifically Nauru and Banaba that were once critical for Australian agriculture, but are now absent in Australian public memory even through the environmental and social ruinings endure for Indigenous peoples; this provides evidence for the life of imperial debris and the longevity of structure of dominance 

• There were phosphate rich rocks found on Banaba that were valuable sources of phosphoric acid as a key ingredient of phosphorus bearing fertilisers, Banaba was no longer thought of as an island but instead a ‘sea of phosphate’ that was mined to a point that it broke down human and environmental connections as the landscape was devastated alongside the native’s connections to the land and one another such that they were forced to relocate to Fiji in 1945

• The Banabans tried to reconstruct their culture in Fiji, yet they remain an isolated and marginalised group as they have been subject to transformation of their livelihoods in every way to see their home replaced as an economic system in which they have little control or agency

• Australian stakeholders and British Empire farmers benefited from this mining, where those in Banaba and Nauru were subjected to ruining; the economic, social and environmental impacts on the peoples and lands formed these as some of the most socially and economically challenges in the region viewed as unstable and corrupt

• Australia continues to influence the economic and political affairs in their former Pacific territories as they offer large aid assistance packages in exchange for hosting refugee detention centres on Nauru, showing how the island has historically and is now regarded as a site for managing Australian challenges with little acknowledgement of long-term impacts to the population

• Australians should now acknowledge this devastation and imperial debt

Edwards, 2014

• After Banaba was transformed into a major phosphate-mining settlement it became uninhabitable and Banabans were forced to relocate to Rabi Island, Fiji in 1945; as there is much recent attention given to likely future climate induced population displacements in Oceania, this relocation can be used as a valuable lesson on relocation approaches

• Relocation is an extremely complex process as affected communities are exposed to risks of severe economic, social and environmental hardship; planning is required to minimise the trauma of upheaval and ensure positive social dynamics

• The colonial authorities had devised a resettlement action plan for Banabans, but the timescale of a few months proved unrealistic as the reestablishment of a community is a long process that may take many years; pressing issues in planning include the need for involvement of the community at the initial discussions stage, an assessment of alternative homes and long term post-relocation planning including the creation of sustainable livelihoods supported by external agencies

Robinson et al., 2023

• Colonial institutions and legacies shape modern-day adaptive capacity in postcolonial urban centre Georgetown, Guyana as Dutch and British colonial governance has shaped the physical and social structures of the city to influence present day processes and institutions limiting response to climatic risks such as sea level rise, coastal inundation and flooding

• The maintenance of critical infrastructure for building adaptive capacity such as the colonial era seawall and drainage system has been inconsistent due to financial constraints 

• Various international organisations have financed large scale hard infrastructure projects for sea and river defences, but community based projects have been more successful in mitigating flood risks to prove the effectiveness of grassroots interventions 

• There is now a need for more long term resilience relating to knowledge making and to financing and strengthening local institutions to improve the cities adaptation now and in the future

Bakker, 2005

• The 1989 privatisation of the water supply sector in England and Wales is cited as a model of market environmentalism where market institutions are introduced to natural resource management as a means of reconciling goals of efficiency and environmental conservation

• Although privatisation and commercialisation were effectively applied to water supply management, the commodification of water was limited due to its geography alongside a failure to introduce direct competition and political backlash over metering and pricing that demanding the reregulation of the water supply; despite this environmental and drinking water quality did improve showing how neoliberalism can bring positive outcomes for humans and nonhumans

• Market regulation sees water recast as a scarce resource where efficiency and cost must be prioritised over social equity, this transformation of water is an example of the neoliberalisation of nature where the private sector, market mechanisms and commercialisation take over and allow for the commodification of nature

• Market environmentalism has been seen as a form of ‘green imperialism’, accumulation by dispossession to create social inequality and a project of environmental governance as it is not only one of political economy but also socio-environmental change through the process of privatisation, commercialisation and commodification

• Commodification is more than an economic process but a socioeconomic, discursive and material process, it has both an economic and symbolic meaning; in the case of water there is a shift to managing demand through new techniques such as metering, tariffs, education and water shifts from an entitlement to a service to be purchased

• The failure to commodify water was due to water’s geography as life-giving, continually circulating and a scaled resource; it was hard to introduce direct competition and political resistance arose leading to neoliberalism being forced to retreat; this did lead to improvements in water quality

Nel, 2015

• Market environmentalism embodied in carbon forestry in Uganda sees a biopolitics of climate security discourses and interventions arise as the activities of state and non-state actors constitute the grounds for direct and bio-cultural sacrifice of populations and ecologies that are written off through direct violence and degradation

• Carbon forestry can be argued to have become a fetishised, unfinished and calculative process working as contemporary accumulation by dispossession or carbon colonisation as it is complicit in marginalisation and exclusion in newly formed sacrifice zones demarcated by market environmentalism 

