Case Studies - Geographies of Global Environmental Change

Experience of Indigenous communities

• Where climate change is often viewed as a detached, scientific process by Western narratives, but it can be seen as an ‘emergent form of life’ that is not managed through measures and strict regulations but instead memories, myths, experiences and historical knowledge are used to formulate new strategies to cope with the climate crisis

• There is also a sense of deja vu associated with contemporary environmental changes such as the loss of forests, land degradation and changes in ecological regimes as they have been felt before in an era of colonialism through economically justified invasions clearing land and displacement (Whyte, 2017)

• Environmental change therefore acts as an intensification of these past impacts instead of an entirely new phenomenon, this forced reflection on brutal pasts may evoke an emotional plain to introduce a unique strand of emotionality politicising the environment (Smith, 2008)

Arctic Terns, Orkney Island, Scotland

• The more-than-human also experience distinct impacts of environmental change through complex ecological relations that multiply across landscapes (Robin, 2018)

• The loss of… has had ascending impacts upon the biosphere, local culture and human inhabitants as other birds lose their food sources and there is a haunting on the local level of where these birds used to represent the coming of Spring in their migration (Newman, 2025)

Global mean temperature vs regional climate signatures

• Scientists and international organisations assert that the planet has warmed by up to 0.8 degrees since the mid nineteenth century; however, this a great generalisation as no one individual experiences this exact increase and certainly not the global population as a whole

• These ‘global’ measures obscure regional signatures of climate variation such as monsoons in Asia and Africa, and see the individual bodies affected by these local climatic changes erased from global understandings of climate change (Hulme, 2010)

El Niño and disease incidence

• 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 it 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 it 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 (Kovats, 2000)

The Ordinary Anthropocene

• The same restrictive logic is applied to concepts such as ... that through repetition, reinforces global discourses surrounding the homogeneity of humanity and enforcing a singular manner through which humans interact with nature (O’Brien, 2011)

• There can also be an attention paid to the…, whereby wild flamingos return to Florida, this story is more ambiguous that stories of catastrophes, super storms and flooded cities and instead provides a lens to open up reflection on the multivariate ecological relationships and shifting assemblages of everyday life and death (Fredriksen, 2021)

Marshall Islands, Pacific

• Have seen sovereignty passed from Spain, to Germany, to Japan and finally to the US where military and nuclear testing took place

• This Oceanic island state sees climate adaptation as particularly important as without swift and large scale adaptation they will become uninhabitable by the mid-century and the population will be forced to migrate as climate refugees leading to losses of sovereignty, culture and livelihoods 

• Decision makers and leaders and committed to large scale aggressive adaptation necessary for preserving national identity and sovereignty; however, they rely on external funding which forms a major barrier as funders see migration as investible and even desirable 

• 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 (Bordner et al., 2020) 

Georgetown, Guyana

• Colonial institutions and legacies of British and Dutch colonial governance shape the modern-day adaptive capacity of the postcolonial urban centre  

• This limits responses to climatic risks including sea level rise, coastal inundation and flooding as maintenance of critical infrastructure for building adaptive capacity has been inconsistent due to financial constraints

• There have been international organisation efforts to finance large-scale hard infrastructure defences but community based projects have been more effective in mitigating floods to prove the use of grassroots interventions

• There is a need to form long term resilience through knowledge making and financing and strengthening local institutions to improve the cities adaptation now and in the future (Robinson et al., 2023)

Banaba and Nauru, Pacific

• Phosphate rich rocks were found on these islands and mined by British, Australian and New Zealand companies and stakeholders; yet the native populations did not benefit and instead endured social and environmental ruining that continues to the present day

• The economic, social and environmental impacts led to forced relocation of the people to Fiji in 1945 where they remain a marginalised and unstable community with their lifestyles completely transformed and cultures lost

• … has also seen much social and economic challenge and is now a refugee detention centre for Australia in exchange for large assistance packages and debt bail outs, this allows Australia to continue to use the territory as a space of convenience rather than a populated island

• This evidences environmental and cultural devastation, the life of imperial debris and the longevity of structural dominance (Teaiwa, 2015)

• As attention grows to likely future climate induced population displacement in Oceania, it is useful to learn from the relocation and appreciate that relocation is a complex process that careful planning is required for to minimise trauma 

• Although the colonial authorities had devised a plan of resettlement, the timescale of a few months proved unrealistic as the establishment of a community takes many years; there is a need for the involvement of the community in resettlement planning to assess alternative housing, long term planning and the creation of sustainable livelihoods supported by external agencies (Edwards, 2014)

Vancouver, Canada

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

• Has the largest urban Indigenous population 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 (McCeary & Milligan, 2021)

Water supply, England and Wales, 1989

• The privatisation is a model of market environmentalism where market institutions are introduced to manage natural resources

