Climate change is wreaking havoc in communities and environments across the globe. The reality and experience of devastating events are now clearly quite widespread, with large-scale heatwaves, fires, and floods—often in combination—having become a growing reality. We have seen devastating fires and their repercussions across the United States and Canada, Greece and Portugal, Chile and China. There are heatwaves on every continent, and historic storms and floods that are no longer unique events but regular occurrences in areas previously unaccustomed to such impacts. Each of these climate-enhanced events have multiple follow-on crises around health, housing, displacement, costs, conflict, and inequitable impacts. And this is not just about the human experience, as landscapes, oceans, glaciers, and icecaps also experience heat waves, with impacts to biodiversity and earth systems. I call the unsettling and compounding impact of such events on various individual bodies and communities “climate turbulence.” This essay explores the relationship between the increasing experience of this climate turbulence and conceptions of environmental and climate injustice.
First, beyond the obvious and necessary discussions on carbon mitigation and energy transition, it is critical to examine the nature of our increasingly climate-impacted world, the disruptions of climate change, and the challenging reality of climate turbulence.Footnote 1 The everyday experiences of “climate wreckage”Footnote 2 are material, physical, and psychological—and this reality is both disruptive and unsettling in human and ecological communities alike. I differentiate climate turbulence from the more common concept of polycrisis.
Second, I examine what the reality of climate turbulence, disruption, and displacement means for the way we think about climate justice and injustice. Why and how, exactly, are these increasing disruptions of climate change unique experiences of injustice? What is it about the physical, material, and relational impacts of climate turbulence that qualify its injustices as unique? In short, the argument is that the material, psychological, social, and ecological impacts of climate turbulence on people, communities, and relations to place requires broadening the concept of climate justice.
Finally, and referring back to my earlier piece on capabilities and climate justice in this journal,Footnote 3 I will discuss implications for a capabilities-based approach both to climate justice broadly and to just responses. While it is important to discuss the inequities of climate impacts as a core form of climate injustice, the focus here is on the multiple ways that climate turbulence undermines the basic needs of life, and individual and community functioning—including basic attachments to place.
Climate Turbulence
I want to start by making a few key points about climate turbulence, both about the nature of turbulence as a way of rethinking climate impacts, and about the materiality and physicality of that turbulence.
Clearly, we now live in a very unsettled, disaster-ridden, climate-challenged environment, with reports of the types of “unprecedented” events noted above an increasingly common occurrence. My own thinking about this reality of climate turbulence began as a result of my experience of Australia’s Black Summer bushfires of 2019–2020, which burned for 10 months, decimated 243,000 square kilometers of forest, and killed 34 people directly and another 400 from respiratory issues due to smoke.Footnote 4 An estimated three billion animals were killed.Footnote 5 My own inhalation of the remains of those forests and animals brought on asthma I had never had before. The heat, fires, smoke, difficulty breathing, and the broader experience of the fires changed both my body and my thinking.Footnote 6
It is becoming more and more obvious that the reality of climate change is not just in the kind of singular, shock, massive event such as that of the Australian Black Summer. Increasingly, the experience of climate change is taking the form of living within multiple compounding events and impacts triggered or exacerbated by climate change and its repercussions. Here in Australia, we are predicted to have more frequent, hotter, and longer lasting heatwaves, which will regularly kill people and animals and undermine whole ecosystems, both terrestrial and marine. Heatwaves combine with windstorms and lead to fires, which create a public health emergency around air quality and respiratory distress. Heat and fire events interrupt various supply chains and increase food insecurity. Prices go up; corporations, such as supermarket chains, take advantage and engage in price gouging. Construction and insurance costs rise, and inflation kicks in. Interest rates increase along with all of the other pressures to bring about a housing crisis. Inequality grows as a result of those impacts and the differential capabilities for survival and resilience. Mental health declines across communities and climate anxiety spreads as climate wreckage increases. And then fires come again—or, in the case of my experience in Australia, a pandemic, massive flooding, periodic heatwaves, and more fires. This constant set of impacts, tipping points, and cycles is the experience of climate turbulence.
Numerous scholars and the commentariat are now describing such intersecting crises as the “polycrisis,”Footnote 7 but many of those who use the term conceptualize it simply as another word for complexity, or just “a lot going on at once.” However, focusing too much on complexity and interaction alone risks understanding the current moment as being two-dimensional, like a Venn diagram of intersecting issues. Yes, we face multiple and intersecting crises, but “poly” does not capture the visceral, material reality of climate turbulence, nor the end of a Holocene epic of relative ecological stability. Polycrisis is now too often used as a buzzword without depth or context; ironically, it becomes too static a representation of the world when the reality is constant, unpredictable, and unsettling. A recent study of the wide range of definitions and uses of “polycrisis” illustrates the multiplicity of the term, yet argues that it can still be “a generative lens for navigating the turbulence of planetary upheaval.”Footnote 8 On the contrary, I suggest, given the confusion and divergent definitions, that we focus on that real and visceral reality of “turbulence” as the preferred term.
