The politics of 21^st century environmental disasters

ABSTRACT

We outline the main concerns for grappling with increasing environmental disasters in this Symposium. Our focus is threefold: first, to theoretically investigate what constitutes an environmental disaster and identify the parameters for political responses through the discourse in high level multilateral fora; through the construction of the sovereign state system; and through the promotion of ignorance. Second, we aim to identify contemporary practices of the state that exacerbate the impact of, and responses to, environmental disasters. We show how states promote extractivism based on limited understandings of nature drawn from Western political liberal philosophy. Finally, we highlight the strengths and weaknesses in political and institutional responses at the local level to such disasters by state and non-state actors. This shows how both slow and fast violence of environmental disasters affects communities, but also how vulnerable subjects are predicated on pre-existing capabilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental disasters
• extractivism
• states
• institutions

Introduction

We are at a critical juncture in human history. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report states that it is ‘unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land,’ and that the ‘scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years’ (2021, p. 9). We know this has led to an increase in average surface temperature, sea level rise, and melting glaciers. It has also directly contributed to ‘many weather and climate extremes in every region of the globe.’ Scientific knowledge for attributing change to human activity has strengthened in relation to ‘observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones.’ Human influence ‘has likely increased the chance of extreme compound events since the 1950s’ such as ‘concurrent heatwaves and droughts, fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents, and compound flooding in some locations’ (IPCC 2021, pp. 10–11; emphasis added). Not only are we changing the climate, but human activity is also changing the rate and type of environmental disasters.

Environmental disasters are a ‘serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic, and environmental losses and impacts’ (UNISDR 2017). In April 2021 we reached the tipping point of more than 420 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which scientists identify as ‘half-way to doubling point’ of pre-industrial levels (Cappucci and Samnow 2021). Doubling CO2 in the atmosphere is likely to lead to a warming of between 2.3 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. Despite a dramatic decline of CO2 emissions during the global pandemic in 2020, a rebounding of economic activity and a failure of clean energy policies has led to resurgent CO2 emissions (International Energy Agency (IEA) 2021). The current trajectory demonstrates that action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, primarily CO2, but also methane and nitrous oxide, is not happening fast enough to limit catastrophic climate change. This is contributing to feedback effects on other earth systems including two extensive ice melts in late July 2021 of the Greenland Ice Sheet, with more melting expected (Scambos et al. 2021). It is also having a multiplier effect on environmental disasters (UNDRR 2019, p. 134). Environmental disasters are recognised as affecting those least likely to be able to withstand them: the vulnerable, and lowest income communities and households in middle and low-income countries. (Park, this issue).

To date, the focus on environmental disasters has been on isolated events. In the northern hemisphere summer in 2021, sudden and unexpected floods in Northern Germany resulted from extreme precipitation; a heat dome over North America caused record-breaking temperatures; and a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti in August. Not all environmental disasters are human induced. But they are often exacerbated by the complex inter-relationship between hazards and vulnerabilities, with changing earth systems likely to alter our ability to predict their likelihood (Park, this issue). In response to specific environmental disasters like the global COVID19 pandemic, political leaders scramble to respond immediately, often as though these are exogenous events that interrupt normal activities. Yet, as the IPCC report demonstrates, extreme precipitation and heatwaves are not only on the increase, but they are also becoming more intense, more widespread, and are part of ongoing alterations in Earth systems the effects of which we are unsure (Lenton et al. 2019, pp. 592–3). Climate change interacts with the other earth systems: it is one of many drivers that exacerbates habitat loss and species extinction (IPBES 2019, p. 11), which in turn increases the likelihood of the spread of zoonotic diseases and human pandemics, while also increasingly impacting on long term human development outcomes.

