Climate Breakdown Research Articles

Complex interlinkages, key objectives, and nexuses among the Sustainable Development Goals and climate change: a network analysis

Global sustainability is an enmeshed system of complex socioeconomic, climatological, and ecological interactions. The numerous objectives of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement have various levels of interdependence, making it difficult to ascertain the influence of changes to particular indicators across the whole system. In this analysis, we aimed to detect and rank the complex interlinkages between objectives of sustainability agendas. We developed a method to find interlinkages among the 17 SDGs and climate change, including non-linear and non-monotonic dependences. We used time series of indicators defined by the World Bank, consisting of 400 indicators that measure progress towards the 17 SDGs and an 18th variable (annual average temperatures), representing progress in the response to the climate crisis, from 2000 to 2019. This method detects significant dependencies among the time evolution of the objectives by using partial distance correlations, a non-linear measure of conditional dependence that also discounts spurious correlations originating from lurking variables. We then used a network representation to identify the most important objectives (using network centrality) and to obtain nexuses of objectives (defined as highly interconnected clusters in the network). Using temporal data from 181 countries spanning 20 years, we analysed dependencies among SDGs and climate for 35 country groupings based on region, development, and income level. The observed significant interlinkages, central objectives, and nexuses identified varied greatly across country groupings; however, SDG 17 (partnerships for the goals) and climate change ranked as highly important across many country groupings. Temperature rise was strongly linked to urbanisation, air pollution, and slum expansion (SDG 11), especially in country groupings likely to be worst affected by climate breakdown, such as Africa. In several country groupings composed of developing nations, we observed a consistent nexus of strongly interconnected objectives formed by SDG 1 (poverty reduction), SDG 4 (education), and SDG 8 (economic growth), sometimes incorporating SDG 5 (gender equality), and SDG 16 (peace and justice). The differences across groupings emphasise the need to define goals in accordance with local circumstances and priorities. Our analysis highlights global partnerships (SDG 17) as a pivot in global sustainability efforts, which have been strongly linked to economic growth (SDG 8). However, if economic growth and trade expansion were repositioned as a means instead of an end goal of development, our analysis showed that education (SDG 4) and poverty reduction (SDG 1) become more central, thus suggesting that these could be prioritised in global partnerships. Urban livelihoods (SDG 11) were also flagged as important to avoid replicating unsustainable patterns of the past. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK Research and Innovation.

Health co-benefits of climate change action in Italy

The climate breakdown is increasingly affecting the health of people around the world. As weather extremes intensify, the global health burden of unhealthy diets, sedentary lifestyles, and air pollution increases too. Against this backdrop, overstretched health systems can take stock of the co-benefits that a low carbon transition could deliver if health is prioritised in climate policies.1 Yet, as pointed out in a recent commentary,2 the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, UK, put little focus on health-related goals.

Revitalising embodied community knowledges as leverage for climate change engagement

Human survival is threatened by climate breakdown and ecological collapse. This levies huge responsibility on society to address how present modes of living have created these problems. Citizens need to learn about the consequences that have been unleashed and find ways to live more sustainably. Yet, the scale of these crises and lack of wisdom to act can be overwhelming, so how will they become more informed and motivated to act? This paper proposes that cultivating communities of practice (Wenger) around low carbon citizenship can help generate discrete engagement strategies that rouse public attention towards changing attitudes and behaviours. To be effective, these engagements need to be relatable, values-oriented, and framed towards the priorities, knowledges, capacities, and lived experiences of the group who each share a passion for a practice and learn collectively how to do it better. Such an approach is explored in the case study, Grow Your Own Community, that sought to engage marginalised communities with decarbonisation activities through the strategic repositioning of their embodied community knowledges (ECK). This community of practice helped to motivate and mobilise local participation by integrating carbon literacy with the situated, practical capacities that already lay within the community. Key findings reveal that revitalising a community’s existing body of knowledge to engage people with climate change knowledge creates the conditions for generating community-led mitigative action.

