Disasters, Climate and Racial Inequality Revision

How have discourses of Global South vulnerability evolved over time?

Early European encounter with the Global South in the C19th led to a discourse of ‘topicality’ formed to other tropical environments and form them as zones of danger and illness that should be treated through the application of Western medicine; this evolves to ‘development’ discourse in the C20th conceiving the Global South as backwash and underdeveloped and finally to ‘vulnerability’ where a lack of scientific prediction, engineering preparedness and management of hazards require Western technocratic intervention through a continuation of imperialism and cultural authority

What is a structural understanding of vulnerability?

A focus on everyday social interactions and historical structures that determine the nature, cause and consequence of disasters driven by economics, social and political influences in specific settings; this is often related to marginalisation and multidimensional, compounding structural factors can be seen as a form of slow violence

What are key social factors influencing vulnerability?

Lack of access to resources, limited political power, poor social capital, beliefs and customs, building stock and age, lines, density of infrastructure, age, gender, race etc.

What does the ‘hazards of place’ model use to quantify risk?

The social fabric of a place, measures of community, economic development, demography and housing to see social and biophysical vulnerabilities interact through a geographical filter

How can social protection be applied to climate change?

Often climatic changes can push people into poverty as well as the poor being the most vulnerable, social protection policies should seek to address this issue though livelihood diversification, climate resilience, asset building and resilience; this could involve climate resilient agriculture, pastoral opportunities, seed diversification, asset transfers, food provision or increased mobility and training

How have social protection and climate change been combined in Malawi?

Here diverse seed packs have been distributed to local land owners to include resilience to climate change through crop diversification

How are disaster studies characterised and how to they understand disasters?

This is a multidisciplinary area engaging with social, cultural, economic and political implications of diseases; notions of control and power are also fundamental for who controls information and can produce meaning

How does the discursive framing of disasters contribute to action?

Framing of disasters can produce institutional and elite action which sees harms shift and evolve, this includes the counting of death and injury which often renders deaths of racial and ethnic groups invisible

How many people tied in the Philippines during typhoons and in which year did this occur?

1600 people died in 2004 due to typhoons, landslides and floods

How are the typhoons in the Philippines evidence of multiple structural vulnerabilities?

it was not only heavy rainfall and deforestation that lead to destruction, but also structural conditions such as difficulty in accessing land and resources leading people to live in unsafe areas and farm Streep slopes; corrupt elites also allowed for illegal logging and overexploitation of trees that formed unsafe conditions through geographical and political marginalisation

How was Hurricane Katrina an example of racial marginalisation?

US entitlement to healthcare, clean food and water, safe neighbourhoods, transport and political representation is highly differentiated based on racial, class, gender and ethnic gradients; African-American people in New Orleans lived in the most hazard prone areas and were less able to evacuate due to lower access to transportation, insurance cheques were also delayed for these households

Which hurricane hit Puerto Rico and in what year to demonstrate colonial abandonment?

Hurricane Maria in 2017

What was the impact of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and why?

Electricity was lost for nearly a year, there was widespread deterioration, degradation and forced waiting as buildings remained shattered, cables unrecovered and public lighting out of service due to state neglect of Black and Brown bodies rendered disposable; residents were forced to set up community kitchens, clear up debris, distribute solar lights etc. as a way of breaking free from US dependence through community care

What year did droughts hit northern Uganda and when did the Civil War end that impacted this?

Droughts hit in early 2017 to amplify the impact of the Civil War ending in 2006

How were the droughts made ‘catastrophic’ by the impacts of the Civil War?

The war led to the forcible displacement of over 1 million people and the landscape was radically changed due to widespread felling of trees due to global demands for timber products; this decline in productivity, destruction of ecosystems and changes in weather patterns led to exacerbated impacts as part of the devastation of war

What year did the Haitian earthquake occur?

2010

What were key dimensions in the disaster of the Haitian 2010 earthquake?

Bad geology paired with historical dimensions of racial and class based conflicts, urbanisation forcing huge numbers of people to live in slums in the city where there was widespread good insecurity and political unrest; the state was also indifferent and did not aid in the response leading to a state of intimate permanent disaster

What hurricane hit Honduras and in what year?

Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998

What were the impacts of Hurricane Mitch and what did this prove?

This led to a reduction of 40% in crop incomes and a 6% increase in poverty as low-income households lost the capacity to generate earnings and uphold their lifestyles due to losses of productive assets and housing; growth differences law the wealthiest households rebuild after 3 years but the lowest income households became trapped in poverty traps leading to long term, unequalised effects

What are the origins of environmental justice?

Grassroots activism in the US contesting proposals to site pollution and toxic facilities being built in predominately Black and poor communities sparking questions on the distribution of environmental harms, inequality and injustices related to pollution, race and civil rights

What is environmental racism and what does this lead to?

Environmental racism sees differences in environmental quality between Black and White communities arise from institutional racism influencing land use, enforcement of environmental regulation, industry facility sites etc.; this sees environmental harms shifted to Black communities while providing benefits to White populations; this often leads to air pollution, environmental health risks, contamination of food and water, toxicity etc. compounded with lesser access to healthcare

What is the environmental apartheid?

