Experiences and observations of Hurricane Melissa’s path through Cuba: preparations, sanctions, and citizen networks

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In this blog, humanitarian practitioner and researcher Carla Vitantonio reflects on the immediate experiences of people in Cuba affected by the path of Hurricane Melissa, which slowly approached the Caribbean nation in mid-October 2025. As the Hurricane approached Cuba, various (international) NGO, citizen-led, and civil defence preparations were triggered, despite issues with international sanctions and internal bureaucracy. Though regularly battered by tropical storms and hurricanes, the experiences of Cuban people and institutions with Hurricane Melissa reveal some timely developments in the country.

Photo Credit: Esteri

We began observing Melissa on October 21st. It was a tropical storm, one step below hurricane level, according to Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. However, we knew that its slow pace did not bode well, and realized that it wasn’t a matter of predicting whether it would pass through Cuba, but simply of understanding where.

I have been working in disaster risk prevention and management for fifteen years, seven spent in Cuba. I know the protocols and am well aware of my role in a situation like this. I have studied the preparedness system developed by the EMNDC (Estado Mayor de la Defensa Civil) in Cuba, and which many around the world admire. This system has allowed this small country in the Caribbean to survive  annual hurricanes and storm seasons since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.
Yet I live here and know that, beyond the official propaganda and its many detractors, Cuba is no longer what it once was.

Like many, I still sting with the memory of Hurricane Oscar, which devastated eastern Cuba a year ago. Last year, when a colleague from Brussels called me the day before Oscar made landfall in Cuba, to ask if we needed support, I responded with a bit of bravado: “Cubans brush their teeth with a Category 2.” And I was wrong. Even today, a year later, there is no clarity on the number of deaths or the damage caused by Oscar and the human errors that followed, and many believe that the historically efficient Early Warning System failed that time.

I’m not the only one who bitterly remembers October last year, the 3 (for some up to 7) days without electricity, refrigerators left open, as if gutted, while the luckiest ones tried to cook their stored food in an attempt to save at least some of it, the chaos of information and misinformation and the clear feeling, listening to the fragmented accounts of colleagues from the affected areas, that beyond the usual duel between the regime and dissident press, something really hadn’t worked in the preparation and response.

Unfortunately, we were not involved in any learning exercises after the fact: we don’t know whether the Civil Defense  analyzed what happened and learned any lessons, nor can we hope to know: living in Cuba means oscillating between a scandal-mongering and delegitimizing press that is mostly funded by the diaspora and quoted by international media, and a state-controlled press, which publishes only sanitized and repackaged news, increasingly detached from what we see every day on the streets.

But let’s go back to October 21st. Melissa’s slow approach allowed everyone to organize. The Civil Defense evacuated approximately 500,000 people. In Cuba, preventive evacuations have historically been managed along two lines: anyone who finds themselves in a situation where they need to leave their homes, first looks to family members nearby living in areas designated as safe by the Civil Defense. Only a small portion go to shelters, which are generally schools temporarily set up as shelters. Cuba’s civilian evacuation mechanism does not allow for individual objections.

Recently,  a Cuban doctor that helped interrupt mother-to-child transmission of HIV told me about Cuba’s approach to HIV: “Because in Cuba, the life of every citizen is worth more than anything else. And to save it, we do everything, sometimes without caring whether someone agrees with our methods, or not. As if we had these lives at our disposal.”

I personally experienced the truth of this statement during COVID, when the state, to protect its citizens, imposed measures that would have been deemed unacceptable in many countries around the world. This was done precisely because of this duty to protect, which sometimes goes even beyond recognizing the agency of citizens. Evacuations during hurricane preparations, a painful process in which people are forced to leave behind what is most precious to them, and often even their livelihoods, work in the same way. We must save what is most precious to us: our lives. Everything else can come later.

International Reactions and Preparations

Meanwhile, mindful of the events of 2024, several European donors, including Germany, announced a couple of days before the hurricane hit that they would donate several hundred thousand euros to CERF, the United Nations emergency fund that will most likely handle the response. This is a sign of confidence in multilateralism. Unfortunately, the sixty-years long embargo (unilateral sanctions with extraterritorial effect imposed by the US), combined with the notoriously lengthy and complex internal bureaucracy in Cuba, make it virtually impossible to import any goods in less than three months—an interminable time for those who have lost their homes, and even for those wishing to provide almost immediate relief. And so, we are now witnessing creative appeals from the United Nations urging local entrepreneurs and individuals willing to respond, and who have access to products already on the local market, to come forward and join forces.
Beyond the commendable coordination effort, it is clear that the crisis the humanitarian sector has reached this country too.

Meanwhile, on October 29th, after 24 hours of intense rain and wind, Melissa made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, hitting the provinces of Holguin, Granma, Santiago, and Guantanamo. The latter two are regions that have become extremely socially and economically impoverished in recent years, and are still struggling following the impact of Hurricane Oscar in 2024. Furthermore, these are the areas of Cuba hardest hit by the deterioration of the national electrical system and the infamous and lengthy apagones, blackouts that last for days, punctuated only by a few hours of power, which now plague the country relentlessly.

This year, the Early Warning System did not fail, and everyone is already prepared: international NGOs have alerted their local partners of the need to gather information as quickly as possible, the United Nations has activated its coordination system, and above all, the Cuban Civil Defense has mobilized the complex network of military and civilian personnel (including the Red Cross) that will handle the response in the hours immediately following Melissa’s passage. Within 24 hours, the hurricane receded, leaving behind destruction and fear, but the consequences continued for days to come: rivers, swollen by the rain, began to overflow their banks on October 31st, especially in the province of Granma, forcing the Civil Defense to launch a massive rescue operation that even included a mass transportation of people by train.

As I write this article, it seems we have emerged from the most critical phase and that we can all deal with the very delicate recovery phase.

What have we learned, as citizens and people involved in disaster preparedness and response?

  • Times have changed, and the Cuban government is slowly shifting to a different approach: on November 1st, an official gazette formally established that the government would pay 50% of the reconstruction costs for all citizens who need to rehabilitate their homes. We are therefore moving away from the “the state will take care of it” approach, which in recent years had sadly turned into empty rhetoric, given that the state no longer had the resources to handle everything. We are moving toward a supportive approach, where the state recognizes the citizens’ leading role while still striving to offer participation and support. The feasibility and sustainability of this offer remain to be seen.
  • Beyond the national and international agencies traditionally responsible for response, we need to rely on all those networks of private citizens who, from areas of Cuba less affected by the hurricane and often even from abroad, offer material support and donations. This change in trend began, I recall, with the tornado that hit Havana in 2019. Just a few months earlier, Cubans had gained access to 3G connectivity on their cell phones. Thanks to it, citizen movements rapidly mobilized to provide aid beyond and regardless of the official response.
  • That climate change is not an opinion, and we must think in terms of systems: for the first time we are witnessing a joint effort by agencies based in different countries (Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas) to reflect on the impact of the event and combine their energies, not only for the response, but for future preparations.
  • That climate change is not an opinion (reprise), potentially disastrous events are intensifying in frequency, becoming more unpredictable in nature and, therefore becoming difficult to prepare according to the “business as usual” model.

In short, it would be interesting, beyond the usual ideological controversies that inevitably emerge when discussing Cuba, to look at this recent event as a source of learning, a pilot, something that can point us in the right direction for the future of preventing and responding to disasters.

 

Originally published in Italian on Left.

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the author:

Carla Vitantonio is a humanitarian practitioner and researcher who has worked across a number of contexts and organisations, including CARE (as country Director for Cuba), and Handicap International (including as country Director for North Korea). She contributes to academic research initiatives at institutes including the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the European University Institute, and ODI. Carla hosts the podcast ‘Living Decoloniality’, and also serves on the Board of the International Humanitarian Studies Association, as well as regularly contributing blogs, think pieces and papers – in English, Spanish, and Italian.

 

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Early Warning is one of the most important components of Disaster Risk Reduction – and one of the most successful!

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In this blog to mark the International Day of Disaster Risk Reduction (October 13), HSC Coordinator Tom Ansell dives into the role of ‘Early Warning’ systems and policies as part of Disaster Risk Reduction initiatives. They fit within greater DRR programming to make sure that people are warning in advance and can take precautions, or other measures, to prepare for an upcoming shock or hazard. The 2004 Asian Tsunami highlighted the need for more early warning systems for countries with Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts – these systems were triggered earlier this year after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia.

Photo Credit: UNDRR

Introduction – DRR on multiple levels

Managing the risks to people’s lives and livelihoods before, during and after a disaster (whatever the cause) requires looking beyond just ‘responding to a disaster’. Since the 1990’s, and the UN’s ‘International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction’, attitudes towards the disaster cycle have matured and within many emergency management agencies there is some reference to several ‘phases’ of a disaster in a ‘cycle’. For example, the Australian Emergency Management Agency refers to the ‘prevention, preparedness, response, recovery’ phases (now considered a bit old fashioned!). The ‘risk management approach’ is currently the most modern frame for disaster preparation for and responding to a disaster, which focuses on risks rather than timelines: “establish contexts, identify risks, analyse risks, assess risks, treat risks” – and repeat!

Risks are themselves a mixture of hazards/shocks (something that might cause a disaster), vulnerability (socioeconomic conditions that might exacerbate the hazard), exposure (how close people, livelihoods, etc, are to the hazard), and coping capacity (the resources and protocols in place to manage risk).

It’s all put together as the following formula:

Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability x Exposure
Coping capacity

To make a risk assessment, practitioners consider the severity of a risk, and the likelihood of it occurring, to make a compound ‘score’. Disaster Risk Management involves activities, policies, procedures and so on to mitigate risks (DRR), often by reducing vulnerabilities or exposure, or by increasing coping capacity.

So a systematic approach to DRR will approach all of these various components. It’s easy to see why knowing about a hazard early might make it easier to protect people and livelihoods. Or, in technical language: Early Warning increases coping capacity, by giving more time to prepare for a hazardous situation (by taking anticipatory action), thereby decreasing exposure! Within the humanitarian sector, programmes and interventions around this are usually referred to as Early Warning, Early Action (EWEA). Ideally, these activities should be contextual, appropriate, ‘people-centred’, community-based and/or managed, and inclusive.

What do Early Warning systems look like?

What an early warning system looks like is completely dependent on the context and hazard in question. The logic behind most early warning systems, though, is monitoring a hazard (say, a river level) and then triggering information sharing and next steps once a certain level of immediacy has been reached.

For example, the Syria Civil Defence (the White Helmets) co-developed an app-based early warning system for airstrikes, military activities, and knock-on emergencies during the Syrian civil war. A central command room processes incoming reports of, say, jets taking off from an air base, and then sends a warning via app and SMS to mobile phones in the region, with instructions to take cover. Prior to this system, early warnings of air strikes were spotted by people in watch-towers, and communicated by word of mouth and a walkie-talkie radio network, which led to delays in warning people about incoming danger. This app-based system could be used to warn of other incoming hazards, for example a particularly violent winter storm, upstream flooding, or seismic activity. The Netherlands utilizes a similar system for all manner of hazards, NL-Alert.

But whilst tech-enabled Early Warning systems have grown in the last 15 years, there are plenty of contexts where word-of-mouth, radio broadcasting, or an emergency network (the ‘telephone tree’ method) is the most effective way of getting information to people in time to evacuate, take precautions, or otherwise prepare. For example, if there is a river close to a community that periodically floods, people ‘upstream’ can monitor river levels, and spread the words to communities ‘downstream’ if there is particularly high water. This is also the case for knowledge passed down through the generations: if a particular species of animal usually leaves just before a violent storm, for example, this can serve as the ‘trigger’ to warn people.

Early Warning systems are equally useful for slow-onset disasters. An example here is part of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia, which is designed to reduce the risk of famine during poor harvests by offering cash-for-work and cash transfers for people that mainly rely on local agriculture for income and to maintain access to food. The programme is ‘activated’ when drought has been detected for a certain number of months, depending on the region.

Early Warning for Tsunami since 2004

On 26 December 2004, a large underwater earthquake off the coast of Indonesia triggered 50-metre high waves that killed over 220,000 people, as well as leaving more than 2 million people homeless in 15 countries. At the time, Indonesia was not considered an especially high-risk country for tsunami, meaning that the at the time there was little monitoring of underwater seismic activity, or sea level surface. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre was only able to find out about the impending disaster through internet news stories about devastation in Thailand (itself also unprepared for underwater earthquakes or tsunami at the time), and so couldn’t warn countries with Indian Ocean costs in time.

Following the destruction of the 2004 tsunami, national governments, UN agencies, and NGOs all put renewed efforts into reducing exposure to tsunami and oceanic hazards. At an intergovernmental level, the tsunami sped up development and adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Risk Reduction (now surpassed by the Sendai Framework). At a national level, Thailand created a multi-hazard oceanic early warning system, with tsunami detection buoys and information sharing with Indonesian, Australian, and Indian detection buoys. These signals are sent to a national coordination centre, whereupon various operating procedures are activated. A warning is then broadcast in five languages by fax, SMS, through ‘warning box’ speakers, radio relay towers, public tannoys, social media and through radio and TV warnings. The system will be developed further to give direct to mobile phone warnings in the coming decades.

Indonesia, meanwhile, has developed a network of 553 seismographs, as well as using oceanographic modelling and local hazard mapping for low-lying coastal areas. Once this network detects seismographic activity, procedures include public announcements, vertical evacuation routes, and evacuation signage.

Outside of the Pacific region, the destruction of the 2004 tsunami impelled Caribbean governments to put together the Tsunami and other Coastal Hazards Warning System for the Caribbean Sea and Adjacent Regions (ICG/CARIBE EWS), a multi-hazard coastal early warning system, and since 2011 have integrated the CARIBE WAVE exercise, which simulates a tsunami or underwater earthquake evacuation. In 2024, over 700,000 people were ‘evacuated’ during the exercise.

Unfortunately, well-functioning early warning systems are not enough to completely mitigate the risk of a large disaster, as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami demonstrates. More than 20,000 people died during the quake and 39-metre tsunami wave, with knock-on effects including the Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident, despite Japan having a well-developed tsunami early warning system. The worth of all of this preparation work was evident this July, though. An 8.8 magnitude offshore earthquake occurred off the coast of Russian Kamchatka, triggering early warning systems and causing precautionary policies in several countries (including Japan, Indonesia, Russia, and China), including evacuations. The earthquake did cause tsunami-like waves, though did not have the same destructive force as the 2004 tsunami.

Conclusion – early warning as part of a multi-level DRR framework

Early warning systems, then, are a key part of reducing disaster risk, especially to climactic and environmental hazards. But we shouldn’t equate that with completely eradicating risks, or indeed think that early warning is the only part of risk management and reduction that should be concentrated on. Early warning systems work best as part of a full multi-level DRR framework, with training and education on detecting hazards, well-developed protocols for early action, evacuation, or other mitigation measures; and a general policy to reduce societal vulnerability through equitable policies, reducing socio-economic inequalities, and strong governance structures.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the Author

Tom Ansell

Tom Ansell is the coordinator and programme manager of The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre, and the Coordinator of the International Humanitarian Studies Association. He has a study background in religion and conflict transformation, as well as an interest in disaster risk reduction, and science communication and societal impact of (applied) research.

 

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Emphasizing locally-led knowledge interventions in cases of neglected humanitarian crises: Launching the Namibian Humanitarian Observatory

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In this blog, Sister Agrippina Nandjaa (Caritas Namibia) marks the opening of the Humanitarian Observatory in Namibia, considering the importance of ‘neglected crises’ and their intersection with climate change. The Observatory in Namibia joins a growing network of spaces for research, discussion, and advocacy, coordinated by The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre (HSC).

 

Image by Unsplash : Bernd Dittrich

The Namibia Humanitarian Observatory was launched on 24 May 2024 to create a space for discussion with communities and stakeholders around vulnerability to disasters across the country. The self-governed Observatory aims to engage communities prone to recurrent climate-related shocks to share experiences and explore pathways toward creative and self-reliant communities, especially in the case of drought. The widespread impact and long duration of drought make it one of the most costly hazards in Namibia. However, the impacts of drought can often be lessened through preparedness and early action aimed at decreasing community vulnerability and exposure. Namibia is the most arid sub-Saharan country, experiencing very high evapotranspiration rates (Mendelsohn et al., 2002). Consequently, it is exposed to recurrent droughts, with historically devastating consequences. A growing population, persistent poverty, and climate change provide even greater threats in the future. And, with the situation in Namibia often falling into the category of ‘neglected humanitarian crises; affecting international support and aid, we are reminded of the importance of the everyday actions and practices that drive humanitarian action from the local and grassroots level.