• This project was one of successful privatisation, broad commercialisation but a failure to commodify water due to its geography as life-giving, continually circulating and being a scaled resource with biophysical, spatial and sociocultural characteristics rendering it resistant to commodification

• The ecological and health consequences of large scale network integration prevented the introduction of direct competition, and the introduction of efficiency pricing and metering was met with resistance as water was changed from an entitlement of citizens to a commodity available for customers

• This led to a reregulation of water and forced the retreat of neoliberalism from water supply; however, did lead to increased environmental and drinking water quality as a result of an injection of private capital, the regulation of privatised operators through new agencies such as the Environmental Agency and technological innovation sparked through market competition (Bakker, 2005)

Ugandan carbon forestry

• Market environmentalism embodied through carbon forestry has formed a biopolitics of climate security discourse and interventions; the activities and moves of the state and non-state actors now constitute the ground for direct and bio-cultural sacrifice of people and ecologies

• Sacrifice zones are formed through the neoliberalising of carbon forestry where there is an assumed ecological disconnect between people and the environment, this normalises environmental degradation in some places while protecting others; there is an uneven reassertion of protected first territories that are conducive to maximising carbon finance and investment 

• This sees local populations relocated, dispossessed and marginalised in the reorganisation of territory in carbon forestry seen as necessary for the green economy; individuals and communities are displaced as powerful actors take advantage of laws and institutions to invest in sequestration; this leads to a serving of relationships to land, local cultures and economies

• There is also an ecological sacrifice as forest areas not amenable to valuation, commodification or extraction are left outside of protected areas and instead left to deforest and degrade; this also leads to losses in biodiversity 

• New forms of forestry governance rolled out by market environmentalism work to sustain heterogeneous forests and power relations destructive to local ecologies and cultures (Nel, 2015)

UK Government ‘Migration and Global Environmental Change’ Report 2011

• An article was released with language, logic and lessons consistent with the wider diffusion of neoliberal views in contemporary environmental governance circles 

• 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 (Felli & Castree, 2012)

Indonesian peatland

• 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 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 disciplinary 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 (Astuti, 2021)

IPCC ‘Burning Embers’ diagram

• This 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 (Mahony, 2015)

The Catholic Church, German speaking countries

• A multi-level actor that can contribute to the partnership of social actors in achieving climate compatibility; technical solutions alone will not achieve sustainable development as cultural transformations are equally important 

• Religions are an important societal force that can implement climate compatible lifestyles and foster sustainable development on local, regional, and global levels; it is a global community on many levels where ecological awareness and practical efforts to protect the environment have become increasingly visible from Pope John Paul II’s human ecology to Pope Francis’ focus on environmental issues and introducing sustainability as key to thinking; now actions are largely embedded in broader perspectives of ecological awareness and sustainability

• In Austria, the Austrian Bishop’s Conference established its own department for ecology to form environmental managers and in Switzerland it publishes brochures on environmental questions and supports parishes in their path to ecological certification

• In Austria, Germany and Luxembourg it calls for a programme of ‘car fasting’ over the past 20 years where car use is reduced during Lent to allow for a time of spiritual recollection and change to be re-interpreted in an ecological way based on the principle of responsibility for creation and society alongside intergenerational responsibility; this has spread to wider calls for fasting for the climate and ‘plastic fasting’

• It also engages in education on all levels from kindergartens to adult education in German speaking countries; the number of courses with an ecological focus has increased since 2015 after Pope Francis broadened the environmental focus to consider society, responsibility and environmental peace by bringing sustainability into the everyday (Ostheimer & Blanc, 2021)

‘Love thy neighbour’

• Modern day Catholics and Christians are bombarded with a huge array of social issues, now the US Conference of Catholic Bishops offers teaching on global climate change based in the theological perspective of climate change rooted in Jesus’ commandment demanding we take steps to prevent global warming and consequences for the poorest 

• The commandment considers human responsibility to love God with one’s whole heart, mind and resources and one’s neighbour as oneself; today many of our poorest neighbours are unequally hurt by production and consumption in developed countries and therefore God calls on us to act and bring about justice

• Catholic social teaching extends to all of God’s creations to see social and ecological justice inseparable, this shows a need to make renewable energy switches and abandon our consumerist lifestyle and love God’s creatures both human and non-human

• Adopting a simpler lifestyle is seen to help the environment and place us in solidarity with the poor and nature; there is a need to stop sinning and wasting to bring together Catholic social teaching and ethics of environmental stewardship (Braun et al., 2007)

Tuvalu ‘wishful sinking’

• The islands 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 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 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

• It 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 (Farbotko, 2010)

Pacific Climate Warriors

• 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

• They 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 (McNamara & Farbotko, 2017)