The limitations of environmental policies on mobility, neighbourhood options, job opportunities and the location of toxic waste sites as communities become sacrifice zones

What is slow violence?

The type of violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, it is delayed in destruction and is not immediate or explosive but instead incremental and accretive; an example is seen toxic pollution as a gradual brutality caught up in structural harms and epistemic violence allowing for persistence

What is a key factor in increasing the breadth of environmental justice and what might this include?

Gender is key for drawing attention to the differential impacts of toxicities based on intersections between factors such as age, disability, immigration status etc; this allows for a refocusing on the body and maternal systems or children’s health; the changing environment must be shown to impact social reproduction and everyday life in changing environmental conditions

How do petrochemical industries illustrate environmental racism and where?

In Louisiana the South is seen as backward and the colonial mentality allows local governments and large businesses to take advantage of those political and economically powerless as the collapse of sugar plantations led to a new prime location discovered for petrochemical industries; the Lower Mississipi River industrial corridor now contains 125 companies and is dubbed ‘Cancer Alley’ as a toxic sacrifice zone where the lives of the Black and poor communities are rendered expendable

How does slow violence play out in ‘Cancer Alley’, what other type of violence is at play here?

Pollution slowly accumulates and residents observe this in invasive chemical smells, stories of increased cancer rates, vegetation wilting, trees drying, wildlife disappearing or health issues; slow violence is visible to resists but invisible to scientists, writers and external bodies due to the impact of epistemic violence that should be challenged through increasing representation of these stories

Where and how is the intersection of gender and environmental justice evidenced?

In the Canadian Arctic Indigenous mothers have been found to have their great milk contaminated by toxic chemicals as a result of industry pollution long distances away; this is leading to higher rates of infectious diseases, immune disruption and challenges to neuro-behavioural development of newborn children

Where is slow violence occurring as a result of waste formations and redevelopment?

Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco

How does slow violence play out at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard?

The Shipyard was abandoned in 1974 and has since become a highly toxic place housing waste accumulated through industrial shipbuilding and radiological lab waste leading to asthma, cancer and death for the African American community living on the margins of San Fransisco due to racial banishment from the inner city; it is now being redeveloped as a brownfield project seeking to form private urban developments, commercial spaces and climate change think tanks but this encouraged a new white residential population and creative class to displace the African American community due to rising prices and new socialites; this links race to waste-ablity both in toxic and human waste

How does postcolonial government and governance in India affect the application of environmental justice?

Differential governance, state reform and environmental social movements sees Western environmental justice inapplicable to postcolonial contexts; the state is a key institution but often breaks its own regulations due to being dominated by economic and social elites who remain focused on economic growth at all costs, this was evidenced in the management of forests failing and the Joint Forest Management formed in the 1970s but this is also undermined through a lack of political will, weak civil society organisation and the subordination of marginalised groups; the state lacks coherent objectives, has poor identification of prioritise and inappropriate methods and tools showing a need to challenge the universal vase of environmental justice and make it more appropriate to non-Western contexts

How Is climate inequity characterised and how should this be improved?

The most damaging and long lasting consequences of GHG emissions are not constrained to borders but decades the world’s common climate system with variable impacts based on vulnerabilities’ this sees the least vulnerable countries emitting the most but the most vulnerable face the largest impacts and contribute the least; there is a need to enforce common but differentiated responsibility frameworks and improve climate financing to move towards greater equity

What does critical climate justice seek to expose and redress?

The unequal impacts of climate change and how to redress inequalities in fair and equitable ways; this uses solidarity and collective action alongside greater engagement with intersectional and international feminist scholarship to encourage impactful and accountable action

What kind of action does critical climate justice promote?

Inclusive planning and action beyond techno-managerial climate solutions to improve the lived experience of those suffering inequalities; this seeks to move away from victim narratives to resilience, care and communing to bring about equitable change

How is climate colonially expressed?

Global racism, othering, dispossession and communication, destruction, sacrifice zones and excessive exposure to harms based on colonial differences that compound in a slow violence rendering the lives and ecosystems of those in sacrifice zones disposable; this is seen in development, land grabs, conservation and deforestation

What is the climate apartheid?

The socio-spatial differentiation of who pays for the climate breakdown, who is expendable and who is spared based on the intersection of race, gender and class; this also privileges Western expertise, normalises technocratic management and extractives in material and epistemological sites of struggle that must be decolonised

How is vulnerability a matter of political economy?

Vulnerability is shaped by powerful actions to inform choices of adaptation that benefit institutions and interests by depoliticising it and promoting innovations in finance and the market as the solution; this is embedded in discourses, epistemologies and ideologies to impose capitalist and colonial desires framed as fixes to reproduce power dynamics and fail to recognise the agency and humanity of those at risk

How is pollution colonialism?

Pollution is an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land as entitlement to land allows pollution to assimilate through assumed access to Indigenous lands without permission or consent; this is reified in environmental solutions, landfills and scientific research