A platform for discussion and analysis around drought

In partnership with The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre (HSC) of the International Institute of Social Studies, the Namibia Humanitarian Observatory will be a platform for discussions that enable communities and authorities to respond to humanitarian crises. It will bring together communities to assess historical drought events and their extent and impacts in Namibia. It will facilitate the gathering and analysis of relevant data and explore the current institutions and systems involved in drought monitoring, forecasting, early warning, mitigation, and reduction in the country by subsistence farmers.

This space will also act as an early action initiative that initially focuses on rapid-onset hazards such as climate change awareness and strategies for subsistence farming. Agriculture is primarily the main activity for subsistence farming in Namibia. In its humanitarian work across the country, particularly now with the distribution of food parcels for vulnerable households, which includes undocumented people, Caritas Namibia has been thinking of what skills, training, and advocacy of recovery programs are needed in the long term in order to cope with protracted drought in the 14 regions of Namibia. Traditional farmers seem unable to cope with the changing weather and climate that has resulted in low rainfall during the farming season compared to 50 years ago. Now, Caritas Namibia, together with the local government authorities, wants to explore the way of rethinking lost skills, new skills, advocacy, and training for subsistence farmers to improve their household livelihood to counter dependence syndrome and increase the communities’ adaptive capacities. The Namibia Humanitarian Observatory will contribute to this objective and will also safeguard the importance of local and indigenous knowledge and practices when it comes to disaster preparedness, response, and prevention.

The launch was hosted in the Zambezi Regional Councils and was attended by the Governor of Zambezi region, the Councilors, and council staff, Joseph Moowa Kalokela, member of Namibia Observatory, Gabriela Anderson, community manager of HSC, Joram Tarusarira from the University of Groningen and member of the Namibia Observatory, and Agrippina Nandjaa, Coordinator of the Namibia Humanitarian Observatory and Caritas coordinator. The attendees of the launch were able to leave reflecting on how countries like Namibia, who are adversely and continuously vulnerable to the effects of climate change, can play a vital role in international politics in holding other countries accountable for their own roles in the changing climate, like the environmentally damaging consequences of warfare in Israel and Russia.

Together, the presenting team at the launch of the Namibia Humanitarian Observatory were able to gain the support of the local government in the Zambezi region of Namibia and further the roots of the Humanitarian Observatories. That is, the importance of discussing the role of different actors within the humanitarian field and how they work together (or not) in addressing humanitarian needs in a highly contextual and locally relevant way.

For more information about the Humanitarian Observatories, check out The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre website, and the information pages around the Humanitarian Governance (HUM-GOV) project. The Humanitarian Observatories regularly contribute interesting articles to BlISS. 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author

Sister Agrippina Nandjaa

Sr. Agrippina Nandjaa is a Catholic religious sister lives and work in Namibia, and directing Caritas Namibia-Namibian Catholic Bishop’s Conference. Agrippina hold a master degree in development Studies-Social Policy from International Institute of Social Studies-Erasmus Rotterdam University, Honor degree in adult education and community development and Diploma in community education from the University of Namibia. She has experience over ten years. Agrippina is also coordinating the Namibia observatory which was lunched on 24 May 2024 in Zambezi region-Namibia.

 

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Why Religion could be an important driver of achieving the SDGs

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Religious institutions, leaders, and grassroots movements hold the potential to be powerful allies in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From combating poverty to promoting climate action, the reach and influence of religion are vast and often undervalued. In this blog, Kim Tung Dao explores how religion’s moral authority, extensive networks, and community-driven initiatives can be integrated into global development strategies, offering fresh insights into tackling humanity’s greatest challenges. Discover why embracing religion as a catalyst for sustainable development is crucial to bridging gaps and accelerating progress toward a better future.

UNEPs Faith for Earth

Why Religion could be an important driver of achieving the SDGs

In a world where 84% of people identify with a religious group, an enormous untapped force for sustainable development remains largely overlooked. While governments and NGOs race to achieve the United Nations’ ambitious development goals, religious institutions – which reach over 6.5 billion people globally – could hold the key to accelerating progress (2012 report from the Pew Research Center).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), introduced by the United Nations in 2015, represent a global framework for addressing the most pressing challenges facing humanity, from eradicating poverty to ensuring environmental sustainability. Despite its worldwide endorsement and growing efforts to achieve these goals, significant gaps in progress remain. Even more troublingly, some of the goals seem to be delayed or even regressing, raising concerns about the overall feasibility of the SDGs.

The continuity of these issues prompts the question of whether the current approach to achieving the SDGs is missing a crucial force. In this context, one area that has received little attention is the role of religion. Given that religion continues to play a vital role in the lives of billions of people, especially after COVID-19, its potential impact on sustainable development will be argued for here. This blog explores how religion might be incorporated into the discussion on the SDGs to provide new insights and solutions to these enduring challenges.

Religion has historically shaped the values, ethics, and behaviors of societies. Whether through teachings that promote social justice, natural environment sustainability, or community solidarity, religion has the capacity to influence large populations in undeniable ways. This influence makes religion a potentially powerful force in the quest to achieve the SDGs.

This blog will explore the intersection between religion and sustainable development by discussing three key aspects: the role of religious institutions, the impact of religious leaders, and the power of grassroots religious movements. By examining these facets, we can better understand how religion can contribute to the SDGs.

The role of religion in achieving the SDGs

Religion’s impact on sustainable development can be profound and multifaceted. At its core, religion shapes the moral and ethical frameworks that guide human behavior, influencing how communities engage with the SDGs. For example, many religions advocate for the protection of the environment, the dignity of all individuals, and the importance of charity and community support – all values that align closely with the SDGs.

However, the potential for religion to contribute to the SDGs may go beyond these shared values. Religious institutions often have extensive networks and resources that can facilitate development initiatives. In addition, religious leaders’ words and actions hold significant weight over their followers and can be great allies for achieving the SDGs. Finally, grassroots religious movements can motivate the local communities to take action, promoting local ownership of the SDGs.  While the SDGs have been shaped largely and mainly from scientific, secular, and governmental perspectives, incorporating religious factors could make achieving these goals more feasible.

Religious institutions: An important force for Sustainable Development

Religious institutions, with their long-established history and widespread influence, can be powerful agents of change. One striking example of how religious institutions support sustainable development can be found in the Catholic Church’s environmental efforts, particularly through Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si. The Laudato Si’ (‘Praise be’) 9 has encouraged environmental engagement and social justice, both of which are highly in line with the SDGs. This document has inspired Catholics to consider the ethical dimensions of environmental issues, leading to increased activism and policy advocacy.  Thus, urging Catholics to see environmental issues as moral concerns. This aligns with SDG 13 (Climate Action), as the document encourages responsible stewardship of the Earth through ethical consumption and reducing environmental degradation. This has spurred various environmental initiatives among Catholic communities, from promoting renewable energy to waste reduction campaigns.

Furthermore, religious institutions often have resources and networks that can benefit the sustainable development process. For example, faith-based organizations like Caritas and Islamic Relief Worldwide have played significant roles in humanitarian aid and poverty alleviation, directly contributing to the achievement of at least two SDGs namely SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger). The impact of these organizations is substantial and measurable. In 2022 alone, Islamic Relief Worldwide reached an unprecedented 17.3 million people across various regions, providing aid to those affected by crises and working to alleviate poverty (according to the Islamic Relief Worldwide Annual Report 2022). And the Caritas Internationalis 2021 annual report indicates that they implemented 15 projects, assisting 5.3 million people in 14 countries. These efforts directly contribute to SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), demonstrating how religious institutions can effectively mobilize resources for sustainable development.

Religious Leaders: Promoters of Changes

While religious institutions provide structural support and resources for sustainable development, it is often the voices of religious leaders that inspire personal commitments and actions. These leaders, through their moral authority, can influence the entire community towards achieving the SDGs. Religious leaders can have significant influence over their followers, often serving as moral and spiritual guides and examples. This influence can be utilized to promote the SDGs. A good example is the role of the Dalai Lama in promoting peace, compassion, and environmental responsibility. His teachings have inspired millions, inspiring efforts toward peaceful coexistence (SDG 16) and environmental sustainability (SDG 13).

Similarly, local religious leaders in various communities have successfully stimulated their followers to contribute to the development activities from education and health (SDG 3 and SDG 4), poverty eradication (SDG 1), environment and peacekeeping (SDG 13, SDG 14, SDG 15, and SDG 16) to gender equality (SDG 5). These leaders can bridge the gap between global sustainability goals and local practical daily life, making the SDGs more accessible and relevant to their communities and, hence more achievable.

On the other hand, while religious leaders can be pivotal allies, tensions may arise when their goals conflict with those of secular development agencies. For example, certain religious values might conflict with policies around reproductive health (SDG 3) yet fostering dialogue and cooperation between these entities could help find common ground, such as shared concerns around poverty or education.

Grassroots religious movements: fuels for local action

Beyond the influence of prominent religious leaders, grassroots movements rooted in local communities can serve as powerful engines of change. These movements engage people at a personal level, fostering a sense of ownership in sustainable development efforts and driving collective action from the ground up. Grassroots religious movements often emerge from local communities that are deeply tied to their cultural and religious identities, giving them a strong position to steer sustainable development actions at the heart of community life. These movements, because of their close connection to local people, can bring a sense of ownership and empowerment to each community member, encouraging them to take action in support of the SDGs usually at their own pace.

For instance, a movement named Greenfaith unites people of various religious backgrounds in environmental activism. Emphasizing ‘grassroots’, ‘multifaith’, and ‘climate justice’, they have successfully mobilized communities to combat climate change and protect natural resources. By framing environmental protection as a moral and spiritual obligation, Greenfaith has inspired grassroots actions that contribute directly to SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 15 (Life on Land).

Conclusion

Considering the role of religion in achieving the SDGs opens new and potentially effective perspectives. Religious institutions, leaders, and grassroots movements have the capacity to move a large number of people (e.g. their followers), material resources, and spiritual resources (such as innovative ideas) in support of sustainable development. By integrating religious perspectives into the SDG framework and process, we can enhance the feasibility of these goals.

This approach is not only useful for policymakers and development practitioners but also for the religious communities themselves, who can find new ways to contribute to global development efforts while at the same time increasing their influence. As we continue to strive towards a more sustainable future, the insights offered by religion should not be overlooked or ignored but rather embraced as valuable input for achieving the SDGs.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the Author:

Kim Tung Dao

Kim Tung Dao is a recent PhD graduate of the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests include globalization, international trade, sustainable development, and the history of economic thought.

 

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Disaster Risk Reduction doesn’t (always) need to be expensive: introducing Frugal DRR

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Photo credit : Pixabay

In this blog, to mark global Disaster Risk Reduction Day, Tom Ansell (HSC Coordinator) considers whether disaster risk reduction activities can be made less-resource intensive through Frugal Innovation. Whilst Frugal DRR shouldn’t be considered a money-saving replacement for development and infrastructure work, it does provide an opportunity for communities to reduce their vulnerability and increase their capacity for dealing with the consequences of hazards that could include extreme weather, geological hazards, or other environmental hazards.

What is DRR? And what’s wrong with the term ‘natural disasters’?

Disaster Risk Reduction, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) is activities that are “aimed at preventing new and reducing existing disaster risk and managing residual risk, all of which contribute to strengthening resilience and therefore to the achievement of sustainable development.” So, in simple terms, activities that work to prevent and mitigate risks to reduce the effects of disasters. It’s important to note here that we use the term disaster in connection with hazards like earthquakes, floods and others while avoiding the ‘natural disaster’, as this ignores the social dimension of disasters.

People across the world live in places that have different levels of risk and have different vulnerabilities in the face of these risks. More than the hazard itself, a much larger defining factor for how much damage, social upheaval, and loss of life occurs is how vulnerable people are, and how prepared they are for when a potential hazard becomes a disaster. In other words, an earthquake of magnitude 8 will have significantly different effects in a wealthy country with a strong governance system, to a much poorer country with (for example) a fragmented government. In the words of Margaret Arnold at the World Bank, “the key lesson is that disasters are social constructs. People are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and natural hazards due not just to their geographical context, but their financial, their social status, their cultural status, their gender status, their access to services, their level of poverty, their access to decision making, and their access to justice.”

For example, Tokyo often suffers from extreme stormy weather: as many countries with a Pacific coast do. The city of Tokyo, however, also has one of the largest storm drains in the world to help divert water resulting from storms or extremely heavy rainfall. The project, completed in the 1990s and costing around 3 billion US Dollars, means that though the city is often affected by tropical cyclones and typhoons, there is typically much less loss of life in the Tokyo area than others affected by the same typhoon – especially as the city of Tokyo has well-developed evacuation routes, early warning and information systems, and more besides.

This example serves to demonstrate the purpose of DRR activities: to prevent risks and – where this is not possible – to minimize the overall damage caused by extreme weather. As the ‘no natural disasters’ movement emphasizes, reacting after the event is a less intelligent way to respond to disasters, compared to prevention, pre-preparation, and planning is a much more productive and intelligent way to ‘respond’ to disasters. Various frameworks for ‘good’ risk management activities have been devised, including the Hyogo Framework (2005-2015) and Sendai Framework (2015-2030).

Are DRR activities always expensive?

In the example above, of the city of Tokyo, a major contributing factor to mitigating climate risks for the city involved constructing a large piece of public infrastructure. Similar projects have taken place around the world, for example the Delta Works in the Netherlands , the Thames Barrier in the UK, or the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway West Closure Complex in New Orleans in the USA. These three examples are all related to storm surges, flooding, or other water-related hazards. But (expensive) risk-reducing infrastructure also exists to mitigate the effects of rockfall (for example in Interlaken in Switzerland), avalanches (for example the Gazex system), or to stabilize land vulnerable to landslides through enormous retaining walls (for example in West Bengal, India).

At this point, it might seem that all DRR activities are exceptionally expensive, very large public infrastructure that are only available to the very wealthiest regions in the world. But that would be a serious oversimplification of what smaller groups of citizens, with or without the support of institutions, can achieve to mitigate risk and so reduce their vulnerability. DRR activities also include mapping areas that will be most affected by an extreme event, creating evacuation routes, developing information systems and early-warning systems, training citizens on flood-proofing their homes, or even making informational videos on what to do should a disaster strike.

This is not to say that large infrastructure projects aren’t important: indeed they can be transformational. However, it is important to emphasize that DRR activities are not always expensive: even though an all-round DRR plan for a place will likely include both more expensive infrastructure, less economically-expensive activities can also make a difference.

Can ‘Frugal Innovation’ inspire low-cost but effective interventions?

In order to develop new ideas around lower-cost (frugal) risk reduction activities, it is useful to dive into the world of Frugal Innovation. The International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI), based at ISS and part of LDE, considers the practice and approach to be a potentially transformative way of finding new solutions to growing societal problems, in a non-excessive way. Andre Leliveld and Peter Knorringa, in an article from 2017 setting out the potential relationship between Frugal Innovation and development, note that the field sprouted from multiple sources but takes much inspiration from jugaad practices in South Asia. Jugaad is an excellent catch-all term (borrowed from Hindi, and with similar terms in Punjabi, Urdu, and various Dravidian languages including Telugu and Malyalam) for low-cost and often ingenious solutions to nagging problems; as well as the kind of mindset that allows the creative thinking around these solutions to occur. Whilst the term and thinking is often used in business (to create products for people with less purchasing power), it is very versatile.

Utilising some of the thinking inherent within Frugal Innovation in relation to DRR activities requires taking a solutions-oriented approach, and making use of existing resources, skills, or initiatives to reduce vulnerability by mitigating risk.

Painting and planning: Frugal Disaster Risk Reduction in action

How urban communities adapt to heatwaves across India is an interesting way to demonstrate how integrating Frugal Innovation techniques into Disaster Risk Reduction carries the potential for meaningful reduction in vulnerability.

Heatwaves have the potential to be very destructive, and one solution that is being rolled out across several areas that have a high number of informal dwellings in cities including Mumbai and Nagpur is the low-cost but high-yield technique of painting roofs white (to reflect the sun) and installing secondary ‘shade roofs’ on buildings. This can reduce inside temperatures by several degrees on the hottest of days. Similarly, a network of inexpensive recording devices has been installed to track ‘hotspots’ in the city, which can inform where communal ‘cooling zones’ need to be set up local city corporations or voluntary groups. And, in Ahmedabad in the north-west of India, a ‘Heat Action Plan’ was developed by the city corporation and scientific partners that is estimated to have prevented hundreds of fatalities.

Developing evacuation routes, making sure that citizens are prepared for what to do in a disaster, small and uncomplicated changes to people’s homes, or even utilising close-knit communities and communication networks as informal warning systems may not structurally reduce peoples’yet vulnerabilities yet can make a difference in preventing the worst of disaster impacts. And, whilst not as transformational as large public infrastructure projects, any gain in a communities’ resilience is an important step. Luckily ‘Frugal Innovation’ techniques show us that DRR doesn’t always need to be expensive.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Tom Ansell

Tom Ansell is the Coordinator of the Humanitarian Studies Centre and International Humanitarian Studies Association.

