Pacific Climate Cultures


Book Description

This edited volume examines the opportunities to think, do, and/or create jointly afforded by digital storytelling. The contributors discuss digital storytelling in the context of educational programs, teaching anthropology, and ethnographic researc




Climate Change and Impacts in the Pacific


Book Description

This edited volume addresses the impacts of climate change on Pacific islands, and presents databases and indexes for assessing and adapting to island vulnerabilities. By analyzing susceptibility variables, developing comprehensive vulnerability indexes, and applying GIS techniques, the book's authors demonstrate the particular issues presented by climate change in the islands of the Pacific region, and how these issues may be managed to preserve and improve biodiversity and human livelihoods. The book first introduces the issues specific to island communities, such as high emissions impacts, and discusses the importance of the lithological traits of Pacific islands and how these physical factors relate to climate change impacts. From here, the book aims to analyze the various vulnerabilities of different island sectors, and to formulate a susceptibility index from these variables to be used by government and planning agencies for relief prioritization. Such variables include tropical cyclones, built infrastructures, proximity to coastal areas, agriculture, fisheries and marine resources, groundwater availability, biodiversity, and economic impacts on industries such as tourism. Through the categorization and indexing of these variables, human and physical adaptation measures are proposed, and support solutions are offered to aid the inhabitants of affected island countries. This book is intended for policy makers, academics, and climate change researchers, particularly those dealing with climate change impacts on small islands.




Foreign to Familiar: A Guide to Understanding Hot - And Cold - Climate Cultures


Book Description

Foreign to Familiar is a splendidly written, well-researched work on cultures. Anyone traveling abroad should not leave home without this valuable resource! I highly recommend it as required reading for cross-cultural workers. Sarah Lanier's love and sensitivity for people of all nations will touch your heart. This book creates within us a greater appreciation for our extended families around the world and an increased desire to better serve them. - Dr. Kingsley A. Fletcher President, Hope for Africa, Inc. [on back cover].




Weathered


Book Description

Climate is an enduring idea of the human mind and also a powerful one. Today, the idea of climate is most commonly associated with the discourse of climate-change and its scientific, political, economic, social, religious and ethical dimensions. However, to understand adequately the cultural politics of climate-change it is important to establish the different origins of the idea of climate itself and the range of historical, political and cultural work that the idea of climate accomplishes. In Weathered: Cultures of Climate, distinguished professor Mike Hulme opens up the many ways in which the idea of climate is given shape and meaning in different human cultures – how climates are historicized, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, re-designed.




Loss and Damage from Climate Change


Book Description

This book provides an authoritative insight on the Loss and Damage discourse by highlighting state-of-the-art research and policy linked to this discourse and articulating its multiple concepts, principles and methods. Written by leading researchers and practitioners, it identifies practical and evidence-based policy options to inform the discourse and climate negotiations. With climate-related risks on the rise and impacts being felt around the globe has come the recognition that climate mitigation and adaptation may not be enough to manage the effects from anthropogenic climate change. This recognition led to the creation of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage in 2013, a climate policy mechanism dedicated to dealing with climate-related effects in highly vulnerable countries that face severe constraints and limits to adaptation. Endorsed in 2015 by the Paris Agreement and effectively considered a third pillar of international climate policy, debate and research on Loss and Damage continues to gain enormous traction. Yet, concepts, methods and tools as well as directions for policy and implementation have remained contested and vague. Suitable for researchers, policy-advisors, practitioners and the interested public, the book furthermore: • discusses the political, legal, economic and institutional dimensions of the issue• highlights normative questions central to the discourse • provides a focus on climate risks and climate risk management. • presents salient case studies from around the world.




Pacific Climate Cultures


Book Description

Low-lying Pacific island nations are experiencing the frontline of sea-level rises and climate change and are responding creatively and making-sense in their own vernacular terms. Pacific Climate Cultures aims to bring Oceanic philosophies to the frontline of social science theorization. It explores the home-grown ways that 'climate change' becomes absorbed into the combined effects of globalization and into a living nexus of relations amongst human and non-humans, spirits and elements. Contributors to this edited volume explore diverse examples of living climate change--from floods and cyclones, through song and navigation, to new forms of art, community initiatives and cultural appropriations--and demonstrate their international relevance in understanding climate change. A Prelude by His Highness Tui Atua Efi and Afterword by Anne Salmond frame an Introduction by Tony Crook & Peter Rudiak-Gould and nine chapters by contributors including John Connell, Elfriede Hermann & Wolfgang Kempf and Cecilie Rubow. Endorsement from Professor Margaret Jolly, Australian National University: This exciting volume offers innovative insights on climate cultures across Oceania. It critically interrogates Western environmental sciences which fail to fully appreciate Oceanic knowledges and practices. It reveals how climate science can be both 'a weapon of the weak' and 'an act of symbolic violence of the powerful'. A compelling series of studies in the Cook islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Samoa suggest not diverse cultural constructions of 'natural facts' but processes of knowledge exchange and at best a respectful reciprocity in confronting present challenges and disturbing future scenarios. 'Home-grown' Pacific discourses and ways of living emphasise the interconnections of all life on earth and in our cosmos; they do not differentiate between the natural and the moral, between environmental and cultural transformations. These studies evoke the creative agency of Oceanic peoples, too often seen as on the vanguard of victimhood in global representations of climate change, and offer distinctive visions for all humanity in these troubling times.




Combatting Climate Change in the Pacific


Book Description

This book analyses the regional complexes of climate security in the Pacific. Pacific Island States and Territories (PICTs) have long been cast as the frontline of climate change and placed within the grand architecture of global climate governance. The region provides compelling new insights into the ways climate change is constructed, governed, and shaped by (and in turn shapes), regional and global climate politics. By focusing on climate security as it is constructed in the Pacific and how this concept mobilises resources and shapes the implementation of climate finance, the book provides an up-to-date account of the way regional organizations in the Pacific have contributed to the search for solutions to the problem of climate insecurity. In the context of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris in 2015, the focus of this book on regional governance offers a concise and innovative account of climate politics in the prevailing global context and one with implications for the study of climate security in other regions, particularly in the developing world.




Environmental Law and Governance in the Pacific


Book Description

This volume examines environmental law and governance in the Pacific, focussing on the emerging challenges this region faces. Fourteen Pacific Island countries, and a broad range of themes, such as deep-sea mining, fisheries, protected areas, heritage, endangered species, human rights and access to justice, are addressed in the volume.




Managing Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific Region


Book Description

This book presents papers written by scholars, practitioners, and members of social movements and government agencies pursuing research and/or climate change projects in the Pacific region. Climate change is impacting the Pacific in various ways, including numerous negative effects on the natural environment and biodiversity. As such, a better understanding of how climate change affects Pacific communities is required, in order to identify processes, methods, and tools that can help countries and the communities in the region to adapt and become more resilient. Further, the book showcases successful examples of how to cope with the social, economic, and political problems posed by climate change in the region.




The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change


Book Description

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.