Toward Radical Risk Reduction and Revolutionary Adaptation: Climate Disasters, Agriculture, and Capitalist Modernity

Abstract

Disasters happen with increasing frequency, resulting in greater devastation, due to global warming. This happens all over the world, particularly in the Global South. Risk reduction and adaptation to climate change are vital strategies for ensuring safety, wellbeing, and perhaps survival, for millions of people. Decades of studies in the social sciences have led to the realization that disasters are more a product of structural inequality, and socially constructed vulnerability, than they are purely “natural” hazards. This is particularly evident when it comes to the age-old disaster of famine. While this suggests that risk reduction and adaptation strategies must be fused with radical politics, the United Nations’ joint policy concept of disaster risk reduction/climate change adaptation nevertheless seems firmly tied to the hegemonic world order of capitalist modernity. An alternative solution to climate change disasters would be a more radical, revolutionary set of projects, that I term radical risk reduction and revolutionary adaptation.