This Symposium is not primarily focused on climate change although its hand in environmental disasters is increasingly visible. It seeks to shine the light on political actors and institutions in terms of how they respond to environmental disasters at different scales. We can analyse how political actors frame the accumulation of knowledge and responses to these changes in the earth’s systems at the international, national, and local levels. While states try to lock in international agreements to curb emissions through the UNFCCC, various political actors are responding to environmental disasters at the national level through regulations, policies, and action plans, and at the local level where communities must mediate with government and non-government actors such as (multinational) corporations to prevent or mitigate disaster. The symposium seeks to critically examine how actors engage politically with each other and with(in) institutions to address disasters.

The articles in this Symposium examine political responses to environmental disasters according to different scales, timeframes, probabilities, and impacts. Political actors help frame what constitutes the disaster and how it ought to be addressed. This is important because many environmental problems are not decomposable, yet they are often treated as such. Evaluating how actors identify the problem shapes what is and is not addressed. This takes place at all scales. Both the global and the local are important for three reasons: first, because earth systems trends are no longer the background for environmental disasters but actively contribute to them. Clearly some environmental disasters, like floods, heatwaves, and fires must be addressed by the communities affected. But they are increasingly occurring everywhere. We cannot be blind to these trends. Second, because political communities are arranged into units such as sovereign states that delimit what responses to environmental disasters are possible. At the local level this may shape how the problem is mediated through national institutions such as laws, governing bodies, and culture. Finally, because the impact of environmental disasters is felt locally: Communities must respond to wildfire, plagues, and drought. They must also engage with institutions and actors to prevent environmental disasters and manage their ongoing harms, from preventing drilling for fossil fuels, to industrial leaks, oil spills, and mining waste.

The Symposium therefore has three key issues that it seeks to address:

1. to theoretically interrogate our understanding of what constitutes an environmental disaster and identify the parameters for political responses.

2. to identify contemporary practices of the state that exacerbate the impact of, and responses to, environmental disasters.

3. to highlight the strengths and weaknesses in political and institutional responses at the local level to such disasters by state and non-state actors.

In addressing the first issue, the collection provides insight into how different theoretical approaches and concepts can be used to reveal how environmental disasters are understood and what alternative ways of thinking have been overlooked. This means that we can identify how the international framing of responses to environmental disasters contributes to how it has thus far been sidelined in terms of the action required to address environmental disasters. In the first article, I use a constructivist lens to examine how the structure of the sovereign state system limits its ability to address fast moving, systemic, and potentially irreversible change that is increasingly occurring in unanticipated ways. This is because sovereign states have advanced environmental disasters as an external risk to be reduced, outside their collective contribution to both hazards and vulnerabilities. States are autonomous actors with political authority and territorial autonomy, which enables them to extract natural resources for production and destruction. Their behaviour collectively constitutes the international system, and in turn are constituted by it. By ignoring the role of states in contributing to the conditions that enable environmental disasters, they limit the ability to effectively govern increasingly unknowable and cascading environmental disasters.

Contributors to this Symposium move beyond this to identify ways of acting and thinking. Sabine Selchow aims to align the governance of disasters to correspond to a cosmopolitised reality, which is distinctly integrated but also distinctly uncertain. Through a discourse analysis of the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) 2019 Global Assessment Report (GAR), she shows openings within the web of meaning of how disasters are governed that recognise how we are all linked within the global political economy, despite our separate political communities. Specifically, she examines how the 2019 GAR invokes the concept of systemic risk, which provides a vehicle for incorporating a broader understanding of ‘planetary disaster’ for how to think about and therefore govern disasters. Using Ulrich Beck’s concept of reflexive modernisation, Selchow demonstrates how systemic risk as a concept highlights how containerised national level decision making around techno-industrial political and economic decisions are reflexively undermined when one brings in concerns for those affected beyond the state, and far into the future, such as those not yet born. The UNDRR as an institution is open and flexible such that an opening for the concept of planetary disasters is possible, which would better reflect a comopolitised reality.

