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Health. Disability. Vulnerability. These words are often used when discussing the risks of climate disruption. These discussions warn of the potential for climate impacts to "undermine 50 years of gains in public health" (as stated by the Lancet Countdown on Climate Change). Increasingly, such discussions also acknowledge climate injustice, examining who will benefit or lose out from climate change, how and why. The embodied vulnerability of disabled people is often assumed within such discussions, with less consideration of the social, economic or political conditions that create this vulnerability. By bringing disability justice and disability studies into correspondence with care, environmental and climate justice scholarship, this reflective paper challenges the master narratives that blur differentiated experiences of disability and climate impacts into a single story of inevitable vulnerability. Recognising disabled people as knowers, makers and agents of change, it calls for transformative climate action, underpinned by values of solidarity, mutuality and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasingly fragmented rangelands, restricted mobility and climatic stress, diversification has accelerated among East African pastoralists. Diversification is also promoted as a climate change adaptation strategy to reduce climatic exposure. Through a study of a Maasai communal land in southern Kenya, we analyze how pastoralists navigate changing access to key productive resources that are linked to diversification processes, social differentiation, and the reshaping of livelihood practices. By integrating an intersectional approach in access theory, we unpack a deeper level of context specific patterns of inclusion and exclusion embedded within evolving production relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current conceptualizations of vulnerability have so far served to describe—and reproduce—social difference, setting people apart at local and global scales. Yet vulnerability is fundamental to the connectedness in social relations critical to understanding and acting on climate change. A more compassionate type of research is urgently required; that is, one that goes beyond the material and political dimensions to investigate the deeply personal. Drawing on politics of adaptation, emotional geographies, sustainability science and psychology literatures, the paper reconceptualizes vulnerability as co-suffering, linking lived experiences with a shared humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change scenarios have significant implications for the livelihoods and food security of particular groups in society and will necessitate a range of adaptation actions. While there is a significant literature on the social as well as biophysical factors and limits to adaptation, less is known about the interactions between these, and what such interactions mean for the prospects of achieving sustainable and resilient food systems. This paper is an attempt at addressing this gap by examining changing biophysical and social factors, with specific consideration of vulnerable groups, across four case studies (Ghana, Malawi, Norway and Spain). In each case, future climate change scenarios and associated biophysical limits are mapped onto four key social factors that drive vulnerability and mediate adaptation, namely, scale, history, power and politics, and social differentiation. We then consider what the interaction between biophysical limits and socio‐political dynamics means for the options for and limits to future adaptation, and how climate may interact with, and reshape, socio‐political elements. We find that biophysical limits and socio‐political factors do not operate in isolation, but interact, with dynamic relationships determining the 'space' or set of options for sustainable adaptation. By connecting the perspectives of biophysical and social factors, the study illuminates the risks of unanticipated outcomes that result from the disregard of local contexts in the implementation of adaptation measures. We conclude that a framework focusing on the space for sustainable adaptation conditioned by biophysical and social factors, and their interactions, can help provide evidence on what does and does not constitute sustainable adaptation, and help to counter unhelpful narratives of climate change as a sole or dominant cause of challenges in food systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alarming rates of environmental change have catalyzed scholars to call for fundamental transformations in social‐political and economic relations. Yet cautionary tales about how power and politics are constitutive of these efforts fill the literature. We show how a relational framing of adaptation and transformation demands a political, cross‐scalar, and socionatural analysis to probe the affects and effects of climate change and better grasp how transformative change unfolds. We bring affect theory into conversation with the literature on adaptation politics, socio‐environmental transformations, subjectivity, and our empirical work to frame our analysis around three under investigated aspects of transformation: (i) the uncertain and unpredictable relations that constitute socionatures; (ii) other ways of knowing; and (iii) the affective and emotional relations that form a basis for action. Affective adaptation represents a different ontological take on transformation by reframing the socionatural, normative and ethical aspects as relational, uncertain, and performative. This directs analytical attention to processes rather than outcomes. The emphasis on the encounter between bodies in affect theory points to the need for experiential and embodied ways of knowing climate to effect transformative change. Effective transformation requires recognizing uncertainty and unpredictability as part of transformative processes. This is not because all outcomes are acceptable, but rather because uncertainty and unpredictability are elements which help generate affects (action) and emotional commitment to shared human and more than human relations in action, projects, and policies. