Gareth A. S. Edwards

After nearly a decade of policy inaction by the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison Coalition governments, the election of Anthony Albanese’s Labor government has ushered in expectations of a sea-change in Australian climate policy, one that might allow the country to finally emerge as a global leader on the issue. Yet while years of inaction have left some relatively easy victories for the new government to rack up, the change of leadership and rhetoric obscures some key continuities in the Albanese government’s approach that need to be foregrounded and critiqued by domestic and international audiences alike. In this brief commentary, we consider what the new Labor government might mean for Australian climate action over the coming years. We focus, in particular, on the role that fossil fuel exports will continue to play in overwhelming any emissions cuts achieved domestically, and underscore the need for a much broader and more ambitious national climate strategy designed to wean the country off its reliance on coal and gas revenues.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has rapidly risen to prominence in the last two years, but in part because of the group’s meteoric rise, there are relatively few academic analyses of it. This paper draws on collective-action framing theory to examine the engagement of one XR group – XR Norwich – with notions of climate justice. Drawing on ten in-depth interviews conducted in mid-2019, it argues that despite general concern for the global South, XR Norwich members mostly framed climate change in terms more reminiscent of mainstream environmental policy makers, rather than the radical climate justice movement. This raises questions about the extent to which XR Norwich engages their members on climate justice concerns, whether XR Norwich is more concerned with generating appeal instead of offering radical solutions, and whether such a strategy might lead to factionalism within the broader XR movement.

Global carbon emissions continue to rise, 1 rates of global biodiversity loss continue to increase, 2 and social and economic inequalities continue to widen. 3 Signi­ficant global social movements ...

As experts predict that at least some irreversible climate change will occur with potentially disastrous effects on the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities around the world, it is paramount to ensure that these communities are resilient and have adaptive capacity to withstand the consequences. Adaptation and resilience planning present several ethical issues that need to be resolved if we are to achieve successful adaptation and resilience to climate change. In this paper, we present six core discussions that should be an integral part of adaptation and resilience planning: (i) Where does ‘justice’ feature in resilience and adaptation planning and what does it require in that regard?; (ii) How can it be ensured that adaptation and resilience strategies protect, take into consideration, and represent the interest of the most vulnerable individuals and communities?; (iii) How can different forms of knowledge be integrated within adaptation and resilience planning?; (iv) What trade-offs need to be made when focusing on resilience and adaptation and how can they be resolved?; (v) What roles and responsibilities do different actors have to build resilience and achieve adaptation?; (vi) Finally, what does the focus on ethics imply for the practice of adaptation and resilience planning?

This overview adopts a critical social science perspective to examine the state of play and potential futures for coal in the context of climate change. It introduces key trends in coal consumption, production and trade, before reviewing the relevant literature. Finding surprisingly little literature directly focused on coal and climate change, it appraises existing work and highlights key areas for future research. In addition to established literatures on the situated politics of coal and the political economy of coal, new work calling for demand side policies to be supplemented with supply side policies highlights the increasing importance of normative contestations in driving debates over coal. This suggests that scholars must engage much more directly with climate change as an issue, and particularly with the place of coal in a just transition. Because of coal's mammoth contribution to climate change and the complex political economy which drives its production and consumption, it is likely that coal will remain at the center of difficult questions about the relationship between climate action and development for quite some time.This article is categorized under:Climate and Development > Decoupling Emissions from Development

Seeking to govern the city in relation to climate change is a political project that at once imagines the present in terms of the future and the future in terms of the present. The urban politics of climate change has brought multiple visions of the possibilities (and limits) of urban futures. In this context, we find urban responses taking experimental form – creating sites through which to explore and experience different futures. They provide spaces in which utopian visions can be imagined, enacted and contested. Conceptualizing urban climate change experiments as heterotopic sites seems fruitful in at least two regards. Firstly, it captures their provisional and ambivalent relationship with the broader urban milieu. Secondly, and even more critically, it opens up the dialogues between the future and present which are at the heart of the climate governance project, and highlights the spatial form of these politics. We examine both with reference to two examples of climate experimentation in Berlin and Philadelphia.

Urban authorities and a range of private and civil society actors have come to view housing as a key arena in which to address climate change whilst also pursuing wider social, economic and environmental objectives. Housing has been a critical area for urban studies, but often considered in sectoral terms and work on urban responses to climate change has followed this positioning. By contrast, an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective would position housing in more integrated terms as part of the metabolism of the city. Yet so far there has been relatively little written in UPE about either housing or climate change. This paper therefore seeks to bring UPE into dialogue with the emergent literature focused on governing climate change through housing. It does so through a detailed study of the ‘Retrofit Philly “Coolest Block” Contest’. We argue that this contest highlights the ways climate change is changing the way housing is embedded in the circulations of the city, pointing to changes in who is governing housing, how housing is being governed and who is able to access the benefits of (climate change-branded) action on housing.

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship is increasingly framing justice in terms of capabilities. This paper argues that capabilities are fundamentally about well-being and as such there is a need to more explicitly theorize well-being. We explore how capabilities have come to be influential in EJ and how well-being has been approached so far in EJ specifically and human geography more broadly. We then introduce a body of literature from social psychology which has grappled theoretically with questions about well-being, using the insights we gain from it to reflect on some possible trajectories and challenges for EJ as it engages with well-being.

Scholars studying the neoliberalisation of nature (and political ecologists more broadly) have been notably concerned with justice, but have underspecified their own conceptions of justice and have failed to seriously question or investigate what kind (or kinds) of justice is actually being pursued in the context of neoliberalism. In this paper, I argue that a more robust treatment of justice is required, building on recent calls for a more reflexive approach to normativity in critical human geography. I make this argument by drawing on a study examining how justice has been mobilised in Australia's neoliberal water reforms, and particularly through a series of semi‐structured interviews with water policymakers and industry professionals. I show that the justice being pursued through these reforms is multivalent, but coalesces around an allocative framework I call the ‘basic needs plus market’ framework. This framework ultimately finds its moral compass in a utilitarian conception of distributive justice, and this utilitarianism both facilitates neoliberalisation and tempers its expression. Understanding neoliberalisation as a means to broader normative ends, I suggest, has considerable potential for both explaining the contradictions and contestations scholars have argued are intrinsic to ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and opening up opportunities for productive critique and engagement.