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UNFCCC Conference 2024 | How a feminist approach to climate change can help bring together animal welfare and gender equality agendas

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Source: AI Generated Photo
Source: AI Generated Photo

Attending the UNFCCC (SB60) Conference in Bonn in June this year as a representative of the World Federation for Animals (WFA) was a remarkable experience for ISS PhD researcher Irma Nugrahanti, most of all because it visibilized the striking parallels between climate change-related issues faced by women and animals and the crucial role of these two advocacy groups in fighting climate change. In this blog article, she reflects on different conversations that took place at the conference and how this reaffirmed the significance of a multifaceted approach to climate issues.

At the recent UNFCCC conference, observing dialogues on animal welfare, gender, and climate change enhanced my understanding of how these topics are interlinked and what this means for climate action. Each conversation opened my eyes to the rich tapestry of perspectives, revealing how interconnected and parallel these issues are, like chain links, impacting one another and forming an intricate and powerful network of interactions. Reflecting on the discussions at the UNFCCC conference and beyond, it is evident that embracing the intersectionality of feminism and animal welfare is essential for creating a just, sustainable, and resilient world for all living beings — and for tackling climate change.

Author at the UNFCC (SB60) Conference

A step in the right direction

While preparing for the UNFCCC side event focused on the crucial role of animals in climate change mitigation strategies, I reviewed the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of various countries. I observed the notable failure to acknowledge the contribution animals can make to climate resilience. However, from different discussions at the conference, I observed a positive shift towards recognizing the role of both human and non-human actors in environmental protection. For example, the crucial role of the social sciences in understanding indigenous communities and the human-nature relationship, particularly within the context of ocean-climate dynamics, was acknowledged.

Additionally, there was a strong emphasis on engaging local governments, advocating for locally-led solutions tailored to community needs, and advancing the implementation of global stocktake suggestions. These recommendations include incorporating animals into the Loss and Damage (L&D) matrix, allocating resources to scientific research and data collection, and ensuring that the contributions of animals are acknowledged in IPCC reports and NDCs. These discussions highlight the need to move beyond an anthropogenic view of humans as the central to climate solutions and to embrace a plurality of perspectives that value different types of knowledge and practices, the diversity of life, and its intrinsic values.

As these conversations advanced, it became evident that while progress was made in embracing different perspectives, the commonalities between the experiences of women and animals in relation to climate change have not been sufficiently acknowledged. And they should: women and animals, while vulnerable to the effects of climate change, both play a pivotal role in mitigation efforts. Thus, furthering the role of women in climate change action and strategies and protecting animals are intertwined objectives. This recognition is crucial because caring for animals transcends compassion; it is a profound expression of feminism.

Recognizing the shared challenges faced by both women and animals in the context of climate change could help broaden our understanding of vulnerability and resilience, so that we can transform existing policies that often overlook these marginalized groups. In doing so, we must also recognize and confront the existing power dynamics that influence climate policies. As many studies have shown (see here, here and here), in the climate change domain, men have a dominant presence, namely in research, policy, implementation, and activism.

What women and animals have in common

1. Both women and animals face substantial obstacles stemming from oppression, violence, and objectification.

The connection between patriarchal gender relations and the exploitation of animals reveal how sexism and speciesism come from the desire to dominate inferior groups; this mindset, rooted in patriarchal values, shapes people’s attitude toward women and animals, as Ashley Allcorn and Shirley M Ogletree have noted. Women in countries with a strong patriarchal culture experience multifaceted oppressions, which results in limited possibilities for accessing education and economic opportunities, as well as in exposure to growing harassment and violence. This systematic marginalization is embedded in legal frameworks that hinder gender equality. Likewise, animals endure exploitation and cruelty, being seen as simple commodities rather than sentient beings.

2. The economic value of animals and women in mitigating climate change is underrecognized.

Moreover, although women’s environmental care work plays a crucial role in climate change mitigation, economic assessments often overlook their value. Conventional economic indicators, including the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), fail to include the unpaid care work performed by women in the form of managing natural resources and supporting their communities. This omission underestimates their valuable efforts and maintains ongoing gender disparities. Likewise, the ecological benefits offered by animals, such as carbon sequestration and biodiversity preservation, are rarely accounted for in economic analyses. This omission results in the insufficient protection of animals and a lack of investment in animal welfare. Integrating economic analysis using a gender lens, such as gender-responsive climate budgeting, and the direct valuation of animal welfare in environmental economics may help to ensure adequate resources and appropriate valuation for both women and animals.

3. Both women and animals play a pivotal role in protecting the environment and combating climate change.

Women’s knowledge of sustainable agriculture, water management, and biodiversity conservation is invaluable. Thousands of women-led initiatives around the world serve as proof. For instance in Peru, the indigenous women-led initiative Asociación de Mujeres Waorani de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (AMWAE) is dedicated to preserving the Amazon rainforest. These women use indigenous knowledge to combat deforestation and advocate for sustainable land use, making a substantial contribution to carbon sequestration and the preservation of biodiversity. Similarly, women play a critical role in community-based conservation efforts. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement, founded by Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, has empowered women to plant trees, combat deforestation, and restore ecosystems. This initiative not only mitigates climate change but also improves local livelihoods and promotes gender equality.

In a similar vein, the preservation of an ecological balance and the promotion of biodiversity depend on the existence of healthy animal populations. For instance, African forest elephants make significant contributions to natural carbon capture. They reduce competition and facilitate the growth of larger trees that store more carbon by trampling young trees as they move through the rainforests. This would increase carbon capture equivalent to over 6,000 metric tons of CO2 per square kilometre if their population were to be restored to its previous level, which highlights their critical role in climate regulation.

Why an ecofeminism lens is useful

Ecofeminism, a branch of feminist theory, offers a critical analysis of the dominance of nature and animals imposed by patriarchal systems, drawing parallels with the oppression experienced by women and marginalized populations. Carol Adams and Lori Gruen in their 2022 book Ecofeminism: feminist interaction with other animals and the earth explain the notion of the “logic of domination”. This concept highlights the shared struggles women and animals experience: they are subjected to hierarchical dualisms that diminish their worth, objectify them, and dismiss their individuality and intrinsic value. On objectification, women are often valued according to their appearance or reproductive capabilities, while meats and dairy products have been deeply valued and integral to human diets in most cultures for thousands of years.

Another example of using a feminist lens is incorporating multi-species justice in climate change action. Multi-species justice theories advocate for the recognition of rights, welfare, and interconnectedness between human and non-human beings. It calls for rethinking justice systems for the impacts of human actions on non-human entities and the environment. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka in their book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights for example advocate for a political framework that recognizes animals as co-citizens and grants them rights and protections. This viewpoint challenges the traditional concept of justice by advocating for a political framework that acknowledges animals as co-citizens. Their ideas extend the concept of justice, commonly applied to humans and challenging the anthropocentric bias in political ideologies.

Lastly, the feminist and animal rights movements are both grounded on ethical issues. Lori Gruen emphasizes the objective that ethical veganism and feminism have in common, namely to put a stop to the exploitation of the powerless by those in positions of power. This ethical position challenges the prevailing systems of oppression and exploitation, promoting a society that is more compassionate and just.

Toward an ethics of care

Ecofeminism offers a framework for defining an ethics of care that transcends human interactions and includes every living being and the environment. It emphasizes care as an essential component of our interactions with others, both human and non-human. Its relational and caring approach not only criticizes current power structures but also suggests a paradigm shift toward inclusive and compassionate behaviours, especially those related to animal welfare. In her book In A Different Voice, Carol Gilligan critiques anthropocentric and patriarchal structures through her definition of ethic of care by promoting a caring and attentive connection with nature, akin to a mother’s care for her child. This entails actively listening to and caring for nature in a non-hierarchical manner, promoting a transition from unequal power dynamics to ecologically responsive relationships.

The ethics of care promotes a deep appreciation for natural environments, including animals, which contribute to the process of carbon sequestration and the conservation of biodiversity, which is essential for the ability of ecosystems to face the impacts of climate change. Therefore, in our ecological relationship, it is important to reflect on the way we are being, doing, and seeing to be more environmentally conscious and honour the interconnectedness of all living beings. I believe the common task for posthumanist feminist scholars and policymakers now is to translate this concept into policy and legal frameworks, a complicated but important mission to achieve.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author

Irma Nugrahanti

Irma Nugrahanti is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), focusing on the intersection of gender, climate change, and public finance management. Her research highlights the importance of integrating a gender lens into climate budgeting policies and practices, particularly at the national and regional levels of public expenditure management. With a background in the non-profit sector, Irma has extensive experience in finance, program management, and policy advocacy, striving to bridge the gap between research and practice to create inclusive and sustainable climate policies.

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How artisanal fishers across the world are trying to turn the tide by adapting to climate and anthropogenic change

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Artisanal fishers across the world are facing change from all sides. While these changes have been well documented, the intricacies of the adaptation strategies they are forced to assume remain underexplored. A group of researchers met at a workshop held at the ISS in December last year to discuss the challenges artisanal fishers face and what we can learn from their responses. In this blog article, Ilaha Abasli, Nina Swen, and Oane Visser highlight the key takeaways of the workshop, showing that while artisanal fishers are trying to turn the tide by adapting, the challenges they face at times may seem unsurmountable.

Artisanal fishing is a profession and livelihood profoundly impacted by climate and other anthropogenic changes (Mills, 2018; Ojea et al., 2020; Otero et al., 2022). Fishers across the globe are facing declining fish stocks, biodiversity loss, and shrinking spaces caused mainly by environmental pollution, changing sea temperatures, and fish migration, combined with increasingly restrictive ecological conservation policies. They are forced to adapt their practices, for example by changing how and where they fish.

The adaptation practices of artisanal fishers remain under-researched, however, which prompted a group of researchers at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) to organize a workshop in December last year titled ‘Artisanal fisheries, climate change and knowledge for adaptation’, which sought to bring together junior and senior researchers from the Netherlands and beyond who work on socio-ecological aspects of fisheries, climate change, and marine anthropologies.

We as workshop organizers focused on the following questions: How do fishers adapt to the changes they face? What role do collaboration and new technologies play? The first part of the workshop comprised a panel discussion among early-career researchers centred around artisanal fisheries, knowledge, and technology in the context of climate change adaptation. The second part of the workshop featured a plenary session where senior researchers discussed their research on artisanal fisheries. This was followed by a roundtable discussion with representatives from academia and beyond. This blog article shares the workshop’s key takeaways.

Is climate change the only cause of the challenges fishers face?

Artisanal fishers are among the first to notice climate and other anthropogenic changes, including fluctuations in sea levels and temperatures and changes in the quantity and quality of available fish, altered fish migration patterns, and the appearance or extinction of species.

Climate change and anthropogenic activities heavily impact artisanal fisheries. Ilaha Abasli, Nina Swen, and Oane Visser of the ISS showed that fisheries situated along the coast of the Caspian Sea for instance are threatened by oil and gas extraction that causes pollution, disrupts fish migration, and affects fish populations. Vitor Renck of Wageningen University & Research demonstrated that Brazilian artisanal fishers in Bahia face overfishing by larger vessels and inadequate regulation of fishing activities. And Yasmine Ahmed Hafez of SOAS University of London noted that at Lake Victoria, strict quota systems and environmental conservation measures exacerbate the negative impacts, limiting their access to certain areas and types of fish.

Climate and anthropogenic change is fundamentally changing how small-scale fisheries are operating.

 

The combination of climate and anthropogenic impacts on these water bodies lead to fundamental changes in the practices and livelihoods of small-scale fisheries. They are unable to maintain the same level of fishing in quantity and quality as they did previously and have to go further offshore in vessels that are ill suited to withstanding harsher conditions, risking their lives. These changes often affect their practices, income, and food sovereignty.

For instance, fishing communities must adapt to unfamiliar species, such as the invasive round goby in the Eastern Baltic Sea. Guntra Aistara of the Central European University talked about how such invasive species transition from being perceived as threats to becoming a valuable food source. It exemplifies how communities rapidly recognize their nutritional and social significance.

By sharing their skills, knowledge, and technology with each other, fishers are learning more about adapting.

Many of the case studies discussed during the workshop highlighted the exchange of knowledge and technology as a key adaptation strategy. Workshop participants drew on their research to discuss its definition and the ways in which it manifests. Artisanal fisheries in the Caspian Sea for example adapted to change through collective initiatives; these include pooling resources to acquire affordable technologies like GPS trackers and life vests, which facilitates navigation in deeper waters, and sharing skills, for example teaching others how to swim and how to repair and refurbish old technology and boats.

Along the Caspian coast, communication platforms and tools such as WhatsApp groups and gatherings at tea houses (cayxanas) served as a way of sharing information on weather events, fish migration patterns, and recipes for preparing fish previously considered “poor man’s food”. Aistara noted that fishers from the Eastern Baltic and Caspian Seas share a Soviet history that enable them to compare adaptation strategies. Both groups have adapted to the new conditions of the seas by becoming skilled in repairing, constructing, and repurposing materials and other existing technologies.

Knowledge- and technology-sharing practices are influenced by social norms and values.

Such cases reveal that while knowledge and technology sharing are widespread, these practices are influenced by community social norms and values. In specific communities, people for example uphold and respect territorial boundaries agreed upon by fishers and refrain from crossing into each other’s parts of the sea, even if it means catching fewer fish.

Ahmed Hafez highlighted the bottom-up adaptation process taking place at Lake Victoria and Egypt’s Nile Delta by reflecting on internal dynamics that (re)shape social norms and values such as race, migration, and gender. She explicitly focused on patriarchal norms, as men in the communities mostly dominate fisheries. Iddrisu Amadu and Ingrid Boas of Wageningen University & Research talked about how nomadic Fante fishing communities in Senegal and Gambia are adapting, focusing on the entanglements between social and material elements across land-sea spaces (1). They also stressed that mobilities and their challenging encounters within fisheries during adaptation transcend fixed land-sea boundaries.

Traditional knowledge driving local adaptation needs to be incorporated into official adaptation strategies.

Artisanal fishers in Bahia have successfully adapted technologies, actively using advanced GPS technology and various nets combined with traditional knowledge to navigate changing waters. Renck observed that the significance of adaptation to fishing communities (in Siribinha and Poças) extends beyond preserving fisheries; they are also actively involved in mangrove preservation initiatives in Brazil. Workshop participants agreed that documenting and incorporating the traditional knowledge of local fishers into adaptation strategies is of critical importance for fostering a dialogue between scientific and indigenous and local knowledge systems amidst environmental and anthropogenic changes.

Contextual factors have a bearing on collaboration but does not prevent it.

In several fishing communities, collaboration among fishers is facilitated or constrained by the geographical, political, legal, technological, cultural, and social context they live in.  Cornelie Quist of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) for example shared that despite their diversity, artisanal fishing communities have mobilised nationally and globally in manifold ways to push for recognition and prompt political change through policies and treaties. The most significant achievement in this respect is the endorsement in 2014 of the International Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Alleviation following their lobbying efforts. Quist noted that these guidelines are important for promoting a human rights approach in fisheries policies.

Fishers are adapting, but what does the future hold?

A critical reflection followed on the limitations of adaptation to climate change. Participants highlighted unease among fishers in the adaptation process, particularly because of its high costs for artisanal fisheries already unacknowledged by governance regimes and crowded out by industrial aqua fisheries. And despite pooling resources, adaptation through technology and collective action is only sometimes feasible due to ecological and governance limitations.

For instance, at Lake Victoria and in the Nile Delta, artisanal fishers are forced to abandon their fishing grounds due to resource depletion and relocate further along the river. Similarly, in the case of the Caspian Sea, some artisanal fishers have abandoned their vessels and have become taxi drivers to provide for their families. Joeri Scholtens of the University of Amsterdam commented that fishers working in the Indian Ocean are subjected to a shrinking space for adaptation, with smaller fisheries being outcompeted by bigger industrial vessels.

Additionally, adaptation practices are influenced and disrupted by evolving border regulations and stricter governmental policies prioritising environmental preservation or industrial activities, such as imposing quotas, fines, and territorial markings. Scholtens demonstrated how the Indian government’s Blue Revolution and Blue Economy policies from 1960 to 2020 squeezed out many of the small fisheries and reinforced the pre-existing vulnerabilities of these groups.

We need to work towards preserving traditional knowledge systems and better understanding and recognising their role in modern adaptation strategies.

All in all, the workshop sparked extensive discussions and highlighted the cultural, economic, and social importance of artisanal fishing. Moreover, it highlighted the significance of fishers’ knowledge in addressing the challenges posed by climate and anthropogenic change. The conversation also discussed the interplay between moral and legal boundaries and associated imaginaries. As Aistara aptly summarised, the future holds manifold uncertainties for artisanal fishing, influenced by climate and economic changes and conditioned by political regimes and internal dynamics.