• Environmental sacrifice zones assume an ecological disconnect between people and the environment in specific zones to normalise environmental degradation in some places while protecting others; this occurs in the Ugandan forestry landscape as new authorities and actors begin to shape environmental governance 

• Neoliberal environmentality produces profit maximising subjects to combat environmental degradation, in this case the aim is to sequester carbon dioxide in trees through carbon offsetting where financial payments for commodified emissions reductions operate through carbon markets, this is a form of biopower as it justified actions under claims of nurturing and sustaining life; this renders forests technical 

• Negative processes of relocation, dispossession and marginalisation become normalised in the reo-organisation of territory in carbon forestry as it is seen as necessary for the green economy; individuals and communities are displaced as powerful actors take advantage of laws and policies to invest in sequestration at the expense of local populations who lose connection to the land and culture

• Forests that are not amenable to valuation, commodification and extraction are also sacrificed as they are left outside of protected areas to be deforested and die, this is legitimised through being unable to support themselves and has indirect consequences of biodiversity loss

• Forestry governance in this way sustains heterogenous forest practices and power relationships that are destructive to local ecologies and cultures

Felli & Castree, 2012

• The UK Government’s Office on Science released an article on Mitigation and Global Environmental Change 2011 with language, logic and lessons consistent with the wider diffusion of neoliberal views in contemporary environmental governance circles stressing the need to produce adaptable human subjects who can respond tactically to anthropogenic alterations to the biophysical world whilst remaining subjects of capitalist market relations

• Policy makers are encouraged to promote migration as a strategic and transformational resilience plan to escape disproportionate environmental change, being developmental benefits to their home countries (e.g. remittances) and have a positive impact on destination countries through the injection of a young, entrepreneurial workforce

• There is a belief that the individual must deal with environmental change with a focus on their qualities and capacity to adapt, there is a focus on the individual/community level response where the state is seen as merely external to the population and only needed to plan long term adaptation

• There is a neoliberal social philosophy underlying the report that promotes individual actions rather than collective or state interventions

Harvey, 2005

• Neoliberalism is a political and economic practice that proposes human wellbeing can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade

• The state should be small and minimalist as it cannot possess enough information to second-guess market signals and powerful interest groups are likely to distort and bias state intervention to their own benefit 

• This stresses concepts of dignity and individual freedom, this is an ideology that hopes that institutional arrangements will take on a life and momentum of their own through the invisible forces driving the market

McAfee, 1998

• New supranational environmental institutions including the World Bank attempt to regulate international flows of natural capital through green developmentalism; this sees nature constructed as a world currency and ecosystems as resources for industry 

• This promises market solutions to environmental problems, but reinforces inequalities between the Global North and Global South by valuing local nature in relation to international markets controlled by elites and currencies such as the euro or the dollar, this abstracts nature from spatial and social constructs and reinforces claims of global elites to the greatest share of the Earth’s biomass and what it contains

• There international environmental institutions justify their role as humanity has a common goal in mitigating planetary ecological degradation; they becomes sites for the production of ‘global’ environmental discourses where the dominant voice is a neoliberal environmental economy applied on a world scale, the key to market solutions is seen as privatisation and commodification of all nature in a global metric for valuing natural resources

• The use of complex institutions, discourses and practices that manage the efficient use and exchange of natural capital is green developmentalism reflecting capitalist actors ideals to overcome barriers to accumulation caused by the climate

• This seeks to shift more of the burden of the ecological crisis onto the Global South to reinforce environmental injustice on a world scale as the market cannot account for the subsistence value of nature to local populations, the inability to interchange carbon units and the power imbalance as the price of nature is set by the Global North to allow wealthy countries to continue polluting whilst buying the right to do so in the Global South which can lead to green grabbing

• Green developmentalism is less about saving nature and more about extending the reach of global capitalism

Felli, 2012

• Discourses are turned from ‘climate refugees’ in which organisations perceive migration as a failure to adapt to the changing climate, to ‘climate migration’ where migration is promoted as a strategy for adaptation; however, this migration should be managed within forms of neoliberal capitalism as a strategy to continue to accumulate capital 

• This new discourse sees climate migration as a strategy and a solution, but only when managed through sophisticated rules, practices and norms that specifically relate to the migrant as a worker; this governance is explained through a political economy perspective as the migrant is managed in a manner conducive to further capital accumulation for the state as part of a global circuit of capital responding to social struggles

• Climate refugees are transformed into entrepreneurial migrants who can lift themselves out of poverty at the same time as they contribute to their current countries economy and their origin country through remittances, transfer of technological skills etc. to lead to a number of interconnected wins as waged labourers

