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Climate Services And Transformational Adaptation, Edward Carr
Climate Services And Transformational Adaptation, Edward Carr
Sustainability and Social Justice
The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report states that effective adaptation to the changing climate will require transformational changes in how people live. This article explores the potential for climate services to catalyze and foster transformational adaptation. I argue that weather and climate information are not, in and of themselves, tools for transformation. When designed and delivered without careful identification of the intended users of the service and the needs that service addresses, they can fail to catalyze change amongst the users of that information. At worst, they can reinforce the status quo and drive maladaptive …
From The Virocene To The Lovecene Epoch: Multispecies Justice As Critical Praxis For Virocene Disruptions And Vulnerabilities, Jude Fernando
From The Virocene To The Lovecene Epoch: Multispecies Justice As Critical Praxis For Virocene Disruptions And Vulnerabilities, Jude Fernando
Sustainability and Social Justice
In the Virocene epoch, global pandemics such as COVID-19 disrupt the world order organized by capitalism and racial privilege, making clear the unsustainability of ‘normal’ ways of organizing both society and nature. Despite its failure to address these disruptions, the existing capitalist-racist system attempts to reproduce itself, posing greater risks of disease, inequalities, and injustice to the most vulnerable human and nonhuman populations. The Virocene epoch makes these workings visible, and challenges both hegemonic and counterhegemonic ways of organizing human-nature relations. Political ecology requires new emancipatory theoretical-political strategies firmly grounded in a theory of justice that embodies social and ecological …
The Virocene Epoch: The Vulnerability Nexus Of Viruses, Capitalism And Racism, Jude Fernando
The Virocene Epoch: The Vulnerability Nexus Of Viruses, Capitalism And Racism, Jude Fernando
Sustainability and Social Justice
COVID-19 has ushered in a new planetary epoch—the Virocene. In doing so, it has laid bare the limits of humanity’s power over nature, exposing the vulnerability of ‘normal’ ways of living and their moral and pragmatic bankruptcy in coping with those vulnerabilities. ‘Normal’ is powerless against the virus and has not worked for a majority of the world’s human and non-human population. Whatever new normal humanity fashions depends on the socio-ecological change set in motion by mutations between human and non-human species. The outcomes of society’s responses to the pandemic depend on how human agency, as an embodiment of social, …
Understanding Women's Needs For Weather And Climate Information In Agrarian Settings: The Case Of Ngetou Maleck, Senegal, Edward Carr, Grant Fleming, Tshibangu Kalala
Understanding Women's Needs For Weather And Climate Information In Agrarian Settings: The Case Of Ngetou Maleck, Senegal, Edward Carr, Grant Fleming, Tshibangu Kalala
Sustainability and Social Justice
While climate services have the potential to reduce precipitation- and temperature-related risks to agrarian livelihoods, such outcomes are possible only when they deliver information that is salient, legitimate, and credible to end users. This is particularly true of climate services intended to address the needs of women in agrarian contexts. The design of such gender-sensitive services is hampered by oversimplified framings of women as a group in both the adaptation and climate services literatures. This paper demonstrates that even at the village level, women have different climate and weather information needs, and differing abilities to act on that information. Therefore, …
Vulnerability, Risk Perception, And Health Profile Of Marginalized People Exposed To Multiple Built-Environment Stressors In Worcester, Massachusetts: A Pilot Project, Timothy Downs, Laurie Ross, Robert Goble, Rajendra Subedi, Sara Greenberg, Octavia Taylor
Vulnerability, Risk Perception, And Health Profile Of Marginalized People Exposed To Multiple Built-Environment Stressors In Worcester, Massachusetts: A Pilot Project, Timothy Downs, Laurie Ross, Robert Goble, Rajendra Subedi, Sara Greenberg, Octavia Taylor
Sustainability and Social Justice
Millions of low-income people of diverse ethnicities inhabit stressful old urban industrial neighborhoods. Yet we know little about the health impacts of built-environment stressors and risk perceptions in such settings; we lack even basic health profiles. Difficult access is one reason (it took us 30 months to survey 80 households); the lack of multifaceted survey tools is another. We designed and implemented a pilot vulnerability assessment tool in Worcester, Massachusetts. We answer: (1) How can we assess vulnerability to multiple stressors? (2) What is the nature of complex vulnerability-including risk perceptions and health profiles? (3) How can findings be used …
Complexities Of Holistic Community-Based Participatory Research For A Low Income, Multi-Ethnic Population Exposed To Multiple Built-Environment Stressors In Worcester, Massachusetts, Timothy Downs, Laurie Ross, Suzanne Patton, Sarah Rulnick, Deb Sinha, Danielle Mucciarone, Maria Calvache, Sarah Parmenter, Rajendra Subedi, Donna Wysokenski, Erin Anderson, Rebecca Dezan, Kate Lowe, Jennifer Bowen, Amee Tejani, Kelly Piersanti, Octavia Taylor, Robert Goble
Complexities Of Holistic Community-Based Participatory Research For A Low Income, Multi-Ethnic Population Exposed To Multiple Built-Environment Stressors In Worcester, Massachusetts, Timothy Downs, Laurie Ross, Suzanne Patton, Sarah Rulnick, Deb Sinha, Danielle Mucciarone, Maria Calvache, Sarah Parmenter, Rajendra Subedi, Donna Wysokenski, Erin Anderson, Rebecca Dezan, Kate Lowe, Jennifer Bowen, Amee Tejani, Kelly Piersanti, Octavia Taylor, Robert Goble
Sustainability and Social Justice
Low income, multi-ethnic communities in Main South/Piedmont neighborhoods of Worcester, Massachusetts are exposed to cumulative, chronic built-environment stressors, and have limited capacity to respond, magnifying their vulnerability to adverse health outcomes. "Neighborhood STRENGTH", our community-based participatory research (CBPR) project, comprised four partners: a youth center; an environmental non-profit; a community-based health center; and a university. Unlike most CBPR projects that are single topic-focused, our 'holistic', systems-based project targeted five priorities. The three research-focused/action-oriented components were: (1) participatory monitoring of indoor and outdoor pollution; (2) learning about health needs and concerns of residents through community-based listening sessions; (3) engaging in collaborative …
Achieving Millennium Development Goals For Health: Building Understanding, Trust And Capacity To Respond, Timothy Downs, Heidi Jane Larson
Achieving Millennium Development Goals For Health: Building Understanding, Trust And Capacity To Respond, Timothy Downs, Heidi Jane Larson
Sustainability and Social Justice
Biomedical interventions promise achievement of health-related Millennium Development Goals provided social-, capacity- and knowledge-based constraints to scaling up and reaching marginalized people at risk, are addressed, and balance between prevention and treatment is struck. We argue for a new approach: multi-stakeholder capacity building and learning for empowerment: MuSCLE. MuSCLE is used as a way to frame three systemic weaknesses in traditional health science and policy approaches: (1) a lack of engagement with people at risk to build a collective understanding of the contexts of health problems, including social drivers; (2) a lack of multi-criteria evaluation of alternative interventions; (3) a …