East Timor

• Many are dependent on agriculture for their sole of main source of income with no state income support, they have little alternative food source beyond their own production with maize as an important food supply

• This is not irrigated and in times of low rainfall maize production can reduce by up to a third leading to issues including hunger and malnutrition 

• This reduction in livelihood security can increase the risk of violent conflict (Barnett & Adger, 2007)

Bangladeshi climate refugees

• 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 it 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 (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2010)

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

• 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 with growing initiatives at the UN, EU, US-China summits etc. which encouraged the use of back channel negotiations at the summit (Brun, 2016)

‘Icy geopolitics’

• Reveals how ice can be treated as a geopolitical matter; it is represented and experienced in a multitude of ways from oral cultures of Indigenous communities to the colonial framing of an unstable, ungoverned space

• As melting and thawing continues, Arctic people and states seek to press their interests through expressions of territorial colonisation and resource extraction at odds with Indigenous autonomy, stewardship and conservation

• Ice humanities open up to critical ocean studies to draw attention to Indigenous experiences and knowledges as well as power plays, strategy, infrastructures, justice and autonomies that occur in the Anthropocene 

• Ice and its relationship to geopolitics deserve further examination as they reveal how places like the Arctic holds interactions with Indigenous peoples, animals, land, seas etc. and colonialism (Dodds, 2021)

Plastic pollution

• 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 it 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 (Liboiron, 2021)

Populism and net-zero, UK

• Politicians and commentators link…, 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

• This 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 

• 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 (Atkins, 2022)

COVID and climate change

• The overlapping global socio-ecological crises 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 … 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 (Sultana, 2021)

The Maldives

• Daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people’s everyday lives, routines and practices 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

• 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 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 (Kothari & Arnall, 2019)

Ecuador and Bolivia, legal Rights of Nature

• In 2008 … 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 … applying them slightly differently; however, the rights of nature are advancing (Tanasescu, 2013)

• There have been legal rights given to rivers in …, as well as legal Rights of Nature in … (Robin, 2018)

UK news media

• 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 (Hayes & O’Neill, 2021)

Greenland on film

• The documentary genre is key to the cinematic turn of critical geopolitics and international relations as films deploy the everyday, affective and embodied to make distinct claims about their subject matter; documentaries and films attempt to represent geopolitical relationships, agents, objects, ecologies and Indigenous communities

• Representations have moved from Cold War experimentation to a resource frontier, to a focus for anxieties about climate change and now begins to be challenged by a growing fourth type of Indigenous filmmaking 

• Films are used to provoke feelings, sensations and wider affective economies such as the US documentary ‘Chasing Ice’ in 2012 picking up on the trope of the fate of melting ice being indicative of rapid change and showing the severity of climate change

• Indigenous communities challenge non-Indigenous representations of the Arctic as emptied of people, cultures and ecologies to seek to convey the everyday realities of Indigenous life on the ice 

• A Canadian Inuit film ‘Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner’ sought to refill land, document cultures, everyday living and working and ecologies to push back against Cold War representations of the Arctic as an empty, strategic and experimental space (Dodds & Jensen, 2019)

Don’t Look Up

• Makes no direct reference to climate change, but functions as a climate communication film to satirise political and societal responses to scientific evidence of climate change and the lack of global climate action

• It is a cultural story of climate inaction to critique capitalism through speculative techno-fixes and celebrity commodity culture

• However, this privileges Global North perspectives and should go beyond apocalyptic imaginaries to more clearly centre climate justice (Doyle, 2022)

Fiji planned relocation

• The residents of coastal villages 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 

• 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 (McMichael & Katonivualiku, 2020)

Fallujah, Iraq birth defects

• Understanding long term effects of recent wars on civilians health is critical, this has been found within the population 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 (Alaani et al., 2020)

Island of Cardoso, Brazil

• Enseada de Baleia is a small fishing community; in 2016 a cyclone hit and there was significant erosion of the sandspit leading to an imperative to relocate to a safer part of the island at Novo Enseada

• The sand spit was caught in a thick temporality itself as the waves were always moving the sand and moving the island; it was seen as returning to its original state where it was captured by the waves by going to a predicted future, the anticipation of this was linked to relocation and a state of risk 

• When the floods came during a new moon in 2016 the islanders were forced to wait in a heavy state where they considered connections to their ancestral lands, immediate anxiety on erosion and the flooding of their homes and their uncertain future

• Their ancestral knowledge of fishing points and trees informed their relocation, as they based their livelihoods around interactions with nature and rebuilt in these entanglements 

• This challenges the idea of relocation as an adaptation strategy or last resource, but an intricate and intimate process embedded in non-linear temporalities and connected to the water that shapes the lives of humans, nonhumans and the land for the people of Enseada de Baleia (Gini, 2025)