Denaturalizing climate change: Environmental injustice and social vulnerability in contexts of socio-spatial segregation in Mexico

Abstract

In this article, I present a deep description to the great inequality in terms of exposure and social vulnerability to flood risk, from the context of El Colli, a territory with a high socio-spatial segregation in the municipality of Zapopan, Mexico. El Colli presents three diverse ways of inhabiting the space (informal settlements, consolidated popular neighborhoods, and closed subdivisions). Also, El Colli shows that the increasingly occurrence of risks such as floods is immersed not only in climate change but also in the processes of transformation and degradation of the territory linked to urbanization patterns. That said, the question that guides the research is, how is social vulnerability to climate change configured from the experience of families that live in contexts of socio-spatial segregation? To provide an answer, I carried out an ethnographic study guided by the differences in social vulnerability to flood risk. Furthermore, I propose a theoretical framework aimed at denaturalizing climate change. For this, the contributions of studies on the social construction of risk from the social vulnerability approaches were taken as a reference. In conclusion, the case of El Colli shows that ignoring the structural causes of social vulnerability to risk events, such as floods, can promote situations of environmental injustice, especially for indigenous and migrant populations residing in irregular settlements.