Intersectional Climate Justice in the Coastal Global South

Abstract (English)

By 2100, rising sea levels could threaten the livelihoods of over 410 million people globally. In the past decade, sea levels have already risen by 10 cm (World Economic Forum, 2024), exacerbating impacts of climate change on coastal ecosystems and communities, particularly in the Global South (IPCC, 2022; Oppenheimer et al., 2019; Sen Roy, 2018). As climate change intensifies, coastal communities face ecological hazards exacerbated by failures of global adaptation strategies: tidal floods, land loss, increased frequency and severity of storms, erosion of shorelines, saltwater intrusion into freshwater resources, and rising temperatures impacting marine ecosystems. Power dynamics between the Global North and South significantly influence climate agendas, marginalizing voices from the Global South in decision-making processes (Hurrell & Sengupta, 2012; Wilhite & Salinas, 2019). These inequities perpetuate historical and structural injustices, disproportionately increasing the burdens of multiply marginalized groups, including women, children, LGBTIQ+ people, Indigenous peoples, fishing communities, and people with disabilities (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014; Mikulewicz et al., 2023). Pre-existing social, political, economic, gender, and environmental inequities are amplified by the climate crisis, leading to: extreme poverty, deteriorating sanitation, violence, forced migration, gender injustice, and mental health challenges (Caridade et al., 2022; Dube et al., 2021; Gan et al., 2021; Pope et al., 2023; Savo et al., 2017). Despite these adversities, affected communities demonstrate resilience and resistance. Their experiences underscore the urgent need for intersectional-transformative adaptation policies and action that address the unique challenges faced by various coastal communities (Amorim-Maia et al., 2022; Resurrección et al., 2019), and which are grounded in multiple epistemologies and the pluriverse.

Our panel seeks to centre lived experiences of these challenges and more importantly responses to them. We warmly invite creative and empirical contributions that critically engage with and highlight the importance of intersectional approaches to climate, gender, environmental, social and disaster justice in coastal communities, that centre diverse and embodied epistemologies, experiences, voices, resistance and solidarities from coastal regions of the Global South, and which can challenge, provoke and decolonise existing climate discourses, agendas, and knowledge production. Contributions could, but are not limited to, address:

• How Southern epistemologies, lived experiences, emotions and embodied diversity shape understandings of and responses to climate change in coastal communities;
• How socio-cultural, political, economic, colonial, gender, and ecological injustices shape intersectional vulnerabilities, impacts and responses of coastal communities;
• Creative and community-led models, innovations, experiments and practices towards more just, inclusive, transformative climate adaptation and mitigation policies, agendas, and actions;
• How existing and dominant climate governance frameworks reproduce inequalities, and how can they be transformed;
• Intersectional complexities, conflicts and resistance in climate change responses;
• Creative responses and expressions of climate change that centre local arts and epistemologies.