(1) This case explored the intricate ways that fluid relations binding mobile fishery practices (including women involved in market and land practices) of the Fante on land and sea in a transnational context enable adaptive strategies, challenging conventional understandings of cross-border land and sea-based fishery mobilities.

 

We would like to thank all participants for their thoughtful and engaging contributions:

  • Callie Berman (PhDResearcher, Cambridge University);
  • Cornelie Quist (Sociologist; Member of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers);
  • Guntra Aistara (Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University);
  • Ilaha Abasli and Nina Swen (PhD researchers, International Institute of Social Studies);
  • Joeri Scholtens (Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam);
  • Ingrid Boas and Iddrisu Amadu (respectively Associate Professor and PhD researcher, Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University);
  • Matteo Lattuada (Post-Doctoral researcher, Technische Universität Braunschweig);
  • Oane Visser (Associate Professor, International Institute of Social Studies);
  • Per Knutsson (Senior Lecturer, Director of Center for Sea and Society, University of Gothenburg).
  • Vitor Renck ( Post-Doctoral researcher, Federal University of São Paulo and Wageningen University); and
  • Yasmine Ahmed Hafez (PhD researcher, SOAS University of London).

List of presentations:

Abasli, I., N. Swen, N & O. Visser (2023) ‘Climate change in  Caspian Sea, small-fisheries and climate adaptation’. Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Ahmed Hafez, Y. (2023) ‘A lakeview on Nile politics: A socio-environmental analysis of fishing in Lake Victoria and the Egyptian Delta lakes’. Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Aistara, G. (2023) ‘ “The ugly guest who’s come to stay”. Round Goby from foe to food on the Eastern Baltic Coast’. Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Amadu, I. and I. Boas ( 2023) ‘Fisherfolk navigating west African borderland in the context of changing environments’. Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Quist, C. (2023). Roundtable Discussion, ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Renck, V. (2023) ‘Varieties of expertise in local communities. Insights from artisanal fishing villages in Brazil’. Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Scholtens, J. (2023) ‘Blue revolutions, shrinking spaces and adaptation of small- scale fishers in the Indian Ocean Region.’ Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

                                                                          

Oane Visser is an associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) studies the role of technology in agrifood and the environment, for instance in precision agriculture, greenhouses  and urban agriculture.

Ilaha Abasli is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Her research interests include the circular economy in the Global South, especially its social dimension, and fostering sustainability through science-driven and participatory policies.

Nina Swen is a Ph.D. researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Nina’s research focuses on knowledge, technologies, and human-environmental relations in contexts of pollution and extractivism, with a regional focus on the Amazon.

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“Who cares about social reproduction in a time of climate crisis?” Reflections from environmental justice scholar Giovanna Di Chiro

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[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The enduring efforts by marginalized women across the world are sustaining community well-being in the face of the climate crisis, which is why their work of social reproduction is needed now more than ever. Professor of Environmental Studies Giovanna Di Chiro in her recent visit to the ISS spoke about the power of stories to turn our attention to the importance of social reproduction or life-making as part of “living environmentalism”. In this blog article, ISS Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development Wendy Harcourt shares some of Di Chiro’s reflections.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”28868″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

Renowned scholar of environmental justice at Swarthmore College in the United States Giovanna Di Chiro visited the ISS on 12 June this year, where she presented a seminar titled “Social Reproduction in the Age of Climate Crisis”. In the seminar organized by the ISS Political Ecology research group, Di Chiro pondered the following important question: What would a just approach to ‘sustainability’ look like that supports ‘life-making’ in all its forms, even — or especially — in the wake of the ruins of capitalism?

Using a critical ecofeminist lens[1], she examined how neoliberal ‘green’ solutions[2] to the climate crisis have not taken seriously the material effects of embodiment and the capacity for communities (human and non-human) to accomplish social reproduction — that is, the capacity to sustain everyday life and to thrive into the future. I invited her to talk about this at the ISS, as her research insights are crucial for our ongoing collective efforts to address multiple, intersecting challenges and crises. In this blog article, I share some of her reflections.

The convergence of crises — and the convergence of struggles

Social reproduction risks are now intersecting with environmental crises, leading to the convergence of struggles for social reproduction and environmental justice. Giovanna Di Chiro’s work is inspired by women grassroots activists in the environmental justice movement in the United States who have been fighting for their survival and the survival of their children and families. These women activists have been seeking to stop the onslaught of toxic pollution from chemical factories, waste incinerators, and many other toxic assaults on their lives. In her research, Di Chiro has documented[3] how grassroots women leaders — who are largely poor and low-income Black, Brown, and Indigenous women — organize to build connections between environmental movements and women’s movements. These activists expose how the intersecting systems of hetero-patriarchy and racial capitalism have resulted in the poisoning of their air, water, and lands, and show how these have harmed their own reproductive health and the well-being of their communities.

Yet, despite decades of women’s environmental justice activism, the chances for everyday survival and possible futures for millions of people, and for billions of other species on the Earth, have gotten worse; we are all familiar with the horrible statistics of worsening climate disasters, the mass extinctions of plants and animals, and widespread violence and war. Adding to this the attack on reproductive rights in the US by the Republican right wing and the rise of neofascism worldwide, we see even more threats to social reproduction and survival into the future as it relates to environmental justice. Everyday survival is still a problem for many low-income Black and Brown communities in the US, and survival remains the first priority.

One example of the connection between social reproduction and environmental injustice is the recent decision by the Republican Governor of Louisiana to withhold millions in federal monies to repair the city of New Orleans’ decaying water treatment infrastructure (which is needed to prevent flooding, toxic lead leaching, and saltwater infiltration in the city’s drinking water due to rising sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico). He withheld this funding because New Orleans’s Democrat-controlled city government had refused to comply with the state of Louisiana’s total ban on abortion, which would require the city to arrest and prosecute low-income and poor women who seek abortions in the state.

Another example of the increased threat to social reproduction and its connection to environmentalism involves rising incidences of eco-fascist rhetoric that blames the “over-population” of immigrant bodies for jeopardizing the sustainability of our environment. In 2019, two years after Trump came into office and authorized anti-immigrant violence across the US, a 21-year-old white man opened fire at a busy Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, targeting the predominantly Latino and Mexican shoppers. He killed 23 people and wounded another 26. The shooter had earlier published a lengthy, online manifesto expressing his white supremacist, ‘eco-fascist’ beliefs, stating, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion of Hispanics.” He blamed Latinos for overpopulating the country and taking away real Americans’ jobs and destroying the environment. This is a revival of an extremist environmentalist politics blaming the invasion and over-breeding of racialized bodies for the country’s downfall.

‘Living worlds’ to counter global injustices

Many of today’s intersectional movements engage in creating new stories about building what feminist political ecologist Diana Ojeda[4] calls ‘Living Worlds’: stories about how we must live and especially about how we must thrive in these precarious times. Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer[5] urges us to work to change the world by prioritizing what she argued are the core features of building anti-colonial Living Worlds: raising good children, raising a garden, and raising a ruckus. They are ‘living environmentalisms’ of marginalized communities’ struggles for everyday life.

Di Chiro’s talk showed how social reproduction is at the heart of the environmental justice (EJ) movement. Social reproduction means not only care for children, families, and communities; it also means ensuring that you can breathe healthy air and drink clean water and that the places where you live, work, and go to school are free from toxic contamination. We learnt from her talk how sustaining everyday life should be at the heart of environmentalism and at the core of definitions of “sustainability.” In times of climate crisis and climate anxiety, it is important to understand how citizens can act and continue to resist, as well as flourish, in communities of care. Di Chiro’s pedagogical approach is, in itself, part of living environmentalism. She is among those environmental activists, scientists, and artists who write about what motivates them to act on social and environmental injustices, connecting their own personal stories to larger historical narratives and broader social and environmental issues.

References

[1] Di Chiro, G. 2017. ‘Welcome to the White (M)Anthropocene? A feminist-environmentalist critique,’ in S. Macgregor (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. London: Routledge.

[2] Wichterich, C.  2015. ‘Contesting green growth, connecting care, commons and enough,’ in Harcourt, W. and I. R. Nelson (eds), Practicing Feminist Political Ecologies. London: Zed Books.

[3] See for example Di Chiro, G. 2015 ‘A new spelling of sustainability: engaging feminist-environmental justice theory and practice,’ in Harcourt, W. and I. R. Nelson (eds), Practicing Feminist Political Ecologies. London: Zed Books.

[4] Ojeda, D. et al. 2022. ‘Feminist Ecologies,’ Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Vol. 47, pp. 149–171.

[5] Wall-Kimmerer, R. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1719410637773{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]

About the author:

 

Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University in The Hague.

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Pandemics such as Avian Influenza and COVID-19 show that we need to overcome human exceptionalism to prevent another ‘catastrophic moral failure’ by Dorien Braam

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[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]After the COVID-19 pandemic, governing bodies, research institutes, and health organizations around the world reflected extensively on our (failed) responses to the pandemic, hoping to identify lessons that can be applied to the governance of future pandemics. As various bird flu strains are spreading across the world, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Dorien Braam reflects on gaps in the COVID-19 response and the need for a different approach to prevent mistakes from being repeated. Without understanding people’s behaviour and decision-making processes related to animals, it will be impossible to respond appropriately to the next pandemic, she writes.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”28825″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Only four years ago, much of the world came out of its first lockdown after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe. People hastily stocked up on essentials, found coping mechanisms to deal with isolation, and showed their appreciation for healthcare providers working on the frontline. Many people died; many more fell ill. At the time, the pandemic had a profound impact on us, changing our behaviour and views of the present, past, and future.

There has been much high–level reflection on the pandemic since then, for example about how we can prevent ourselves from making the same series of mistakes that led to the devastating pandemic and the significant loss of life, especially among marginalized populations lacking access to healthcare (something we wrote about in the Conversation in May 2020). The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2021 similarly remarked how our way of handling the pandemic as a collective can be seen as a ‘catastrophic moral failure’ with a profound impact on the world’s poor. In making this claim, he highlighted the impact of unequal access to healthcare, vaccines, and livelihood support. And now, our collective response to the current avian influenza (‘bird flu’) pandemic shows that we risk making the same mistakes we did then.

Novel, much more deadly pandemics

While some lessons may have been learned, there is increasing disquiet among professionals that the world has not learned enough, in the best case scenario, or, in the worst case, has blatantly ignored warning signs of novel pandemic threats, of which Avian Influenza (the H5N1 virus or ‘bird flu’) is currently the most likely candidate.

There is good reason to take this virus seriously. Outbreaks have occurred sporadically throughout the past century; however, the current pandemic has arguably been ongoing since 1995, when it was recognized that the ‘epizootic’, or outbreak of animal disease, dwarfed the bird flu outbreaks until then. In the past months devastating images from Antarctica have shown that the disease has now affected virtually every ecosystem in the world. Besides the risk to humans, bird and other animal populations have been devastatingly affected by the disease, including some species which are already struggling for their existence.

At the end of April 2024, an article in the Washington Post sounded the alarm: after two human casualties in the United States, the risk of a new, much more deadly pandemic seems to be edging ever closer. The writers mention the frustration among officials and experts that not more is done in terms of testing and data sharing, drawing parallels with some of the failures that occurred at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These conclusions dangerously ignore the fact that the disease has already caused the death of millions of non-human animals, in addition to 463 human deaths out of 889 human cases across 23 countries. Besides highlighting the geographic health inequalities through expressing only concern for human health in the Global North, they also ignore the realities of the biological interconnectedness of animals and humans whereby the majority of emerging infectious diseases are transmissible between animal and human populations. The result of this messaging is that animals are routinely blamed for disease outbreaks and are considered a disease ‘risk’, which ignores the fact that zoonoses spread largely as a result of human behaviour, such as through industrial intensive farming systems and deforestation.

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated the global revisiting of existing approaches to the interlinkages of animal and human health, strengthening systems approaches such as Ecohealth, Planetary Health and One Health, the latter of which earned its very own high–level panel consisting of animal, human, and ecosystem health experts. The panel includes social scientists as well, as the importance of including social science to outbreak responses is increasingly acknowledged; now this needs to become more pronounced within One Health approaches.

Towards a more inclusive approach

What we can learn from reflections about the COVID-19 pandemic — a conclusion that should be guiding our response to Avian Influenza — is that no-one is safe until everyone is safe, including marginalized populations such as animals; understanding our relationship with the animal world is key to responding effectively, as well as to developing intersectoral and transdisciplinary responses.

The negative impacts of animal and human disease are greatest in poor populations depending on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood; therefore, poverty reduction needs to be part of disease prevention activities. Facilitating testing for animal disease requires providing insurance and compensation to animal owners, who otherwise may lose essential livelihoods through diseased livestock. Most importantly however, industrial farming needs to be rapidly scaled down, which requires large-scale, and potentially costly, sustainable solutions for farmers. This will simultaneously address a range of increasing health challenges beyond the risk of pandemics, including the existential risks of anti-microbial resistance, pollution, and biodiversity loss.

Without understanding people’s behaviour and decision-making processes related to animals, it will be impossible to respond appropriately to the next pandemic. And without more drastic measures to increase interspecies health equality, it is unlikely that we can prevent or respond effectively.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1719387091156{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]

About the authors:

Dorien Braam, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Social Science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and member of the UK Health Security Agency Rapid Support Team, as well as Director of Praxis Labs, a global research collective. Her research focuses on interspecies inequalities in complex emergencies, and she has conducted fieldwork with communities in Jordan and Pakistan. Previously, she worked with the United Nations, Netherlands Government, IFRC and NGOs across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

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Fueling the fire or preventing it? How fire ontologies shape (fire) disaster governance in Kenya’s ghettos

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You might gaze at this image and think, “If only the photographer had been a little more creative and had reached beyond the mesh, we would have gotten a clearer view of the fire.” Yet we, as the authors of this article, cannot help but appreciate how beautifully it portrays the complex essence of fire disasters, perceptible only when one looks ‘beneath the surface’. In contested spaces like ghettos, a fire disaster is not just a physical occurrence; it is a socio-politically intertwined phenomenon laden with dynamic micropatterns that shape the interpretations and subsequent responses to such disasters. In this article, Beatrice Gitundu and Future (Francis Mukiri) discuss how fire disasters in Nairobi’s ghettos are navigated, hoping to provoke a deeper comprehension of the multiple ontologies of fire disasters and how these can inform disaster risk governance in ghettos.

Picture by the GRO6 Fire Network

As you read this article, you’ve likely encountered a fire today, whether in preparing a warm meal, savouring a barbecue, or simply lighting a candle or a cigarette. For many, fire is an intuitive part of human life — a simple flick of a match or the flip of a switch to give us a flame for our daily use.

However, for the over one billion people living in ghettos (1) worldwide, a fire transcends these simple, intuitive meanings. Here, fires pose an everyday threat, often intersecting with multiple vulnerabilities to cause devastating fire disasters. Fire disasters in turn can lead to severe injury, deep psychological trauma, extensive property damage, the loss of lives, degraded ecological health, and enduring impacts on lives and livelihoods. Given their ubiquity, pervasiveness, and intricate interaction with city and community systems, there is more to a fire disaster than meets the eye.

In this article, we use an illustrative example of Nairobi’s 2011 pipeline fire to discuss multiple ontologies inherent in a (fire) disaster and the implications for disaster governance in ghettos. So, pull up a chair and kahawa as this blog takes you on a journey through the deeply ingrained layers of fire disasters, exploring what such layering can tell us about interpretation and governance of (fire) disasters. While our insights draw from immersive engagements with a network of community firefighters in Nairobi’s ghettos called the GRO6, the challenges to understanding and adequately managing (fire) disasters transcends regional borders.

Reconstructing and recounting the events

The observations here are based on two mobile theatre sessions co-organized with GRO6 on 8 and 9 November last year. These sessions form part of a broader series of methods used by Beatrice for conducting her PhD research, which examines multi-level disaster governance arrangements at the grassroots level through a case study of fire disaster management in the ghettos. During these sessions, members of grassroots organizations from Mukuru (including victims and emergency responders like co-author Future) recounted their real-life experiences of the disaster in Sinai. The narratives were enriched by participatory actor mapping and an on-site fire demo, where GRO6 and residents in the now-rebuilt area of Sinai not only recounted the events of the day but also showcased localized fire safety strategies that emerged afterwards. The observations from the mobile theatres are enhanced by expert narratives compiled from Beatrice’s interviews with fire administrators between January and March 2024, as well as from pre-existing interviews from secondary data sources.

The disaster: from “foretold hellfire to” “industrial accident”

On the rainy morning of 12 September 2011, what was to be a typical Monday for the residents of the Nairobi ghetto Mukuru Sinai turned tragic. A deafening explosion was heard, followed by a raging fire that razed through the ghetto, reducing over 400 homes to ashes and claiming more than 120 lives. An oil pipeline carrying lethal super petrol from a nearby oil depot had spilled large amounts of petrol into the storm water drainage system and the river flowing through Mukuru, which was ignited, causing an explosion.

