Accumulation by adaptation

(Geography Compass 2024)

Accumulation by adaptation names the phenomenon by which political and economic elites profit from climate adaptation efforts. As with the notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ from which it derives, the term speaks to the injustice of capital accumulation—in this case, accumulation associated with configuring some groups' vulnerability to climate change as business opportunities. However, unlike accumulation by dispossession, the mechanisms by which accumulation by adaptation proceeds have not been adequately conceptualized. This review synthesizes critiques of Marx's formulation of primitive accumulation, recent scholarship on colonial racial capitalism, and critical adaptation studies to locate how capital circulates through and reproduces the violence of climate change.

Competing to adapt

(Development and Change 2023)

The imperative for vulnerable populations to adapt to greater environmental variability is increasing in lockstep with the onset of wide-ranging climate change impacts. However, while critical adaptation research emphasizes the necessity of addressing the underlying drivers of vulnerability to climate change, mainstream approaches to adaptation stress economic growth as a prerequisite for climate responses. Accordingly, capital-intensive adaptation measures promote competitiveness to spur economic growth in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, where more than 18 million people face environmental hazards such as seawater intrusion, flood, drought and cyclones. This study evaluates competitiveness as a mandate for effective climate change adaptation. It finds that adaptation can advance either competition or vulnerability reduction, but it cannot logically or pragmatically pursue both.

Run-of-the-river dams

(Environmental Management 2024)

The classification of a hydropower scheme as run-of-the-river (or run-of-river; ROR) evokes an image of a low-impact installation; however, examination of eight case studies worldwide shows that substantial negative societal and ecological impacts are tied to them, albeit in somewhat different ways. We conclude that ROR dams not only potentially displace communities, disrupt livelihoods, and degrade environments in surrounding areas, but they also divert water from areas of need, impact aquatic ecology through habitat destruction and disruption of fish migrations, emit non-trivial amounts of greenhouse gases over the lifespan of the project, and disrupt streamflow in downstream river sections. While these negative impacts vary on a case-by-case basis, medium and large ROR dams consistently have multiple and cumulative impacts, even when not having appreciable reservoirs. We contend that many impactful dams do not qualify as low-impact ROR projects, despite being defined as such. Such mislabeling is facilitated in part by the ambiguous definition of the term, which risks the ROR concept being used by proponents of impactful structures to downplay their negative effects and thus mislead the public or gain status, including within the Clean Development Mechanism in relation to mitigating climate change.

River borders and security

(Political Geography 2021)

Rivers have long been convenient yet troublesome borders. Inherently itinerant, rivers routinely defy cartographic depictions of borders as static, territorially bounded formations. Such dynamism poses material and conceptual challenges to state regulatory activities, resulting in increasingly heterodox attempts to fix water- bodies through various securitizing mechanisms. I examine the dialectical relationship between rivers and borders through the concept of the river-border complex. I ask how the Ganges River shapes the form and function of the Indo-Bangladeshi border and how, in turn, bordering practices in India regulate flows along the river, which comprises 129 km of India’s border with Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records, in-person interviews, and river data, I find that the border and efforts to secure it mediate many flows along the river. The study corroborates previous work within critical border studies that securitizing cross-border flows has the perverse effect of generating greater insecurity in adjoining countries. Crucially, historical analysis of sediment, information, and human flows reveals how international rivers also determine patterns and processes of circulation and thereby warrant reconceptualization as border infrastructures, rather than as merely being subject to them.

Slow infrastructural violence

(Edward Elgar Publishing 2021)

Infrastructure refers to the physical networks that facilitate long-distance communication, transportation, and energy transmission, to name a few. Due to the fact that these amenities have become essential to daily life, the full complement of their socio-ecological costs is neither captured in the price tags of infrastructure projects nor widely appreciated by the diverse publics that rely on networked services. Here, I argue that beyond the more visible and well-documented violence associated with infrastructural construction, abandonment, and deterioration, infrastructure also metes out gradual, accretive violence in the course of its normal functioning. As I illustrate through several examples of water infrastructure, violence is not incidental to infrastructure but intrinsic to it. This is lamentably the case because of the way that spatial, temporal, and social horizons are written into infrastructural designs. However, these same factors reveal opportunities for producing more egalitarian ecologies, thus pointing a way toward non-violent infrastructural relations.