Estimated material metabolism and life cycle greenhouse gas emission of major plastics in China: A commercial sector-scale perspective

Plastics are one of the most greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive and the fastest growing industries in the manufacturing sector. Environmental tradeoffs of plastics occur through all stages of their life cycles, accelerating climate breakdown and threatening our ability to maintain a sustainable climate. Herein, material flow analysis (MFA) of three major synthetic resins (PVC, PP, PE) in China was first conducted from production to end-of-life. Meanwhile, life cycle assessment (LCA) was applied to investigate “cradle-to-gate” environmental impacts of these synthetic resins, and then GHG emissions during each plastic life stage were quantified by the integrated LCA-MFA framework. Results suggested that GHG emissions during resin production were 5.42, 4.72 and 3.43 kg CO2eq for 1 kg PVC, PP and PE, respectively. Taken together, China generated 304 million metric tons (Mt) CO2eq in 2020 by synthetic resin production, and additional 44 and 55 Mt CO2eq were emitted due to further plastic product manufacturing and end-of-life management, respectively. Packaging was identified as the major GHG contributor during the use phase, which should be critically monitored for GHG management. The study provides a new perspective to reveal environmental hotspots that drive GHG emissions among plastic life cycles and guides policy-makers towards effective carbon control and sustainable plastic management.

Gender, Climate Breakdown and Resistance: The Future of Human Rights in the Shadow of Authoritarianism

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the future of human rights by looking at how ‘authoritarianism’, in its multifaceted forms and manifestations, intersects with existing discourses on climate change, environmental protection, populism and ‘gender deviance’. By adopting an intersectional lens, we interrogate the emergence of the right to a healthy environment and reflect on whether it will help against the double challenge faced by human rights: of climate breakdown and rising authoritarianism. We study the link between authoritarianism and populism, focusing on far-right populism and the creeping authoritarian features that we can associate with far-right groups, both movements and parties. We also consider how certain understandings of nature and the environment are put forward by authoritarian regimes. This leads us to consider so-called ‘ecologism’ and the ways in which far-right movements draw upon green thought on the natural environment to further a gendered agenda based on conceptions of nature as a ‘national treasure’. These conceptions, as we demonstrate, go hand in hand with policies that promote national identity and directly undermine the rights of migrants, ethnic minorities, women and LGBT+ groups.

Splintering Urbanism and Climate Breakdown

ABSTRACT On the anniversary of the publication of Splintering Urbanism, climate breakdown heralds a new era in public investment in infrastructure. However, current proposals for infrastructure overlook two decades of work in infrastructure studies. For example, both the Green New Deal advanced by activists in the United States and the European Green Deal, proposed by the European Commission, establish a dual logic between investments in centralized systems and off-grid systems that reinforce, rather than challenge, the infrastructure models critiqued in Splintering Urbanism. The lessons of Splintering Urbanism debates, such as the rise of post-networked conditions of living in dialogue with everyday practices of living with and against infrastructures, are still missing from the policies that will likely shape urban futures.

Climate crisis and ecological emergency: Why they concern (neuro)scientists, and what we can do.

Our planet is experiencing severe and accelerating climate and ecological breakdown caused by human activity. As professional scientists, we are better placed than most to understand the data that evidence this fact. However, like most other people, we ignore this inconvenient truth and lead our daily lives, at home and at work, as if these facts weren’t true. In particular, we overlook that our own neuroscientific research practices, from our laboratory experiments to our often global travel, help drive climate change and ecosystem damage. We also hold privileged positions of authority in our societies but rarely speak out. Here, we argue that to help society create a survivable future, we neuroscientists can and must play our part. In April 2021, we delivered a symposium at the British Neuroscience Association meeting outlining what we think neuroscientists can and should do to help stop climate breakdown. Building on our talks (Box 1), we here outline what the climate and ecological emergencies mean for us as neuroscientists. We highlight the psychological mechanisms that block us from taking action, and then outline what practical steps we can take to overcome these blocks and work towards sustainability. In particular, we review environmental issues in neuroscience research, scientific computing, and conferences. We also highlight the key advocacy roles we can all play in our institutions and in society more broadly. The need for sustainable change has never been more urgent, and we call on all (neuro)scientists to act with the utmost urgency.

