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71 results in Climate and Sustainability Elements

Page 1 of 4

Planning, Urban Design, and Architecture for Climate Action

Planning, Urban Design, and Architecture for Climate Action
‘Alaska’ is Not a Blank Space

‘Alaska’ is Not a Blank Space
  • Unsettling Aldo Leopold's Odyssey
  • Julianne Warren
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • This Element supports Gwich'in, Iñupiat, and all Alaska Natives' collective continuance and reparative justice from the perspective of a settler in the traditional territories of lower Tanana Dene Peoples. It stands with Alaska Natives' recovering and safe-keeping: kinships obstructed by settler-colonialism; ontologies and languages inseparable from land-relations and incommensurable with English-language perspectives; and epistemologies not beholden to any colonialist standard. These rights and responsibilities clash with Leopoldian conservation narratives still shaping mind-sets and institutions that eliminate Indigenous Peoples by telling bad history and by presuming entitlements to lands and norm-making authority. It models an interlocking method and methodology – surfacing white supremacist settler-colonialist assumptions and structures of Leopoldian conservation narratives – that may be adapted to critique other problematic legacies. It offers a pra xis of anti-colonialist, anti-racist, liberatory environmental-narrative critical-assessment centering Indigenous experts and values, including consent, diplomacy, and intergenerational respect needed for stable coalitions-making for climate and environmental justice.
Justice for Resilient Development in Climate-Stressed Cities

Justice for Resilient Development in Climate-Stressed Cities
  • Diana Reckien, Sirkku Juhola, Anika Nasra Haque, Heba Allah Khalil, Maria Fernanda Lemos, Shuaib Lwasa, Leila Niamir, Juan Camilo Osorio, Cristina Visconti, William Solecki, Minal Pathak, Martha Barata, Aliyu Salisu Barau, Maria Dombrov, Cynthia Rosenzweig
  • Published online:
    12 June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 July 2025
    • Element
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  • Climate impacts and risk, within and across cities, are distributed highly unequally. Cities located in low latitudes are more vulnerable to climate risk and impacts than in high latitudes, due to the large proportion of informal settlements relative to the housing stock and more frequent extremes. According to EM-DAT, about 60% of environmental disasters in cities relate to riverine floods. Riverine floods and heatwaves cause about 33% of deaths in cities. However, cold-waves and droughts impact most people in cities (42% and 39% of all people, respectively). Human vulnerability intersects with hazardous, underserved communities. Frequently affected groups include women, single parents, and low-income elderly. Responses to climatic events are conditioned by the informality of social fabric and institutions, and by inequitable distribution of impacts, decision-making, and outcomes. To ensure climate-resilient development, adaptation and mitigation actions must include the broader urban context of informality and equity and justice principles. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Descartes and the Non-Human

Descartes and the Non-Human
  • Emma Gilby
  • Published online:
    02 May 2025
    Print publication:
    29 May 2025
  • Descartes features heavily in ecocritical literature. He is often said to dismiss the non-human world as irrelevant and inanimate, and to espouse a harmfully instrumental attitude towards it. This Element goes into detail on the standard picture in circulation, while also outlining an alternative approach that it terms 'ecohistorical'. It aims to offer insights into the seventeenth-century context; and to explain in clear terms what Descartes said, what problems emerge with his account, and why a more precise understanding of these problems can be useful today. Reconsidering Descartes in this light involves extending prior arguments about his treatment of animals to a study of the natural world in general. Early modern narratives about the world's living networks are complex and interesting. When locally salient artefacts, attitudes, ideas, and vocabulary are highlighted, a more nuanced picture emerges, changing the relevance of Descartes for environmental thinking.
Climate Adaptation and Conflict Mitigation

Climate Adaptation and Conflict Mitigation
  • The Case of South Sudan
  • Ore Koren, Jerry Urtuzuastigui
  • Published online:
    21 April 2025
    Print publication:
    12 June 2025
  • As climate change intensifies, conflict-prone tropical regions face heightened vulnerabilities, yet little is known about how climate adaptation and food security efforts affect conflict dynamics. Using South Sudan – a country highly susceptible to climate stress and conflict – as a test case, this Element analyzes how international nongovernmental organizations' (INGO) climate adaptation interventions influence civil war and local social conflicts. It develops a theoretical framework linking climate adaptation to conflict, positing both positive and negative externalities. Drawing on original high-resolution data on INGO-driven adaptation and food security efforts, alongside climate, conflict, and development data, findings are substantiated with interviews from policy workers in South Sudan. The results indicate that while adaptation generally does not reduce conflict, interventions that promote preparedness and are implemented during periods of high climate stress can mitigate social conflicts between militias, pastoralists, and farmers. These insights provide guidance for designing climate adaptation strategies that reduce conflict risks.
Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960–1990

Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960–1990
  • An Intimate Cultural History
  • Epp Annus
  • Published online:
    07 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Russia's twenty-first-century military aggression has inspired calls for rethinking the Soviet era and its aftermath – for drawing attention to decolonizing efforts within the (former) USSR and to Russia's colonial practices and imperial aspirations. At the same time, the present era of anthropogenic climate change urges us to consider the global and planetary implications of local actions. This Element combines these two scholarly impulses to consider Soviet-era Estonian society between the 1960s and the 1980s: it investigates how natural environments and social ideas and circumstances were intertwined in fundamental ways, and it emphasizes local agency over homogenizing strategies of Soviet rule. Estonians cared deeply about their local environments, but they also took inspiration from environmentalist works of global importance. Various aspects of Estonian environmental thought and practice are analyzed as tied to local, intimate environments, as impacted by Soviet/Russian colonial rule, and as connected to the global circulation of ideas.
Environmental Ethics of War

Environmental Ethics of War
  • Tamar Meisels
  • Published online:
    31 March 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • War is bad for nature, yet relatively little attention has been devoted to environmental military ethics by just war theorists and philosophers of war. Most wars since 1945 have been civil conflicts, often in areas containing the greatest biodiversity. Combining environmental ethics with ethics of war, this Element examines how the environmental crisis should challenge and change the rules of war. While environmental wartime regulation has been addressed rarely by just war theorists, environmental jus ad bellum has hardly been tackled at all. Can environmental harm trigger a new justification for war? Can targeting nature constitute terrorism? And what would be a proportionate response to 'environmental aggression'? With global degradation and climate change right around the corner, this Element discusses some of the most pressing practical ethics issues of our times, suggesting that grave environmental transgressions should be combatted by measures that do not themselves cause disproportionate harm to nature.
Learning from COVID-19 for Climate-Ready Urban Transformation

Learning from COVID-19 for Climate-Ready Urban Transformation
  • Darshini Mahadevia, Gian C. Delgado-Ramos, Janice Barnes, Joan Fitzgerald, Miho Kamei, Kevin Lanza, William Solecki, Minal Pathak, Martha Barata, Aliyu Salisu Barau, Maria Dombrov, Cynthia Rosenzweig
  • Published online:
    17 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
    • Element
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  • Cities have suffered from three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and are increasingly experiencing exacerbated heatwaves, floods, and droughts due to climate change. Going forward, cities need to address both climate and public health crises effectively while reducing poverty and inequity, often in the context of economic pressure and declining levels of trust in government. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in city readiness for simultaneous responses to pandemics and climate change, particularly in the Global South. However, these concurrent challenges to cities present an opportunity to reformulate current urbanization patterns and the economies and dynamics they enable. This Element focuses on understanding COVID-19's impact on city systems related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and vice versa, in terms of warnings, lessons learned, and calls to action. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Evolution and the Fate of Humankind

Evolution and the Fate of Humankind
  • Peter A. Corning
  • Published online:
    15 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • In recent years we have come to understand better the forces that have shaped biological evolution over the course of time. Evolved purposiveness (teleonomy) in living systems themselves has been an important influence. Cooperative effects (synergies) of various kinds have also been influential. And the bioeconomics (functional costs and benefits) have been important constraints. Now we are facing a mounting survival crisis that may determine the future of life on Earth. We need to make a major course change, utilizing our insights into these important influences. Here is a review, and a 'prescription.'
Who Tells Your Story?

Who Tells Your Story?
  • Women and Indigenous Peoples Advocacy at the UNFCCC
  • Takumi Shibaike, Bi Zhao
  • Published online:
    07 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • Thousands of civil society organizations (CSOs) attend the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) every year. Through their advocacy work, CSOs define and redefine what “climate change” is really about. The Element focuses on climate advocacy for women and Indigenous peoples (IPs), two prominent climate justice frames at the UNFCCC. Which CSOs advocate for women and IPs? How and why do CSOs adopt gender and Indigenous framing? Bridging the literature on framing strategy and organizational ecology, it presents two mechanisms by which CSOs adopt climate justice frames: self-representation and surrogate-representation. The Element demonstrates that, while gender advocacy is developed primarily by women's CSOs, IPs advocacy is developed by a variety of CSOs beyond IPs organizations. It suggests that these different patterns of frame development may have long-term consequences for how we think about climate change in relation to gender and IPs.
Sustaining Development in Small Islands

