Subaltern learnings: climate resilience and human security in the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

The United Nations’ invocation of ‘human security’ a generation ago promised a world increasingly governed by a ‘people-centred’ security agenda. In this paper we focus on arguably the most vital global security challenge faced throughout the planet today: climate resilience. We outline how advancing smart climate action and securing climate resilience can be aided by securitization practices that recall the earlier emphases of the United Nations’ human security concept. The paper draws upon evidence from the Caribbean as a territory defined dominantly as part of the Global South, yet offering vital knowledge of productive climate security governance that can be instructive to the Global North. The impacts of global warming are particularly evident for the people of small island developing states such as those located in the Caribbean. By analysing the case of Cuba as a country increasingly resilient to extreme weather events, and by interrogating the genealogy of the broader Caribbean’s hurricane culture, we show how an effective human security vision for climate justice and resilience can be achieved by recognizing and integrating the valuable forms of locally attuned knowledge that continue to emerge and coalesce in vulnerable geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• climate resilience
• human security
• climate justice
• Cuba
• Caribbean

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The seven distinct components of human security identified were: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (UNDP, 1994).

2 For an extended discussion on the genealogy, challenges and uses of the concept, see Morrissey (2020).

3 Extant research projects that global warming in the Atlantic basin over the 21st century will lead to the mean intensity of tropical storms increasing (Bhatia et al., 2018; Knutson et al., 2013).

4 The Caribbean Risk Management Initiative is an umbrella programme launched in 2004 by UNDP as a knowledge network for the management of climate-related risks across the region. Participant countries include: Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Belize, and Haiti (Pallen, 2008).

5 The countries included in this study were: Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago.

6 The term ‘extractivism’ is used to name extractive capitalism in the Americas. It is an economic system based on expropriation and the intensive exploitation of environments as part of colonial and neo-colonial projects (Gómez-Barris, 2017).

7 This is the second highest number of deaths during a hurricane in Cuba in the 21st century after Hurricane Dennis killed 16 people in 2005 (Beven, 2005, p. 4).

8 On the fascinating life of Viñes, see Ramos Guadalupe (2014).

9 Translated from Viñes (1875, p. 1).

10 The diachronic analysis here of Cuba’s hurricane culture does not seek to establish any simplistic, hereditary line between the Taínos, Viñes and contemporary Cuban meteorological expertise, but rather envisages a coalescing of effective extreme weather management practices that emerged from overlapping historical environmental knowledges.

11 As Lizarralde et al. (2014, p. 89) note, Cuba’s ‘culture of safety’ emerged from a vision of activated social capital in which meteorologists’ expertise is coalesced into ‘a social fabric that includes an integrated institutional system and education and health-care systems that emphasise knowledge development’.

12 The UN has specified that ‘designations “developing”, “in transition”, and “developed” are intended for statistical convenience and do not necessarily express a judgement about the stage reached by a particular country or area in the development process’ (UNCTAD, 2019, n.p.). However, discursively, these terms transcend the statistical arena and normalize and reify Othering.