Final bits

Interesting point on the guardian

• changed language

• deliberately to describe the environment in a different way

  • global warming → global heating

  • climate change → climate crisis

• these changes are political - they express need for action

• and focus on narratives of crisis (urgency) and retain focus on temperature as the metric but moving from warming to heating again highlighting urgency

Migration link to colonialism

• Forced relocation under colonial duress now seen as a model for climate change relocation

• Migration as an adaptation to response – origins within the colonial era

  • What does this solution mean for rights, identity and citizenship

• Colonial model of the Banabans is held up as a potential ‘solution’ for those displaced by climate change

• Phoenix Island Settlement Scheme (Maude, 1968)

  • Relocated I-Kiribas individuals to the island on Environmental grounds due to the overpopulation of the capital which drained resources

  • This was used to establish colonial power

  • This island is periodically exposed to drought (hence why it was unpopulated before this)

• Forced relocation during the colonial era shapes justified by environmental reasons continues to shape contemporary perceptions (Weber, 2016)

• Relocation era of climate change (Edwards, 2014)

Slow violence

• “typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011, p.2)

  • Environmentalism of the poor

  • Incremental, cumulative, insidious

  • Over a range of temporal scales

  • To study this you need to understand the difficulty of representation and the invisibility of slow violence

    • Hard to act when you can see the problem

      • But who cannot see these issues

• Slow violence is a useful theoretical framework to understand ongoing effects of (colonial) environmental degradation

Decolonising

Tuck and yang, 2012 – decolonisation is not a metaphor it is about the redistribution of power and rights

Example of decolonial org

• UNPO – 40 political communities which are denied access to international fora

• Governments in exile

• Indigenous communities

  • E.g. Uigur, Tibet, Catalonia

• Committed to nonviolence and democracy

• Small secretariat

• Training and lobbying for the most marginalised people on the planet

• Leadership and diplomacy

• Solidarity organisation

Ozone

• CFCs used widely

• Led to the depletion of the Ozone – more UV radiation to the surface

• International community reached a consensus

  • 1987 Montreal protocol

  • Set deadlines and ozone recovering

One of the most successful international acts of cooperation

Planetary boundaries

How to govern the anthropocene – new configurations of human and non-human life?

Rockstrom et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015

• Collateral concept, closely aligned or directly linked, to the Anthropocene (Castree, 2014)

  • Global managerialism

• Privileging of the global environment over local social issues (Brown, 2017)

• Planetary framing – securitization of environmental issues (Dalby, 2009)

  • Ecological limits tied to security concern over changing global environment

• Planetary boundaries are a political notion which fight for the role of multilateral solutions

• Decolonising underlying colonial-capitalist ideologies and practices (Sultana, 2023)

What is risk

• the probability that something bad will happen

Risk perception paradox

Wachinger et al., 2012

• spec natural hazards

• personal experience and (dis)trust of authorities has the greatest impact on risk perception

• with cultural and individual factors (age, gender, education) playing an amplifying or mediating role

paradox

• assumption that high risk perception will lead to high preparedness

• but the opposite can occur if there is a choice not the prepare

  • due to acceptance of benefits, strong ties to the land

  • lack of realisation of agency - transfer responsibility elsewhere (the state)

  • few resources

Risk analysis practices timeline

• science and technology relating to risk have improved over time - there is more knowledge of risk

• but does this mean people are less at risk

• or do changing planetary and social conditions (climate change, the advent of nuclear weapons combined with greater geopolitical instability) mean that there is more risk?

the usage of risk within the English language has increased since WWII

• new risks - nuclear power

• and greater societal awareness of risk

• Zinn, 2010

(Cutter, 2020)

• post war paradigm - linear thinking

• hazard + population = risk

• physical force interacting with vulnerable people or assets = adverse outcome

  • results in the use of spatial delineation of human occupancy of hazard zones

  • focus on the role of hazard perception

80 = shift to vulnerability paradigm

• different vulnerability of different people

• explains how different social groups are differentially at risk from the same event

• and allows for consideration of the role of historical, social and political processes in accentuating risk through increasing vulnerability

Construction of risk

• Strong constructivism

  • risk is entirely socially constructed - some cultures would not see a volcano as a risk

• Weak

  • both real and socially constructed in how we understand it

in this essay i will take a critical realist approach which entails an understanding of risk through the lens of weak constructivism

objective realism - there is a real probability and we can calculate it

• this approach is used within the (western) physical sciences

• which aim to reduce risk and therefore require metrics and measurements, targets and thresholds

uncertainty

• risk science

• and risk in general is uncertain and probabilistic

• this is crucial and underscores the reason risk is important for geographers to study

• there is power in manipulating this uncertainty

Geographies of power associated with risk

• directly linked to ideas of epistemic value and violence

• speaks to how knowledge is produced

• and what knowledge is valued or discarded

Foucault, 1972 - risk can be used to channel power

• risk used to problematise issues and politicise them rather than looking at other aspects

• and elevates the views of experts above others

  • how are experts defined

  • when considering biophysical risks (CC, health, volcanoes) often those best informed by western science

  • marginalising other forms of knowledge - such as indigenous community experts in place specific risk and risk management

Political nature of risk assessment - exclusion and inclusion (Jasanoff, 2010)

Whose responsibility is risk management

• the state?