Sustaining Development in Small Islands
  • Climate Change, Geopolitical Security, and the Permissive Liberal Order
  • Matthew Louis Bishop, Rachid Bouhia, Salā George Carter, Jack Corbett, Courtney Lindsay, Michelle Scobie, Emily Wilkinson
  • Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
    • Element
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  • The viability of small island developing states (SIDS) is threatened by three distinct processes – a backlash against globalisation; rising geopolitical competition between powers; and accelerating climate change – which are pulling at the threads binding the liberal international order together. We suggest that this order has been kinder to SIDS than is often acknowledged because its underpinning norms – sovereign equality, non-interference, and right to development – are inherently permissive and thus provide SIDS with choices rather than imperatives. Their leaders should fight for the continuation and enhancement of that order rather than be seduced by alternatives. We provide a rationale for and examples of policies to achieve this, including reforms to the way ODA is measured, debt restructured, climate finance allocated, and global governance organised. These enhancements represent the most plausible pathway for SIDS in a period of significant global upheaval. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Institutionalising Multispecies Justice

Institutionalising Multispecies Justice
  • Danielle Celermajer, Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Erin Fitz-Henry, Nicole Rogers, David Schlosberg, Christine Winter
  • Published online:
    29 January 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
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  • Multispecies Justice (MSJ) is a theory and practice seeking to correct the defects making dominant theories of justice incapable of responding to current and emerging planetary disruptions and extinctions. Multispecies Justice starts with the assumption that justice is not limited to humans but includes all Earth others, and the relationships that enable their functioning and flourishing. This Element describes and imagines a set of institutions, across all scales and in different spheres, that respect, revere, and care for the relationships that make life on Earth possible and allow all natural entities, humans included, to flourish. It draws attention to the prefigurative work happening within societies otherwise dominated by institutions characterised by Multispecies Injustice, demonstrating historical and ongoing practices of MSJ in different contexts. It then sketches speculative possibilities that expand on existing institutional reforms and are more fundamentally transformational. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Growing Hope

Growing Hope
  • Narratives of Food Justice
  • Alexa Weik von Mossner
  • Published online:
    27 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Growing Hope takes a closer look at how such narratives can carry the promise of a better future in the face of grim realities. It brings together two kinds of narratives that are rarely considered in conjunction: stories about urban community gardening and stories about vegan food justice. It shows that there is much common ground between these movements and that the stories told by them are worth exploring as part of a larger narrative about creating a better and more equitable future. In the United States, this is especially true for the stories told by and about people of color and their historically marginalized communities. Employing an econarratological approach informed by critical food studies, environmental justice ecocriticism, and transmedia studies, Growing Hope explores a selection of narratives about people who fight against food injustice and the ideologies sustaining it: stories about defiant gardening and culinary self-empowerment.
Public Engagement with Science

Public Engagement with Science
  • Defining the Project
  • Angela Potochnik, Melissa Jacquart
  • Published online:
    27 January 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
    • Element
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  • 'Public engagement with science' is gaining currency as the framing for outreach activities related to science. However, knowledge bearing on the topic is siloed in a variety of disciplines, and public engagement activities often are conducted without support from relevant theory or familiarity with related activities. This first Element in the Public Engagement with Science series sets the stage for the series by delineating the target of investigation, establishing the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration and community partnerships for effective public engagement with science, examining the roles public engagement with science plays in academic institutions, and providing initial resources about the theory and practice of public engagement with science. Useful to academics who would like to conduct or study public engagement with science, but also to public engagement practitioners as a window into relevant academic knowledge and cultures. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Crime Fiction and Ecology

Crime Fiction and Ecology
  • From the Local to the Global
  • Nathan Ashman
  • Published online:
    14 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This Element examines how contemporary ecological crime narratives are responding to the scales and complexities of the global climate crisis. It opens with the suggestion that there are certain formal limits to the genre's capacity to accommodate and interrogate these multifaceted dynamics within its typical stylistic and thematic bounds. Using a comparative methodological approach that draws connections and commonalities between literary crime texts from across a range of geographical locales – including works from Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America and Oceana – it therefore seeks to uncover examples of world crime fictions that are cultivating new forms of environmental awareness through textual strategies capable of conceiving of the planet as a whole. This necessitates a movement away from considering crime fictions in the context of their distinct and separate national literary traditions, instead emphasising the global and transnational connections between works.
Climate Activism, Digital Technologies, and Organizational Change

