Lindsay Stringer shares with us her thoughts on emergency framing for climate, environment and livelihoods in the eleventh blog in this series based on the IGDC/YESI Webinar event ‘Emergencies, wellbeing and social justice in the Anthropocene.’
Lindsay’s research focuses on human-environment relationships, particularly the links between livelihoods and environmental change, and the practical and policy mechanisms that can advance sustainable development. Lindsay joined us in this webinar to discuss emergency framing for climate, environment and livelihoods.
The window for change is closing
I was involved in Working Group 2 for the most recent IPCC report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability focusing on impacts adaptation and vulnerability. Following the assessment of more than 34,000 published scientific papers, the report notes that “the science is clear: any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future”.
While the United Nations regularly talks about the Paris Agreement as recognizing the climate emergency, the Paris agreement text itself doesn’t seem to use those words.
The Emergency is climate change not what results from climate change
One of the only times ‘emergency’ is mentioned within the Paris Agreement is in the section on “cooperation and facilitation to enhance understanding, action and support”. Examples of those things include early warning systems and emergency preparedness alongside a number of other things.
This is quite a mixed message as it seems to imply that the word ‘emergency’ relates to the impacts of climate change; suggesting that emergencies are what happen after the climate hazard has hit, when people are left homeless or dead or without clean water or food and so on, rather than climate change itself being the emergency.
This seems to be common in a lot of environmental discourse more generally. We seem to want to focus on trying to deal with the immediate aftermath of a problem after it’s happened, even when we know it’s going to happen, rather than trying to deal with the drivers of the problem, and the problem itself.
Another good example of this is the current international decade of ecosystem restoration that was declared by the UN from 2020 to 2030. Restoration is necessary because we’ve messed up so many environmental processes and lost some of the benefits that ecosystems provide us with. However, that doesn’t really send the right message. By focusing on restoration, it could be argued that it provides a licence to continue degrading; ‘it’s all right, we can just restore it later, it’s a problem for the future, not a problem for now’.
In terms of how the framing of climate and environment challenges as emergencies might shift perceptions or alter current practices or policy responses, in some ways we’ve become immune to the strength of the word ‘emergency’. I usually think of urgent meaning that action is needed ‘now’ with an emergency requiring action being needed ‘now now’!
When local or city councils in the UK declare a climate emergency it can (but doesn’t always) support the release of new resources to support actions to address the emergency. Generally, when a Council uses those words ‘climate emergency’ they then have to set a future target date to reduce their local climate impacts. Commonly, that future time they select is 2030. They have to convene a working group to quickly report on the immediate and longer term actions they’re going to be taking. And they need to plan to engage with a cross-section of the community. The cynic in me thinks that’s what good future planning should look like anyway, so what actually is different, just because we’re calling it a climate emergency?
Everyone needs to act now
We often seem to focus on our small areas, our environments locally, without thinking about the interlinkages and relationships between environmental and biophysical processes that operate on a larger, even planetary, scale.
When it comes to climate, for example, for a number of people it’s only when it becomes personal that it matters: when you or your family are disrupted or affected by a climate hazard such as your house flooding, or your daily activities being disrupted by an extreme weather event, or food prices go up because of a drought. Often it’s only then that you really start to think about it as an emergency and you really start to feel it. Even then, you might still not change what you’re doing.
Those people who are more dependent on climate sensitive livelihoods to survive are living climate change every day. Most of these people are in developing countries, where adaptive capacity is lower so it’s harder to change what they’re doing, even if they wanted to, because their options are more limited. There’s an element of injustice there as well, which sees those people emitting the least being the most exposed and most sensitive to climate impacts.
Returning to the emergency framing: a planetary emergency requires everyone to act now to secure our future. At the moment we’re not seeing that urgency from our decision makers, and also as fellow humans we’re not empathising enough with those who are more regularly directly affected in the here and now. There’s an empathy we’re currently lacking.
Check out the full version of Lindsay’s talk:
About the author
Lindsay’s research focuses on human-environment relationships, particularly the links between livelihoods and environmental change, and the practical and policy mechanisms that can advance sustainable development.
Lindsay takes an interdisciplinary approach, grounded in systems thinking, using theories and both qualitative and quantitative methods from the natural and social sciences. Her systems focus helps to develop solutions to specific problems while recognising the complexity of the world’s sustainable development challenges and the trade-offs and opportunities created by change.
In 2017, Lindsay won a Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society, and in 2013, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for her work on environmental change and sustainable development in drylands. She was an IPCC lead author on the Special Report on Climate Change and Land, as well as on the most recent Working Group II Report: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.