From environmental to climate justice: social-environmental expulsions and the emergence of a climate edge in Europe

ABSTRACT

This paper builds on a recent strand of critical social theory – Sassen’s [Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Harvard University Press; At the systemic edge. Cultural Dynamics, 27(1), 173–181] expulsions and systemic edge perspective – to argue that a sociological theory of climate change needs to start from the critical sites where change takes place. To this end, we propose the concept of climate edge as the intersection of accelerating environmental injustices and future climate change vulnerabilities. We use data from the Environmental Justice Atlas and the Climate Adapt platform to select 17 cases that approximate, to various degrees, the climate edge concept. We conclude that these sites deserve closer attention as they signal the transformative potential of long expulsion chains that may define the characteristics of future climate-related conflicts. The climate edge is simultaneously a site of social struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Expulsions
• climate edge
• extreme energy projects
• climate vulnerability
• Europe
• Environmental Justice Atlas

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the developers and contributors of the Environmental Justice Atlas.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Available at: https://ejatlas.org/.

2 The platform is not available anymore as of March 2020.

3 https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=0eb02ab01ca04bffbd1901a33722eefe.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant of Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-2260, within PNCDI III.

Notes on contributors

Filip Alexandrescu

Filip Alexandrescu is a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Quality of Life (RIQL), Romanian Academy. He is the principal investigator of the Cathartic project, which applies an environmental justice approach to climate change adaptation challenges facing Roma communities in Romania. He has published environmental and urban sociological research in Organization and environment, cities, history of the human sciences and Land use policy. He is interested in research that connects lived experiences of environmental transformations with political economic processes through actor-network, fractal or spatial theories.

Ionuț Anghel

Ionuț-Marian Anghel is a researcher at the Research Institute for Quality of Life (RIQL), Romanian Academy. His main areas of interest include racial and ethnicity studies, governance studies in European Union, governmentality studies, social movements and social policies. His most recent publications: Anghel, I. (2018). Romania's perennial ‘outsiders’. From a foreign non-European minority to intra-EU displacements. An exploration of Roma’s perpetual socio-economic and symbolic exclusion. Journal of Community Positive Practices, XVIII(4), 3–18 and Anghel, I.-M. (2019). ‘It’s in their blood’. The securitization of roma westward migration in Europe. Quality of Life, XXX(2), 146–161.

Simona Stănescu

Simona Maria Stănescu is a sociologist and senior researcher at the Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy. Simona is the author of two books: ‘The welfare state between survival, reform and European integration’ (Dimitrie Gusti award for sociology of the Romanian Academy) and ‘Social Protection in the European Union: A Comparative Analysis’ (2015). Her research interests include the welfare state, social assistance, social economy, the Roma minority, and vulnerable groups.

Lucrina Ștefănescu

Lucrina Ştefănescu is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her fields of research include environmental risk management, environmental impact of anthropogenic activities, natural hazards and risks, with a focus on risk communication as a very important stage in risk management. She is the principal investigator of the ERMINA project, dealing with the communication of environmental risks induced by mining activities. Her most relevant scientific results were published in journals such as Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Environmental Science and Policy, Land Use Policy, Sustainability and Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

Alina Pop

Alina Pop is Senior Lecturer in Communication Psychology at the “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University of Bucharest, Romania. She holds a PhD in Social representations and Communication from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. Her research interest focuses on the construction and communication of social representations in conflict situations and the role of social representations in coping with social and environmental conflicts.