The idea of climate turbulence also addresses the more physical, material, and phenomenological experience of the crisis. The point is not only to understand the reality of the intersecting impacts but also how they are actually physically experienced and create meaning in everyday life—the visceral, the undermining, the disturbance, the unsettling. The inhalation of smoke. Heatwaves and the bodily impacts on those without access to cooling. Flooding, mud, wading through toxic water, living with mold growing in houses. This is what is going to be crucial in the coming decades—the experience of people and communities on the ground and in the midst of this upheaval. This physicality and materiality of turbulence will be a shared, common experience. Such visceral turbulence is the inevitability of life on a climate-changed and climate-turbulent planet. Using the language of new materialism,Footnote 9 there is a vitalism in this turbulence: a powerful impact on our bodies and meanings from these changes in our environments, and an affective response to that impact. The reality is that these kinds of impacts now come via multiple experiences of the climate crisis. Living with turbulence means engaging with the material, physical, and phenomenological impacts of disturbed environments.
We can see the ways in which the underlying concept of climate turbulence is present in literature, ecology, psychology, and beyond. For example, the physicality and materiality of turbulence and collapse, and its impact on the senses, is a common element of much climate fiction and writing. Throughout the novel Deluge, to take just one illustration, author Stephen Markley writes of climate change as convulsing and unrelenting; throughout the book he describes the impacts of heat on bodies, the sound of levees breaking, the choking smoke of fires, smells encountered by rescue workers, and the feeling of hunger.Footnote 10 This sensorial depiction of climate chaos and turbulence is part of the genre. Similarly, Amitav Ghosh explicitly calls for a politics of vitality—an understanding of the power such changes in environment have on lives and relationships—in response to political, colonial, and ecological turbulence.Footnote 11
Climate turbulence also pushes us to think about effects not only on human systems and societies in isolation but also on ecological systems, as well as the interruption of intertwined human and more-than-human individuals and ecological systems—an undermining of longstanding interdependence, entanglements, and relations. The field of disturbance ecology is useful to apply here.Footnote 12 Ecological disturbances such as naturally occurring fires are common, and many ecosystems have the ability to recover from such shocks—in fact, some need them for their very functioning. But climate turbulence overwhelms and undermines this built-in resilience that ecological systems have to normal disturbances. What climate change is bringing on is ecological disturbance without resilience or recovery—just radically changing ecosystems, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse. We see such events happening not just occasionally, but repeatedly—for example the unprecedented annual bleaching and now growing death of the Great Barrier Reef. Climate change-induced ecological turbulence is disturbance ecology at unprecedented levels, and one that is impacting and undermining both the resilience of those systems and human reliance and entanglements with them.
On the human side of the experience of such shocks, there is a growing literature on climate anxiety and the stress of climate change, of the sense of impending doom and loss from these converging crises and turbulence.Footnote 13 In this, there is a key relationship between the physical and material experience of such shocks on the one hand and the impact on human mental well-being on the other. As Daniel Lindvall has argued, “What determines the psychological impact of extreme weather can differ from situations and locations. Events that involve multiple senses, such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods, may have a particular effect… The magnitude and frequency of events matter for the personal experience.”Footnote 14 It is this physical and sensory experience of climate turbulence, tied to disruptions to everyday life and existing entanglements between and across human and nonhuman relations, that is the focus of this essay.
There is clearly a definite physicality and material vitality to the new reality of climate-fueled turbulence. Such expanding, intersecting climate impacts are literally undermining and unsettling, socially and ecologically, disrupting human and nonhuman communities alike, along with their relations. As William Connolly has argued, climate wreckage can disturb and undermine cosmologies—that is, ways of thinking and ways of life—and it is crucial for the social sciences and humanities to understand these “diverse periods of volatility.”Footnote 15 The end of the last ten thousand relatively stable years of the Holocene, climatically speaking, means the re-introduction of the long Earth history of climatic and ecological instability, variation, and turbulence.
Climate turbulence can thus be understood in the context of the increasing experience of the instability of climate change. What I want to offer here is a way of understanding how such volatility should impact the way we can understand and frame climate injustice. In order to understand injustice as a result of climate turbulence, and to conceptualize climate justice for turbulent times, we must start with this clear knowledge of the impact of such turbulence on bodies, emotions, and ways of living and perceiving in this world.