Map showing the oil pipeline (in orange) and the site of the explosion. Created by the authors.

This fire disaster was seen through various lenses. Sinai residents described the fire vividly as a “rolling fireball”, a “burning river of death”, “the foretold hellfire”, “Black November” (an oil exploitation movie), “the walking dead”, and in other ways. Future, one of this article’s authors, describes the aftermath as “[…] a harrowing experience that transformed the beautiful Sinai into a field punctuated by death cries and drenched in blood, leaving lasting physical, mental, emotional, and financial scars that continue to undermine the residents’ resilience.”

For the privileged elite, on the other hand, the disaster was merely an accidental oil spillage. In its press release (Annex IV), the oil company attributed the fire disaster to a technical fault and denied any responsibility for the ‘accident’ caused by the spillage. Civil society actors on the other hand saw it as a crisis of enforcement, as a penalty paid by the impoverished for living there illegally, or as the deprioritization of ghettos by state agencies and the private sector as a result of corruption.

Civil society actors were actively responsive, with agencies like the Kenya Red Cross engaging in complementary search and rescue/recovery operations and emergency relief distribution. Others formed coalitions and engaged in legal contestation and collective advocacy through CSO statements aimed at holding the government and the pipeline company accountable. Additionally, UNEP and UN-OCHA conducted emergency environmental assessments to determine the ‘actual’ cause of the fire and inform policy decisions. They deemed the disaster an “industrial accident”. Post-disaster psychological first aid (PFA) was offered, albeit temporarily, which grassroots organizations criticized as a ‘hit-and-run’ response.

Politicians framed it in different ways, for example as the harsh cost of the pervasive encroachment on riparian reserves by illegal squatters or as a tragedy caused by systemic failures which were confronted politically and legally by the area’s Member of Parliament. Meanwhile, the media portrayed the disaster as a recurring ‘lesson never learnt’. This observation is especially poignant following the Embakasi fire tragedy in February this year — nearly 13 years later — that, like the Sinai pipeline fire, led to the loss of homes, lives, and dignity.

What lies beneath the flames?

These interpretations reveal the complexity of fire disasters, illustrating the interconnectedness of (such) disasters with place-based socio-cultural, political, religious, and economic systems. The Sinai disaster embodied multiple fire ontologies (2) that impacted how the disaster was governed and understood during and after it happened. The engagements during the mobile theatres and a critical analysis of supplementary data point to three fire ontologies with different undertones:

  1. Reinforced exploitation

Two significant trends set the stage for this ontology. The first was the recurring incidence of oil spills in the Mtongwe River (Ngong River). Every now and then, oil products would find their way into the river due to leaks or the vandalism of pipelines to access the precious commodity. Residents would scavenge for leaked oil. The second was the rampant practice of illegal oil siphoning — a lucrative business linked to business and political elites. The grassroots organizations revealed how this illegal business was camouflaged using exhauster trucks to transport siphoned oil. Youth got involved for profit, interpreting it as a “once-in-a-lifetime, God-given opportunity.”

This illustrates how oil siphoning has been socialized as a means of survival, how poverty drives the urban poor into perilous ventures, how the oil black market becomes politicized, and how capitalism perpetuates risk. The absence of alternative livelihood opportunities coupled with what Aiyabei et al. describe as the failure of enforcement created a fertile ground for continued exploitation of desperate residents. Ghetto residents considered taking the risk as better than unemployment, while the affluent in the oil market ‘industry’ exploited cheap labour whilst remaining hidden.

  1. Systemic failure

Multiple systemic failures were seen as gradually having reproduced the disaster. From absence of proper environmental and social impact assessments to a lack of planning, a lack of decent livelihood opportunities, the political facilitation of illegal siphoning, and weakened community vigilance, we see multiple factors converging over time to facilitate the tragedy. Narratives of illegality of the Sinai neighbourhood deflected attention from these contributing factors. “In the first place, it was even illegal to put up houses there. Where were we? We should have enforced the law,” remarked one civil society actor in a documentary (21:32). The ontology of ‘fires as a failure of systems’ hereby discounts the direct association of disaster risk solely with the illegality and unplanned nature of ghettos, emphasizing instead the need to look beneath the surface at the other underlying factors that mediate the occurrence and severity of a disaster.

3. Disaster bias

When a fire, especially a ghetto fire, is pitted against the myriad competing needs in cities, it never seems to make the cut. In Sinai, promised compensation and recovery investments were not fulfilled. In contrast, fires affecting the upper echelons of society, such as those at the city’s mall and airport, garnered immediate and substantial political attention, leading to generous resource allocation and the epoch-marking establishment of a national unit mandated to coordinate disaster management efforts. As one expert mentioned, “[…] two events that happened in Kenya during that year [2013] informed the decision by the then president to direct the establishment of a unit, and with a mandate and functions and vision, mission, and all that.”

These patterns underscore how economic and political influence shape the hierarchy of disasters, with some being perceived as more serious and others trivial. This (de)prioritization of disasters attracts varying levels of attention, responses, and resource allocation. It also raises the question: Why isn’t fire considered a good-enough disaster? While some speculate that fires generally rank lower on the disaster hierarchy, the reality reveals an interplay of power and politics that perpetuates disaster risk.

Oversimplified understandings yield oversimplified responses  

Probing the underlying contingencies that give a disaster its ontology is essential for understanding how the disaster is interpreted and consequently addressed. Despite the Sinai fire tragedy having been formally categorized as an industrial accident, the narratives analyzed here indicate complexities that go beyond the assumed spatial, temporal, and stakeholder boundaries of the disaster. The limited attention to exploitative patterns, systemic failures, and disaster biases constrained the development and implementation of comprehensive fire disaster management strategies before, during, and after the fire disaster. Oversimplifying disasters as single, isolated physical incidents overlooks their intricate interconnectedness with society, politics, economics, culture, beliefs, religions, and other factors. This ontological analysis lays emphasis on understanding the disaster in its multiple realities, boundaries, and interactions as an important foundation for effective disaster governance.

There is therefore an urgent need for Nairobi County’s disaster risk reduction department (DRR), the Kenya Red Cross Society, and other pertinent agencies to revisit the Sinai Tragedy. This entails not only fostering meaningful fire disaster resilience in Mukuru Sinai but also rethinking and collaboratively designing an approach to incorporate fire ontologies into fire disaster management practices. Enhanced an understanding of the multiple ontologies of fires can further bolster the efforts of frontline fire responders such as the Nairobi Fire Rescue Services (FRS) and community firefighters, including those in GRO6 and the Africa Fire Mission.

We continue engaging with GRO6, a grassroots network of community firefighters in the Mathare, Mukuru and Kibera Ghettos.

Endnotes:

(1)The term “ghetto” is used by communities is the so-called ‘informal settlements’ of Nairobi to refer to their homes. Therefore, this lexicon is adopted here to the extent necessary to uphold the indigenous nomenclature.

(2) Goodall et al. broadly describe ontologies in disaster sciences as the “philosophy of reality”, simplified as exploring the existence of a phenomenon (such as a fire) through the realms of underlying meanings, beliefs, and values that may be intuitive, assumed, and/or debated.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Beatrice Hati is a pracademic specializing in people-centered urbanism and resilience. She currently pursues a doctoral degree in multilevel disaster governance at the ISS while simultaneously serving as an urban development and research associate at the International Centre for Frugal Innovation (Kenya Hub).

Future (Francis Mukiri)is a community resilience advocate, a community firefighter, and leader of a grassroots organization in the Mukuru Ghettos.

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What can the frugal innovation debate learn from the Norm Life Cycle debate?

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There is a strong case for making innovations more frugal. The world needs innovations which are sparing in the use of resources and affordable by poor people. They matter especially in poor countries but also for people in rich countries, as frugal innovations can help us to push towards a more sustainable future. Frugal innovations are therefore relevant for most of the world’s population. The problem is that frugal innovation so far remains a fringe phenomenon.  The question addressed in this blog is how frugal innovation can become the norm rather than remain the exception.

Norm Life Cycle Illustration

To address this question, we draw on the Norm Life Cycle framework because it helps us to unpack the time dimension. It creates the mental space for detecting insights into process and sequence. This blog shows how the Norm Life Cycle framework helps to understand how idealistic and committed actors – going against the tide – can bring a new norm towards a tipping point. Once it reaches this tipping point, it starts to become the new normal. Then also those who earlier dismissed this new norm will start to adhere to the new norm, even if with fits and starts. A final stage is when such a new norm becomes internalised in a society through policy and law making.

Norm life cycle based on Illustration in Savarimuthu and Cranefield(2019)

In what follows we present the Norm Life Cycle framework in more detail and then indicate how it can move us forward.

Three stages 

The framework was developed by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink in their article International norm dynamics and political change. It investigates how the norms for what is acceptable behaviour in a society change over time. Its key propositions are as follows. In the first stage of norm emergence, altruism, empathy, idealism and commitment are seen as the main motives for so called ‘norm entrepreneurs’ to push for a new norm. This new norm goes against the tide of ‘how things have always been done’ and is initially dismissed by mainstream stakeholders as going against common sense and the interests of the elites, being impractical, going to drive up costs, etc. An often-used example is the abolition of child labour. While child labour was once considered a normal and convenient practice in many societies in earlier centuries, at some point ‘enlightened’ activists began to rally against child labour. In the early stages these activists fought an uphill battle, and it took them lots of effort and perseverance to get the upper hand and reach what in the Norm Life Cycle framework is called the tipping point when such a new norm becomes mainstreamed.

This is called the second stage of norm cascading where it becomes ‘the right thing to do’ for more mainstream stakeholders beyond the idealistic norm entrepreneurs. Even less convinced stakeholders may start claiming they adopt the new norm in order to minimize the risk of being considered a laggard or ‘out of touch with the new reality’. Effectively, the societal license to operate has tipped and a new norm has become established. Another typical dimension of an established new norm is that it becomes difficult to imagine that such a norm did not exist before, like in the case of the broad conviction that child labour should never have been allowed.

The third and final stage is norm internalization. This is when the new norm becomes consolidated in policy and law making as it is considered to represent a generally accepted minimal level of legitimate behaviour. Here it is important to note that this implies that policy and law makers tend to follow norm setting in society instead of spearheading the establishment of new norms.

The key actors 

What does this imply for the frugal innovation debate? In order to show how this framework helps us with mainstreaming frugal innovation thinking, we need to populate these stages with actors. We distinguish between two types of actors. Those who develop frugal innovations and those who facilitate the process.

Amongst those who actually develop frugal innovations, we can identify three types of norm entrepreneurs. The first group consists of people trying to creatively solve a bottleneck in their own community. They are not primarily motivated by the prospects of subsequently making a business based on their innovation. They recognise a problem and see a technical or organizational solution, which is affordable and saves energy or other resources. The second category are social entrepreneurs and NGOs who develop frugal innovations – sometimes with local stakeholders – to help address a Sustainable Development Goal, like access to electricity through a solar-panel driven local mini-grid. These two types of norm entrepreneurs embrace frugal innovation thinking as a way to tackle developmental challenges. The third type of entrepreneurs develop frugal innovations to enhance their competitiveness and profits. They may do this through, for example, simplifying and stripping products, services and systems from superfluous frills, using fewer and possibly more renewable resources.

Next to those actors who actually develop frugal innovations, we identify four types of facilitators. These are researchers, educators, early adopters and policy makers.  Let us start with the researchers. An increasingly multi-disciplinary academic debate is emerging among researchers about the importance and relevance of frugal innovation. A recent example is a multi-disciplinary Handbook on Frugal Innovation, published by Edward Elgar. Educators further spread the message further, for instance business schools which offer case studies of frugal innovation in their courses for future executives. Another example is the popular module on Frugal Innovation for Sustainable Global Development offered to bachelor students from Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities in the Netherlands. This module presents frugal innovation as a crucial component in broader sustainability thinking for the next generation.

The third category of facilitators are so-called early adopters, a term that comes from marketing science. They make frugal innovations fashionable, demonstrating a lifestyle that others can then aspire to. Typically, they are younger people with high levels of income and education, for whom greener and more frugal consumption patterns are already a more established norm. A final facilitating actor are law and policy makers. In the basic Norm Life Cycle framework, they come to prominence only in the final stage of internalisation, where they further consolidate a new norm in the law and in policies. In principle, however, they can also play a role earlier in the process, as discussed in the next section.

Moving forward 

What stage are we currently in? De facto we are in the norm emergence stage. However, advertising creates the illusion that we are already in the norm cascading stage. ‘Responsible resource use’ may be ubiquitous in advertising but not yet in reality. In this concluding section we indicate how the various actors can help the progression from norm emergence to norm cascading.

In the present norm emergence stage, norm entrepreneurs that actually develop and implement frugal innovations are crucial to show how such innovations benefit poorer people while being sparing in the use of resources. The facilitating actors are also crucial as their role is to showcase these examples and create the conditions for the broader public and policy makers to grasp the importance of frugal innovations. The research community, one of the facilitating actors, showed recently an encouraging sign of getting closer to the tipping point towards norm cascading. In its December 2023 editorial, the journal Nature apologizes for neglecting frugal innovation research and encourages policy makers, scientists and journal editors to ‘not just to make do, but to make amends’ and make frugal innovation a mainstream concern. (Nature, Vol 624, 7 Dec 2023, p. 8).

The question is how to achieve this. Here we benefit from the step taken in the previous section in which we populated the Norm Life Cycle framework with the relevant actors.  Now we need to take this one step further and consider these actors not in isolation but as potential collaborators in a common project. The relevance of doing this was stressed in our previous blog which emphasized the role of coalitions in promoting renewable energy.

There are signs that some policy actors (facilitators of frugal innovation!) are starting to join hands and build alliances with like-minded stakeholders. Some policy makers at the provincial and European levels have been pro-active in generating interest in frugal innovation thinking, and in trying to convince their colleagues and political chiefs of its importance. Such frontrunners are important allies in attempts to weld stronger coalitions with like-minded norm entrepreneurs and other facilitators to push towards the key tipping point towards norm cascading.

Still, as a diverse community of facilitators, we need to become more strategic about the need to really act in tandem as norm entrepreneurs. As shown in our previous blog mentioned above, one can go further and build selective and temporary coalitions with stakeholders who may well have other ulterior objectives but would lend support to the initiative in question. This also applies here. While actors may have very different motives for promoting frugal innovation, we need to pragmatically form alliances to create critical mass.  For example, actors whose prime concern is the fostering of local economic development or the promotion of Small and Medium Enterprise could become allies in supporting frugal innovation projects and policies. Operationally, we can start with developing a set of appealing pitches for various audiences of why and how frugal innovation will help to address some of the grand challenges of our time. Further sector- and region-specific research is needed to substantiate and concretize such pitches.

There is an alternative route from norm emergence to norm cascading in which early adopters play the key role. Let us explain. So far, we have assumed that the norms emerge in the context of poor communities. Indeed, frugal innovation research has tended to unearth examples of innovations which are resource saving and are affordable by the poor from the start. However, we need to recognise that some innovations are expensive to start with and become affordable by the poor later in the product life cycle. This is why we introduced the category of early adopters as facilitators of frugal innovation. These early adopters tend to be young, rich and well-educated, and they demonstrate a sustainable lifestyle and make it fashionable. This matters because the more others aspire to such lifestyles the faster the decline in prices and the greater the affordability by the not-so-well off. Researchers can contribute by showing examples of communities where frugal innovation thinking – taking this route – has become the way to move forward. In other words, a concern with the dynamics of frugal innovation leads us to also consider this route from norm emergence to norm cascading.

As stressed in the beginning, the Norm Life Cycle framework helps us to unpack the time dimension and creates the mental space for exploring processes and sequences. We have seen that bringing about a cascading effect is a huge challenge. Once frugal innovation reaches the norm cascading stage, policy and law makers are crucial to further consolidate this in the norm internalization stage. Moreover, the early adopters can pave the way towards norm internalization by setting the example of more frugal consumption patterns, out of choice, not necessity. For this norm internalization to occur it would benefit from a vision that is aspirational and expresses both the resource saving and affordability of our ambition. We propose ‘frugal prosperity for all’ as the vision to strive for.

This article was first published here

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Hubert Schmitz is a renowned development economist specializing in sustainable industrialization, investment politics, and green transformations with 40 years of expertise.

Peter Knorringa, is a Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and specializes in the multifaceted influence of businesses on development.

 

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Disasters as ‘tipping points’? How the deadly Bhola Cyclone influenced East Pakistan’s 1970 electoral outcomes and what this means for disaster politics

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The Bhola cyclone swept through the Bengal region in November 1970, displacing millions of people and leaving more than 300,000 dead. While such natural disasters cause widespread destruction that are felt for many years afterward, they can also be seen an opportunity for political change, writes Muhammad Basar, who contends that the cyclone influenced the 1970 election that ultimately led to the separation of united Pakistan. But although such calamities can act as catalysts for political restructuring, it is important not to become complacent in managing disaster risks, he writes.

