Planetary Crisis Research Articles

A situated urban political ecology of plastics recycling in Bangkok

Calls for better municipal waste management practices that are in line with the principles of ‘circular economy’ and ‘circular cities’ abound in many parts of the world including Thailand. Our research aimed to understand how waste pickers in Bangkok currently operate as key actors in the recycling economy, given the lack of state funding and infrastructure for operationalizing circularity, using a situated urban political ecology (SUPE) approach. We conducted surveys and walk-along interviews with waste pickers in two districts of the city. This was supplemented by desk reviews and key informant interviews. Mainly, walking with waste pickers in their daily work routes threw light on the embodiment of waste metabolisms and everyday practices in accessing and metabolizing waste. We find how waste economies were sustained despite policy neglect through fluid relationships between humans and non-humans that operate within a messy, contested urban space. Negative affect and corporeal harm characterized such a metabolism. Characterization of power in urban political ecology can be strengthened by locating diffuse forms in which power is enacted and by looking at the political dimensions of affect. Unexpected alliances between actors posited counter-narratives to powerful instruments of regulation and global waste flows. Through the results presented in this paper, we call for UPE scholars to draw from (a) embodied and situated processes and practices in the transformations of socio-natures and (b) spatio-sensorial methods that can trace circulations and metabolisms of socio-natures. We suggest that such a SUPE can underpin grounded projects of bettering human-environment relationships in the age of planetary crisis.

Pluralising the Planetary: The Radical Incompleteness of Machinic Envisioning

Automated techniques have driven new approaches to visualising and acting upon planetary crises, such as Microsoft’s Planetary Computer and Amazon’s partnership with the start-up Overstory (formerly 20tree.ai). However, “planetary” machine envisioning, together with its critical theorisation, tends toward scalar equivalence and the assumption of interoperability across media, infrastructure, and optics. The “planetary” becomes a mode for and platform of seeing Earth and beyond in which AI vision systems conjoin seamlessly with a predictive imaging of the planet and have the effect of becoming mutually dependent and self-reinforcing. In this article, we argue for a more pluralistic and nonhuman set of Earth images and imaginings. We argue that such modes of imaging are multiscalar and are indebted to what Paul Edwards calls “data friction.” Here materialities of both media and Earth impede the seamless movement and exchange of data involved in machine vision; and disjunctive syntheses are instead constantly being generated. We examine eccentric modes of configuring the planetary via the artwork of Tega Brain, who deploys disjunctive and nonscalable relations of climate and environment in her use of data and AI imaging techniques. In spite of considerable financial, cognitive, and affective investment to entangle Earth with machine vision, we propose instead that imaging and imagining the planetary is a radically incomplete project. Drawing on Indigenous approaches to AI development via Country Centered Design and the process philosophy of William James and others, we propose that planetary “vision” operates within a pluralistic universe of seeing, in which ongoing and radical incompleteness is core to its imaging.

Accountability in the Anthropocene: Activating responsible agents of reform or futile finger‐pointing?

AbstractConfronted by intersecting ecological and social crises associated with the rise of the Anthropocene, architects of global environmental governance have often attempted to harness accountability claims to single out the individual or organisational actors contributing most significantly to these crises and pressure them to uphold responsibilities to society and the planet. Yet critics have cautioned against excessive reliance on individualised accountabilities as means of tackling planetary crises, given the constrained ability of such approaches to lead the large‐scale transformations required to redirect anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change. This article adapts agent‐centered approaches to accountability to address such critiques. It is first argued that agent‐centered accountability is an important element in broader efforts to support systemic change, helping to identify responsible powerholders, redefine normative standards of responsibility and empower advocates of strengthened global environmental governance to demand compliance with expanded responsibilities. However to take seriously the distinctive demands of large‐scale institutional change, such approaches need to be: (a) differentiated in ways that account for the contrasting roles of different individual and organisational actors within de‐centred accountability systems; (b) materially extended in ways that enable agents to be held more effectively to account for their contributions to collective social and political processes; and (c) discursively challenged in ways that resist discursive efforts to present individualised accountabilities as substitutes for more radical and large‐scale institutional interventions. The article's argument is elaborated and illustrated through exploration of problems and practices of accountability associated with the contested governance of global production systems.