The Injustice of Turbulence
As a researcher of environmental, climate, and ecological justice, the growing reality of climate turbulence raises two key questions with regard to justice. First, how are we to understand how existing frameworks and examples of environmental injustices are engaged or exacerbated by the reality of climate turbulence? Here, there has been much work about a wide range of growing climate injustices resulting from the acceleration and intersection of climate-induced events. The second question raised by the increasing experience of climate turbulence is how it may require the development of additional and unique ways of thinking about the injustices it creates. Does climate turbulence require new understandings of climate injustice?
Work in climate justice often examines the impact of both shock events and the exacerbating impact of “slow violence” or already discriminatory and/or inadequate systems.Footnote 16 Shock events, such as massive storms or floods, immediately have an impact on populations in a range of unjust ways. Poor communities, those already made vulnerable through inequitable public policy, those with no transportation, no alternative housing, no air purifiers, and no air conditioning are all hit harder. The disabled, migrant and insecure workers, and the elderly and solitary are among the most vulnerable. These impacts thus occur within the existing injustices, inadequacies in socio-economic systems, and captured public policy processes that create vulnerability and make shock events worse.
These impacts and injustices can be examined by looking at research through the tripartite framework I initially developed for understanding the meaning of justice used by the U.S. environmental justice movement,Footnote 17 which focuses on the impacts of inequity, lack of recognition and respect, and lack of participation or procedural justice. Climate inequities, of course, are a major focus, in particular the reality that those least responsible for the creation and exacerbation of climate change will be the most vulnerable to it.Footnote 18 A climate inequity approach includes a focus on historical emissions and responsibilities from Europe and the United States. It also addresses the distribution of the burdens of climate change and benefits of responding to it—for example, the inequitable impact on minority and migrant communities in many countries,Footnote 19 and the increasing reality of resilience infrastructure being a form of green gentrification for the more well-off.Footnote 20
But climate justice has never been solely about distributional issues.Footnote 21 Central to many conceptions of climate justice are issues of recognition and respect, especially on the part of Indigenous and Pacific Island cultures, and to those in the Global South.Footnote 22 Here, it is not just the fact that some benefit and some lose, but the reality of what is lost—the cultural places, values, and connections to place that are the essence of individual and cultural identities and the ability to reproduce them.Footnote 23 For instance, Pacific Island representatives at the major climate conferences (such as the COPs) regularly state the injustice of rising seas in terms of lost territory, histories, and cultural connection to place—in addition to the inequity of the reality of climate change.Footnote 24
The third concern is procedural justice. Of course, the failure of the COPs themselves to actually address the reality of rising CO2 and the continued use of fossil fuels is often blamed on the lack of authentic, meaningful participation of those most impacted by climate change.Footnote 25 Critiques of mitigation governance largely focus on the corruption of decision-making, the influence of the fossil fuel industry, and the exclusion of civil society and affected actors.Footnote 26 Procedural injustice over the course of two decades worth of global climate governance is absolutely a key reason why that governance has failed to address the very basic issue of carbon emissions.
Beyond that now standard tripartite of environmental and climate justice, a more critical approach focuses on issues of power and capital in the creation of injustice. Interestingly, such a focus is where much of the discourse of climate justice originally began, criticizing the power of the fossil fuel industry.Footnote 27 This power-based critique has also long engaged the reality of racism and colonialism, and ties to capital and extractivism.Footnote 28 This critique of power continues, most recently around the unjust impacts of the transition to renewables, including the ongoing treatment of communities in mineral mining supply chains.Footnote 29 Recent research illustrates that this more critical and power-based approach to understanding environmental injustice is now generally shared across environmental and climate justice activists and scholars.Footnote 30
Clearly both the experience and the conceptualization of climate injustice is already multifaceted and pluralistic, and all of these areas or issues of justice come into play with the growing and turbulent impacts of climate change. But the question here is whether the reality of the growing experience of climate turbulence demands a broadening of climate justice thinking. What does the material viscerality of climate change—including the disturbance, distress, and displacement associated with climate-enhanced events—mean for how we might conceptualize climate injustice? Can the reality of ongoing and multiple disruptions, converging crises, and that physicality—a life of climate turbulence and wreckage—be fully captured by current frameworks of and approaches to environmental justice? Or is there something specifically unjust about the materiality and disruptions of climate turbulence?