 

The emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation in 1971 is a significant event in modern history: its birth is not only the result of a prolonged struggle for freedom but also the consequence of an unexpected natural hazard leading to a man-made disaster that contributed to the rise of Bengali nationalism and their secession from Pakistan.

In November 1970, a severe cyclone made landfall on the East Pakistan coast, resulting in the tragic loss of nearly 300,000 lives in a single night of devastation. According to the Economic Times , the cyclone is ranked the fourth most devastating hazard in the past century. But what made the cyclone so destructive was not the force of nature but the force of circumstances: the Bhola cyclone struck at the worst possible place at the worst possible time.

The cyclone is particularly significant in the field of disaster studies not only due to its immense destructive impact but also because of the detrimental policies pursued by West Pakistan in its aftermath. This we explored in detail in our recent scholarly article titled ‘The final straw: Bhola cyclone, 1970 election, disaster politics, and the making of Bangladesh’. Our article offers valuable information for researchers and practitioners in the fields of disaster management and humanitarian assistance, shedding light on how ineffective disaster governance policies can contribute to political division in the wake of a disaster.

We refer to this event as a “critical juncture“, as it was one of the first instances of a compound disaster where a natural event contributed to the start of a civil war, an external military intervention, and, ultimately, the dissolution of a nation-state.We studied this phenomenon using qualitative research methods, which included six months of archival research, the analysis of media contents, and interviews with aid activists, political leaders, and survivors of the cyclone.

The pre-cyclone political configuration

The Bengalis, comprising 54% of Pakistan’s population, had limited influence over the economic and political affairs of the country. As a result, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the President of the Awami League (AL), a regional political party of East Pakistan, advocated for provincial autonomy and democracy through the famous ‘Six-Point Plan’ in the late 1960s. In response to increasing demands for democracy and equality, the Pakistani military government set a date for the nation’s first national election. The election was planned for December 7, 1970 and would take place simultaneously across all provinces.

However, on November 12 — just three weeks before the election — a powerful cyclone with winds reaching up to 200 km/h accompanied by 30-foot tidal waves hit the East Pakistan coast at midnight. The cyclone caused widespread destruction, resulting in a significant loss of life and displacing millions of individuals. Regrettably, the people of East Pakistan were not adequately warned about the cyclone, as the warning system failed to operate promptly.

The cyclone’s impact on East Pakistan’s political dynamics

The fallout of responses to the cyclone was found to be more severe than the cyclone itself. It took almost ten days for the government to officially announce a state of emergency and mobilize the military to aid in relief and recovery operations.President Yahya Khan received substantial criticism for his mismanagement of the crisis, with many viewing his lack of concern as a form of criminal neglect. This delayed reaction significantly influenced the attitudes of the Bengali population and fueled their desire to break away from the rest of Pakistan. Moreover, the cyclone had struck the poorest area of East Pakistan, where infrastructure, livelihoods, and economic prospects were severely lacking. And this disaster served as a wake-up call, revealing the critical importance of economic equality and political freedom for the survival of the Bengalis.

The leadership emphasized this point strongly. Maulana Abdul Hamid Bhashani, at the time a prominent figure within the National Awami Party in East Pakistan, voiced strong disapproval of how the government handled the cyclone’s aftermath. He criticized the Pakistani government for its perceived lack of empathy towards the affected individuals. On November 23, 1970, he made the significant declaration of East Pakistan’s independence and advocated for a boycott of the impending election. In response to his stance, two additional leftist parties also opted to abstain from participating in the election.

AL leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (popularly known as Mujib in both Pakistan and Bangladesh) conversely took advantage of the situation to unite the Bengali population against the ruling authorities of West Pakistan. Rahman highlighted the inadequate response of the central government to the crisis and stressed the need for increased autonomy to better protect the people of East Pakistan from future natural disasters. Through public gatherings, marches, and promotional materials, Rahman drew attention to the grievances of the East Pakistanis and emphasized the disparities between the two regions. A notable poster with the slogan “Why is Golden Bengal a Crematorium?” became a significant symbol of the AL’s electoral campaign.

A ‘Tipping Point’?

Political analysts had anticipated that the AL would emerge as the dominant political force in East Pakistan, but few had foreseen its landslide victory; it secured 160 out of 162 seats for East Pakistan in the election. The electoral outcome was surprising not only to political factions but also to the Pakistani military, which had underestimated the growing influence of Mujib’s AL in East Pakistan. Yahya and his administration were confident that no political party would be able to attain the critical threshold of 151 seats, resulting in a hung parliament that would be more susceptible to their manipulation in the future. Yet this is exactly what transpired.

This overwhelming victory provided Mujib with the authority to independently establish the government at the national level without requiring support from any other political party. He declared that his future government would draw up a new constitution for Pakistan based on the demands of his Six-Point Plan, which would give East Pakistan greater provincial autonomy and weaken the ties between the center and the provinces.

Despite the victory, a transfer of power did not occur. In an attempt to engage in dialogue, the central authority sought to persuade Mujib to abandon his plan and adhere to the principle of greater unity for Pakistan. However, Mujib and the Bengali nationalists saw no reason to deviate from their demands, as they had already received a mandate from the Bengali voters. Failing to resolve the issue with Mujib, the military instead of relinquishing power initiated a brutal military operation, known as Operation Searchlight, on March 25, 1971. This event sparked a civil war in East Pakistan, ultimately leading to the successful establishment of independent Bangladesh.

The complex interplay between natural disasters and politics

Our research suggests that the Bhola Cyclone of 1970 not only caused immense devastation but also had far-reaching political consequences in South Asian history. The post-disaster politics shaped the electoral landscape in East Pakistan, leading to a call for an election boycott and ultimately resulting in the AL gaining a significant majority. However, the military’s refusal to transfer power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman sparked a civil war that lasted for nine months, leading to India’s intervention and the eventual emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country.

The aftermath of a cyclone created a distinctive situation in disaster politics, as it sparked a nationalist movement that ultimately resulted in the country’s fragmentation. This highlights the importance of effectively managing disaster crises during times of political instability to prevent further harm to a divided nation. The events following the Bhola Cyclone underscore the intricate relationship between natural disasters, politics, and the lasting impact of such occurrences. Despite the historical importance of these outcomes, they have been largely neglected in global historical narratives.

How can we further reduce the risk of disasters?

Disaster risk reduction in a situation where a state is politically, culturally, and economically divided and on the brink of fragmentation is one of the most challenging tasks in disaster governance. The Bhola Cyclone highlighted several key weaknesses in the disaster governance system.These included a deficient warning system, inadequate infrastructure and logistical support, reliance on foreign aid for recovery efforts, and a lack of political trust due to the presence of a non-democratic regime, leading to widespread public anger and political unrest.

This event demonstrated that a disaster can raise questions about legitimacy and underscore the importance of democratic freedoms and equal opportunities for all. Additionally, it revealed the significant impact of non-state actors, such as the media, civil society, political parties, and foreign donor agencies, in influencing government opposition.

To learn more about the cyclone and its relation to the independence of Bangladesh, our recent article published in the Contemporary South Asia can be consulted. The article is the outcome of our joint research funded by North South University, Bangladesh (CTRG-20-SHSS-05; NSU IRB/ERC: 2020/OR-NSU/IRB/1121).

About the author:

 

 

Muhammad Asiful Basar is a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and Senior Lecturer at North South University, Bangladesh.

 

Contested Spaces and Narratives at COP28: A Reflection Piece

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In this blog, ISS MA student Manju von Rospatt reflects on her experiences at the UN Climate Change conference (COP28) held in Dubai from December 6 to December 13. Manju attended COP28 representing Eutopya and interviewed stakeholders and attendees at COP and contrasts the approach of indigenous, youth, and Global South representatives with the glitz of lobbyists from industry, and representing some of the biggest countries attending.

Image by Author.

From December 6th – December 13th, I took a short break from my regular academic routine at ISS to enter a very different world of high-stakes negotiations around climate change: the controversial and consequential 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) in the United Arab Emirates. Attending COP28, the largest climate conference to date, in Dubai was a dizzying experience. Like many participants, I entered the conference with ambivalence, unsure what the week would have in store both for me and the final statement. The news coverage that we read about COP28 in the mainstream media tends to be dominated by the progression of the formal (and closed door) negotiations processes taking place between the 200 member states of the UNFCCC. Yet, attending COP28 was so much more than following the official negotiations and drafting of the agreement text.

 

Clashing narratives and crossing paths

Together with the international youth media group Eutopya, I interviewed a host of people across countries and roles at the conference, from indigenous and youth leaders, environmental justice activists, and civil society leaders to researchers, negotiators, and politicians. If you’re interested in these interviews, please look out for updates from our podcast in the following weeks. Speaking to a cross-section of people across age, ethnicity, gender, sectors, roles, and regions, gave me a sense of how COP28 is a contested space, rife with contradictions between various factions campaigning with different methods and interests. Each constituency proposed different solutions: technological, market-based, political, social, or spiritual. Cognitive dissonance permeated my time at COP28, as I jumped between conversations and events with climate justice advocates calling for people-centred just transitions and with organizations focused on energy transitions alone. I found fewer spaces than I had hoped at COP28 that brought these disparate perspectives together into a holistic approach. I found that people tended to stay within their constituency bubbles through self-selection whilst at COP28. Several interviewees also commented that the spatial distribution of pavilions across the Expo City venue further facilitated the segregation of interest groups. Even within buildings at the conference, pavilions were juxtaposed in glaring ways. For example, to visit the climate justice and indigenous youth pavilions, one needed to walk past two floors of pavilions of large energy companies and organizations, including OPEC.

The national pavilions, with multi-million dollar price tags, featured carefully curated narratives of national sustainability. These were further presented and performed by country representatives at side-events. Clearly, green-diplomacy has become an opportunity for many countries to green-wash, exercise soft-power, and legitimize state activities.

The corporate presence at COP was also striking, particularly in the open and commercialized Green Zone,  has been likened to a trade fair.

Single-Person Electric Helicopter featured in the Green Zone

Alongside COP28, I attended the private-sector event World Climate Summit, hosted in a glitzy hotel by the World Trade Center. I heard mining executives explicitly discuss how to maintain and enlarge profit margins, by including corporate social responsibility and sustainability as a flashy ‘side initiative’.

Luxury Electric Car Shows in the Green Zone at COP28

At an event hosted by Chilean mining corporation SQM on “sustainable lithium mining,” an audience member, a mining executive from Nigeria, explicitly initiate a business deal mid-Q&A to expand mining operations together with SQM. Their explicit concerns about expanding profit with the transition towards renewables and disregard to rhetoric around sustainability could not differ more from the ones I heard from civil society.

 

Separate spaces for differing ‘solutions’

Coming from a social justice perspective, I was particularly interested in how indigenous leaders, youth groups, and Global South environmental justice advocates would position themselves at the conference, which was bound to focus mostly on the energy transition. I was curious as to what kinds of tension would emerge between the mainstream narratives and voices at the margins of the conference. According to Asad Rehman, Executive Director of War on Want, this was the first year in which civil society and climate justice organizers were able to secure an official pavilion. At past COPs, organizers would gather at the margins of the venues, hosting meetings on the lawn, benches, and cafes. Across interviews with civil society members, I heard that protests at COPs were increasingly prone to UN securitization and oversight. At the same time, formalized channels for CSO constituencies and youth representative negotiators are incrementally included in the formal COP negotiation process. Despite this progress, corporate and national interests glaringly dominate the COP process.

During the six days I spent at COP, I witnessed and participated in several protests in the UN-designated blue zone of the Expo City (the Green Zone lies within UAE’s jurisdiction and has a zero tolerance policy for protests). The protests called for everything from calling for negotiators to add the phrase “phase out of fossil fuels” to the final text, climate reparations through sovereign debt cancellation for African countries, ceasefire in Palestine, and centering indigenous voices. Among smaller daily protests, a large protest organized by the COP28 coalition of CSOs on December 9th made history; activists marched through the conference venue, demanding their voices to be heard.

Farooq Tariq, General Secretary Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee (PKRC) and president Haqooq Khalq Party, speaking to protestors about climate justice

On December 11, the COP28 coalition organized another historic event, the “People’s Plenary”, in counter-response to the market-based, technocratic and Eurocentric approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Historic People’s Plenary on December 11th featuring climate justice speakers

Many activists I spoke with were particularly concerned about the location of COP28 in the authoritarian UAE as well as COP29 which will be held in Azerbaijan. Following UNFCCC regulations, all slogans, posters, and routes had to be planned with and approved days in advance by executive members of the UNFCCC secretariat, upon risk of being ‘debadged’ (having your access to the Conference taken away) and deported if the agreements were not upheld. Following the UN’s rules, organizers needed to refrain from phrases directly mentioning Israel or the US and avoid “Free Palestine” calls, though the more neutral “Ceasefire Now” was permitted.  I also heard multiple stories from interviewees of intimidation and debadging against climate activists from the UN security officers.

Final protest on the evening of December 12th as negotiators finalize the wording of the text

A final agreement written to serve corporate interests

As I write this now, the final COP28 document has passed, hailing “the beginning of the end to fossil fuel” due to the unanimous acknowledgment of the need to transition away from oil, coal, and gas. Yet, the final product of the non-binding agreement is full of frustratingly vague and softened language which will allow for many loopholes without clear targets or timing. Language such as “phasing-down unabated coal power” and “phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” clearly reflect the lack of scientists present at the conference (estimated at 0.5% of overall attendees) and high influence of fossil fuel lobbyists (with some 2,456 lobbyists present) and the political influence of OPEC. OPEC’s strategy was to have member states reject any language on phasing out fossil fuel production and rather push for language on reducing fossil fuel emissions, enabling further extraction and profit with promises of dubious carbon capture and storage technology.

Civil Society forms an unauthorized chain of solidarity, whispering “please support the phase out” to negotiators, in front of the entrance of the room in which final negotiations take place.

Though the outcome of COP28 has been a deep disappointment for many, it is a start: a beginning of the end to fossil fuels. I feel inspired by the fierce energy and tireless conviction with which civil society and activists, especially youth, have campaigned to build their coalition-based collective power. Without the pressure and demands of civil society, processes like COP would be even more susceptible to corporate and elite capture. I feel honored to have been present and witnessed history in action and know that the climate justice movement will only expand from here.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1702979927530{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]About the author:

Manju von Rospatt is an MA student at ISS in the Social Policy for Development Major and producer for Eutopya, an international youth media group. She is also an intern at the African Diaspora Policy Center. Manju’s interests center on issues of climate justice, labor migration, transnational networks, gender equality, rural development, and social protection, especially within the South and Southeast Asian context. Manju attended COP28 this year with Eutopya, interviewing various stakeholders, from climate justice activists and civil society groups to politicians and COP negotiators.  Please follow along with the podcast on Spotify!

 

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‘Important and urgent’: this decision-making matrix shows that we need to act now to fight climate change

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Climate change was first flagged as a global risk several decades ago, but warnings were not taken seriously. Now that climate change is part and parcel of our daily lives, the need for immediate and concerted action to limit its effects is increasingly being recognized, but there is also strong resistance to the radical change required to do this. In this blog article, ISS Professor of Pluralist Development Economics Irene van Staveren contemplates how the well-known Eisenhower decision-making matrix can help us take climate change seriously. We are already in the ‘important and urgent’ box, she argues — an understanding that should drive us to act.

Image Source: Asana.

Some years ago, when I was receiving training in time management, I was introduced to the Eisenhower matrix. I am still grateful to the American general for it because I use the two-by-two table every day. The two columns are called ‘urgent’ and ‘not urgent’ and the two rows are called ‘important’ and ‘not important’. And that’s where you plan all your tasks.

The trick is to spend most of your time working on tasks that are important but not urgent. Then you can work wonderfully focused on your core tasks and not under time pressure and with the fear of not meeting a deadline. The latter happens if you have let time slip through your fingers or have not planned properly. Then you suddenly find yourself in the box of tasks that are not only important but also urgent.

Now that I am preparing a course on climate change for the Economics Bachelor at EUR in Rotterdam, I notice that the Eisenhower matrix can also be applied to climate change. When Shell knew more than thirty years ago that fossil fuels could lead to global warming, almost no one saw it as an important problem and certainly not as an urgent problem.

On the contrary, we all happily consumed fossil fuels, regardless of the CO2 increase due to more cars, taking flights and enabling deforestation for our consumption of meat. It was only in 1995, with the first international climate conference (held in Berlin), that policymakers seem to realize that it could become an important problem.

But it was not until twenty years later that governments worldwide were prepared to make agreements in Paris on a safe limit on warming: 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. And now, many uncontrollable forest fires, severe floods and droughts, and rapidly melting ice caps later, it has also become an urgent problem.