Hydrocolonialism

(Water Alternatives 2021)

Transboundary water governance between the United States and Canada – ahistorically described as cooperative and harmonious – has been instrumental to Settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples around the Great Lakes. At Rainy Lake, on the border between the American state of Minnesota and the Canadian province of Ontario, transboundary water governance supported a binational, Settler colonial joint venture through which European-descended Settlers established themselves in this area. It allowed for the construction of hydroelectric dams that enabled industrial development but also damaged ecosystems and species on which local Ojibwe and Métis communities depended, particularly the lake's wild rice (Zizania palustris) stands. We reconceptualise transboundary water governance in the region by expanding the framework of hydrohegemony to include relations between Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Nations. By recognising Indigenous Nations and Settler colonial states as having equal status in political negotiations around the use of water, our analysis reveals negative hydro-hegemony between the United States and Canada on one side, and Indigenous Nations on the other. We advance hydrocolonialism as a framework for describing these relationships. Hydrocolonialism persists through the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous Nations from nation-to-nation diplomacy; this exclusion is particularly embedded in the functioning of the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty and the International Joint Commission which it established.

Development failures

(Annals of the American Association of Geographers 2020)

Long described as the “largest poorest” country, Bangladesh has been a prime target for massive infusions of foreign aid for decades. Through historical and ethnographic investigation, I document how flood control and agricultural intensification projects underwritten by foreign institutions exacerbate vulnerability to water crises in Bangladesh. These ostensibly pro-poor water governance and economic development programs engender cycles of crop loss, groundwater and soil salinization, reduced fisheries, and impeded navigation that erode agrarian livelihoods, thereby reproducing the conditions and rationale for continued flows of aid dollars into the country. Shifting attention away from depoliticized problems and solutions, I develop the concept of the interest-shed as a broadly applicable method for intervening in cycles of failure by examining the interests that they serve. This framework can also be used in the planning process by enabling differently situated groups to evaluate how proposed schemes include, ignore, or prioritize their interests.

Rivers in the Anthropocene

(Geopolitics 2017)

Excerpt: Biodiversity hotspots. Big bang. Keystone species. Anthropocene. The natural sciences are replete with terms that convey the significance of the referent object or event, and concepts so named often have political as well as scientific salience. The notion of biodiversity hotspots, for instance, has been employed in the designation and protection of critically threatened habitats containing high levels of endemism. In the case of the Anthropocene, this provisional epoch highlights the long-term impacts of human interference with global biogeochemical cycles, which underpin the viability of socio-ecological systems such as international rivers. The Anthropocene has already been invoked in proposals for large-scale geoengineering of the climate and enhanced policing against wildlife trafficking, for example. Might the boundary-transcending concept of the Anthropocene also inform the traditionally territorial issues of international river governance?

Water security

(Geography Review 2019)

Excerpt: Billions of people lack water security. The case studies discussed here show the importance of looking beyond immediate factors to understand and explain water insecurity. In some cases, like South Asia, relations between states sharing water resources may be a key factor, while in others, like South Africa, it may be necessary to consider dynamics even further afield to address why people lack something so abundant and essential as water.

Environmental geopolitics

(Territory, Politics, Governance 2022)

Although Japanese colonialism in Korea lasted less than half a century (1910–45), Korea served as a critical foothold for Japanese expansion into Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese Empire once encompassed a fifth of the globe, and its reach was just as contingent upon dominating marine environments as it was on land- based conquest. Reading Japanese colonialism as a volumetric undertaking, we examine colonial archives, whaling statistics and legal documents to understand how geopolitical ambitions shaped, and were shaped by, colonial whaling projects to dominate marine spaces around colonial Korea. Japanese whalers employed volumetric techniques to control voluminal marine space and its constitutive elements – including whales – and to satisfy the political and economic needs of colonial and later wartime Japan. However, while Imperial Japan’s extensive subordination of marine space has earned it the moniker of a ‘pelagic empire’, we fnd its territorialization was always partial and incomplete, impeded as it was by material realities. Our analysis of Japanese colonial whaling demonstrates how the ongoing process of (re)making marine territory is intertwined with, and reliant upon, terrestrial and aerial volumes.