Introduction: Anthropocene Austria

Introduction:Anthropocene Austria Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas In the eighth of his 'Lectures on the New Climatic Regime', Bruno Latour discusses an intervention which took place on the fringes of the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 in Paris, 2015. In the course of a performance entitled 'Theatre of Negotiations', young people playing the role of delegates negotiated a model climate agreement on behalf of forty-two groupings, twenty-four of which represented nation-states and eighteen a diverse range of non-state actors. '[T]hey began to climb up on stage,' Latour writes, 'delegation after delegation, "Forest" after "France," "India" next to "Indigenous Peoples," the "Atmosphere" delegation before "Australia," "Oceans" after "Maldives," each one introducing itself with pride, equal in sovereignty to all the others.'1 For Latour, this theatrical performance illustrates the 'earthbound' in all its complexity. 'Theatre of Negotiations' calls into question the historically contingent political formation we call the nation-state, but does so without advocating its abolition in favour of a globe or planet without borders. Instead, the nation-state takes its place as one type of grouping among others; one of many, messy, overlapping ways of distributing agency on an Earth that has never been, and will never be, conceivable as a whole. A dizzying leap of scale is required to think about a small nation like Austria against the background of the seemingly all-encompassing and ever more theorized predicament called the Anthropocene. The critical move implied by the title of this volume risks seeming arbitrary at best or parochial at worst. But, as the 'Theatre of Negotiations' suggests, the juxtaposition of the national (and thus transparently political) and the planetary is not only possible but also necessary. The mere fact that Austria and Austrian culture are undeniably part of the earthwide network of forces which shape, and are shaped, by anthropogenic climate and environmental change is enough to warrant closer examination of this thematic constellation. Timothy Clark has referred to the paradox of focusing on a single national culture in the context of the Anthropocene as 'methodological nationalism'.2 By sitting with this very [End Page 1] paradox, the current volume aims to enable relationships between regional or national context and planetary crisis to come more clearly into view. The category of the national — along with its political and cultural institutions, which include a body of literature and a scene of culture somehow identified with the nation — belongs to the 'old but still useful world of states', as Clemence Hallé and Anne-Sophie Milon describe it, a world which coexists alongside trans-, inter-, sub- and supra-national forces, systems and factors.3 Pace Clark, 'methodological nationalism' may serve as a starting point for analysis, if not a final destination for understanding. It is in this spirit that the current volume brings together readings of Austrian literature and film which engage with the notion of the Anthropocene. If the idea of Austria, like that of any national formation, is 'old but still useful', the other keyword of this volume's title is contrastingly new and of as yet uncertain value. Beyond its original geological context, in which it refers to the current geological epoch of indelible anthropogenic impacts on the fabric of the planet, the term Anthropocene has become a convenient if controversial shorthand for a bundle of interconnected features and effects of industrial civilization in the age of fossil fuels. These effects include climate breakdown and global heating, ecological destabilization, habitat and species loss (which are now also recognized as factors in the rise of zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19), systematic addiction to consumption, including the consumption of fossil fuels, and the political, ideological and discursive regimes that uphold, exacerbate, manage and disavow these realities. Critiques of the term are not hard to find, and the proliferation of alternatives has become something of a running joke in the humanities.4 The most frequently cited and compelling objections relate to the flattening effect of grouping together all humans on Earth into the species-category anthropos: 'the fossil economy', as Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg note, 'was not created nor is it upheld by humankind [End Page 2] in general...