So, we have all wasted too much time on other things, such as drilling new oil wells, pumping out old gas fields and pointing to other countries that emit even more CO2 or are catching up because their prosperity is much lower than ours. Some even thought it was better to first generate even more polluting economic growth in order to earn the money to invest in sustainable energy.

We now know better, continuing on the old path is expensive: every day that we intervene earlier, the costs in the future will be lower. We need to get to net zero faster as a popular and insightful book argues. And now we are all in the box of ‘important and urgent’. The deadline to stay below 2 degrees is close on our heels.

This means that we, particularly in the Global North, are now forced to take controversial measures, provided they have an effect in the short term. So, no new nuclear power plants or solar shields in space. But CO2 capture and storage underground. And mega wind turbines near nature reserves, because horizon pollution is not nice, but in about 30 years those wind turbines can be taken down again because, hopefully, we will have made the energy transition.

And much stricter regulations for the acceleration of CO2-neutral construction, production and transport, and much more and higher CO2 taxes. In short, now that the climate problem has become not only very important but also quite urgent, there is only one thing left: to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, as various authors are arguing as well. Eisenhower would have looked at us shaking his head: what a poor planning.

This column appeared in Dutch newspaper Trouw of 5 September 2023.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Irene van Staveren is a professor of pluralist development economics at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Professor van Staveren’s theoretical interest is in feminist economics, social economics, institutional economics and post-Keynesian economics. Her key research interest is at the meso level of the economy with topics such as social cohesion, social exclusion, inequality and discrimination, as well as ethics and values in the economy and in economics.

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Academics must have a voice in social affairs, too, no matter their affiliation

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The current wave of protests on the A12 highway in The Hague against government subsidies for fossil fuels have been both applauded and condemned. Several scientists have joined the protests in their professional capacity, which has led to questions of whether their activism threatens their independence as scholars. In this blog article, Dorothea Hilhorst responds to the argument of Dutch scientist and writer Louise Fresco in an NRC column last week that academics have no place in protests. All academics/scientists should be wary of their place in society and should use their positions of expertise to advocate for better outcomes, she writes.

Last Sunday, on 1 October 2023, I was standing on the highway of the A12 in The Hague, together with about 600 activists from Extinction Rebellion, until we were taken away by the police. I was fascinated by the colourful collection of activists with their original slogans chalked on cardboard and enjoyed the cheerfulness of the chants and the music. Many of the activists were here for the twentieth time in a row. Extinction Rebellion has been blocking the highway on a daily basis, starting 9 September, and aims to return every day until the Dutch government stops subsidizing fossil fuels.

As I was sitting on the road, I had serious conversations about why I was there as a scientist and whether my presence was at the expense of my independence. What struck me most is that the question of independence is so strongly linked to activism and taking action to the street. Scientists constantly interact with social groups. In fact, this is encouraged. Scientists who entrench themselves in their ivory towers have an increasingly smaller chance of obtaining scientific funding or promotions. Science is part of society, and the issues we deal with are largely determined by societies. And often enabled by societal actors, too, a lot of research is in fact financed by commercial companies.

It is very common for scientists to be active in politics in addition to their work and, for example, to serve on behalf of a political party in the Senate or on municipal councils. Scientists also often sit on supervisory boards or are attached to a company as supervisory directors. This often leads to additional income, which must be properly reported, for example on university websites, for reasons of propriety and transparency.

The social involvement of scientists regularly leads to questions about the independence of science, especially when it can be demonstrated that the scientist takes the interests of a company into account in the scientific work or — as is currently the case — if the question is raised whether it is ethically responsible to have companies such as the fossil industry, the tobacco industry, or alcohol producers help pay for research. Except in these specific cases, social involvement is seen as a must and is not considered to be in conflict with the independence of the academe. But strangely enough, it does when it comes to involvement in an activist organization — a clear double standard.

Take for example Louise Fresco, who recently argued in a column for the NRC that scientists and academics have no place in a protest, is an example of a socially involved scientist. In the past, she was a supervisory director of Rabobank, a major Dutch bank, and, as a scientist, she was co-director of Unilever in addition to her scientific work. She is currently a supervisory director at agriculture company Syngenta. In her column, though, Fresco says that scientists should not demonstrate . With that argument, scientists should also not be involved in an industry or political party. These organisations are not exclusively based in their actions by scientific evidence, and their agendas are always encompassing more that the scientist’s field of expertise can oversee.

I am happy that the activists of Extinction Rebellion are open to listening to my research findings about the consequences of climate change for poor people in poor countries — people who have never been on an airplane, yet who are paying the highest price for climate change. I think that with my scientific attitude, which is used to questioning and critically observing (like all scientists), I can contribute to the movement, and I notice that my questions about the action strategy are taken seriously, whether or not they are taken up. Above all, I am convinced that being on the A12 will not prevent me from remaining true to my independent research methods.

Is criticism of the alleged loss of independence of demonstrating scientists perhaps a veiled rejection of the method of civil disobedience that Extinction Rebellion has adopted? In that case, I advise Louise Fresco and other concerned colleagues to delve into the positive contributions to the world history of civil disobedience for, for example, the abolition of slavery, decolonization, or the fight for women’s suffrage. Scientists that remain in their ivory towers, or indeed continue to sit around glass-topped boardroom tables, can fail to engage with the full spectrum of society. This, surely, is to the benefit of no-one.

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Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Dorothea Hilhorst is professor of Humanitarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University.

 

 

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Climate change governance: Why a Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) approach is vital for preventing extreme weather events from turning into disasters

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Climate change reports and scenarios paint a bleak picture of the present and the future — one filled with extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, storms, and droughts that could result in the loss of lives, threaten livelihoods, and exacerbate existing problems. But it is too simple to blame climate change for the increase in the number of disasters and for their effects. Today, as we celebrate Disaster Risk Reduction Day, disasters and humanitarian studies scholar Rodrigo Mena argues that a Disaster Risk Reduction approach to governing climate change could be essential for preventing extreme weather events and other climate-related phenomena from becoming disasters.

Image by Rodrigo Mena (Flood mitigation project, Afghanistan, 2017)

Watching the news these days, it is impossible not to hear about disasters: from floods in Greece and Sri Lanka to fires in Australia and Tropical Storm Philippe in Antigua and Barbuda. Climate change is often mentioned as an important factor driving these disasters and, what is more, thanks to climate change, we can expect more and more intense disasters in the future. Is all this true? And is there anything we can do? Can we mitigate some of the worst consequences of a disaster before it has occurred? In this article, written on the occasion of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) day, I discuss the relationship between disasters and human-caused climate change and emphasize the importance of DRR as an approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change.

 

Disasters and hazards aren’t the same

While fires, droughts, storms, and earthquakes are often perceived as disasters, experts stress[1] that these are just natural events that can possibly cause harm to people or property. For instance, a thunderstorm can be seen as a hazard due to its lightning and heavy rain, but it doesn’t always cause significant harm. A disaster on the other hand is said to occur when a hazard actually causes a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society, like floods that destroy homes or  hurricanes that leave many people injured.

 

Vulnerability turns hazards into disasters

Which conditions turn hazards into disasters, then? The key factor behind the occurrence of disasters is the vulnerability of people to specific hazards.[2] For instance, if a city is designed to withstand heavy rainfall or earthquakes, these events are unlikely to lead to disasters. This explains why earthquakes of similar intensity can have completely different impacts in Chile compared to Haiti, for example.

And this social vulnerability is shaped by political choices, resource allocation, funding availability, and cultural heritage. This is why the concept of a “natural disaster” is now considered a misnomer by the UNDRR, academics, and other actors, as it places more emphasis on the natural event than on the social and political conditions that truly explain a disaster. It is now also recognized that through the effective and timely use of DRR strategies, it is possible to prevent hazards from progressing to disasters.

 

It’s too simple to say that climate change leads to disasters

In brief, climate change mostly refers to long-term shifts in average weather patterns and conditions attributed directly or indirectly to human activity.[3] These shifts can result in variations in the frequency and intensity of weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves, and heavy rainfall, as well as changes in overall weather patterns. In other words, it does affect the weather, but as noted before, the development of disasters is often better explained by people’s vulnerability rather than the intensity or frequency of weather events alone.

Saying that climate change will result in more disasters is, therefore, imprecise (or at least not that simple), and we need to acknowledge some important nuances and exceptions. Ilan Kelman’s post on Pulse presents a good overview of these arguments with several scientific sources being referenced. An important takeaway, also seen in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, is that climate change may not always lead to more disasters if our societies take adequate action to reduce their risk of occurrence and impact — in short, if DRR measures are in place.

The problem seems to be, however, that we are not doing enough, nor are we doing it fast enough. Therefore, climate change is already and will continue to contribute to more disasters, but not because of more (or more frequent and extreme) natural events occurring. We as a society are not doing enough to curb carbon emissions that drive climate change, nor are we taking sufficient measures to reduce our vulnerability to climate-related hazards. In other words, we (or more precisely, some people in power) are deciding to have more disasters. DRR can and must play a critical role here.

 

Why to adopt a DRR approach in mitigating and adapting to climate change

DRR involves the steps and plans we make to prevent disasters from happening and ensure that when disasters occur, they cause as minimum harm as possible to people.[4] In addressing climate change, mitigation and adaptation remain the two primary measures. Climate change mitigation aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions, slowing climate change and so indirectly reducing the severity of climate-related disasters. Climate change adaptation on the other hand involves adjusting to current and new climate conditions to address related risks, for example through city design, food systems adaptation, or managing coastal and river delta infrastructure.

While DRR is not yet seen as an important measure to combat climate change, it’s vital in addressing the complexity of the crisis. How? DRR is an approach that can be applied in various situations:

As we emphasize the importance of DRR measures and strategies today, the invitation is then to avoid simplifying disasters as consequences of climate change (which also brings us to the complex world of attribution) and, as scientists Emmanuel Raju, Emily Boyd, and Friederike Otto plead, to “stop blaming the climate for disasters.” Instead, we should emphasize their complex nature as social and political phenomena, engage in broader discussions about DRR, and consider the measures that could be taken but are not effectively implemented to reduce the risks and impacts of disasters.

[1] See The Routledge Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction and Mapping Vulnerability Disasters, Development and People

[2] Including exposure as part of vulnerability

[3] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/glossary/

[4] https://www.undrr.org/terminology/disaster-risk-reduction

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About the author:

Rodrigo Mena is Assistant Professor of Disasters and Humanitarian Studies at The International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Dr. Mena has studied and worked in humanitarian assistance, disaster governance, and environmental sociology for twenty years, especially in conflict-affected and vulnerable settings. He lectures on humanitarian action, disaster risk reduction, methodology, and safety and security for in-situ/fieldwork research.

 

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Humanitarian Observatories Series | A humanitarian observatory for discussing heatwaves in South Asia was recently launched — here’s how it wants to improve responses to heatwaves

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The heightened vulnerability of the South Asian subcontinent to heatwaves can be ascribed to several interacting characteristics — but these have not been adequately examined and discussed. The Humanitarian Observatory Initiative in South Asia (HOISA) was launched earlier this year in an attempt to bridge this gap by charting the particular risks and vulnerabilities of the region, observing the state of current humanitarian governance processes, and based on ongoing discussions providing recommendations for more effective responses to heatwaves. This article details some of the main dynamics of heatwaves in South Asia considered during HOISA’s first panel discussion, including specific governance challenges that the observatory will focus on.

A street vendor in Ahmedabad adapts to heat on hourly basis using his own resources, technology, and design. 2022.

A heatwave is a climatic process and a period of abnormally high temperatures — higher than the normal maximum temperature that occurs during a particular season.[1] While they have always occurred, their frequency and severity have rapidly increased due to climate change caused by the industrialisation of modern economies and increased carbon emissions.[2] The WHO considers heatwaves to be one of the most dangerous natural hazards because of their destructive effects, which are severe: from 1998 to 2017 alone, more than 166,000 people have died globally due to heatwaves,[3] and the impact on livelihoods has been just as immense. Yet, heatwaves rarely receive adequate attention because of their delayed effects that moreover are not always easily to pinpoint.

 

South Asia is particularly vulnerable to heatwaves

While heatwaves are global phenomena that know no national boundaries, their manifestations and impact vary from region to region, depending on various characteristics such as demographics and geography. From this viewpoint, South Asia is known to be one of the most vulnerable regions in the world. First, it has a high-density population numbering close to two billion people. Second, the region has immense variations in its geographical features, social structures, built environments, socio-economic means, and much more. The interaction of these characteristics makes it particularly complex to govern — and the complexity increases even more when heatwaves occur.

 

And the subcontinent is set to face even more heatwaves

Moreover, a recent report of the WMO claims that heatwaves are 30 times more likely to take place on the subcontinent than before, with massive damage to livelihoods and wellbeing, ecosystems, economies, and infrastructure expected to occur in the coming decades. In one of the latest examples, February this year was observed as the warmest month since 1901. Thus, not only are heatwaves already affecting South Asia badly — it’s going to get much worse.

 

A humanitarian observatory to better understand heatwaves in South Asia

It is in light of this that the HOISA, the Humanitarian Observatory Initiative of South Asia, was launched in April this year. Its objective is to monitor humanitarian governance processes, with a focus on responses to heatwaves. Considering the urgency of the matter, HOISA organized a first panel discussion on April 7th, which brought together about 30 actors working on heatwaves. Panel discussants included Dorothea Hilhorst (International Institute of Social Studies — ISS), Prabodh Chakrabarti (Swami Vivekananda Chair and Professor of Environment and Disaster Management, RKMVERI, Kolkata), Keya Saha Chaudhary (International Council of Voluntary Agencies — ICVA), Nimesh Dhungana (Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute of the University of Manchester — HCRI), Delu Lusambya (PhD researcher at the ISS) Mihir Bhatt (All India Disaster Mitigation Institute — AIDMI), and Khayal Trivedi (HOISA Project Lead).

The panel focused on the increasing risk of heatwaves, the uniqueness of this occurrence in the region, existing humanitarian systems, and the first steps towards measuring and planning for the effects of heatwaves. This is because although South Asia has suffered the most due to heatwaves and also has found many ways to adapt to it, relatively limited humanitarian and governmental action has been observed and recorded. Some of the main observations made by participants and action points are discussed below.

 

South Asia’s characteristics make heatwaves more intense and dangerous

At the launch, we discussed how the abovementioned characteristics such as population density, infrastructure, and geographical features such as altitudes affect and sometimes aggravate the effects of a heatwave. For example, recent research on ‘wet-bulb temperatures’ in South Asia reports that parts of the region on the subcontinent are much closer to the threshold limits of human survivability than the African and Gulf regions. The depth and range of vulnerability and exposure of the population and economy of the region to heatwaves are also much more intense and complex here. In light of these and other observations, we argue that the current humanitarian approach to heatwaves in South Asia needs to be revisited.

In such a context, we must accelerate the implementation of heatwave action plans at all levels and in key sectors driving development, starting with employment, health, education, and so on. The built environment and supporting infrastructure in their current form, for example, are simply not capable of withstanding severe temperature shifts and is making it harder to adapt, Nimesh Dhungana, one of the key panel members from Nepal, stated at the discussion. A comprehensive study is required to ensure that these are adapted sufficiently and rapidly.

 

Mobilizing funding for adaptive measures is a key priority

Another important parameter in planning for and mitigating this natural hazard is the mobilization of funding. Across the humanitarian sector, current funding is simply not sufficient to meet the growing needs, particularly when it comes to taking adaptive measures. At the panel discussion, we agreed that more holistic and less siloed approaches to securing funding are needed to address the impacts of climate change. In the case of heatwaves, this means funding modalities that consider both the immediate and long-term consequences of heatwaves to ensure not only immediate responses but also the improved resilience of communities to heatwaves over time. Therefore, increased investments and integrated funding should form part of heatwave management strategies and plans in South Asia.

As part of this, attention should be paid to the meaningful locally led involvement of communities and local and indigenous solutions to addressing heatwaves. What makes this challenging and even more urgent is that the heatwave-affected population in South Asia is hardly protected by a social safety net, leading to massive losses and damage. Resolving or forming sustainable practices that ensure uniform funding will protect these populations therefore becomes critical. Furthermore, the coming together of researchers and operational experts to study and pilot heatwave safety nets, both formal and informal, is overdue in South Asia.

 

Heatwaves must be placed on the global political agenda

In the wake of increased risks associated with heatwaves and the distinct ways in which it affects the region and its people,[4] this phenomenon must be placed on the global political agenda. Governments, the United Nations, academics, and activists together must aim to draw a global heatwave compact signed by all stakeholders — including those affected — that stretch beyond the current climate policy community.