Of course, how disasters are constituted through discourse and framing by states is not the only way to understand our impact on the environment and therefore what ought to be done to mitigate it. Rebecca Lawrence examines how ignorance can be actively produced when assessing the impact of uranium mining. In investigating the prospect of rehabilitating the just closed Ranger Mine in the Northern Territory of Australia in 2021, Lawrence shows how particular scientific knowledge is prioritised to make the process manageable, despite over 1000 leaks from the mine into the waterways and groundwater of a tropical monsoonal environment. This creates uncomfortable knowledge about the toxicity of the mine and the prospect of containing contamination. The ignorance of the entirety of the environmental disaster is actively produced both in terms of acknowledging the immediate impacts of the mine but also its effects deep into the future by the mining corporation, the government regulators, and even the environmental NGOs pushing for rehabilitation in the knowledge that this may not be possible.

The second aim of the Symposium is to investigate contemporary practices of the state that exacerbate the impact of, and responses to, environmental disasters. In other words, it examines different blinkered lenses and limitations in the organisation of the state. The state’s complicity in human induced environmental disasters highlights the ways in which energy systems and use are geared towards understanding nature as a resource to be exploited. Christine Winter argues that environmental disasters are unsurprising because they result from an underdeveloped Western liberal philosophy. Drawing on John Locke’s understanding of persons with private property and possessions being united with government to create a political community, nature has been understood by the West as something to exploit and improve. Governments extended this principle throughout the world through colonisation. Analysing the High Court challenge to deep sea oil drilling off the coast of New Zealand, Winter uncovers how the government, through carving up separate Departments of Energy from Environment, effectively enable the promotion of environmental disasters while refusing to acknowledge the Maori Te Whānau-ā-Apanui’s (Apanui) people’s spiritual values in protecting the water, vegetation, and animals of the ocean and sea floor. While the project never came to fruition, it demonstrated the difficulty of the Apanui to challenge the state’s drive for exploitation, making potential disasters near a volcano unsurprising.

Third, the Symposium analyses community responses to environmental disasters and how this challenges states’ political institutions. As noted, Christine Winter exposes the weaknesses of the New Zealand legal apparatus in ignoring the Maori cosmology connecting people to land and place, which facilitates the potential for environmental disasters in seismic areas. Teresa Kramarz looks across and within states to argue that extractivist disasters, such as those already mentioned, affect the ability of communities in project areas and disaster zones to resist. She argues that we should consider how the temporal dimension of a disaster affects groups, but also to consider the agency of a community in terms of its ability to respond. For example, research into slow violence highlights how community capacity is significantly affected by ongoing exposure to hazards, making groups more vulnerable. Kramarz compares this to fast violence such as the BP oil spill off the coast of Florida, where the immediate impact led to swift responses. Depending on the extent of the disaster and the response, fast occurring disasters can then shift to become slow violence. But we also need to examine communities’ capacity to respond to such events. Looking at the vulnerability of the community before a disaster also provides insight into its capacity to react. Here vulnerable subjects may be the very ones we expect: poor, racialized communities in high-risk areas in developing states. But they may also be middle-class communities in industrialized states without the capacity to challenge the perpetrators of slow violence. Kramarz provides a typology of social vulnerability through which we can analyse the capacity of vulnerable subjects to react to environmental disasters.

The 21^st century will be more disaster prone. More extreme weather events are likely. Our consumption and production patterns are changing the earth systems (Wiedmann et al. 2020, p. 4). Internationally, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action for states to grapple with these environment and development challenges to enable us to live within the Earth’s carrying capacity. Multilateral environmental agreements, like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Sendai framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, require real commitments from states. Meanwhile, an increasing number of environmental defenders are being killed every week for protecting their land and livelihoods against the very extractivism that contributes to environmental disasters (Butt et al. 2019, p. 744). Environmental disasters are an environmental issue, a political economy issue, a human rights issue, and a security issue (Scheidel et al. 2020, Johnson et al. 2021). The politics of 21^st century environmental disasters must incorporate the earth’s feedback effects into any and all future decision-making.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Sydney.