Re-evaluating international humanitarian law in a triple planetary crisis: New challenges, new tools

AbstractIn the face of the triple planetary crisis, which includes climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation, there is growing recognition that the environment needs to be re-evaluated and better protected. Recent developments, such as a values assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES),1 the concept of biocultural rights and the acknowledgment of granting rights to nature, emphasize the intrinsic value of the environment and endorse the understanding of the interconnectedness between humans and non-human entities. These developments are also increasingly evident in legal frameworks; for instance, several domestic legal systems now accept the rights of nature and grant legal standing to natural entities. This expansion in our understanding of the environment challenges the traditional anthropocentric focus of international law, which has primarily prioritized human rights and interests, perceiving humans as having dominance over nature and the liberty to harness its resources. Simultaneously, international environmental law is increasingly recognizing the interdependence of ecosystems and species. This acknowledgment drives the promotion of approaches to environmental management and conservation that centre around ecosystems and local communities. The present article looks at how to reconcile these heightened environmental values and the legal norms in armed conflict by examining two examples: the safeguarding of protected areas and the restoration of the environment post-conflict. By analyzing the changing values and legal developments in this area, the article offers legal and practical tools to support the protection of nature's intrinsic value in future warfare.

Information and Material Support to Environmental Education in Slovakia in the Times of Crisis

Abstract Introduction: The undergoing globalization brings epidemiological, economical, energetical, and environmental security risks. The current task in the field of improving the quality of the environment is educating students in schools for adaptation to the climate change and mitigating its impact on the life and health of living organisms. Methods: The authors carried out a research study on the sample of teachers in 57 schools in the Slovak Republic focusing on particular themes of environmental security, teachers’ knowledge in the field and the availability of material didactic means. Results: Particular themes of environmental security were identified and teachers’ knowledge in the field was examined. Special attention was paid to the availability of material didactic means to be used for the purposes of environmental education. Statistically significant differences were found between their availability in towns and villages. Discussion:Human activities have significantly changed the quality of the environment and now, the necessary to start applying a more environmentally responsible approach is clear. In the Slovak school system, the cross-cutting theme environmental education provides space for it. Limitations:Limitations are given by the size and the composition of the sample, which do not allow to generalize the obtained findings to the entire population. Conclusions:In education, it is important to introduce measures and to prepare graduates for the future as a reaction to the climate emergency situation and the planetary crisis. So, teachers should have expertise, possess objective information, as well as appropriate didactic means for educating students.

Scenario Fiction and the Novel Claims of Insurance

Abstract Emerging during a Cold War era of nuclear uncertainty, refined in decades of neoliberal turbulence, and used today for modeling climate futures, scenario thinking has now entered the domain of the Anthropocene novel. This article argues for the adoption of scenarios as a formal strategy of two contemporary realist novels engaged in updating the genre to present scales of crisis: Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2014). As these novels process new forms of risk in a time of epochal fracture, they likewise signal a conceptual break in realism's capacity to imagine new configurations for the present based on the shape of things past. Scenarios prioritize plausibility over predictability, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in processing an age of planetary crisis while also showing the limits of statistical methods of world-building. By attending to the many configurations that could emerge from the volatile state of the present, scenario fiction seeks to preempt unmediated outcomes and insure the novel's critical extension into all possible futures.

Frozen in trauma on a warming planet: a relational reckoning with climate distress

"As awareness of the destabilising impacts of the climate crisis and its multiple layers of connected injustices increase, individuals struggling with climate distress have begun to arrive at our clinical doorsteps. This article details some of the questions and challenges of climate-informed clinical work, including aspects of what both clinician and client experience emotionally and ways we may turn away from the reality of harms and injustices. Utilising a trauma lens, a detailed case description is presented of a man ‘frozen in trauma’ in response to the climate and environmental crisis. Since clinicians are embedded in the climate emergency along with their clients, the author shares her personal trajectory of climate awareness (Hoggett and Randall, 2018), along with countertransferential responses that occurred in the therapy. The clinical description includes an understanding of the client’s history of a transgenerational trauma that echoed with and amplified his responses to the planetary crisis. Ways of processing and holding the difficult emotions within the clinical work are outlined, along with how the client was usefully able to enlarge his focus to helping others. Recognizing multiple forms of interconnection, including with the more-than-human world, are described as a way to move forward. Keywords climate distress, environmental injustice, trauma, grief, psychoanalysis, transgenerational, interconnection"