Two viruses, one prescription: slow down

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated communities throughout the world. However, the negative impacts of another pandemic, affecting cities worldwide, arguably rival those of COVID. This destructive global health problem, which we have largely ignored, has been described as the “hurry virus” – the culture of speed that dominates modern lives and cities, causing us to constantly strive to ‘go faster’. This hurry virus has comprehensively infected our city transport systems from the early 20th century. Since then, as speed became a more important goal in city planning than liveability, sustainability and walkability, the consequences for health – human, environmental and economic – have been profoundly damaging. This paper argues that to respond effectively to the hurry virus in city transport, a policy of creating ‘slow cities’ is required. This involves the simultaneous application of two synergistic strategies: slowing the speed of existing motor vehicle traffic; and encouraging greater use of the ‘slower’ active modes. Examples of where such policies have been introduced are discussed. The core of the paper shows how – serendipitously – the world-wide response to the COVID-19 virus in cities has produced policies, strategies and tactics that also provide an antidote to the ‘virus of hurry’. For example, we discuss how cities have rapidly added new or widened bike lanes and sidewalks, and opened streets for people by restricting, slowing or banning motorised traffic. In addition to the intended anti-COVID outcome of providing safer, socially distanced space in neighbourhoods, such policies deliver co-benefits of local healthy living and movement in less-polluted, ‘slower cities’, as well as help combat global heating by reducing CO2 emissions. The paper outlines urban design and operational principles that would promote both pandemic-resistance as well as slower, more local and healthier lives. We show how, in future pandemics, robust plans for rapid, effective action will be required to shut down inter-district connections and implement social distancing to ride out any outbreaks without lasting damage to the city. We discuss one promising strategy that involves relatively self-sufficient and independent precincts, such as 20-minute neighbourhoods that are internally accessible by foot, bike or scooter, that enable people to meet most of their daily needs within an 800 metre (20-minute) return trip from home. If a virus outbreak occurs in one neighbourhood, it can be temporarily closed and isolated from other neighbourhoods, while allowing them to function. The key point is that these responses to combat the COVID virus will produce co-benefits which combat another virus, that of ‘hurry’. The 20-minute COVID-protected city will, by definition, be a hurry-protected, slow city – and what is more – it will be a key component of combatting the overarching existential threat of climate breakdown. We conclude that achieving such co-benefits in cities that remain (or return to being) ‘fast’ would be far more challenging, if indeed possible at all. The pandemics of our time may allow us to reshape the behaviours, values and cultures both of urban residents and policy makers. The paper concludes that we have an unprecedented opportunity to reject the old normal and to re-imagine a new normal of cities that are slower, closer and healthier.

Rising Sea Levels and the Right Wave: An Analysis of the Climate Change Communication that Enables ‘the Fascist Creep’

Climate change communication can create space for a ‘fascist creep’ by playing into fear and not communicating the different responsibilities for, and impacts of, climate breakdown. This paper gives a brief overview of past and current of eco-fascists and points towards tropes and ways of communicating that might give space for a fascist creep. These include the Anthropocene concept, the Extinction symbol, and calls for purity.

Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

Building a Climate-Resilient Power Grid: Lessons From Texas-Size Storms and the Queensland Floods

When a city is lashed by storm or swamped by epic rains, there's at least one predictable moment in the chaos: the lights go out. In this article, we focus on the challenge of protecting assets from storms and floods in the era of climate breakdown. This often involves physical fortification or smarter placement. To understand the policies and decisions involved, we examine recovery efforts following storm- or flood-based outages that occurred this century in the state of Texas in the United States and the state of Queensland in Australia. We first describe the outages, their consequences, and the policy recommendations and responses that followed. We then evaluate the recovery processes, focusing on the challenge of protecting assets like substations and transmission structures. We find that each jurisdiction could do more to incorporate forward-looking climate data, to match the level of government authority to better fit the desired function, and to capably fund the work to be done.