• Here climate migration is framed as an individual rational choice and entrepreneurialism is encouraged on an individual/community level rather than collective or political action; Southern states must respond to this by becoming proper managers of their own populations to harness their value-producing activities

Astuti, 2021

• New disciplinary governmental technologies emerged in Indonesia to address socio-ecological crises resulting from the conversion of peat forests to large scale agricultural plantations of palm oil and pulpwood

• Forest fires, atmospheric crises and haze in 2015 were seen as resultant of the conversion of peatland to form a violence to the land and the environment; as a result, the Government of Indonesia bought in new peatland governmental apparatuses that were created to enforce and govern peat farming through legal disciplinary, surveillance and enforcement mechanisms that prioritised technological fixes over long term strategies of changing peatland users behaviours

• The key policies included spatial governance on peatland areas and hydrogovernance to enforce the maintenance of a specified groundwater table level; however the plantation industry used its own governmentality to contest policies, challenging their science, suing the government and making arguments around job losses and the value of the agroforestry industry 

• This showed that nature of environmental governance as ‘prickly’ as technical solutions cannot solve highly political problems; the limits of neoliberal governmentality were shown as the state tried to discipline powerful capital interests and they contested this leading to unfinished governance

Hulme, 2022

• There is a scientific impulse to explain the complexity of the world through simulation; however, climate change can be considered as a phenomenon that transcends the ability of any one person to comprehend therefore there should be a separation of facts and meanings 

• How people come to know and understand climate change is bound up with social, moral and political orders and constructed through interactions with public life and political discourse to shape how people respond and how they consider future possibilities of shaping this; humans act not only by scientist facts but the meanings they construct from them

• Science-based positions see climate science as cumulative, reliable and culturally authoritative with an ability to offer foundational knowledge about climate and future dynamics, this is valorised through the creation of the IPCC with science becoming a powerful ideology that shapes, leads and underpins policy; without trusted science these policies would be directionless

• More-than-science positions provide little authority to science as a way of knowing the material world, it cannot and does not provide a foundation for motivating political action or guiding personal behaviour; here an expansive and holistic understanding of the world is taken that resists modernist, Western or scientific hegemony 

• This explores the ways in which mythical, personal and normative knowledges of the world exceed climate science knowledge with a deeper engagement with diverse humanities that resist a single meaning of climate change, but instead takes a pluralist understanding of the world to recognise that different cultural expressions of meaning and purpose offer powerful narratives to guide personal and collective action

Hulme, 2020

• Since the first Earth Day in 1970 it is easier to bring forward knowledge on the dynamics of the Earth system and futures of climate change to garner widespread attention, but it is much harder to use this knowledge to orchestrate systemic change due to divergent human values forming the knowledge-action gap

• Facts stemming from scientists and the IPCC are now not enough, they merely fuel climate reductionism, deadline-ism and solutionism; these closed times tables and engineered emergencies fail to respect the diverse moral horizons, meanings and ethics that characterise climate politics

• Visions of the future are rooted in different cultural values forming ideologies such as eco-modernism, ecological citizenship, eco-socialism or Catholic climate solutions; these all offer different motivations for tackling climate change and guide different public policy action

• The belief that climate change can be solved should be moved past as metrics and solutions simplify complex realities; there is a need to look to more holistics stories on climate belief and motivation for action

• We cannot aim for one action when there are many futures imagined for many different groups, instead of a single ideology and destination there should be more incremental projects emerging from complex meanings, these should be bottom-up and may differ for local and cultural contexts

Lave, 2015

• There is a decline in scientific authority that reflects a deep shift in the character and organisation of knowledge production; a new scientific regime is born in which academia carries much less legitimacy than it has previously done with claims developed outside of the academy gaining support 

• There is now an increasing interest in environmental knowledge claims produced outside of the academy to draw on amateur scientists, Indigenous knowledges, local knowledge, crowdsourcing, citizen science and commercial science produced in the private sector; these reorganisations see knowledge become increasingly horizontal and power relations shift

• Perhaps this is not a decline of scientific authority, but instead a redistribution within a wider range of knowledge producers all afforded legitimacy; this can promote progress and increasing horizontal processes of knowledge production

Mahony, 2015

• The IPCC’s burning embers diagram visually rendered global reasons for concern and has been embraced by some, rejected by others and used by further readers to argue both for and against a global threshold where climate change becomes dangerous; this contestation shows that the notion of objectivity is spatial and situated within particular cultural and political formations

• The visual is at the forefront of knowledge making through cinematic notions of framing, focus and zoom that expand to practice, embodiment and affect; images are practices of multiple meanings that may not map neatly onto science-policy relationships leading the burning embers disagree to become an important visual disruptive of climate change

• Contestations, transformations and exclusions of the diagram show how scientific controversies are not merely over cognitive content but also over the norms of scientific practice as the scientist is able to make meanings and knowledges from a ‘blind site’ lacking in authority of judgement over specific local spaces

