Prevention and Response (Asynchronous Session)
Responding to Climate Induced Displacement in Bangladesh: A Governance Perspective View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kisinger Chakma, Kenichi Matsui
In Bangladesh’s low-lying disaster-prone river delta, cyclone, flood, and riverbank erosion occur every year and displace about one million people with a loss equivalent to about 1% of its GDP. This paper examines how this country has dealt with climate-induced displacement. In particular, we analyze Bangladesh’s climate governance by focusing on its resettlement-rehabilitation-resilient policy. This policy assisted displaced households to resettle in so-called “cluster villages” and provided them with training for essential skills, leadership, disaster preparedness, and income generation/diversification. We discuss how the central government’s seventeen departments and relevant local government institutions played roles in this policy. In the last ten years or so, this rehabilitation program has been incorporated into the national climate change policy and socio-economic development plans. Our examination of these recent policy developments shows that the decision-making process essentially remained top-down despite the increasing emphasis in policy documents on local participation. In conclusion, we identify some factors that have prevented local households from actively participating in resettlement and socio-economic developments.
Emergency Meals-To-You: Preparing for Climate Change Impacts on Hunger and Poverty View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tyson-Lord Gray
According to the USDA, 10.5% or 13.7 million U.S. households were food insecure at some point in 2019. In 2020 we have seen those numbers rise due to COVID-19 and researchers at Northwestern University estimate that food insecurity more than doubled as a result of the economic crisis brought on by the outbreak. Food insecurity is defined as limited or uncertain access to food and the USDA estimates that more than 11 million children in the U.S. live in food-insecure households. This means that 1 in 6 children may not have consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. At the height of the pandemic, countless families found themselves quarantined and cut off from vital resources. Not only families living in poverty but those in rural areas, who had previously depended upon school lunch programs to provide children with two meals a day, where now facing food insecurity. Although the impact of COVID-19 was unique, the challenges it posed were not. They mirrored those of communities in the wake of natural disasters brought on by climate change such as droughts, storms, earthquakes, landslides, and floods that are occurring more frequently every year. This paper, Emergency Meals-To-You: Preparing for Climate Change Impacts on Hunger and Poverty, analyses the Emergency Meals-to-You program launched by The Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty as an emergency model for future climate change impacts on food insecurity.
Preventing Drought Through Proactive Risk Mitigation Policy: Moving from Reactive Crisis Management View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margot Hurlbert
Increasingly there is evidence that movement away from reactive drought response and exclusive focus on disaster management toward proactive drought risk mitigation reduces vulnerability and improves adaptive capacity. However to do so requires both deep interdisciplinary science surrounding vulnerability and adaptation, as well as the engagement of agricultural producers as active participants in drought planning and technology adoption. Such participatory planning requires an interdisciplinary team and a conception of holistic climate change and drought policies that work symbiotically together and over time. Response to slow and creeping events of drought, and rapid onset are equally important. Considering compound, interconnected, interacting, and cascading risks in different locals, regions, and contexts grounds analysis in vulnerability and sensitivity. Comparing case studies in South America and Canada allows for generalizable findings respecting policy instruments and mixes of policy instruments that advance resilience, reduces soft limits of adaptation, while avoiding maladaptation. This paper reviews case studies in Western Canada, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia providing specific institutional and policy recommendations as well as policy and research practices.
The Lavish! Project: Cultivating an Ethos of Wilderness Conservation Through Art Practice and Art Education in the Highly Biodiverse and Climate Resilient Forests of Appalachia View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zoé Strecker
Aesthetic engagement in communal space is a powerful way to connect with ecological issues that might otherwise be daunting and individually paralyzing – climate change, biodiversity loss, and, in my home region, severe environmental degradation caused by mountaintop removal coal mining and fracking. Lavish! is an immersive installation sculpture with a long-term social engagement element, that focuses on exceptionally biodiverse old growth forests in the Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky. I work to cultivate reverence for wild places in several ways – by opening my creative process to include artists, students, and the general public as active collaborators; by sharing completed artwork (exhibitions, readings, performances, talks and guided walks) in diverse venues / locations; by making available a variety of documentation of the artwork and of the places that inspired it to people who cannot access remote natural sites, due to physical, geographic, or economic limitations; and by including essential scientific information about biodiversity and solutions to climate change in various engaging forms throughout the project. Additionally, I work with academic colleagues to teach interdisciplinary undergraduate courses with similar goals and I collaborate with a regional land trust partner organization to run retreats and group exhibitions that engage other artists in responding through their own practices. This study provides an overview of these projects and invites questions about improving and expanding this type of work.
Discursive Strategies on Climate Change on Facebook: An Approach from Leading Accounts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alicia De Lara, María Carmen Erviti
Social media has changed the way the public consumes information. Regarding science information, a Pew Research Center survey (Funk, Gottfried & Mitchell, 2017) finds that about a quarter of American social media users consider them an important source. Social media are being studied in recent years as an important channel where people consume information about climate change (CC) (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014; Ilundain, 2016 or Painter, Kristiansen & Schäfer, 2018). A review on CC in social media (Pearce et al., 2018) has found that so far the research has strongly focused on Twitter and large-scale quantitative textual approaches. The authors argue that future work should include other platforms. Some of non common studies focused on Facebook approach the problem of CC fake news (Lutzke, et al., 2019); analyze the climate denial discourse (Bloomfield & Tillery, 2019) or study the main frameworks through which the problem is approached (Vu, Blomberg, Seo, Liu, Shayesteh & Do 2020). This article adds a contribution on the communication about CC focusing on discursive strategies of some of the most relevant voices on CC in Facebook, the first social network in number of users (Digital, 2021). The study is based on 600 posts extracted applying a specific search algorithm the days before, during and after the Madrid Climate Summit (COOP 25, 2019). The findings suggest that the emotional component prevails in the discourse on CC on Facebook and seeks to call for action, but without delving into the causes or consequences of the problem.