The United States at the Center of the Action

The United States at the Center of the Action

Making new history: Contemporary art and the temporal orientations of climate change in Oceania

This article explores artistic production in the region of Oceania that resists the ahistorical and future-oriented temporality of climate change discourse, as it perpetuates colonial structures of power by denying Indigenous futures and ignoring the violent histories that have led to the current climate breakdown. In the video poem Anointed (2018), prominent climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner strategically combines spoken word poetry with visual montage in order to situate Cold War nuclear tests by the US military within the same temporal plane as rising sea levels currently threatening the Marshall Islands. Katerina Teaiwa’s exhibition Project Banaba (2017) similarly mobilizes archival imagery in order to visualize the genealogical relationship between Banabans and the settler landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Sean Connelly’s architectural and design practice in Hawaiʻi Futures, an ongoing digital design project that engages with the threats of sea level rise and coastal erosion in Hawaiʻi, problematizes linear formations of time and favours a future structured around cyclical, ecological time instead. Interacting with vastly different sites, strategies and temporalities, these three multidisciplinary projects provide critical alternatives to the ahistorical framing of colonial climate change in Oceania and thus play a crucial role in constructing a more just future.

Patterns of Repetition: Colonialism, Capitalism and Climate Breakdown in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Patterns of Repetition: Colonialism, Capitalism and Climate Breakdown in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Critical climate justice

AbstractClimate change has had unequal and uneven burdens across places whereby the planetary crisis involves a common but differentiated responsibility. The injustices of intensifying climate breakdown have laid bare the fault lines of suffering across sites and scales. A climate justice framework helps us to think about and address these inequities. Climate justice fundamentally is about paying attention to how climate change impacts people differently, unevenly, and disproportionately, as well as redressing the resultant injustices in fair and equitable ways. Critical climate justice as a praxis of solidarity and collective action benefits from greater engagement with intersectional and international feminist scholarship. Incorporating insights from feminist climate justice bolsters solidarity praxis while enriching and reframing dominant climate change discussions for more impactful and accountable action.

Can we live within environmental limits and still reduce poverty? Degrowth or decoupling?

Can we live within environmental limits and still reduce poverty? Degrowth or decoupling?

Racial geographies of the Anthropocene: Memory and erasure in Rio de Janeiro

This paper interrogates the extent to which imaginaries of climate and ecological breakdown attend to the memories, knowledges, and experiences of communities already impacted by histories of racism, colonialism, and poverty. Drawing on insights from Black studies and decolonial thinking, the article reflects on how the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change can be mapped onto geographies of racialised violence and social dispossession. Specific emphasis is given to Rio de Janeiro, notably its port area, a geographical space where future-oriented narratives remain oblivious to the city’s history of anti-Black violence and Indigenous genocide. In parallel, the paper looks at the recently built Museum of Tomorrow and its public representations of the Anthropocene. Overall, the article contends that pluralising accounts of the Anthropocene might offer alternative epistemic entry points for understanding and interrupting the mounting ecological catastrophe.

Political ecology II: Conjunctures, crises, and critical publics

Political ecologists focus on power relations across scales to develop assessments of systems that produce and maintain crises, such as the overlapping conjunctural crises of the coronavirus pandemic and climate breakdown. Such analyses clarify processual and interconnecting factors, exposing the contours of uneven differentiations and coproductions, while offering possible alternative futures. This report engages recent scholarship wherein conjunctural analysis raises issues for how we understand socionatural processes and outcomes, lessons learned, and the exigencies of critical publics in academia and beyond.

An Apocalypse Converted: William Stringfellow and Catholic Social Teaching on Climate Breakdown

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis advances the concept of integral ecology to connect the environmental crisis with a range of social crises afflicting our societies. This concept is grounded in a theological commitment, but directed towards its political effects. Those two trajectories are represented by the encyclical’s articulation of a spiritual awakening described as an ecological conversion and its repeated calls to dialogue. Francis is not unaware of the risk that a naïve engagement in dialogue could stifle serious mitigation of the crises we face. Yet, even with many dire warnings about outcomes, much of the contemporary discourse around the climate and biodiversity crisis runs the risk of underestimating the nature of the problem. Apocalyptic theology, specifically in the work of William Stringfellow, is proposed as a valuable interlocutor at this point. Stringfellow’s account of the Christian life as a battle with the forces of Death allows Christians to name that which we are converted from in an ecological conversion, strengthening the grounds upon which dialogue is engaged.