Dalby, 2013

• Much early work on geopolitics centred on environmental causation and the influence of nature on the cause of human history through deterministic or racist lenses; there is a powerful politics to natural explanations of social phenomena yet more recent environmental history moves away from these arguments to the Anthropocene where humanity is now able to control the course of the climate as well as environmental possibilism seeing that humans may be able to learn its way out of ecological difficulties rather than being destined for collapse 

• Arguments of naturalised cartography and territorialised socio-economic matters are rejected in favour of the volumetric geopolitics of climate change where carbon, oceans, ice etc. climatic processes operate across traditional borders in ways that demand global governance and geopolitics

• The formation of volume through advanced modelling and climate geometrics such as the 2 degrees, carbon dioxide Gt/PPM, ocean volume, pH of seawater etc. allow for the correction of 2D cartographic measures but this should be extended to discuss the importance of further atmospheric and hydrospheric domains such as air space

• The potential geopolitical tensions resulting from rapid climate change and potential resource scarcity are key to the geopolitical agenda as well as the neoliberalisation of nature in market logics of carbon markets etc. attempt to govern climate change from a nation-state and security view; climate governance becomes more calculable and ecological but should be managed through adaptations to economic and political systems as well as geoengineering that is a matter of global security rather than the domain of any one state

• States are no longer bordered and flat but instead must pay attention to volumetric dimensions, changing thinking and politics in the Anthropocene and sharing a crowded world rather than governing divided territories

Nayak & Jeffery, 2011

• Halford Mackinder incorporated social Darwinism as he saw the world as a stage for competition between races and nations; he suggested that the resources, railways and remoteness of the Russian heartland would pose a threat to powerful states; Mackinder believed that who ruled the heartland would rule the world, showing geography’s connection to empire, he supported British imperialism

• Raztel incorporated Darwin’s theory into the formation of political communities, he suggested the state was a living organism and it’s imperative for living space would justify stronger states to expand territorially into new areas

• Ellen Churchill Semple saw the environment as determining human behaviour and this would influence social, cultural and religious developments; she often resorted to racist tendencies as she saw that entire populations would be morally, spiritually or culturally inferior due to their environments

Farbotko, 2010

• Disappearing islands and climate refugees become signifiers of the scale and urgency of oncoming climate change as islands are transformed into imaginaries of laboratories and experimental spaces providing truth on the climate change crisis; this narrative shapes Tuvalu into a climate change canary where the sinking island and inhabitants are subjected to an eco-colonial gaze

• The islands of Tuvalu are meaningful spaces in cosmopolitan discourse as they disappear whilst media publics watch from a distance to see dramatic representations of climate change and risks of sea level rise to provide the urgent need to reduce emissions; the Tuvaluan government and community advocate for this as they face significant impacts of rising sea levels yet have made little contribution to this

• This builds on early representations of Tuvalu as a place of isolated scarcity, inferiority and difference in opposition to Australia's mainland socio-economic safety; this now transforms into the conditions of a laboratory as the island space offers certainty and closure to see climate change contained and the issue of sea level rise plays out

• Tuvalu becomes a climate canary where it and its populations are expendable, the disappearing island is no longer a located tragedy but a sign of the destiny of the planet through ideas of environmental determinism and positivist studies of larger social systems being conducted here

• Island people are denied their own agency and transformed into fictionalised victims as the island only has meaning once it has sunk, this is then used as a prompt to save the rest of the planet

Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2010

• The geopolitics of fear dictates and drives dominant climate change discourse in and about Bangladesh and on climate induced migrations where climate refugees are framed as a risk and a security problem

• Bangladesh is seen as a black hole for catastrophic anthropogenic climate change as it is a densely populated, low lying, natural disaster prone country becoming the source for millions of displaced climate refugees who are transformed into unwanted, threatening others thought colonial modes of thought and under the anxiety Western cartographic losses

• Through scientific framings Bangladesh is seen to be one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate induced sea level rise which forms overwhelming effects on the human population; national security becomes a key problem here as there is a move from focusing on climate injustices to the securitisation of violent migrants 

• Western countries are framed as having a moral responsibility to accept climate refugees, yet they see this as a sizable problem shown in India’s fears of cultural and religious clashes leading to hostility at the border and in the country; this fear leads to competing definitions of refugees to question their legitimacy and seek to manage their movement 

• This geopolitics of climate fear reinforces the manner in which climate can be securitised and territorialised alongside Northern centric cartographic anxieties; this leads to alarmist imaginative geographies and humiliation of climate induced displacements that displace the equity based notion of the ecological debt to maintain the colonial world order