Intersectoral health governance during floods: a qualitative case-study into the Dutch 2021 flood

Abstract Background With the planetary crisis comes an increasing risk of flooding events. As shown during the 2021 floodings in Limburg, these can have disastrous consequences for the public health system and healthcare organisations. Historically flooding events are often treated as either affecting public health or acute care, but the 2021 events showed the necessity of an intersectoral governance approach. In this study, we investigated how governance actors from different domains collaborate and perform shared sensemaking processes to ensure patient safety continuity of (public health) care. Methods For the past months, we conducted a qualitative case-study in the Dutch region of Limburg where we interviewed governance actors from public health, acute healthcare, water management, and safety and crisis management. We also observed and analysed crisis exercises and hospital crisis management meetings, including relevant paper trails. All data were abductively coded and thematically analysed. Results Our analysis shows that during and after the flooding event, actors were confronted with numerous vulnerabilities about decisions to evacuate hospitals, care homes, or even villages. These include decisions about what are public health risks, and what are not. To curb such uncertainties, intersectoral sensemaking proofed essential with a central role for the public health crisis system. In our presentation we highlight how such sensemaking was done in practice. Conclusions To deal with the effects of the planetary crisis on healthcare, events such as floodings must be approached intersectorally. The public health system plays a central role in perceiving the vulnerabilities in a crisis from all angles. Key messages • Floodings are more likely to affect the public health and healthcare system. • Highly complex crises, such as floodings, require an intersectoral governance response with the public health system in a central role.

From Meaning to Ecocide: The Value of Phenomenology for Green Criminology

The planetary crisis that we face today is not only a result of human-induced environmental degradation, but also of a deep crisis of meaning and value in human existence. In consequence, this article will demonstrate the value of phenomenology towards the existential paradigm within green criminology and its importance to overcome a lived experience that is opposed to the planet’s ecological balance. The article will present Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology through his conception of ‘being-here’, which elaborates on the modes of unreflective and unselfconsciousness of everyday existence. This will then be developed into the theory of being-towards-ecocide that is concerned with the meaning of the individual’s encounter with ecocide. Finally, the value of phenomenology as a conceptual tool for the analysis of green crimes and harms will be outlined as a necessary shift towards transcending ecocide and for an existential, theoretical, and systematic construction for the world of everyday life.

Infrastructuring environmental (in)justice: green hydrogen, Indigenous sovereignty and the political geographies of energy technologies

Abstract. Against the backdrop of ongoing planetary crises, this paper discusses the ambivalent relationship between large-scale material infrastructure, particularly energy technologies, and environmental justice. Inspired by relational and practice-oriented understandings of infrastructure, it develops a conceptual approach for energy-related environmental justice research, which is exemplarily applied to the emerging issue of green hydrogen, drawing on brief insights from the hydrogen frontrunner countries Colombia and Canada and associated struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. This “infrastructural lens”, based on three epistemological shifts – from infrastructure to “infrastructuring”, from social imaginaries to “sociotechnical imaginaries” and from human infrastructuring to “planetary infrastructuring” – provides deeper insights into how patterns of justice and injustice are practically infrastructured and what kinds of imaginaries they evoke or are entangled with. Moreover, it makes tangible how practices of infrastructuring can themselves become part of a broader political ontology, that is, of struggles over ways of being and ways of relating to planet Earth.

Climate Change as Dark Magic in <em>Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir</em> Animation

Climate Change as Dark Magic in <em>Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir</em> Animation

Emergency Aesthetics: The Case of the Four Faces of Omarska

Abstract This article examines how contemporary artists from the Western Balkans have sought to engage with the legacy of ethnonationalist violence. While attempts to examine and openly discuss war crimes that occurred in this region during the 1990s have largely been undermined by populist politics in successor states, the domain of art has provided a critical platform for disrupting the official erasure of these atrocities. This investigation focuses on the Four Faces of Omarska art collective, whose members examine the war crimes that occurred following the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia by studying the transformation of the Omarska site in north-western Bosnia – a location that has variously served as a mining complex, a death camp, and a set for the filming of an ‘ethno-blockbuster.’ In providing a comprehensive (art) historical analysis of their practice, the article considers the collective's public engagement strategies by invoking Santiago Zabala's concept of ‘emergency aesthetics’ as a method for countering the political erasure of urgent issues. This analysis reveals that the significance of the Four Faces of Omarska project extends beyond its immediate post-socialist context, and indeed provides a model of creative practice fit for our era of planetary crisis.