Much of the existing environmental and climate justice activism and literature examines the question of who is made vulnerable, the key differences between those impacted and those not—key maldistribution questions long at the center of environmental justice.Footnote 31 That takes us immediately to the broader question of how that inequity and vulnerability are created and exacerbated—the social conditions, economic structures, and political discriminations that create and maintain vulnerability.Footnote 32 Here, however, I am interested in a different question: how is climate injustice actually experienced in everyday life? How can the changed, disrupted, turbulent life of climate change, specifically, be understood as an imposed injustice?
Turbulence, Climate Justice, and Capabilities
This is where another approach to justice, a capabilities approach, can be applied and expanded. The capabilities approach was initially developed as a counter to standard development logic focused on gross domestic productFootnote 33 and as a way to normatively support a range of human rights that allow people to build lives that they design for themselves.Footnote 34 Justice, on this view, comes through supplying and supporting basic social, economic, and political capabilities. Injustice is when these basic capabilities are undermined, interrupted, or not supplied.
It is clear that the provision of the basic capabilities necessary for functioning depends on a stable climate system.Footnote 35 In an earlier article for this journal, I argued that a “capabilities approach can bring social and political recognition of specific and local vulnerabilities and the effects of climate change on the basic needs of human beings.”Footnote 36 Martha Nussbaum’s classic list of capabilities includes health, bodily integrity, emotions, affiliation, other species, and control over one’s environment—all undermined by environmental damage, distress, and wreckage.Footnote 37 Climate change damages health, destroys housing, and decimates basic infrastructure, including agricultural and energy systems. This results in health insecurity, housing insecurity, food insecurity, energy insecurity—instability and turbulence to the capabilities necessary for people to construct their chosen lives. Relatedly, climate change clearly undermines basic human rights to life, health, and subsistence,Footnote 38 which has led to a set of climate lawsuits, in particular from youth activists, against governments and polluters alike. In short, the impacts of climate change and turbulence undermine a range of basic capabilities and rights necessary for a functioning everyday life, creating injustice.
A broad and encompassing capabilities approach is really the only approach to justice that can incorporate the kinds of material, physical, and vibrant impacts of climate change that are created by climate turbulence. In part, this is where the physicality, the materiality, of increasing climate turbulence comes in. For example, environmental justice scholars and activists, along with ecofeminists, have long discussed the “toxic embodiment” of environmental injustice: the poisoning of bodies, lead in bloodstreams, hormone disrupters and the like, and their impacts on women, reproduction, and children.Footnote 39 Such physical impacts are not really encompassed by the standard tripartite approach to environmental or climate justice. Climate turbulence creates and exacerbates physical and material damage, which increasingly undermines a broad range of basic capabilities, from bodily integrity and health to housing, food, and political engagement.
In response to the material nature of the Australian bushfires, for instance, Blanche Verlie developed a notion of “aspirational justice,” which re-imagines climate justice “inspired by the collective asphyxiation of Australia’s bushfire smoke.”Footnote 40 Verlie writes about the combustion of fossil fuels creating the conditions for greater fires, those fires killing forests and animals and fungi and insects, which then become the smoke that “inhibited the respiration of those that survived the flames.”Footnote 41 One of her points is about how attention to the very act of breathing, or its material interruption, is a way to understand both the human and the more-than-human politics of climate injustice. I mentioned my own asthma—caused, literally, by the inhalation of smoke made up of the remains of burned forests and animals, stuck in my lungs, absorbed into my blood and body. We may be made of stars from eons past, but we are also now made of current climate turbulence. The experience of climate injustice comes with the interruption of the basic capabilities of health and bodily integrity.
Additionally, and as noted earlier, the physicality of climate turbulence is also reflected psychologically, in the experience of climate anxiety. What I want to emphasize here is not only the physicality and materiality of that anxiety but also their impact on the capabilities and functioning of those subject to turbulence. In Australia it is not uncommon for those who have experienced climate disasters to be diagnosed with PTSD, because the smell of smoke or drops of rain on the roof are intensely triggering.Footnote 42 The material manifestation of climate turbulence and its physical and mental impacts undermine a variety of capabilities—health, bodily integrity, control over one’s environment, social and ecological relations—at both the individual and community level. A thorough account of climate justice must be attentive and responsive to the ways that climate change impacts everyday life—individually, socially, and culturally—and the capabilities to support it.Footnote 43
Turbulence, Place Attachment, and Justice
Climate turbulence is unique in the way that it creates both a physical and psychological disconnect, and undermines the ties, between people and the places and environments in which they are immersed. Damage to the experience of living in place, with and within functioning communities and ecosystems, has long been central to the critiques and demands of environmental and climate justice movements and scholarship. Beyond the usual and important experiences of environmental and climate injustice constituted by inequity, disrespect, and exclusion from participation in decision-making, environmental and climate justice movements have long articulated injustice as a form of desecration of how communities physically and materially live in environments. This kind of injustice is experienced as the undermining of the qualities of place, the relationship between culture and environment, and of the capabilities of communities to function in place. For example, Indigenous movements have consistently protested the desecration of sacred sites by mining or development, and many communities have resisted the poisoning of local waterways; both illustrate that damage to place directly impacts communities and their basic capabilities of health, subsistence, and relation to place. Climate turbulence is rapidly increasing and scaling up these kinds of human-made disruptions and place detachments, and accelerating a breakdown of both place relations and the ability of environments to support community capabilities.
