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The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world exemplify the uneven impacts of climate change on populations, even within relatively small geographic regions. Differential human vulnerability to environmental hazards results from a range of social, economic, historical, and political factors, all of which operate at multiple scales. While adaptation to climate change has been the dominant focus of policy and research agendas, it is essential to ask as well why some communities and peoples are disproportionately exposed to and affected by climate threats. The cases and synthesis presented here are organized around four key themes (resource access, governance, culture, and knowledge), which we approach from four social science fields (cultural anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and sociology). Social scientific approaches to human vulnerability draw vital attention to the root causes of climate change threats and the reasons that people are forced to adapt to them. Because vulnerability is a multidimensional process rather than an unchanging state, a dynamic social approach to vulnerability is most likely to improve mitigation and adaptation planning efforts. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values-Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation.

From fossil fuel corporations sponsoring climate change education to youth‐washing international gatherings, young people are bombarded, and simultaneously abandoned, by struggles for climate justice. The root issues fuelling interlocking environmental and social crises are often erased in initiatives involving youth. These crises are a direct result of broader, structural conditions that have become the de facto global order and propel notions of sustainable development. In settler colonial contexts such as Canada, colonialism, capitalism and inequitable forms of violence mutually depend upon one another to perpetuate climate injustice. Youth are increasingly aware of these entanglements, while seemingly discouraged from transformative action. With these tensions in mind, this commentary investigates the obstacles youth face despite making key contributions to justice‐focused climate action, and draws attention to the necessity of strengthening meaningful youth engagement. To explore this issue, we engage with climate and environmental justice literature, youth‐led initiatives, and youth representation on a global stage. Young people are bombarded, and simultaneously abandoned, by struggles for climate justice. Yet, youth are increasingly aware of the root issues fuelling interlocking environmental and social crises despite their erasure in climate action initiatives. With these tensions in mind, this commentary investigates the obstacles youth face despite making key contributions to justice‐focused climate action, and draws attention to the necessity of strengthening meaningful youth engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Transboundary water governance between the United States and Canada - ahistorically described as cooperative and harmonious - has been instrumental to Settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples around the Great Lakes. At Rainy Lake, on the border between the American state of Minnesota and the Canadian province of Ontario, transboundary water governance supported a binational, Settler colonial joint venture through which European-descended Settlers established themselves in this area. It allowed for the construction of hydroelectric dams that enabled industrial development but also damaged ecosystems and species on which local Ojibwe and Métis communities depended, particularly the lake's wild rice (Zizania palustris) stands. We reconceptualise transboundary water governance in the region by expanding the framework of hydrohegemony to include relations between Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Nations. By recognising Indigenous Nations and Settler colonial states as having equal status in political negotiations around the use of water, our analysis reveals negative hydro-hegemony between the United States and Canada on one side, and Indigenous Nations on the other. We advance hydrocolonialism as a framework for describing these relationships. Hydrocolonialism persists through the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous Nations from nation-to-nation diplomacy; this exclusion is particularly embedded in the functioning of the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty and the International Joint Commission which it established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale water management systems were introduced to the Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mekong Deltas in the latter half of the twentieth century to manage extreme water hazards and increase food production. However, these systems significantly altered their respective hydrological regimes, often creating worse socio-ecological conditions and greater vulnerability to floods and seawater intrusion than existed previously. Despite this history of disaster experience, climate change adaptation measures in the Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mekong Deltas use contemporary socio-ecological conditions as the baseline for disaster mitigation efforts. Paradoxically relying on old approaches to address future climate threats, disaster planners overlook how current conditions in both deltas are unstable outcomes of historical processes. These cases illustrate that large-scale and capital-intensive climate responses may fail to measurably reduce disaster risk. The concept of shifting baselines, borrowed from fisheries science, becomes helpful for selecting more appropriate reference points for disaster mitigation than current conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International rivers are conventionally understood as watercourses that cross national boundaries, while borders themselves are taken to be static and given – passive features over and across which riparian processes unfold. Employing such straightforward framings of international rivers and borders, academic studies and policy analyses of transboundary water governance perpetuate problematic ideas about the relevant scales and actors involved in international river conflicts and crises. Through a historical examination of the Ganges River and the Indo-Bangladeshi border, I introduce the ‘river-border complex’ as a new framework for reconceptualizing international rivers and borders as synergistic, co-constitutive and interdependent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]