Barnett & Adger, 2007

• Climate change is increasingly seen as a security problem as it may increase the risk of violent conflict through undermining the security of local places and social groups, detracting livelihoods, increasing conflict and undermining the role of the state as a peacekeeper

• Marginalised people are vulnerable to environmental change undermining their livelihood security due to relying on natural resources and ecosystem services sensitive to climate change as well as poverty, state support, decision making, cohesion etc. with an example seen in the unirrigated maize crops supporting life in East Timor; increased livelihood insecurity can lead to violent conflict 

• Violence can occur as livelihood contraction increases the risk that people will join armed groups, they can be mobilised by leaders, loot natural resources, engage in violence and see this escalate as war begins; there are complex reasons for this but it has been shown that human intracity increases the risk of violent conflict 

• The state is critical in managing violence that is often formed from regional and global forces such as migration or arms trading where the state can intervene, it can also use measures and conditions to pursue certain livelihoods such as cash incentives for finding work or completing training; strong structural conditions and livelihood factors such as democracy and national security can reduce the risk of conflict but climate change is undermining the state’s ability to do this

Brun, 2016

• The Paris Agreement had three key focuses, to increase efforts to mitigate emissions, adapt to adverse climate effects and mobilise support for this transformation; this was effectively achieved through almost universal participation and strong ambition

• The key to broad participation in this agreement was self determination in more flexible approaches where jointly determined and legally binding emissions reductions targets of Kyoto were replaced by more flexible bottom-up, non-binding nationally determined contributions to represent individually appropriate climate efforts; this helped unleash almost universal participation with 196 parties as signatories, almost double Copenhagen

• Before COP15 a main challenge was that targets were inadequate, this was attempted to be overcome through the incorporation of the ambition mechanism with three key pillars to secure a set direction of travel to a long term global goal, expectations that climate action would be enhanced over time, and that parties would do what they pledged

• Climate diplomacy had risen to unprecedented levels 2 years prior to the Paris Agreement with growing initiatives at the UN, EU, US-China summits etc. which encouraged the use of back channel negotiations at the summit

• The Paris Agreement represents the culmination of years of climate diplomacy; this was due to inclusive leadership, back-channel negotiations, universal participation and an anchoring of a clearer direction of travel than ever before

Gay-Antaki, 2020

• COP is an important site to study as decisions around environmental commons can perpetuate or contest socio-environmental narratives responsible for social and environmental inequalities; whilst gender is being introduced into climate debate sites, some meanings of gender are privileged over others (such as balance over equity) and practices continue to perpetuate intersectional injustices

• Climate change has been felt unevenly among social groups and this can be perpetuated by attempts to respond such as efforts to incorporate gender into the climate debate by changing the gender composition of negotiations; however, a critical mass of women does not automatically generate gender friendly climate policies as some gender aspects remain marginalised

• Mainstream gender narratives see women as passive victims of climate change and as a homogenised category that produces essentialised understandings of women’s experiences as common and shared; however this ignores intersectional struggles with structural inequalities such as race, sexuality, religion etc.

• This single narrative that speaks for all women is problematic, instead an ecofeminist lens would allow for greater diversity regarding interpretations of gender in the climate debate with an understanding that all identities are partial, fluid and contradictory

Althor et al., 2016

• The most damaging and long lasting consequence of GHG emissions is not constrained to the border of the emitting country, but degrades the world’s common climate system with highly variable impacts on countries based on differential climate vulnerabilities

• There is a major climate inequality as free rider countries are able to contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions with limited vulnerability to effects, but forced rider countries are the most vulnerable but contribute little to the problem

• The countries least vulnerable to the impacts of climate change are generally the highest GHG emitters e.g. China, US and India but the most vulnerable contribute the least e.g. African countries and small island states in the Atlantic and Pacific; this is also linked to economic output as those using GHGs achieve economic growth through GHGs with few consequences in contrast to vulnerable, low economic growth countries facing severe climate impacts

• By 2030 climate change inequality will rise further and there is a need to enforce common but differentiated responsibility frameworks and improve climate financing as put forwards in the Paris Agreement

Sultana, 2022a

• Climate change has had unequal and uneven burdens across places with injustices laying bare fault lines of suffering across different sites and scales; climate justice pays attention to these unequal impacts of climate change and attempts to redress resultant inequalities in fair and equitable ways

• Critical climate justice uses solidarity and collective action alongside greater engagement with intersectional and international feminist scholarship to encourage impactful and accountable action

• This helps understand who benefits, loses, in what ways, where and why from climate change by integrating historical and geographical differences as colonialism, capitalism and globalisation have produced uneven climate injustices

• These injustices must be identified and underlying causes addressed through insights from many academic theories and grassroots activist movements that seek to expose the root causes of climate change, address and dismantle systematic issues by paying attention to space, place and scale alongside past injustices that cause disproportionate burdens on racialised post-colonial communities and the Global South

