Search

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]

The imperative for vulnerable populations to adapt to greater environmental variability is increasing in lockstep with the onset of wide‐ranging climate change impacts. However, while critical adaptation research emphasizes the necessity of addressing the underlying drivers of vulnerability to climate change, mainstream approaches to adaptation stress economic growth as a prerequisite for climate responses. Accordingly, capital‐intensive adaptation measures promote competitiveness to spur economic growth in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, where more than 18 million people face environmental hazards such as seawater intrusion, flood, drought and cyclones. This study evaluates competitiveness as a mandate for effective climate change adaptation. It finds that adaptation can advance either competition or vulnerability reduction, but it cannot logically or pragmatically pursue both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: As part of a larger study focused on interventions to enhance the capacity of nurses and other health care workers to provide equity-oriented care in emergency departments (EDs), we conducted an analysis of news media related to three EDs. The purpose of the analysis was to examine how media writers frame issues pertaining to nursing, as well as the health and social inequities that drive emergency department contexts, while considering what implications these portrayals hold for nursing practice. Methods: We conducted a search of media articles specific to three EDs in Canada, published between January 1, 2018 and May 1, 2019. Media items (N = 368) were coded by story and theme attributes. A thematic analysis was completed to understand how writers in public media present issues pertaining to nursing practice within the ED context. Results: Two overarching themes were found. First, in ED-related media that portrays health care needs of people experiencing health and social inequities, messaging frequently perpetuates stigmatizing discourses. Second, media writers portray pressures experienced by nurses working in the ED in a way that evades structural determinants of quality of care. Underlying both themes is an absence of perspectives and authorship from practicing nurses themselves. Conclusions: We recommend that frontline nurses be prioritized as experts in public media communications. Nurses must be supported to gain critical media skills to contribute to media, to destigmatize the health care needs of people experiencing inequity who attend their practice, and to shed light on the structural causes of pressures experienced by nurses working within emergency department settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long described as the "largest poorest" country, Bangladesh has been a prime target for massive infusions of foreign aid for decades. Through historical and ethnographic investigation, I document how flood control and agricultural intensification projects underwritten by foreign institutions exacerbate vulnerability to water crises in Bangladesh. These ostensibly pro-poor water governance and economic development programs engender cycles of crop loss, groundwater and soil salinization, reduced fisheries, and impeded navigation that erode agrarian livelihoods, thereby reproducing the conditions and rationale for continued flows of aid dollars into the country. Shifting attention away from depoliticized problems and solutions, I develop the concept of the interest-shed as a broadly applicable method for intervening in cycles of failure by examining the interests that they serve. This framework can also be used in the planning process by enabling differently situated groups to evaluate how proposed schemes include, ignore, or prioritize their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Through an anti-colonial and critical race theoretical framework as well as arts-based methods (photovoice) that engage Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth, we explore the question: what do youth perceive as healthy and just environments and communities? Youth identified two overarching, strength-based messages: Firstly, youth demonstrate the need for a structural-level analysis of the conditions that influence individual-level outcomes of environmental health. Secondly, youth perspectives on healthy and justice-oriented environments and communities challenge environmental health scholars to consider youth as powerful actors. Youth perspectives of healthy and justice-oriented communities present a necessarily structural perspective to consider not only the impacts of environmental decision-making on health, but the conditions that have allowed for harmful impacts. In doing so, youth demonstrate the need for intersectional and complex understandings of health and wellbeing when discussing the environment. And, as we argue here, challenge us as scholars of environmental health to do the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rivers have long been convenient yet troublesome borders. Inherently itinerant, rivers routinely defy cartographic depictions of borders as static, territorially bounded formations. Such dynamism poses material and conceptual challenges to state regulatory activities, resulting in increasingly heterodox attempts to fix waterbodies through various securitizing mechanisms. I examine the dialectical relationship between rivers and borders through the concept of the river-border complex. I ask how the Ganges River shapes the form and function of the Indo-Bangladeshi border and how, in turn, bordering practices in India regulate flows along the river, which comprises 129 km of India's border with Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records, in-person interviews, and river data, I find that the border and efforts to secure it mediate many flows along the river. The study corroborates previous work within critical border studies that securitizing cross-border flows has the perverse effect of generating greater insecurity in adjoining countries. Crucially, historical analysis of sediment, information, and human flows reveals how international rivers also determine patterns and processes of circulation and thereby warrant reconceptualization as border infrastructures, rather than as merely being subject to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate-induced displacement is attracting increasing media, state, and scholarly attention, albeit often in a way that situates migration as either an example of climate adaptation or a failure thereof. Whether depicted as success or failure, both framings can invisibilize the preexisting socioenvironmental processes that render climate-induced migrations necessary—or, conversely, that can inhibit them entirely. Perspectives on displacement and environmental migration from within political ecology and human geography offer an alternative register, looking beyond unidirectional socioeconomic or environmental drivers to document how uneven development reproduces displacements relationally and historically. Drawing on these theorizations, as well as empirical research from agrarian Southeast Asia, this article develops the notion of cumulative socionatural displacements as one approach for conceptualizing socioecologically driven displacement in a world already on the move. We demonstrate this approach through an analysis of displacement in Southeast Asia that begins by tracing the evolving state, market, and agroecological relations that have made mobility integral to agrarian viability while setting the stage for more intense climate impacts. In doing so, we also center the long-term (nonclimatic) environmental changes that are often sidelined in both anthropocentric debates on rural displacements and climate doomsday scenarios. We argue that examining climate-induced migration as just one facet of cumulative socionatural displacements is necessary for overcoming the ontological and political impasses engendered by prevailing narratives that collapse climate migration into convenient but misleading binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum responds to recent calls to hypothesize a geopolitics of the Anthropocene by examining how our notions of geopolitics of water may shift in the context of this new and, at times, divisive framework. The Anthropocene describes the geological epoch in which humans are the dominant actor in the global environmental system and has been a concept that is not without controversy. Taking the Anthropocene as an epistemological divergence where nature can no longer be viewed as separate from humanity, this forum asks how moving away from understanding hydraulic systems as essentially stable to understanding them as unstable and profoundly influenced by humans changes our understanding ofthe geopolitics of water. Collectively the contributions to this forum illustrate that formulating a water geopolitics of the Anthropocene requires 1) moving beyond a focus on fluvial flows to consider other forms of water; 2) broadening our understanding of the actors involved in water geopolitics; 3) examining new geopolitical tactics, particularly those grounded in law; 4) engaging critically with new and emerging forms of visualization and representation in the geopolitics of water, and; 5) examining how the notion of the Anthropocene has been used towards geopolitical ends and worked to elide different positionalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]