  • the provide warnings of potential disaster

  • entails investment in monitoring and communication systems

  • does this give power to control and regulate the activities of the individual

  • twe does risk management allow the trespassing of individual freedoms (such as freedom of movement) in the name of a probable event

  • Me: there is no definable threshold for risk to be high enough to allow for curtailing of freedom - it is a necessary but political (rather than purely scientific) choice

  • science-informed politics

Scale of risk

• National (within a country)

• International

• individual

• these all require different mitigation and communication strategies and have different actors in power

risk must be contextualised and the broader the spatial scale of risk the more divorced it becomes from its local impacts, and context

Also time

• CC is an excellent example

• 2100 - girvan - heighte risk

• which consequences are when

• the role of science in dictating the scale of risk - global outputs of the IPCC

Moving from extremes to the everyday

Cutter, 2020

• sources of hazards such as precipitation, rising sea levels, wildfires

• frequent events producing nearly continuous impacts on the communities they affect

cascading hazards

• by-product f the risk society

• where natural hazards intersect with industrial facilities and create new hazards such as toxic chemicals released into air or water

  • more regional hazard

• Natech - Natural Hazards Tiggering Technological Accidents

• “natech cascade”

  • for example

  • Hurricane Florence (2018) floodwaters breached coal ash containment ponds

  • releasing toxic residue from coal power plants

Enhancing inequalities

• the pace of change under the anthropocene

• producing more disparities risk vulnerability

• especially in affluent countries

• racial, economic, gender divides

• from long standing historical, social, economic and political process

• segment and divide society

• social differences result in different levels of preparedness, response capacity and recovery capabilities

• as structural divides enlarge through the anthropocene vulnerability will be enhanced

• compound harm will increase as hazard frequency increases

Risk society

Beck (1986)

• societal response to increasing risk associated with modernisation (esp. technology)

• in the context of the Chernobyl disaster

Giddens (1998)

• a society that places focus on the future and safety and therefore on risk

focus on the changed nature of dominant risk from “natural” - humans have always been subjected to this, to “non-natural” from tech

I like this

• allows a consideration of local place specific environmental risks

  • floods etc (which can be manifestation of climate change, but also can not be)

  • humans have always responded

  • recognises the role of indigenous knowlegdes

• but CC is a non-natural risk, as is AI etc

  • this is the greater risk we face in the Anthropocene

  • Giddens (1998) and Beck (1986) link to modernisation

  • i would link to the anthropocene more broadly

Action and risk society

• manufactures risks can be quantified and assessed according to Giddens (1998) and Beck (1986)

• which can in turn alter response

• as well as increased awareness of risk affecting individual perception and action

  • backlash against perceived risk of nuclear energy changed its representation (from fuel to CC mitigation) and abandonment of expansion plans

Risk and the Anthropocene

(Zinn, 2016)

• argues that changing perceptions of nature in the Anthropocene have changes the nature of risk

• nature has changed from being independent and available for exploitation

• to concerns over protection and active management to producing nature (links to OVP)

• environmental decision making is shifting from an emphasis on the prevention and minimisation of risk towards risk management and risk taking

• Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000)

• recognition of human impact on the environment = results in the generation of knowledge which allows action towards the future and knowledge (however uncertain) of the future

• KI: the anthropocene and measurement of it have changes risk and risk perception and have reoriented society towards responsibility and drastic action (time)

• resulting in risk taking action - Geoengineering

• idea of risk-society is outdated, now we are in a risk-taking society (focus on shaping the environment, active intervention - threshold of risk management on a global conceptual scale has been crossed).

The changing nature of Hazard and Disaster Risk in the Anthropocene

• the concept of the anthropocene provides reflexive rubric

• to examine human environment interaction

• of which risk is a crucial part

1)

• redefinition of what constitutes extremes (lower probability higher consequence events)

• the focus on the everyday (manifestations of bigger issues) and cumulative impacts (often compounding to produce more significant impacts than single events - link to Slow Violence)

2)

• the complex intersection of nature, human systems, tech etc

• create a coupled and complex web of potential risks and impacts = link to the idea of CC as global and the globalised impacts of actions in one region

3)

• increased inequalities in risk