Climate Change, Disaster Capitalism and Environmental Justice

Climate Change, Disaster Capitalism and Environmental Justice:
Some Implications for Island Nations

Speaker: Professor Kenneth Gould (visiting scholar and 2024 SEELYE Fellow)

Date: Wednesday October 9
Time: noon to 1pm
Location: room 440, Building B201, University of Auckland
Please register as space will be limited

Description:
In an era of climate change, increased frequency and intensity of major storms coupled with rising sea levels makes coastal development risky. Coastal precarity is of particular concern to island nations where both population centers and economic activities are disproportionately distributed along seashores. Climate disasters are altering coastal real estate in several ways including clearing existing coastal property and residents, making physical and social space for new capital investment, increasing the prices of new buildings and infrastructure that incorporate resilient features, and placing additional privatization pressures on collective land tenure systems.

Public policy responses to coastal climate disasters often focus on structural mitigation that raise the cost of redevelopment, giving capital (both local and extralocal) greater control over development decisions. These changes affect coastal communities by making them more expensive and more exclusive. Thus, climate change and the social response to it alter community demographics and further restrict coastal living to economic elites.

Using the example of the Caribbean Island of Barbuda, which was devastated by Hurricane Irma in 2017, I will illustrate processes of climate-related disaster capitalism and environmental injustice. The analysis indicates that the interplay of anthropogenic climate change, neoliberal public policy and transnational capital interests combine to displace coastal residents with traditional (non-Western) land tenure, lower socioeconomic status and lower political power, shifting control of coastal development to domestic and transnational economic elites. These socio-environmental dynamics penalize those whose ecological footprints contribute less to climate change, and rewards those whose larger ecological footprints contribute disproportionately to anthropogenic climate change, reinforcing a cycle of climate injustice.

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Please note that on Tuesday October 15 Professor Gould will be delivering a public lecture on "Perverse Adaptation: The consequences of public investments after coastal climate disasters"
For more details, go to: https://perverse-adaptation-public-lecture.eventbrite.co.nz

Host or Publisher Manuel Vallée, Senior Lecturer, Sociology Department, Faculty of Arts