 

A joint plan of action for South Asian countries should be formalized

Moreover, as a phenomenon that exceeds borders to affect an entire region, a joint plan of action between countries in South Asia must be formalized. And humanitarian actions must take place simultaneously in a cohesive manner for a positive impact, which is in fact the agenda of the several humanitarian observatories forming across the globe. The formation of a global movement to address the effects of heatwaves worldwide is therefore vital.

 

Increased trust in science is a key pillar for effective interventions

But such a joint effort and action across South Asia requires a grasp of the state of South Asia’s heatwaves. Unfortunately, the increasing distance between science and society, between evidence and knowledge, and the fragmented use of data and tools for adapting to heatwaves have also been observed lately in the region. More research, knowledge, and evidence is needed, as well as interdisciplinary knowledge exchanges and the transfer of technology, tools, data, and key concepts. Unlocking private and public data on heatwaves and related phenomena that are currently difficult to access is an important first step.

 

Interdisciplinary heatwave workforces needed

Moreover, we need a locally led comprehensive, multi-level, and multi-directional approach with multiple stakeholders to plan and mitigate the dire effects of heatwaves in the region. Building interdisciplinary heatwave workforces with the knowledge, skills, and capacities to prevent, manage and reduce losses, and to evaluate how to improve things, can help strengthen existing humanitarian systems.

To summarize, South Asia is undoubtedly one of the most complex of the heatwave-affected regions and requires the urgent attention of researchers, policy makers, humanitarian leaders, and other stakeholders to chart local actions and observations and make changes to these to ensure that effective interventions will make a direct impact. Partners of HOISA must and will continue observing, reflecting on, discussing, and recommending actions humanitarian actors and other stakeholders should take.

[1] NDMA India: https://ndma.gov.in/Natural-Hazards/Heat-Wave

[2] IPCC Report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf

[3] WHO: https://www.who.int/health-topics/heatwaves#tab=tab_1

[4] The Guardian view on an Indian summer: human-made heatwaves are getting hotter.

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About the authors:

Khayal Trivedi is the Project Lead, Humanitarian Observatory Initiative of South Asia.

 

 

 

 

Mihir Bhatt. All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI) India.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prabhod Chakrabarti. Swami Vivekananda, Environment and Disaster Management India

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keya Saha Chaudhary. Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific at ICVA

 

 

 

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Fighting fossil subsidies: why professors are protesting in their gowns on the highway

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The recent occupation of the A12 highway in The Hague to protest fossil subsidies has dominated news headlines as protestors blocked the highway en masse for several days in a row. ISS Professor of Pluralist Development Economics Irene van Staveren was one of several academic researchers who joined the protests. In this article, she explains why they decided to appear in academic gowns and refutes several counterarguments scientists, politicians, journalists, and others use to deny climate change or the need for climate action. Neutrality is no longer an option, also for scientists, she writes.

About a week and a half ago, I also stood on the A12 highway alongside Extinction Rebellion (XR) to protest against fossil subsidies. I wore my academic gown, along with about thirty other professors, to make it clear that we were there as scientists. Science has been demonstrating for decades that the Earth is warming, and we have increasingly more evidence that this is due to our economic behaviour.

However, there were some counterarguments. For example, an economist who has held numerous leadership positions in the public and private sectors wrote, to my astonishment, that “there is no way to deduce from climate science that ‘fossil subsidies’ should be abolished.” While economic science convincingly demonstrates that price incentives lead to behavioural change. Economists who specifically focus on climate (climate scientists, in other words) emphasize that a price tag on CO2 emissions helps to reduce them.

The new leader of the political party CDA (Christian Democratic Appeal) also reacted sceptically to our resistance, suggesting that companies would relocate abroad, and emissions would continue while we would have fewer jobs. As if job retention in polluting sectors should be a priority in these times of labour market tightness. We actually need a lot of hands for the production and installation of solar panels, heat pumps, and insulation. In line with this short-sighted point, there is also the well-known comment at social gatherings, “what about China?” If you genuinely believe that, you should stop buying goods that are produced cheaply there. China is not idle; it’s the country that installs the most solar panels.

Let me now address those subsidies. There was some sour commentary from an investigative journalist claiming that the term is incorrect and that the calculation is based on assumptions. The term does not refer to government expenditures but rather to tax breaks for large companies in the oil, gas, and coal industries. But by now, doesn’t everyone who follows the news know this? They are disguised subsidies. And yes, when you calculate a cost advantage, you cannot avoid making assumptions. The research that XR is based on is transparent about this and calculates the tax benefits compared to the fossil taxes that households pay. Meanwhile, the government has just admitted that the amount is even higher: at least 40 billion euros.

Finally, some university boards had reservations about us being there in our academic gowns. Fortunately, my dean and board supported us wholeheartedly. And rightly so. The academic gown does not belong to the university but symbolizes science. When politics claims to want to achieve the goals of Paris but simultaneously ignores scientifically substantiated arguments that this means we must significantly reduce fossil energy much faster, then we have a responsibility to reinforce these arguments.

Because, as the writer Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” If our country does not stop fossil subsidies very quickly, we are contributing to millions of climate victims. Especially in the Global South, more and more people are already facing shortages of drinking water and food, as University of Amsterdam colleague Joyeeta Gupta, the recently awarded Spinoza Prize recipient, mentioned in her speech at the A12.

This blog article is based on a column first published in Dutch in the newspaper Trouw on 19 September 2023.

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About the author:

 

Irene van Staveren is professor of pluralist development economics at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Professor van Staveren’s theoretical interest is in feminist economics, social economics, institutional economics and post-Keynesian economics. Her key research interest is at the meso level of the economy with topics such as social cohesion, social exclusion, inequality and discrimination, as well as ethics and values in the economy and in economics.

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Could we have prevented the disaster in Libya?

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New research published this month gives a better understanding of how and why countries affected by armed conflict are more vulnerable to disasters. In this post, two of the co-authors of this research argue that much of the loss caused by Hurricane Daniel could have been prevented in Libya.

Image by Hans from Pixabay

As Libya’s death toll rises over the thousands due to the massive floods triggered by Hurricane Daniel, it’s normal to wonder if such a catastrophe could have been prevented. Over 5,000 people lost their lives in Libya as torrential rain caused two dams to burst near the coastal city of Derna. Relentless rain devastated much of the city, washing entire neighbourhoods into the sea and claiming thousands of lives while leaving tens of thousands of people without shelter.

While authorities and the media have largely attributed the catastrophe to a disaster caused by climate change, evidence suggests that it could have been largely prevented or its impacts mitigated. New research we published this month gives a better understanding of how and why countries affected by armed conflict are more vulnerable to disasters. In this post, based on this study we show how conflict increases human vulnerability to natural hazards and how this could also be the case for Libya — a situation that could have been prevented.

A country ill prepared

Libya has been torn apart by years of conflict, rendering it ill prepared to face the devastation of Hurricane Daniel. The nation is now governed by two rival administrations — in other words two rival governments forming a transitional unity government with strong rivalry, which complicates and slows rescue and aid efforts. In addition, Libya’s infrastructure has suffered from neglect over more than a decade of political turmoil.

A study we just published along with Dorothea Hilhorst on how armed conflict contributes to disaster vulnerability shows that in countries experiencing armed conflict, disasters occur 5% more frequently and that the death rate due to disasters is an incredible 34% higher in such contexts. While most accounts of disaster occurrence focus on their associated death toll or people affected, their higher chance of occurrence should not be taken lightly, especially in places affected by conflict: while people might survive a disaster, the impact of these on their livelihoods can be significant, with their opportunities to recover also reduced.

We found multiple reasons why disasters occur more often, result in higher numbers of deaths, and can significantly impact people’s lives in places affected by conflict.

 

Poorly maintained and ageing infrastructure

First, conflict causes destruction and prevents the development and maintenance of infrastructure essential to prevent disasters, such as the dams that have been left in disrepair throughout Libya. As we now know, experts had already noted that the first of the two dams to fail, which was finished in 1977, had not undergone any maintenance over the last years.

 

A lack of financial protection from disasters’ effects

Protracted wars also damage a country’s economy, reducing opportunities to invest in building and maintaining low-risk livelihoods and increasing people’s vulnerability, making them more susceptible to be affected by natural hazards such as flooding and wildfires. For example, people are less likely to have savings or reserves in place when a disaster hits. Communities often do not have the resources to commit to longer-term planning to build more resilient livelihoods away from risk zones. Two large dams built in the narrow valley in Derna were highly vulnerable because the area was filled with poorly constructed high-rise buildings.

 

Already displaced and with nowhere to flee to

In addition, wars often force people to flee their homes, leaving them in displacement camps and sheltering with families or friends. This increases their vulnerability to disasters. For example, when flooding hit the world’s largest refugee site in Bangladesh, Rohingya families sheltering there had nowhere to flee to and were stuck living in flooded areas, which made them susceptible to illnesses and disease.

The above examples all show that it is not exposure to hazards driving their devastating effects; rather people’s socio-economic vulnerability and social and political decisions affecting built environments, financial security, and overall stability play an equally great role. Climate change can affect the frequency and intensity of these hazards, but if communities are well prepared for them, these events do not have to become disasters. In the case of Libya, while the civil war ended in 2020, the political situation in the country remains fragile. The UN-facilitated ceasefire in 2020 succeeded in ending militarized clashes between eastern and western armed groups, but much remains to be done to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate militants, stabilize the economy, and reduce the vulnerability of the population resulting from a lack of financial opportunities and weakened infrastructure.

 

Disasters are not natural

What we argue is that vulnerability created through conflict and fragility conditions play a bigger role in disasters’ occurrence than ‘exogenous’ natural events. As many scholars have already observed, disasters are socially constructed phenomena that can be prevented. And while climate change can increase the frequency and intensity of events like storms and heatwaves, proper preparation can prevent them from turning into disasters.

 

Barriers to preparedness

Unfortunately, conflict settings can create significant barriers to preparedness, leading to catastrophic outcomes, as seen in the recent events in Libya. Therefore, in addition to ending the violence, conflict-affected communities also need to be provided with a safe environment that enables them to prepare and which reduces the risk of being affected by disasters.

Finally, the disaster in Libya also highlights another aspect of the interaction between conflict and disaster. Not only should addressing disaster risks receive more immediate attention in the aftermath of war; conflict prevention, resolution, and peacebuilding should be priority approaches to disaster risk reduction anywhere in the world.

Further information

If you would like to know more about the research into how armed conflict contributes to disaster vulnerability, watch this short one-minute video.

Disclaimer

This post was originally published in PRIO Blogs.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Nicolás Caso is a Research Assistant at PRIO’s Migration Centre. His research covers diverse aspects of human development including migration, disaster, and conflict studies. At PRIO he currently works mainly conducting quantitative analyses for two high-profile large projects Aligning Migration Management and the Migration–Development Nexus (MIGNEX) and Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI). Before joining PRIO he researched the interaction between conflict and disasters as part of the NWO funded project “When disasters meet conflict“.

 

 

 

 

Rodrigo Mena is Assistant Professor of Disasters and Humanitarian Studies at The International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Dr. Mena has studied and worked in humanitarian assistance/aid, disaster governance, and environmental sociology for almost twenty years, especially in conflict-affected and vulnerable settings. He lectures on humanitarian action, disaster risk reduction, methodology, and safety and security for in-situ/fieldwork research.

 

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EADI Conference 2023 | From sunbathing to sunstroke: How should we personally respond to the risks of (severe) heat and heatwaves?

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This summer, several weather records have been smashed, with the hottest week ever recorded occurring last week. The heat is becoming a serious problem; some may argue that climate change is on our doorstep and no longer an unimaginable future. But while heatwaves are particularly dangerous, leading to a loss of lives and health risks, above-average temperatures are also risky, even when a heatwave hasn’t been declared officially. In this article, ISS PhD researcher Lize Swartz asks whether we should also be taking action when there are no heatwaves and what role we can play in protecting ourselves—and those around us—from the heat.

We watched as a young woman upend a jug of iced water over her head. “That’s the absolute worst thing you can do when you show signs of heat stroke,” my friend commented. It was a hot day, the temperatures reaching 32°C, and we were sitting at a beach restaurant. We’d been on the beach for a few hours but as it became progressively hotter, we decided to take a break, sitting in the shade at the restaurant until the sun would lose its sting. The woman had turned pale shortly before, moving to the shade after sitting in the full sun. She had been in the sun for too long and showed signs of heat exhaustion.

All around us, we saw people lying or sitting in the full sun–on towels, on lounge chairs restaurants rented out, at the restaurants themselves. Irresponsible, I was telling myself, but these days not only because of the risk of getting skin cancer from enduring exposure to the sun. It was irresponsible because it was hot and because staying in the sun all day causes the body to heat up and not cool down unless measures are taken. Particularly in that kind of heat. You know, the one that’s not pleasant and that there seems to be no relief from. And it seemed that people were not taking these measures, staying in the sun until they were already starting to feel sick, relishing the heat, like lizards, without realizing that they were being scorched.

That got me thinking about whether the risks associated with heat and heatwaves are adequately understood. Granted, it wasn’t that hot, 32°C being a bit hotter than usual, but not the blistering 38°C we’d had in July last year when a heatwave swept across the country. Still, the body’s ability to cool itself down given the type of heat that we were exposed to that day was already reduced. I could feel myself struggling, with the sweat pooling up all over my body instead of evaporating. It wasn’t enjoyable. I needed to drink liters of water to rehydrate, and ultimately, only a lukewarm shower provided relief.

This heat, accompanied by humidity, is the worst type. It doesn’t cool down at night; the air remains hot and sticky. Houses stay warm. We wake up the next day and it would be a continuation of the previous day’s heat. Our bodies don’t regulate our temperatures as well, though they try to. There are only a few things we can do: stay in the shade, stay inside, cool ourselves down with water. Yet the people on the beach weren’t doing that, oblivious to the heat.

Local and national authorities have a mammoth task of creating awareness about the risks of heatwaves and heat in general, for example by issuing a heat warning in advance. A question that arises is when they should start taking action: When there’s an official heatwave? When it’s above 35°C? Clearly, longer exposure to the sun, even at 32°C, can make people ill. Should the government be circulating information on heat-related risks even when it’s a normal summer’s day when there’s a risk of the body not being able to cool itself due to the level of humidity and the lack of the circulation of air? Or should we have enough common sense to be doing it ourselves?

I think that when leaving ourselves to be the judge, we can make poor decisions based on a lack of relevant information to make an informed choice, or out of wilful ignorance. There are tons of people who don’t heed the warning to seek shelter when it’s hot, who still engage in normal activities without realizing that their bodies are overheating. Could it also be a matter of not being able to discern that our bodies are getting too hot? Do we need more education about that, so that we know that when we perspire heavily and remain sticky, it’s a sign that we need to cool ourselves down?

In a year that’s already marked the two hottest days on earth, ever (!), these questions are becoming urgent. The underlying question is, of course, who is responsible for ensuring that we are protected from the heat: the government, or us? It’s a combination, I believe–where we cannot do it ourselves, or do not do it, it should be taking steps to protect those who cannot or will not do it themselves. Through heat plans or awareness campaigns. And by ensuring that vulnerable groups have the necessary means to shade and cool themselves.

But it is also clear that we need to take action individually, and the first step could be to take responsibility for our own bodies—to self-govern our bodies in times of heat by understanding the risks of heat and how it can affect us, and by acting cautiously, especially if we don’t know how our bodies react to the heat. I don’t know how we can start doing this, but reading more about the risks of hot temperatures can be a start.

A second, related step could be to help each other understand the risks of exposure to heat by creating opportunities for social learning and acting on what we’ve learned, including helping each other understand or access information on the effects of heat. And we can act to assist those requiring help. In the U.S., for example, cooling centers are organized by the U.S. government and cooling stations by individuals or organizations acting together for others in their community who suffer from the heat and who don’t have the means to adequately cool themselves.

This remains a big issue among people who live in dwellings inadequately designed to remain cool or who don’t have the financial means to cool themselves, such as through a sun screen or aircon. Often, these are also more vulnerable segments of the population, in particular the sick, disabled, and/or elderly.

The inspiration for my post is the seed panel on urban resilience to heatwaves that THUAS and ISS researcher Sylvia Bergh and I are organizing at this year’s EADI Conference. We’ll be looking at citizen, government, and private sector responses to heatwaves, and I’ll probably want to discuss individual responses.

The panel takes place on Thursday July 13, 2023 at 10:00 CET. Topics range from integrated heat planning in the Netherlands to measuring the accessibility of cooling stations and urban heat hazard exposure in Kampala, Uganda. If you’re a registered conference participant, you can join in person or online. If you haven’t registered, we’re writing up the key takeaways and observations after the conference. Stay tuned!

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

 

Lize Swartz is a PhD researcher studying how changes in urban water availability affect human-water relations. She has co-authored a book called Bron on how residents of Cape Town navigated the near-collapse of the city’s water system. She has been editor of Bliss since 2017.

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