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses governance of water infrastructure in two settlements of Baltistan as an entry point to examine the co-production of power and vulnerability. Access to water and irrigated land is a critical factor in determining how the effects of disasters, such as flooding, are socially distributed within a community. At the same time, the governance of water is intimately linked to the longer-term politics of disaster vulnerability. We examine three different forms of disputes over water infrastructure where struggles over authority and social ordering materialise: (i) between and within settlements over access to a water resource; (ii) within settlements over post-disaster water infrastructure development and (iii) between a settlement and the district government over land, water rights and flood protection. The findings illustrate that the governance of water infrastructure involves continuous negotiations, contestations and disputes over access rights. Access to water resources as an expression of rights plays a key role in the recognition of authority relations. In particular, influential individuals seek to legitimise their leadership role in a settlement by representing the rights and interests of groups in the negotiation of these disputes. However, environmental variability and change, including disasters and post-disaster development interventions, alter perceptions of what constitute legitimate rights, and provide spaces for popular contestation of authority relations through silent non-compliance with decisions. The close interlinkages between material and non-material effects of a disaster are a key feature of the co-production of power and vulnerability. By adding authority relations to studies of village-level practices around disasters, we enrich our understanding of the co-production of power and vulnerability and how these dynamics unfold over time. It is only by investigating this co-production that a deeper understanding can be developed of the mechanisms through which vulnerability is either exacerbated or reduced for particular groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerability to climate change is the result of complex interactions of various social, political, economic and environmental conditions. Humanitarian actions, while often having short-term and 'neutral' intentions, necessarily influence the development pathways that define people's vulnerability to climate change. On the one hand, humanitarian interventions risk reinforcing existing vulnerability patterns by increasing the gap between those who benefit from different programmes and those that remain marginalised. On the other, addressing climate change may provide new opportunities for transforming the development pathways that create vulnerability in the first place. However, while there are shifts at the policy level towards integrating humanitarian assistance with longer-term development, considerations about how humanitarian action may support transformational adaptation are often missing. This article describes a framework for integrating climate change adaptation concerns into humanitarian policies and actions, which has been developed in collaboration with several humanitarian organisations to support efforts to reduce longer‑term vulnerability and the recurrence of humanitarian crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change introduces new challenges for humanitarian aid through changing hazard patterns. The linkages between climate change and humanitarian aid are complex. While humanitarian organisations deal directly with vulnerable populations, interventions and actions also form part of global politics and development pathways that are currently generating climate change, inequities and vulnerability. This IDS Bulletin represents a call for increasing engagement between humanitarian aid and adaptation interventions to support deliberate transformation of development pathways. Based on studies carried out as part of the 'Courting Catastrophe' project, we argue that humanitarian interventions offer several entry points and opportunities for a common agenda to drive transformational adaptation. Changes in political and financial frameworks are needed to facilitate longer-term actions; additionally, transformational adaptation demands moving from a mode of delivering expert advice and solutions to vulnerable populations, to taking up multiple vulnerability knowledges and making space for contestation of current development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is among the key challenges that may influence livelihoods of people in Tanzania. Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) are among the forest products that serve as livelihood resources in the face of climate stresses. However, little is known on the extent to which NTFPs enhance the adaptive capacity of households adjacent to forests in the context of climate stresses. Based on fieldwork in Kilombero District, we investigated how households adjacent to forests use NTFPs as different forms of capital asset to support adaptation strategies for livelihood outcomes. Data were collected using socio-economic appraisal. Three NTFPs out of twelve – firewood, medicinal plants and thatch grasses – were identified as priorities because of their immediate importance for supporting households. Priority NTFPs contributed to human, financial and physical capital assets. They also contributed about 3% of the total household annual income. Income and expenditure of priority NTFPs was significantly influenced (p < .05) by age of respondent, household size, distance to resources, change in management regimes of forest and wooded grassland and household income. The households indicated they would use priority NTFPs to improve livelihoods outcomes. Findings in this study can inform policy and support decision makers to establish mechanisms in conservation rules and regulations to enable forest adjacent households to access the NTFPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]