Identifying the populations and regions most vulnerable to climate change, this chapter features voices including Nakeeyat Dramani Sam from Ghana, highlighting the disproportionate impacts on young people and marginalised groups. Understanding ‘vulnerability’ is the key to addressing climate change. Jevanic Henry from Saint Lucia discusses rising sea levels and frequent hurricanes threatening coastal communities. The chapter emphasises the need for targeted adaptation strategies and global support to build resilience among low-income countries, small island developing states (SIDS), and Indigenous Peoples, and local communities (IPLCs). Isaac Nemuta, a Maasai pastoralist from Kenya, shares how prolonged droughts are decimating livestock. The chapter discusses the unique challenges faced by vulnerable groups, including limited resources, inadequate infrastructure, and political marginalisation. Calls for increased international aid, robust policy measures, and tailored climate resilience plans are emphasised, with examples like the Climate Prosperity Plans from Bangladesh and the Philippines. Empowering local communities through education, sustainable practices, and inclusive governance is crucial.

The chapter provides an introduction to the concepts of Pattern Grammar and Construction Grammar, with a discussion of their similarities and differences. Pattern Grammar refers to a notation system devised to record, in a transparent and flexible way, the behaviour of individual words, as part of corpus lexicography. It has been found that words sharing patterns can be grouped according to shared aspects of meaning. In Construction Grammar, constructions are proposed as pairings of form and meaning. Most constructions allow for variability in the words used in them, with meaning belonging to the construction rather than to the word. Thus, both approaches link form and meaning. Many observed phraseologies can be interpreted both as examples of grammar patterns and as instances of constructions. It is therefore reasonable to propose that the extensive corpus research underpinning Pattern Grammar can be used to inform an inventory of constructions.

Exploring the economic ramifications of climate change, this chapter features insights from financial experts such as Sara Jane Ahmed, Managing Director and V20 Finance Advisor of the CVF-V20 Secretariat. It discusses the adverse effects on GDP growth, inflation, debt, and credit ratings, particularly in vulnerable economies. The chapter highlights the crucial role of financial markets, insurance, and climate finance in addressing these challenges. Innovative financing solutions such as Green Bonds and pre-arranged and trigger-based financing, including loss and damage finance, are explored as means to build economic resilience. The importance of sustainable economic policies and international cooperation is emphasised, with case studies from countries successfully integrating climate resilience into their economic planning. The chapter calls for increased investment in climate adaptation and mitigation to safeguard economic stability and promote sustainable development.

Offering a message of hope and resilience, reflections from climate advocates emphasise the possibility of limiting global warming and mitigating its impacts. Renato Redentor Constantino, senior advisor to the CVF-V20, calls for innovative financial solutions and increased international cooperation to support vulnerable economies. Indigenous voices, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia, stress the importance of preserving traditional knowledge and protecting natural resources. Nakeeyat Dramani Sam from Ghana underscores the urgency of immediate action to safeguard the future for young people. The chapter calls on governments, businesses, and individuals to take decisive action now. The critical role of international agreements like the Paris Agreement is underlined. A powerful call to action urges all stakeholders to seize the remaining opportunities to protect the planet and ensure a sustainable future. United efforts can still create a world where people and the planet thrive amidst climate challenges – if we act fast.

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid growth of municipal towns in British India. Act 26 of 1850 provided for the establishment of municipalities if two-thirds of the inhabitants of a locality applied for it. According to the Act, municipal responsibilities included conservation, road repairs, lighting, the framing of by-laws and their enforcement by means of fines, and the levying of indirect taxes. Thereafter, rudimentary municipal organisations emerged in 352 towns and villages in the Bombay Province. In Bengal, there were only four – Serampore, Uttarpara, Nasirabad and Sherpore – but numbers increased rapidly after the passage of the District Municipal Improvement Act (1864), the District Town Act (1868) and the Bengal Municipal Act (1876). By 1881, Bengal had 138 municipal boards (Tinker 1968). In south Bengal, the fifty-mile radius around the metropolis of Calcutta (now Kolkata) contained a large concentration of new municipalities. Across the river from Calcutta, along the riparian tract on the west bank of the Hooghly River, spatially contiguous municipalities emerged north of Howrah.

Doubling as a theorist of literary character, Virginia Woolf was invested in the tribulations of the modern face, which she approached through the twin genres of portraiture and biography. This chapter revolves around Woolf’s staging of the modernist face in her novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Woolf’s novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity – from Orlando’s memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth in the early modern period to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. At the same time, Woolf’s novel functions as a portrait of Vita Sackville-West, introducing a queer woman into the gallery of memorable historical characters, which Woolf visualized in relation to the all-male National Portrait Gallery in London. Through an engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s recent photographic reflections on Orlando, developed as a response to the racialized opening of the novel, the chapter frames modernist faciality’s mediation by racial difference.

This chapter extends the analysis of the modernist face to Abe’s 1964 novel, which it considers as a text of global modernism. The novel is framed by the conventions of science fiction: the protagonist, a Japanese scientist, has an accident that destroys his face. Studying physiognomic manuals which draw on both Western and Japanese traditions of physiognomy, he builds a new face, which takes the form of an all-powerful mask. This mask acquires a life of its own, prompting philosophical speculation on facial alienation and the ethics of the face. The chapter traces a dialogue between Abe’s novel and Kōjin Karatani’s Origins of Japanese Literature (1980) on the “invention” of the face in Japanese literature. For both novelist and theorist, literature offers an infrastructure for the global travels of the face as a system of signification.

This chapter traces the development of the character of Odette in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If in “Swann in Love” Odette functions as an ekphrastic projection of Swann’s desire (a Botticelli fresco), in “At Mme Swann’s” she reclaims her face, creating a “new, personal style of face.” The text describes a process of facialization as a mode of self-invention, with the help of photography. Thus reinvented, Odette is the only character in the novel who does not age, providing a narrative continuity for the arc of the novel. A reading of the concluding scene in which a gallery of aged characters appear as masks of their younger selves foregrounds Proust’s preoccupation with time and memory. The conclusion: the paradigmatic object of memory retrieval for Proust is the face.