Planet.Health: An Ecosystem Approach to Imagine and Coordinate for Planetary Health Futures

Planet.Health addresses imagination and coordination challenges for planetary health through innovative approaches to social organising. This report presents the findings from the inaugural Planet.Health event in 2022, including the Planet.Health unconference. An unconference is a participant-driven event format that provides flexibility for emergent ideas and connections. In this (un)conference report, we share the challenges, achievements, and lessons learned during the initial year of activities in the leadup to and following the Planet.Health unconference event. We also discuss how the intersection of web3 and planetary health—a major focus of the first year—provides an alternative lens for envisioning, innovating, and coordinating beyond conventional social and institutional frameworks. We explore the potential impact of web3 technologies and decentralised social, economic, and financial networks and highlight the implications of these approaches for addressing planetary crises and supporting a flourishing human–environment relationship. As a new contribution to the planetary health field, this work emphasises the importance of building decentralised systems to foster creative actions and inspire global engagement for planetary wellbeing. The report concludes with some practical insights on how we begin to build and sustain decentralised social networks, including a discussion of the benefits and limitations of these approaches.

An Integrated Approach to Analyze the Progress of Developing Economies in Asia toward the Sustainable Development Goals

This study endeavored to analyze the progress made to meet the Sustainable Development Goals in terms of resource use, sustainable production and consumption, and the triple planetary crisis (i.e., climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollutant emissions) at the national and regional levels in Asia. The study highlighted that the progress toward sustainable consumption and production is still not sufficient to meet the ambitious national targets. An urgent need for a comprehensive approach to address climate change, biodiversity loss, pollutant emissions, and resource use has been ascertained. China’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged tremendously. India is also endeavoring to decouple emissions from growth via renewable energy. Vulnerable Pakistan seeks emission reduction and financial aid. Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam outline emission reduction strategies. Land use change emerges as a key biodiversity loss driver, stressing the need for sustainable land policies and conservation. Material consumption highlights the call for production optimization, circular economies, and innovative technology. Energy’s role in development requires decoupling from growth through efficiency, renewables, and eco-friendly paths. Freshwater needs careful management for sustainability, and international collaboration and policy reform are urged for global water use efficiency. Decoupling trends between growth, resource use, and environmental impact show a complex pattern, with the feasibility of absolute decoupling limited by growth interdependence.

A Clear and Present Pedagogy: Teaching About Planetary Crisis (When You're in a Planetary Crisis)

AbstractThe task of teaching about acute ecological crisis presents a vital pedagogical challenge and an important provocation for critical scholars. Across various environmental subfields, educators are revisiting fundamental and politically significant questions concerning what to teach, how to teach, and even why to teach as their traditional subject matter transforms around them. In this article, we explore how environmental educators are grappling with the implications of what they are teaching and consider the politicising effects of this predicament. We show how this distinctive educational context, beyond posing bewildering learning challenges, is also creating unique openings for radical scholarship in higher education. Through interviews with educators endeavouring to teach about planetary environmental crisis (from within an exceedingly dire planetary environmental crisis), we examine diverse attempts to interpret the radical demands of this learning challenge and to negotiate its many complexities, practical difficulties, and political possibilities.

SUS 3 The Intercollegiate Green Theatre Checklist

Abstract Aims The climate crisis is scientifically irrefutable and poses a major threat to human life (1,2). Healthcare services face the paradox of managing the disease burden caused by the planetary crisis, whilst simultaneously contributing to the problem (3, 4). As surgeons, we have a duty to protect our patients and as such to decrease our environmental impact: this checklist aims to provide guidance towards more sustainable surgical practises. Methods A team of surgical doctors used evidence-based research, grey literature and expert advice, to identify interventions that: The interventions centre on the 5 “Rs” of sustainability and where possible abide by the triple bottom line of sustainable quality improvement. Importantly, they are designed to specifically target recognised carbon hotspots in order to achieve a maximum reduction in the carbon footprint of surgical departments. Results The interventions identified were collated into a checklist with 16 recommendations to be adapted for use by surgical teams on the frontline and accompanied by a compendium of relevant evidence. The Green Theatre checklist was approved by the 3 surgical colleges in the United Kingdom and distributed among their surgical membership. It has gained wide support amongst perioperative professional bodies as well as from the Greener NHS. Conclusion The climate crisis necessitates immediate action. The dissemination of the Green Theatre checklist across the UK will guide surgical teams on the frontline to achieve more sustainable practices, helping the NHS reach its NetZero target.