Climate turbulence and disruption is already changing rivers, ocean temperatures, and farming conditions, and changing what people grow, catch, and fish. Seasons are different, forests are dying, the rain is not what it was for previous generations, insect populations are changing, and species have shifted their range of habitation. This is one of the key vulnerabilities, the real experiences of the current era of turbulence: the reality of disturbances, displacements, and detachments from the places people live, and from the communities—human and nonhuman—in which lives are immersed. What will be the impact of this kind of ongoing and accelerating detachment from the historically known, from longstanding generational knowledge of place? As basic needs and cultural meaning are provided by both local environments and conceptions of place, justice is threatened with the undermining of place attachments. In short, it is crucial to bring attention to this co-constructive quality of place attachments, material experiences in place, and justice.Footnote 44 Environmental and climate justice hinge on a sense of a positive place attachment, and a functioning relationality between human communities and the environments in which they are immersed.Footnote 45
There is also a real sense of loss that comes with the undermining of relationality with, and connection to, place.Footnote 46 This is what Glenn Albrecht has long called “solastalgia”—a sense of loss of connection to a place as the characteristics of that place grow different from that we grew connected to.Footnote 47 Further, and increasingly, communities are expressing a growing sense of “anticipatory solastalgia”Footnote 48 as more people sense and foresee ongoing and future changes to the places in which they are embedded. There is obviously a growing interest in climate displacement—mostly focused on the human migrations that will inevitably occur, both within and across existing national borders—which is certainly coming. But the reality of climate turbulence is that community can also be decimated without people leaving—they are unsettled in place. We can have significant disruption to place without being dis-placed. This is another way that the experience of climate turbulence undermines the relations with place—communities and environments—and the basic capabilities that such attachment provides.
Climate turbulence means that all our relations are threatened—with each other, with place, with environments. The inevitable detachments from place and relations, human and otherwise, as a result of climate turbulence undermine the basic capability of attachment and what it provides to physical and mental wellbeing, at both the individual and community levels. The climate-changed reality where human and nonhuman alike are constantly detached from the decimated places that give us meaning will continue to be the basis of an environmental injustice of climate turbulence.
Conclusions
Climate turbulence is growing, and its injustice is experienced in a range of ways. This includes the usual tripartite understanding of environmental and climate justice (equity, recognition, and participation), and the lenses of power, racism, and colonialism (critical environmental justice). Further, however, and crucially, the material and visceral everyday experience of climate turbulence undermines a range of capabilities, from health and bodily integrity, to social and ecological relations and control over one’s social and political environment. Such impacts undermine the kind of relationality with others and place that is central to the human experience, even if undervalued by liberalism.Footnote 49
Addressing capabilities and connection, not only between humans in community but also between human communities and these environments and ecosystems in which they are immersed, is key to climate justice in this age of turbulence. Recent work on both just transition and just adaptation is addressing this need,Footnote 50 including the important role of the kinds of psycho-social relations between people, and people and place, noted above.Footnote 51 Scholarship on the relationship between climate disasters, community resilience, and just adaptation has illustrated that social infrastructure is key to ensuring the protection and resilience of community relations and capabilities. While much of the focus of social infrastructure tends to be on the infrastructure of social infrastructure (that is, the physical assets of community centers, libraries, and parks), research in Australia after disasters has illustrated the centrality of the social side of social infrastructure—community organizations, local knowledges and networks, relationships, and moreFootnote 52—which provide an array of basic capabilities. Further, the focus not only on social infrastructure but on social-ecological infrastructure, or those relations between humans and environments that sustain the capabilities of each, is absolutely crucial for just adaptation in the midst of climate turbulence.Footnote 53
In the face of climate turbulence and its unique forms of climate injustice, forms of just adaptation must focus on the provision of basic capabilities and the reality that such capabilities are inherently based in human-ecological relations and attachments. While increasing climate turbulence will continually undermine connections to place and a range of basic needs, a focus on practices that enable continuing relations with place, social and cultural connections to environments, and basic economic and social capabilities is crucial to just responses to the climate crisis.
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