Climate Activism, Digital Technologies, and Organizational Change
  • Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Nina Hall
  • Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • Non-governmental and civil society organizations have long been recognized as crucial players in climate politics. Today, thanks to the internet, social media, satellite, and more, climate activists are pioneering new organizational forms and strategies. Organizations like Fridays for Future, 350.org, and GetUp! have used social media and other digital platforms to mobilize millions of people. Many NGOs use digital tools to collect and analyze 'big data' on environmental factors, and to investigate and prosecute environmental crimes. Although the rise of digitally based advocacy organizations is well documented, we know less about how digital technologies are used in different aspects of climate activism, and with what effects. On this basis, we ask: how do NGOs use digital technology to campaign for climate action? What are the benefits and downsides of using technology to push for political change? To what extent does technology influence the goals activists strive for and their strategies.
Slime

Slime
  • An Elemental Imaginary
  • Simon C. Estok
  • Published online:
    06 December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Slime has always stirred the imagination and evoked strong responses. It is as central to life and growth as to death, degeneration, and rot. Slime heals and cures; it also infects and kills. Slime titillates and terrifies. It fascinates children and is the horror in stories and the disgusting in fridges. Slime is part of good sex. Slime is also worryingly on the rise in the warming oceans. Engaging with slime is becoming more urgent because of its proliferation both in the seas and in our imaginations. Inextricable from racism, homophobia, sexism, and ecophobia, slime is the least theorized element and is indeed traditionally not even included among the elements. Things need to change. Addressing growing climate issues and honestly confronting matters associated with them depend to a very large degree on theorizing and thus understanding how people have thought and continue to think about slime.
The Open Veins of Modernity

The Open Veins of Modernity
  • Ecological Crisis and the Legacy of Byzantium and Pre-Columbian America
  • Eleni Kefala
  • Published online:
    04 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • The ecological crisis is the result of modernity's coloniality. The Moderns considered the Earth as 'natural resources' at their disposal. Their colonial vision of nature was complemented by that of nonmodern cultures like Byzantium and pre-Columbian America as passive or primitive, respectively. For the Moderns, the Byzantines were the 'librarians of humanity,' an inert repository of Greco-Roman knowledge, unable to produce their own. Byzantium's inertia was matched by that of nature, both reservoirs of epistemic and material resources. Thanks to those “librarians,” the supposedly inexhaustible supply of natural resources, and the epistemic and material riches of indigenous America, the Moderns believed they were inaugurating an epoch of intellectual maturity and infinite growth. Today, the enduring negative view of Byzantium and the ecological crisis confirm that we remain entangled in modernity's coloniality. We should decolonize both history and nature. To mitigate humanity's existential threat, modernity must be rethought and overcome.
Climate Science

Climate Science
  • Wendy S. Parker
  • Published online:
    27 November 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • This Element examines how climate scientists have arrived at answers to three key questions about climate change: How much is earth's climate warming? What is causing this warming? What will climate be like in the future? Resources from philosophy of science are employed to analyse the methods that climate scientists use to address these questions and the inferences that they make from the evidence collected. Along the way, the analysis contributes to broader philosophical discussions of data modelling and measurement, robustness analysis, explanation, and model evaluation.
Girl Power

Girl Power
  • Sustainability, Empowerment, and Justice
  • Jin In
  • Published online:
    24 October 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • Power. Gender. Sustainability. This Element harnesses powerful new data about gender and sustainability, presents inspiring stories of empowerment, and introduces a framework for building empowerment muscles. First, from a pioneering global survey, it unveils three shocking truths about young women's empowerment. It also compiles significant data on systemic gender disempowerment intersecting environmental degradation, violence, and exclusion, as well as profound societal impact if girls and women were fully empowered. Second, from climate activist Greta Thunberg to the all girl Afghan robotics team, the #NeverAgain movement against gun violence, and the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, today's empowered girls are a transformative force for change. Each modeling a distinct skill - an empowerment muscle - seven case studies present empowerment muscles of focus, solidarity, hope, courage, advocacy, endurance, and healing. Third, unlike most works using empowerment nebulously, this Element concretizes empowerment - a set of muscles each reader can build and strengthen through 'workout' training exercises.

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