Post-treaty water conflict

(South Asia Journal 2012)

Fifty-four rivers traverse the border between India and Bangladesh. As such, these countries occupy a central position in the globally-critical discourse of international water governance and related issues, including global economic security, environmental migration, and natural hazards management. In particular, the Ganges River directly impacts the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people and has been a focal point of Indo-Bangladeshi relations since Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan in 1971. After twenty-five years of frustrated negotiations, India and Bangladesh finally brokered a long-term agreement over the shared management and equitable distribution of the Ganges. However, a close reading of the treaty reveals negative hydro-hegemony, as evidenced by stipulations regarding the timing of water release to Bangladesh and the geographic scope of the agreement. The present analysis then extends beyond the scale of the nation-state to consider supranational and domestic drivers of vulnerability to shifts in water availability.

Climate displacement

(Annals of the American Association of Geographers 2022)

Climate-induced displacement is attracting increasing media, state, and scholarly attention, albeit often in a way that situates migration as either an example of climate adaptation or a failure thereof. Whether depicted as success or failure, both framings can invisibilize the preexisting socioenvironmental processes that render climate-induced migrations necessary—or, conversely, that can inhibit them entirely. Perspectives on displacement and environmental migration from within political ecology and human geography offer an alternative register, looking beyond unidirectional socioeconomic or environmental drivers to document how uneven development reproduces displacements relationally and historically. Drawing on these theorizations, as well as empirical research from agrarian Southeast Asia, this article develops the notion of cumulative socionatural displacements as one approach for conceptualizing socioecologically driven displacement in a world already on the move. We demonstrate this approach through an analysis of displacement in Southeast Asia that begins by tracing the evolving state, market, and agroecological relations that have made mobility integral to agrarian viability while setting the stage for more intense climate impacts. In doing so, we also center the long-term (nonclimatic) environmental changes that are often sidelined in both anthropocentric debates on rural displacements and climate doomsday scenarios. We argue that examining climate-induced migration as just one facet of cumulative socionatural displacements is necessary for overcoming the ontological and political impasses engendered by prevailing narratives that collapse climate migration into convenient but misleading binaries.

Weaponizing vulnerability to climate change

(Global Environmental Change 2019)

As scores of climate change adaptation measures are implemented around the world, there have been growing calls among academics and practitioners to also address the processes that underpin human vulnerability to climate change. However, there is mounting evidence that adaptation and vulnerability are linked, such that ostensibly adaptive responses can have negative consequences and augment people’s vulnerability. We analyzed several climate change responses at various scales and developed a typology of five discrete but related modes by which the vulnerability of already vulnerable populations is being [re]produced. Crucially, this work suggests that for at least one of these modes, the vulnerability of other groups is perversely inverted, such that relatively secure populations perceive themselves to be at risk. The cases we present illustrate that people’s vulnerability is being used against them, or put another way, is being weaponized―exacerbating their precarity by excluding them from much needed and due assistance, while directing resources instead to bolstering the well-being of those already well-positioned to respond to climate threats. Our typology provides a theoretical intervention by illustrating how climate vulnerability and security are co-produced, as well as a practical tool to help decision makers to adopt more just and equitable climate policies.

Uneven vulnerability to climate change

(WIREs Climate Change 2019)

The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world exemplify the uneven impacts of climate change on populations, even within relatively small geographic regions. Differential human vulnerability to environmental hazards results from a range of social, economic, historical, and political factors, all of which operate at multiple scales. While adaptation to climate change has been the dominant focus of policy and research agendas, it is essential to ask as well why some communities and peoples are disproportionately exposed to and affected by climate threats. The cases and synthesis presented here are organized around four key themes (resource access, governance, culture, and knowledge), which we approach from four social science fields (cultural anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and sociology). Social scientific approaches to human vulnerability draw vital attention to the root causes of climate change threats and the reasons that people are forced to adapt to them. Because vulnerability is a multidimensional process rather than an unchanging state, a dynamic social approach to vulnerability is most likely to improve mitigation and adaptation planning efforts.

Hazards mitigation targets

(Climate and Development 2020)

Large-scale water management systems were introduced to the Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mekong Deltas in the latter half of the twentieth century to manage extreme water hazards and increase food production. However, these systems significantly altered their respective hydrological regimes, often creating worse socio-ecological conditions and greater vulnerability to floods and seawater intrusion than existed previously. Despite this history of disaster experience, climate change adaptation measures in the Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mekong Deltas use contemporary socio-ecological conditions as the baseline for disaster mitigation efforts. Paradoxically relying on old approaches to address future climate threats, disaster planners overlook how current conditions in both deltas are unstable outcomes of historical processes. These cases illustrate that large-scale and capital-intensive climate responses may fail to measurably reduce disaster risk. The concept of shifting baselines, borrowed from fisheries science, becomes helpful for selecting more appropriate reference points for disaster mitigation than current conditions.