• Climate justice is the most effective when integrating diverse feminist perspectives critiquing the capitalist patriarchy, anti-racist and anti-colonial voices and the heterogeneity of vulnerable communities formed by interlocking systems of oppression

• This promotes inclusive planning and action beyond techno-managerial climate solutions to improve the lived experience and move away from victim narratives to resilience, care and commoning to bring about equitable system change

Sultana, 2022b

• There is a multiplicity and endlessness to the ways colonialism haunts the occupied, post-colonial and settler-colonial subjects due to embodied experiences of grief, trauma and resistance formed through the ongoing forms of racial domination and hierarchical power that constitute disproportionate climate vulnerabilities among racialised populations

• Ongoing climate coloniality is expressed through global racism, continued othering, dispossession and commodification, destruction, sacrifice zones and excessive exposure to harms in a local, embodied and lived experience stemming from historical colonial differences that compound in a slow violence that renders the lives and ecosystems of those in sacrifice zones disposable under racial logics of climate tragedies 

• Coloniality is experienced through ecological degradation through capitalism articulated development, global land and water grabs, REDD+, conservation, mining and deforestation that leads to domination, displacement, degradation and impoverishment at the hands of the Global North, transnational corporates and neoliberal governance

• The climate apartheid is used to show the socio-spatial differentiation of who pays for climate breakdown, who is expendable and who is spared manifested across different scales and existing through the intersectionality of race, gender and class

• This is also a problem of resource overexploitation leaving the Global South less capable of addressing climate impacts as a result of reduced state capacities, this is also discursively reproduced in global debate and homogenised climate knowledge valuing Western expertise, normalising technocratic management and extractivism in a material and epistemological site of struggle

• There is a need to decolonise climate and mainstream discourses by confronting and dismantling colonial ideologies, politicising climate and exposing structural racism to work towards reducing the heaviness of coloniality in the everyday

Liboiron, 2021

• Plastic pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism, but an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land, it is best understood as the violence of colonial land relations rather than environmental damage; it is colonialism that allows pollution to occur and entitlement to land that assimilates that pollution

• It has been assumed that plastic would be taken to landfills or recycling plants that allowed it to disappear, but this would not be possible without access to Indigenous Lands that act as a sink or a way to store waste; access to land is also assumed for cultural design, scientific research, construing pipelines etc. or imaging clean futures on Indigenous lands without permission or consent 

• Environmentalism also reproduces colonialism through environmental solutions to pollution such as building hydroelectrics dams as it assumes access to Indigenous Land and its ability to produce value for settler colonial desires and futures; these colonial land relations become inherited as common sense 

• Pollution, scientific ways to know pollution and actions to mitigate it are essential parts of the interlocking logic, mechanisms and structures of colonialism that allow it to produce and reproduce its effects; there are ways to approach more ethical land relations with methodologies as a key way to do this

Zellentin, 2015

• Small island developing states (SIDS) are seen as doomed to disappear due to anthropogenic climate change causing them to lose their homelands, social structure and cultural community; this impacts social bases of self respect as cultures and political sovereignty are threatened by sea level rise

• Being displaced from a cultural setting is distressing and affects confidence and sense of self as people begin to see themselves as less valuable contributors to their community; there is a right to social bases of self-respect allowing people to consider themselves full and equal members of society in fair systems

• Forced migration poses a serious threat to this right as SIDS inhabitants are unlikely to get the opportunity to migrate as a community to places where they can recreate their way of life, they are often dispensed to various places where they are forced to integrate, leading them vulnerable and lacking in a support network

• This can be prevented if other global emitters are willing to restrict excessive use of fossil fuels in mitigation efforts, but there should also be adaptation to migration by ensuring migrants enter host countries as valuable additions to labour markets and diaspora communities are able to develop; those displaced must have a voice in debates determining this process

Adelman, 2016

• Low-lying SIDS are threatened by inundation from rising sea levels caused by anthropogenic global warming with islanders facing environmental harms resulting from sudden or slow onset events as well as the prospect of forcible relocation without protection under international law and few resources for resettlement 

• They are not entitled to compensation for climate-related losses and damages in the interests of climate justice, recognising that they are the least responsible for climate change but the most vulnerable to its impacts through the Warsaw International Mechanisms for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts 2013

• As loss and damage from climate change cannot be adequately addressed though adaptation, mitigation or aid payments; there is an ethical obligation for developed countries who have contributed the most to emissions to bear the greatest burden of migration as well as loss and damage caused by emissions from which they have benefited; this is a form of urgent corrective justice as the UNFCCC continually fails to produce legally binding emissions reductions targets