“It hits me in the weirdest moments”: How future female workers experience loss in times of planetary crisis

AbstractThis paper explores how looming planetary crises become present in the lived experiences of future female workers, and how such experiences condition performances of viable subjectivity. Drawing on interview data from a longitudinal study of young women's education and career aspirations, the paper zooms in on moments where concerns about planetary crises were felt in informants' everyday lives. We augment Judith Butler's writings on loss with Karen Barad's concept of “intra‐action” to theorize these moments as experiences of loss in which constitutive dependencies and entanglements—otherwise repressed and invisible—touch young women's lives. Against this theoretical backdrop, we trace how such experiences interrupt performances of neoliberal work subjectivity and thereby create a potential for alternative agencies grounded in an ethics of entanglement. The paper thus contributes new insights into young women's complex performances of viable work subjectivity, showing how more sustainable and collective ways of performing the self emerge. As such, we offer researchers and professionals working with and around young women a nuanced understanding of how young women contest and exceed notions of neoliberal individualism.

A Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy

AbstractThe escalating planetary crises of human‐induced climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and declining biodiversity call for urgent actions to be taken at all levels of society and by the global community. The current political strategy for a sustainable future that emphasizes economic and technological progress is insufficient to bring about the change required; an educational approach based on identities, values, ethics, and new worldviews is also needed. In this article Arto O. Salonen and his coauthors consider the kind of pedagogy that could support a transformation of the human conception of reality into a form that both recognizes the connections and interactions between people, society, and the planet, and imparts an ethical orientation to action that strengthens the health and integrity of all entities. A theory of planetary social pedagogy (PSP) is based on traditional social pedagogy, which provides a theoretical framework for formal, nonformal, and informal education. PSP aims at building a deep holistic understanding of the relationship between the individual, society, and Earth by integrating the fragmented human conception and experience of reality by uniting the three dimensions of a social‐ecological worldview: spatial, temporal, and ethical. Moreover, PSP is a cyclical learning process that alternates between cognitive, metacognitive, and epistemic levels of learning. The ultimate goal of using PSP is to lay the foundation for a fundamental transformation of the ideals, values, and culture that shape human behavior in ways necessary for securing a sustainable future.

Planetary rural geographies

This paper proposes planetary rural geographies to counter the narrative of planetary urbanisation, which has contended that the whole planet has been urbanised and can be understood through urban theory without an outside. Whilst critics have challenged the metrophilia inherent to planetary urbanisation, advanced post-colonial critiques, and posited alternative models of ruralisation, we argue that these responses fall short of fully embracing the radical potential of a planetary perspective. We call for planetary rural geographies that examine rural places as sites of interaction between diverse more-than-human relations that extend above and below the Earth surface and contend that the configuration of human–environment interactions at the ‘rural’ end of urban–rural relations is critical to addressing planetary crises. We elaborate this argument by focusing on three geographies of planetary rurality: as a space of crisis, as a space of conflict, and as a space of hope, evidenced by examples drawn from the global rural literature.

Biosphere Defenders Leveraging the Human Right to Healthy Environment for Transformative Change

Earth’s life support systems depend on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Without radical transformations, staying within safe planetary boundaries becomes impossible. While the inequalities between Global North and Global South are increasingly acknowledged, the agency and rights of people often placed in the category of “vulnerable” -women, youth, indigenous peoples and local communities- are not sufficiently recognized. This article discusses the role of biosphere defenders in the context of the 2022–2030 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the right to a healthy environment. Through dissecting judicial cases, the article investigates promising examples of ways in which biosphere defenders use the law to trigger societal change. This article finds that biosphere defenders contribute to unleashing values of responsibility by various actors, translating biocultural values of ecosystems into evidence in judicial processes impacting bureaucratic and financial systems. Supporting the work of biosphere defenders and placing the right to a sustainable environment at the heart of biodiversity and human rights law will be vital in confronting head-on the planetary crises.