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South Africa has a coal‐based energy system and extractive economy, largely responsible for its high emission levels relative to countries with similar GDP. This extractive, coal‐based economy began during British colonisation and today shows few signs of transitioning rapidly to limit climate change. This paper interrogates the role of coloniality in climate delay, given that colonisation is responsible for establishing fossil fuel dependence in South Africa. Combining theory on decolonisation, specifically colonial hierarchies of power, with a critical discourse analysis, this research uses interview and policy data to show how colonial power hierarchies can lead to climate delay in South Africa, through normalising emissions intensive development and silencing alternatives. In doing so, it highlights the need to recognise the colonial foundations of climate change and the potential for a coalition between decolonisation and climate action to motivate for radical change both in South Africa and at a global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Sinking atolls are an enduring symbol of the power of climate change to destroy inhabited places. Climate impact science and the media share a panoptic gaze on atoll islands seeing them as being small, inert and passive in the face of rising seas. The focus in these accounts is on the power of water as the agent of destruction, while the agency of the assemblage of human and non‐human actors that is the (is)land itself is ignored. Thus, atolls are said to be vulnerable, and the prevailing ideas of adaptation are either international relocation to avoid the sea or seawalls to contain it. Based on qualitative field research in Pacific atolls, this paper examines the connections between island peoples and their terrestrial environments, and the work that they are doing in response to the impacts of climate change. It shows how land is conceived symbolically, socio‐culturally and legally, and considers its role in sustaining livelihoods and anchoring identities through a changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate emergency declarations have become a prominent mechanism within the environmental movement to emphasise the urgency of the climate crisis, with this activism prompting numerous declarations from governments. Embedded in these declarations are claims of emergency, which hold representations of how different actors make sense of the present political moment and imagine trajectories of change. We analyse the contested meanings of public emergency claims made by activists and the state in Aotearoa New Zealand's national climate emergency declaration. Identifying three framings of emergency as an objective truth, an activating property, and a responsibility, our analysis suggests emergency declarations hold ambiguous potential for more radical action on climate change. While opening political space on what emergency means, we argue emergency claims hold risks of depoliticising climate politics and re‐embedding the neoliberal status quo. Emergency claims also contain tensions in imaginaries of transformation, suggesting the importance of contestation within climate emergency declarations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant and insurgent socio‐climatic imaginaries struggle for influence over how the future is envisioned. Africanfuturist imaginaries have huge potential to unsettle racialised and gendered climate narratives. In this article I use Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death in order to challenge mainstream climate imaginaries and to imagine new forms of being and becoming in the context of climate change. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics, as well as black feminist traditions of imagining new genres of the human, I argue that Okorafor's "wild necropolitics" illuminates how the forces of "wild nature" have become central features of the deployment of the means of destroying life, especially in the context of climate change. By examining the motifs of change, violence, wilderness and narration, I argue that reading and writing different stories about alternative climate futures is essential to the process of finding new ways of being and becoming human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]