Hayes & O’Neill, 2021

• Media actors are powerful agency in shaping what we think and how we think about it through news content, this has been key to the cultural politics of climate change and climate protest 

• From 2019/2020 there has been a significant growth in climate protest (in line with the second wave of environmentalism) following the expansion of movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future

• Extinction Rebellion has grown from 15 people in 2018 to a global movement demanding the declaration of a climate emergency, reducing GHGs and creating a Citizens’ Assembly on climate justice; they use civil disobedience and continual economic disruption over long periods such as the shutting down of major road bridges in London for days

• Climate protest imagery from 2001-2009 was dominated by the ‘protest paradigm’ where the protester was obscured, seen as deviant/antisocial and depicted as oppositional to the policy; however, this was shifted in 2019 when the face of climate change became more individualised with a small number of faces clearly visible, they were predominantly young white women and girls to suggest a ‘Greta effect’ in visualising climate protest 

• This changing visual representation reflects a wider shift in attitude towards the climate movement, framing it as an intergenerational justice issue and emphasising the power and agency of young women and girls

Anderson, 2010

• Futures are anticipated and acted on in relation to a set of events taken to threaten liberal democracies; this anticipatory action works through the assembling of styles through which the form of the future is disclosed, practices that render specific futures present and the logics of legitimising certain actions in the presence 

• Acting in advance is seen as an integral part of liberal democratic life; but this can be problematised by asking which future we relate to, what cultures are known and what linear temporalities are used to imagine and invest in the future

• The future is viewed as threatened by a catastrophe that is imminent and therefore must be acted upon, this provides relief to life that is considered valued but not necessarily all lives with others abandoned, damaged or destroyed to protect others; the future is both uncertain and unknown

• In order to act, futures must be known so are calculated, imagined and performed though different mechanisms such as trends, graphs, models, stories, forecasts, plays etc. to generate fears, hope and anxieties that justify action

• Logics of precaution, preemption and preparedness guide which interventions are made by rationalising certain kinds of life over others and allowing the state to generate biopolitical control through interventions in space and time

McMichael & Katonivualiku, 2020

• The residents of coastal villages in Fiji make sense of different temporalities and timescales as climate impacts and adaptation disrupt personal and intergenerational histories of attachment to place, environmental changes and relocation planning impact the everyday experience and extend into the future in certain ways

• These temporalities of the past, present and future of climate change come together in thick time that is palpable in the everyday; an understanding of this temporality is key to ensuring climate adaptation policies and practices are enacted in ways that are locally meaningful 

• Often climate-related mobility is future-oriented and projects how future climate impacts will impact mobility, decisions are made on long term scientific projections but this is challenged by more immediate local concerns based on the observed effects of climate change; projections of future risk can also be brought into the present through anticipatory governance, policies and communication but runs the risk that projected catastrophic futures of inundation will undermine the case for sustainable development in the present 

• In Fiji environmental changes are seen in the everyday through coastal erosion, flooding, crop damage and storm surges but place attachment is also evoked through concerns of relocation as locals do not wish to leave the places they have lived and worked in their entire lives, or that have spiritual and traditional meaning to their cultures

• Villages where the government has not yet begun relocation anticipate this as a response and this shapes contemporary action such as reducing the desire to invest in homes; but in villages where relocation is occurring this becomes an everyday experience of planning concerning where to go, how to access funding, how to construct infrastructures etc. to see past reflections, present experiences and future anxieties come together in thick temporalities

Neimanis & Walker, 2014

• ‘Thick time’ sees different timescales interweave and interact in the everyday 

• It is heavy with a present, present-pasts and present-futures and encompasses many ‘might-have-been’ and ‘could-still-be’ hopeful dimensions; this sees the past and possible futures enfolded in the present 

• The temporal lens of thick time is attentive to the past, present and future time-scapes of climate change and calls attention to the ways in which different timescales become palpable in the everyday 

• This is key to planning relocation and understanding the perspectives of local people to inform climate adaptation policies and practices in locally meaningful manners

Alaani et al., 2020

• Understanding long term effects of recent wars on civilians health is critical, this has been found within the Fallujah population in Iraq with birth defects increasing since 1991 and reaching almost 15% in 2010 (where this is usually not expected above 6%), there is an unusually high prevalence of birth defects and miscarriages from 2009-2010

• There is an expected presence of teratogenic metals in post-war environments due to the weapons systems using in the Middle East with metals persisting in the environment, these can be taken up via respiratory, skin contact and ingestion of contaminated food or water to persist in the hair of those exposed; this exposure can also damage the reproductive system and lead to birth defects 

• Here most of the parents in the town had been present and active during the time of attacks to the town in 2004/5 and showed a high metal load alongside children; this extensive contamination is determined to be a key factor in the increase of birth defects with metal loads also found in newborn children’s hair deriving from the mother’s exposure