Climate reductionism

(Environmental Scientist 2019)

Excerpt: Climate reductionism is characterised by simplifying complex systems such that climate is given primacy as the only or most relevant explanatory variable for understanding system behaviour and response. Thus, reductive approaches emphasise climate to the exclusion of a host of other factors that influence socio-ecological change. In large part due to the wide circulation of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and heightened media coverage of the topic, climate change has become the ‘master concept’ for analysing and addressing global environmental change. Alertness to the phenomenon of climate reductionism becomes helpful for interpreting statements such as the one that opens this article. It invites us to consider whether sea-level rise is really the sole, or even the most important, factor driving demographic and environmental change in mega-deltas such as those in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Population connectivity

(Marine Ecology Progress Series 2009)

Population connectivity plays significant roles on both evolutionary and ecological time-scales; however, quantifying the magnitude and pattern of exchange between populations of marine organisms is hindered by the difficulty of tracking the trajectory and fate of propagules. We explored biophysical correlates of population substructure to determine how well pelagic larval duration (PLD) correlates with population genetic estimates of connectivity in a sample of 300 published studies drawn pseudo-randomly from about 1600 hits on electronic searches. In direct contrast to the general expectation of a strong correlation, we find that average PLD is poorly correlated (r^2 < 0.1) with genetic structure (FST). Furthermore, even this weak correlation is anchored by non-pelagic dispersal, because removal of the zero PLD class (direct developers) from the analysis resulted in a non-significant relationship between FST and PLD. ... Our meta-analysis refutes recent reviews and conventional wisdom that PLD is a good predictor of the magnitude of gene flow and geographic scale of population structure in marine systems.

Marine debris

(mSystems 2016)

Excerpt: Marine plastic debris is a growing concern that has captured the general public’s attention. While the negative impacts of plastic debris on oceanic macrobiota, including mammals and birds, are well documented, little is known about its influence on smaller marine residents, including microbes that have key roles in ocean biogeochemistry. Our work provides a new perspective on microbial communities inhabiting microplastics that includes its effect on microbial biogeochemical activities and a description of the cross-domain communities inhabiting plastic particles. This study is among the first molecular ecology, plastic debris biota surveys in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. It has identified fundamental differences in the functional potential and taxonomic composition of plastic-associated microbes versus planktonic microbes found in the surrounding open-ocean habitat.

Biophysical oceanography

(Continental Shelf Research 2007)

Sea breezes often have significant impacts on nearshore physical and biological processes. We document the effects of a diurnal sea breeze on the nearshore thermal structure and circulation of northern Monterey Bay, California, using an array of moorings during the summer upwelling season in 2006. ... Examination of tidal, current, temperature, and wind records revealed that the observed temperature fluctuations were the result of local diurnal upwelling, and not a result of nearshore mixing events. Westerly diurnal sea breezes led to offshore Ekman transport of surface waters. Resulting currents in the upper mixed layer were up to 0.10m/s directed offshore during the afternoon upwelling period. Surface water temperatures rapidly decreased in response to offshore advection of surface waters and upwelling of cold, subsurface water, despite occurring in the mid-afternoon during the period of highest solar heat flux. Surface waters then warmed again during the night and early morning as winds relaxed and the upwelling shadow moved back to shore due to an unbalanced onshore pressure gradient.

Marine evolution

(Geobiology 2007)

The earliest record of animals (Metazoa) consists of trace and body fossils restricted to the last 35 Myr of the Precambrian. It has been proposed that animals arose much earlier and underwent significant evolution as a cryptic fauna; however, the need for any unrecorded prelude of significant duration has been disputed. In this context, we consider recent published research on the nature and chronology of the earliest fossil record of metazoans and on the molecular-based analysis that yielded older dates for the appearance of major animal groups. We review recent work on the climatic, geochemical, and ecological events that preceded animal fossils and consider their portent for metazoan evolution. We also discuss inferences about the physiology and gene content of the last common ancestor of animals and their closest unicellular relatives. We propose that the recorded Precambrian evolution of animals includes three intervals of advancement that begin with sponge-grade organisms, and that any preceding cryptic fauna would be no more complex than sponges.