The UN's invocation of "human security" a generation ago promised a world increasingly governed by a "people-centred" security agenda (UNDP, 1994, p. iii). In this paper, we focus on arguably the most vital global security challenge faced throughout the planet today: climate resilience. We outline how advancing smart climate action and securing climate resilience can be aided by securitization practices that recall the earlier emphases of the UN's human security concept. The paper draws upon evidence from the Caribbean as a territory defined dominantly as part of the Global South yet offering vital knowledges of productive climate security governance that can be instructive to the Global North. The impacts of global warming are particularly evident for the people of Small Island Developing States such as those located in the Caribbean (IPCC, 2018). By analysing the case of Cuba as a country increasingly resilient to extreme weather events, and by interrogating the genealogy of the broader Caribbean's hurricane culture, we show how an effective human security vision for climate justice and resilience can be achieved by recognising and integrating the valuable forms of locally-attuned knowledge that continue to emerge and coalesce in vulnerable geographies.
Adapted to survive in the interface between land and sea, mangroves are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. They are also highly adaptive to the imagination, with the theme of the mangrove being differently signified across texts, languages and communities as a place to find death in the tropics, a nature tourism destination, endangered environment, magical wood, refuge for maroons and revolutionaries, and source of livelihoods. The cultural malleability of mangroves mirrors their natural adaptability. It also echoes the varied and rhizomatic identities and imaginaries of the peoples of the tropical Americas. Relevant cultural texts produced in the region support experimentations with mangroves as a raw material susceptible to being worked in order to explain diverse realities. In order to highlight the relevance and malleability of mangrove ecosystems, this paper explores resignifications of socioecological interactions at the Ecological Mangrove Reserve Cayapas-Mataje in Ecuador through the lens of photographer Felipe Jácome. Jácome’s photographic essay Los Reyes del Manglar [The Kings of the Mangrove] provides rich material to study the rhizomatic evolution of the theme of the mangrove and its entanglements with people’s lives, cultures and histories. I argue that cultural representations of mangroves can go beyond their metaphorical recovery to support environmental justice. This essay is also informed by extant research on the important role of mangrove forests for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation, which locates these socioecological systems at the centre of people’s struggle for climate justice.
Developing resilience in conditions of extreme geographic and economic vulnerability, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have learned to share what works for adaptation on the ground through transnational Disaster Risk Reduction initiatives that address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This chapter focuses on South-South Cooperation between Caribbean SIDS on Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management, as well as triangulation with the European Union and international organisations through the African, Caribbean and Pacific-European Union Natural Disaster Risk Reduction (ACP-EU NDRR) Program. It critically analyses collaborations between regional platforms to show evidence of successful transferable adaptation strategies and tools that have emerged from disaster risk management experiences. Acknowledging the SIDS’ contribution to climate change adaptation is key for advancing both research and action. The examples of South-South cooperation between SIDS and triangulation with Europe and international organisations addressed in this chapter show that a coherent and effective theoretical framework for impactful adaptation research and global climate action should bring forward participatory, transdisciplinary and translocal perspectives informed by the experiences of early adaptors in the Global South.
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