Intervention: The invisible labor of climate change adaptation

Johnson, Leigh; Mikulewicz, Michael; Bigger, Patrick; Chakraborty, Ritodhi; Cunniff, Abby; Joshua Griffin, P.; Guermond, Vincent; Lambrou, Nicole; Mills-Novoa, Megan; Neimark, Benjamin; Nelson, Sara; Rampini, Costanza; Sherpa, Pasang; Simon, Gregory

doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102769

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…But, despite funding from the Dutch Government of nearly US $62 million, the project relied on the labor of landless contracting societies mostly comprised of women (Thomas, 2020). Such ‘climate adaptation labor’ is distinct from that of professional adaptation planners and practitioners in that it is often invisibilized, devalued, and depleting (Johnson et al., 2023).…”

Section: Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The vast majority of climate adaptation finance is delivered as loans, which not only makes low‐income countries financially responsible for a crisis they did not cause, but also often stipulates that recipient countries employ foreign experts at exorbitant cost (Carty et al., 2020). International consultants earn several times the salaries of local specialists (Johnson et al., 2023), which is difficult to reconcile given that the top climatologists, hydrologists, engineers, and geologists in countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam train abroad at the same institutions and in the very programs as their Dutch, American, British, Japanese, and German counterparts. Once repatriated, this money subsidizes unsustainable, energy‐intensive lifestyles in the consultants' home countries.…”

Section: Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Accumulation by adaptation

Thomas

2023

Geography Compass

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Accumulation by adaptation names the phenomenon by which political and economic elites profit from climate adaptation efforts. As with the notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ from which it derives, the term speaks to the injustice of capital accumulation—in this case, accumulation associated with configuring some groups' vulnerability to climate change as business opportunities. However, unlike accumulation by dispossession, the mechanisms by which accumulation by adaptation proceeds have not been adequately conceptualized. This review synthesizes critiques of Marx's formulation of primitive accumulation, recent scholarship on colonial racial capitalism, and critical adaptation studies to locate how capital circulates through and reproduces the violence of climate change.

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Section: Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accumulation by adaptation

Thomas

2023

Geography Compass

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“…Adaptation labor, or the human effort involved in building or repairing environments and infrastructure to adapt to the anticipated impacts of climate change, takes place across geographic scales and contexts (Johnson et al 2023). This labor can be measured in different ways, from workdays contributed to training to the volunteer hours by underresourced community members to strengthen the resilience of their neighborhoods through on-the-ground work that is deemed critical for absorbing future climate risk.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience Design: Myths of Participation and Stewardship

Lambrou

2023

Journal of Planning Literature

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Design proposals that aim to increase resilience to future extreme weather events increasingly center on equity concerns. The question of the implementation and ongoing maintenance of resilient landscapes, however, receives scant attention in planning literature despite the abundance of stewardship references in resilience proposals. Stewardship, as both concept and act, implicates equity because it is a form of adaptation labor that is invisible and unpaid. Here, I discuss California's Resilient by Design project to show that when the labor involved in stewardship projects is not acknowledged, claims for an equitable and resilient future espoused by planning proposals are diminished.

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Applying recent advances in climate adaptation research to urban heat risk management

Singh,

Ramesh,

Hagenlocher

et al. 2024

WIREs Climate Change

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There is unequivocal evidence that anthropogenic climate change is supercharging temperature and precipitation regimes globally. One of the clearest signals of this is seen in current and projected increases in extreme heat, understood as changes in temperature maximums, longer duration heatwaves, and higher night‐time temperatures. Extreme heat has substantial impacts on socio‐ecological systems through direct impacts on human health and labor productivity, crop yields and water security; and second‐order impacts on infrastructure functioning and hazards (e.g., increased fire and drought incidence). These impacts are differentiated and mediated by preexisting vulnerabilities based on who you are, what you do, where you live, and your capacities to prepare for, prevent, cope with and adapt to heat exposure. Nowhere are these increasing and differentiated impacts of heat more visible than in populous, rapidly urbanizing regions. Governments across the world are piloting and implementing heat management strategies, which are variously called heat‐health plans, heat action plans, heat resilience strategies, and so forth. We argue that such actions and policy agendas can benefit from theoretical advances in the climate change vulnerability and adaptation literature. We synthesize five theoretical advances to highlight the need for suites of actions sequenced in pathways that are more sensitive to trade‐offs, center equity as a normative goal of effective adaptation, acknowledge uncertainty and preexisting differential vulnerabilities, leverage lessons from participatory adpatation planning, and are forward‐looking and preparatory actions. We consolidate these advances and develop an approach to inform urban heat risk management.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice Climate and Development > Urbanization, Development, and Climate Change The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making

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Intervention: The invisible labor of climate change adaptation

Cited by 7 publications

References 52 publications

Accumulation by adaptation

Accumulation by adaptation

Resilience Design: Myths of Participation and Stewardship

Applying recent advances in climate adaptation research to urban heat risk management

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