• This is an example of slow violence as the past war-time environment impacts current births, as well as extending into the future to impact the health of the newborns as they grow up

Curley & Smith, 2024

• The Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Plantationocene are propositions of new ways of understanding the role of people and the planet, these narratives privilege Eurocentric narratives of human history and fail to engage Black and Indigenous scholarship and theorisations of nature

• The cenes work to bound space and time into singular timelines where the future is seen as a catastrophe rather than one that is already underway, this narrows the culpability and is simplistic in its assumptions of a single, linear timeframe; there is a need to centre decolonisation and abolition in an attempt to abolish racial slavery, segregation and capitalism as part of a larger political project of Black liberation

• The cene temporalities generate crisis narratives of the future, rather than seeing the past and present as sites for crisis making; it divides time, places Europe at the centre, forms knowledge to be scientific and allows solutions to environmental change to become technocratic and override existing claims for abolition

• Black and Indigenous scholarship seeks to trouble the human/nature divide, centres place-based and embodied relations to the environment, disrupts narratives of linear time and progress and suggests abolition, decolonisation and anticolonial projects over technical solutions

• By centering Black and Indigenous time, there is attention drawn to different politics and solutions to move away from technological fixes to revolutionary futures

Yussof, 2018

• The Anthropocene narrative is homogenous and attempts to universalize humanity to overlook the fact that the global environmental crisis is unevenly caused and its effects are unevenly distributed 

• The role of race in the Anthropocene debate is re-centred by asserting that the Anthropocene does not acknowledge black and brown death as a precondition for this story; the historical legacy of slavery, colonialism and White Geology are obscured 

• A billion black Anthropocenes refers to the erasure of humanness from the countless forgotten extinctions and deaths of black and Indigenous people, there is a need to resurrect this history to place Indigeneity and Blackness at the centre of our analysis of how past and present catastrophes are understood

• Geology had led to slavery, forced displacement, exploitation of natural resources and the formation of an anti-Black epistemology

• The Anthropocene tortoises the effects of colonialism by erasing its origins; therefore, there can be no address of planetary failures without overcoming extractive colonialism

Kovats, 2000

• El Nino is the best known example of natural climate change variability on interannual timescales due to sea temperate and atmospheric pressure changes across the Pacific Ocean; events occur every 2-7 years and are associated with extreme weather conditions including floods and droughts and increased natural disasters with the greatest impacts to developing countries such as Ecuador and Peru

• There is evidence that El Nino is not only associated with extreme weather, food shortages and famine but also a heightened risk of vector borne diseases as the high temperatures and rainfall increase the breeding of mosquito and rodent populations 

• In northern Pakistan, Rwanda and Uganda El Nino has been associated with an increased incidence of malaria; dengue fever has risen in Thailand and Puerto Rico and hantavirus has also increased with the growing rodent abundance in southern US

McCreary & Milligan, 2021

• Structures of settler colonialism in Vancouver continues to normalise dispossession and disproportionately burden marginalised communities with environmental harms

• Vancouver has the largest urban Indigenous population in Canada with over 1 million people; however, as it developed into a major port Indigenous peoples were displaced to marginal reserves to make space for capitalist development and industry; there rely on a subsistence economy based on fisheries and traditional harvesting 

• The industrial development and pollution continues to impact food supplies seeing fish populations decline and the traditional harvest fail; in 2016 a new gas pipeline was proposed that led to further dispossession, capturing of territory, lack of access to sacred sites and harvesting 

• This shows how settler colonialism is an ongoing process that continues to mount violence against Indigenous peoples and their ways of life

Belicia & Islam, 2018

• Wildlife tourism is frequently cited as a solution to the problem of poaching, habitat destruction and species extinction as wildlife is able to pay to survive and there is an incentive formed to conserve populations and habitats 

• This a major driver of economic growth, accounting for around 12 million trips per year especially in developing countries containing much of the world’s biodiversity; there have been positives here including financial and non-financial contributions, increased incentive to conserve and education on animal welfare to fund habitat management and anti-poaching campaigns 

• However, wildlife tourism often leads to abuse and exploitation of animals to impact breeding, feeding and foraging patterns as well as animals often being taken directly from the wild to captivity, kept in unsuitable conditions and forced to interact with tourists   

• The distinction between society and nature in the present sees some animals loved and cared for, but others exploited based on imposed meanings as entertainment for humans as animals are commodified into photo props, shows and zoos

• Commodification of wildlife allows animals to be viewed as privately owned goods that can be marketed to tourists, they must now be decommodified to respect the value of nature based in Islamic ecological paradigms, land ethic calls and animal rights; there should also be structural changes to capitalist systems

• Wildlife tourism must take more positive forms where animal interest is placed before profit maximisation and the relationship is one of respect and love